The common perception is that Windows users are more willing to pay for an application than Linux users (since the latter have so many excellent programs at their disposal for free, while the former have to pay for every little piece of crap unless it's something Microsoft is giving away to gain market share in a particular application category)
If your Genius Hacker was interested in maximizing the profit from his program, he'd consider these points as well. IMHO, many developers will stick to Windows as a target platform until they've seen enough examples of other developers earning significant amounts of money from sales of Linux software.
Be fair. SuSE isn't just "packaging free software". 1) They write very useful, complex pieces of software themselves (SaX, yast). 2) They have a very good support policy. 3) They support free software developers.
I don't know what your problem is. If you'd rather pay twice the price for a distribution that does less, just because it has that "untainted by capitalism" image (ha), you're free to do so. I'd rather have a cheaper, better distribution. But remember: SuSE get to decide which license to use for their code, they wrote it (and besides, most of their code is free, perhaps all of it will be at some point).
There is no cultural context for "where this is going", because automata that behave like humans have never existed before.
Automata that behave like humans in one way or another have existed hundreds of years ago (do the names Wolfgang von Kempelen and Jacques de Vaucanson ring a bell?). The idea of social and even sexual interaction of automatons with humans is certainly not new (do you ever read Science Fiction books?). The cultural context you seem to have a fixation with develops as new things enter our culture, so it's somewhat useless as a measure of validity of a moral judgement. I don't see why you can't accept someone's current perception of automaton-human interaction to be valid, just because we have seen so little of it and it is not something society has got used to (that would seem to constitute a cultural context for you). Would you say that bestiality may only be considered immoral ("perverted") because it has been known for thousands of years? Arguing that moral judgement of interaction of humans with automatons (assuming for the sake of argument that it is relatively new, which it isn't) is not valid because someone improved the technical possibilities for it recently is like arguing that child pornography on the Internet can't be judged because it has only been around for a few years (and the adaptation of the "cultural context" of child abuse, paedophilia etc. which has been in existence for thousands of years as well, would be invalid according to your argumentation).
But with 95% of humans happy to follow "moral leaders" like sheep, we're in for a field day of a-priori moralistic universalism,...
This would be a valid argument if these new developments were in no way part of our culture/universe and therefore inaccessible for our current value systems. Feel free to argue that this is the case, I just hope that your head is stuck deep enough in sand.
Note that personally, I'm not calling interaction with automatons anything - I am just apalled by your narrow-mindedness and the way you criticise people with other value systems while apparently trying to force the idea that science must be free from the burden of ethics down everyone's throat.
There is no cultural context for "where this is going", because automata that behave like humans have never existed before.
There may be no such thing as perversion in the behaviour of automata by itself, but the interaction of automata with humans is something that can and has to be judged within a human's value system as well.
Aside from that, I don't like "head-in-the-sand" universal apologists either, who would just as gratituously apply their selfish value system to the development of weapons of mass destruction.
Either it does cover all portable PCs and PDAs (with sufficient audio hardware), in which case it's just absurd that it could be a valid patent, or it doesn't, then anyone's free to sell a mp3 player disguised as a PDA by adding a calendar, a notebook etc. (not a big deal). I wouldn't worry about this too much, in 1-2 years we will have plenty of combined PDAs/audio players/cellular phones/wireless internet terminals at our disposal.:-/
While it is a good idea to further the discussions about making Linux more user-friendly, the article was rather rude and inflammatory. If the author can't refrain from insulting people like the developers of window managers (showing in screenshots what a window manager looks like with many windows open indicates that they don't understand the task? huh?), then he'll find that noone will be interested in his cause.
IHMO, the proposal to remove the CLI interface and reduce the user's choices is a major pitfall. It is much better to present the users with a good, useable default environment, so they won't even be tempted to look for other options unless a special need arises (and then, the choices should be available!), than to force them to stick to a particular environment like Windows does just in order to make the designer's and supporter's jobs easier.
Try Yahoo!'s auctions too, there's a separate category with domain names, offering over 3000 domains at this time. Some with a minimum bid of $10 mil. (yes, that's right).
While trying not to sound too serious, I'll have to remark that Motorola's AltiVec CPUs could also be called "exciting" and they're rather new. They'd probably be cheap enough, too.
Call me uninformed or misinformed, but stuff like this really makes me wonder which of the various rumours and announcements have any substance... (I certainly wouldn't bet on that, or any other of the announcements on www.amiga.com, being true)
those with a particular target audience, area of application etc., like Trinux
the "generic" distributions, which differ mostly in their licensing and other political considerations and try to cater for all users
While the first kind of distributions is extremely useful and I'd like to see more of them (e.g. Linux specifically for laptops, with a mostly ramdisk-based installation and very few disk accesses), the generic kind results in too much duplication of efforts and too little diversity to have a good reason to exist in such large numbers. Newcomers to the market like Stormix will have to realize that they need to offer more than just yet another distro for Joe User in order to take market share away from the established distributors like RH, SuSE (and to some extent, Debian and Corel).
Note how they avoided any references to "next generation Amiga systems", they only mention "an advanced operating system that would once again put Amigans at the forefront of technology." (which would be nothing more than a slightly modified QNX, as the rest of the article suggests). So while you could optimistically read the article like they're building a new AmigaOS for a non-mentioned new Amiga system, it seems like they'll try to sell a sufficiently hyped version of x86 QNX to the Amiga fans.
No matter whose ploy it is, until I can see a system that isn't an x86 box with QNX and an "Amiga" sticker on it, it remains a rather pathetic attempt at one for me. I suspect that it'll take more than the purchase of the "Amiga" brand name for the purpose of marketing something under it, to get the Amiga-fans to throw away their 68k boxes and buy something new (especially if it's going to be x86-based!).
As you correctly observed, this is mostly a marketing ploy to get some die-hard Amiga fans to the QNX platform. Note that the article avoids to answer the question whether this is going to be the next AmigaOS or something different, it just suggests that this is "something for the Amiga community".
Face it, there will be no generous support from companies with established products (and niche markets) to revive the Amiga scene, they're after your money while trying to minimize the necessary investments. The Amiga fans are known to be very faithful and commited to their platform and not at all reluctant to pay large amounts of money to keep their system up-to-date. It therefore makes much sense for companies like QNX (for whom the number of Amiga devotees is significant compared to their own user base, btw.) to attempt to lure the Amigans to their platform.
If you want an interesting alternative OS (which will hopefully continue to support non-x86 platforms), choose BeOS now, or wait for a more multimedia-desktop-friendly face of Linux.
Windows has consistently been improved, while getting cheaper and cheaper.
This is just plain wrong - at least for my part of the world. When I bought Windows for Workgroups 3.11 + DOS 6.22 OEM early in 1995 (or late 1994, can't remember), it cost me approx. USD75, which was less than 5% of the cost of my PC. Today, I could get an equivalent PC (compared to what the best available system would be today and would have been in 1995) for less than 2/3 the amount I paid for the PC then, while Windows 98 OEM is actually more expensive than WfW was (Win98 OEM costs ~USD100 here).
Web integration, more hardware support, speed and stability improvements.
Hardware support mostly depends on 1) what hardware is available at the time and 2) how much money the hardware vendors choose to spend on operating system support (OK, I can credit MS for USB support...). As for speed improvements - that's just plain ridiculous - Win98 crawls on my PII system compared to Win95 on a P133...
SuSE contributes very much to Linux development. They send free CDs (the whole retail package, including manual) out to many developers, including people who wrote only a single program which is on the SuSE CDs (i.e. not only the famous developers). They also have many competent people fixing bugs in the distributed software, and they seem to be very good at packaging the software (they go beyond just making rpm's from compiled source - they often fix path names and such). And, last but not least, the documentation they provide write is excellent, the SuSE-made software they include on the CDs is very useful (SaX!).
I've been using SuSE from the first time I installed Linux at home and despite encounters with Red Hat and Debian (for work and at home), I've never been tempted to stop using it (Red Hat was simply a mess compared to SuSE and Debian didn't work on 8MB systems because it ran out of memory while installing - SuSE's was also the only boot disk which worked fine on my laptop with MCA bus). They also saved my butt when I made the libc5->glibc transition on my server at home, which seemed to be impossible to do by compiling and installing glibc from source despite all the (horrible, sloppily written) documentation available for that task. I ended up installing SuSE's rpm's and that was it. I haven't done a complete re-installation since 1996 on that server and everything works perfectly (and is glibc-based).
I have nothing against Red Hat (other than that I can see no reason to prefer their distributions, especially at that price), but I think that they're not paying people like Alan Cox only because they're so kind and interested in promoting the goals of the Linux "movement". Just think about it - if a distributor paid Linus a lot of money, would you not be more inclined to buy his distribution (if you knew that Linus had little to do with managing the distribution)?
Check out Gigabyte's DualBIOS feature in at least one of their newer boards: http://www.giga-byte.com/gigabyte-web/dualb.htm Looks like a useful thing to have while playing with hacked BIOSes.
I'm assuming that for projects where collaboration is worthwhile (i.e. large enough projects), greedy individuals or small teams will soon realize that they have the choice between competing with a larger (arguably better because of synergetic effects) development team and joining the team with a good chance to win the bounty, while settling for a smaller chunk of it. This is the same motive that makes people prefer joining a large team for bounty-driven efforts such as distributed.net and GIMPS, rather than participating alone for the opportunity to win twice the share of the bounty.
I agree. However, the Free Software Community always had and always will have a problem with those of its members who are unable to cooperate (except with a small crowd of similar-minded followers) because they would rather insist on their personal opinion than accept that someone else's opinion might be better. Just look at the never-ending Gnome vs. KDE flamewar and all those miserable little projects started because someone thought it would be better to start a new project rather than help improve an existing one.
This seems to be an attitude problem, not very likely to go away soon, but the bounty schemes might actually help (people should realize soon that cooperation leads to better results, look at efforts such as distributed.net, GIMPS etc. - why is it obvious there that forming teams is a better idea than going at it alone?).
I thought it was already almost obvious that Transmeta is working on emulation technology - e.g. one which allows you to run code for many/all major platforms efficiently. You even mentioned David Keppel and Robert Bedichek. Just look at their research interests... (fast emulation techniques mostly).
When I contacted NeoMagic to ask for developer information about a particular chipset, they told me (rather harshly) that they had provided such information in the past to Red Hat / Precision Insight and would contact them again, should they decide to support sound too (which was why I contacted them). This shows how unfamiliar some hardware vendors are with the Open Source development process and with Linux in general - they need to talk to a company, or they won't talk at all. Therefore it's not a bad idea to have something like a corporate representative for such closed-minded companies. It doesn't have to be one in particular (I'm sure SuSE would have been happy to write drivers for them as well, they've done so for several companies), but which one prevails is just a matter of competition between the commercial distributors.
I understand that Red Hat might try to diverge from the common denominator of Linux distributions at some point in order to try to capture the market, but it's unlikely that they'll succeed, since they don't own or control a significant part of the code. They can't prevent anyone from hacking e.g. CodeWarrior for RH to work on any Linux distribution and distribute the patches, and they won't find much support among OSS development teams either (e.g. the KDE folks won't suddenly write their stuff to work for RH Linux if that makes it difficult to use KDE on other distributions).
>..but it sounds like they (Demon) are being reasonable about it until they're lawyers can draw up a sensible policy. I have this impression too. This is a way of defending themselves from people like Godfrey, whose first reaction to personal insults and defamation is a lawsuit, not a strict censorship policy. From the few things I've heard about L.G., the lawsuits are very rewarding indeed (is that slanderous already?), due to the ill-defined laws regarding ISP liability.
Slashdot Mirror
- Windows has a much larger user base
- The common perception is that Windows users are more willing to pay for an application than Linux users (since the latter have so many excellent programs at their disposal for free, while the former have to pay for every little piece of crap unless it's something Microsoft is giving away to gain market share in a particular application category)
If your Genius Hacker was interested in maximizing the profit from his program, he'd consider these points as well. IMHO, many developers will stick to Windows as a target platform until they've seen enough examples of other developers earning significant amounts of money from sales of Linux software.Which part of their work exactly do they refuse to share? I.e. which part can't you download from ftp.suse.com for free?
I don't know what your problem is. If you'd rather pay twice the price for a distribution that does less, just because it has that "untainted by capitalism" image (ha), you're free to do so. I'd rather have a cheaper, better distribution. But remember: SuSE get to decide which license to use for their code, they wrote it (and besides, most of their code is free, perhaps all of it will be at some point).
Automata that behave like humans in one way or another have existed hundreds of years ago (do the names Wolfgang von Kempelen and Jacques de Vaucanson ring a bell?). The idea of social and even sexual interaction of automatons with humans is certainly not new (do you ever read Science Fiction books?). The cultural context you seem to have a fixation with develops as new things enter our culture, so it's somewhat useless as a measure of validity of a moral judgement. I don't see why you can't accept someone's current perception of automaton-human interaction to be valid, just because we have seen so little of it and it is not something society has got used to (that would seem to constitute a cultural context for you). Would you say that bestiality may only be considered immoral ("perverted") because it has been known for thousands of years? Arguing that moral judgement of interaction of humans with automatons (assuming for the sake of argument that it is relatively new, which it isn't) is not valid because someone improved the technical possibilities for it recently is like arguing that child pornography on the Internet can't be judged because it has only been around for a few years (and the adaptation of the "cultural context" of child abuse, paedophilia etc. which has been in existence for thousands of years as well, would be invalid according to your argumentation).
But with 95% of humans happy to follow "moral leaders" like sheep, we're in for a field day of a-priori moralistic universalism, ...
This would be a valid argument if these new developments were in no way part of our culture/universe and therefore inaccessible for our current value systems. Feel free to argue that this is the case, I just hope that your head is stuck deep enough in sand.
Note that personally, I'm not calling interaction with automatons anything - I am just apalled by your narrow-mindedness and the way you criticise people with other value systems while apparently trying to force the idea that science must be free from the burden of ethics down everyone's throat.
There may be no such thing as perversion in the behaviour of automata by itself, but the interaction of automata with humans is something that can and has to be judged within a human's value system as well.
Aside from that, I don't like "head-in-the-sand" universal apologists either, who would just as gratituously apply their selfish value system to the development of weapons of mass destruction.
Either it does cover all portable PCs and PDAs (with sufficient audio hardware), in which case it's just absurd that it could be a valid patent, or it doesn't, then anyone's free to sell a mp3 player disguised as a PDA by adding a calendar, a notebook etc. (not a big deal). I wouldn't worry about this too much, in 1-2 years we will have plenty of combined PDAs/audio players/cellular phones/wireless internet terminals at our disposal. :-/
IHMO, the proposal to remove the CLI interface and reduce the user's choices is a major pitfall. It is much better to present the users with a good, useable default environment, so they won't even be tempted to look for other options unless a special need arises (and then, the choices should be available!), than to force them to stick to a particular environment like Windows does just in order to make the designer's and supporter's jobs easier.
Try Yahoo!'s auctions too, there's a separate category with domain names, offering over 3000 domains at this time. Some with a minimum bid of $10 mil. (yes, that's right).
While trying not to sound too serious, I'll have to remark that Motorola's AltiVec CPUs could also be called "exciting" and they're rather new. They'd probably be cheap enough, too.
Call me uninformed or misinformed, but stuff like this really makes me wonder which of the various rumours and announcements have any substance... (I certainly wouldn't bet on that, or any other of the announcements on www.amiga.com, being true)
- those with a particular target audience, area of application etc., like Trinux
- the "generic" distributions, which differ mostly in their licensing and other political considerations and try to cater for all users
While the first kind of distributions is extremely useful and I'd like to see more of them (e.g. Linux specifically for laptops, with a mostly ramdisk-based installation and very few disk accesses), the generic kind results in too much duplication of efforts and too little diversity to have a good reason to exist in such large numbers. Newcomers to the market like Stormix will have to realize that they need to offer more than just yet another distro for Joe User in order to take market share away from the established distributors like RH, SuSE (and to some extent, Debian and Corel).No matter whose ploy it is, until I can see a system that isn't an x86 box with QNX and an "Amiga" sticker on it, it remains a rather pathetic attempt at one for me. I suspect that it'll take more than the purchase of the "Amiga" brand name for the purpose of marketing something under it, to get the Amiga-fans to throw away their 68k boxes and buy something new (especially if it's going to be x86-based!).
Face it, there will be no generous support from companies with established products (and niche markets) to revive the Amiga scene, they're after your money while trying to minimize the necessary investments. The Amiga fans are known to be very faithful and commited to their platform and not at all reluctant to pay large amounts of money to keep their system up-to-date. It therefore makes much sense for companies like QNX (for whom the number of Amiga devotees is significant compared to their own user base, btw.) to attempt to lure the Amigans to their platform.
If you want an interesting alternative OS (which will hopefully continue to support non-x86 platforms), choose BeOS now, or wait for a more multimedia-desktop-friendly face of Linux.
I wish NeXT hadn't vanished so quickly...
This is just plain wrong - at least for my part of the world. When I bought Windows for Workgroups 3.11 + DOS 6.22 OEM early in 1995 (or late 1994, can't remember), it cost me approx. USD75, which was less than 5% of the cost of my PC. Today, I could get an equivalent PC (compared to what the best available system would be today and would have been in 1995) for less than 2/3 the amount I paid for the PC then, while Windows 98 OEM is actually more expensive than WfW was (Win98 OEM costs ~USD100 here).
Web integration, more hardware support, speed and stability improvements.
Hardware support mostly depends on 1) what hardware is available at the time and 2) how much money the hardware vendors choose to spend on operating system support (OK, I can credit MS for USB support...). As for speed improvements - that's just plain ridiculous - Win98 crawls on my PII system compared to Win95 on a P133...
I haven't read it (yet), but check out oceania.org. It seems like it didn't work though.
Aren't both right? Mindcraft and ZD seem to test only with a configuration with 4 network devices. Makes you think, doesn't it?
I've been using SuSE from the first time I installed Linux at home and despite encounters with Red Hat and Debian (for work and at home), I've never been tempted to stop using it (Red Hat was simply a mess compared to SuSE and Debian didn't work on 8MB systems because it ran out of memory while installing - SuSE's was also the only boot disk which worked fine on my laptop with MCA bus). They also saved my butt when I made the libc5->glibc transition on my server at home, which seemed to be impossible to do by compiling and installing glibc from source despite all the (horrible, sloppily written) documentation available for that task. I ended up installing SuSE's rpm's and that was it. I haven't done a complete re-installation since 1996 on that server and everything works perfectly (and is glibc-based).
I have nothing against Red Hat (other than that I can see no reason to prefer their distributions, especially at that price), but I think that they're not paying people like Alan Cox only because they're so kind and interested in promoting the goals of the Linux "movement". Just think about it - if a distributor paid Linus a lot of money, would you not be more inclined to buy his distribution (if you knew that Linus had little to do with managing the distribution)?
Check out Gigabyte's DualBIOS feature in at least one of their newer boards: http://www.giga-byte.com/gigabyte-web/dualb.htm Looks like a useful thing to have while playing with hacked BIOSes.
The next big invention of those marketing "geniuses" will probably be an "enhancement" for automatic rebooting every 6 hours :-)
I'm assuming that for projects where collaboration is worthwhile (i.e. large enough projects), greedy individuals or small teams will soon realize that they have the choice between competing with a larger (arguably better because of synergetic effects) development team and joining the team with a good chance to win the bounty, while settling for a smaller chunk of it. This is the same motive that makes people prefer joining a large team for bounty-driven efforts such as distributed.net and GIMPS, rather than participating alone for the opportunity to win twice the share of the bounty.
This seems to be an attitude problem, not very likely to go away soon, but the bounty schemes might actually help (people should realize soon that cooperation leads to better results, look at efforts such as distributed.net, GIMPS etc. - why is it obvious there that forming teams is a better idea than going at it alone?).
- Source code is available to the public at all times during development
- The code is offered under the GPL license
it would encourage developers to cooperate on one solution rather than compete with individual projects.I thought it was already almost obvious that Transmeta is working on emulation technology - e.g. one which allows you to run code for many/all major platforms efficiently. You even mentioned David Keppel and Robert Bedichek. Just look at their research interests... (fast emulation techniques mostly).
I understand that Red Hat might try to diverge from the common denominator of Linux distributions at some point in order to try to capture the market, but it's unlikely that they'll succeed, since they don't own or control a significant part of the code. They can't prevent anyone from hacking e.g. CodeWarrior for RH to work on any Linux distribution and distribute the patches, and they won't find much support among OSS development teams either (e.g. the KDE folks won't suddenly write their stuff to work for RH Linux if that makes it difficult to use KDE on other distributions).
>..but it sounds like they (Demon) are being reasonable about it until they're lawyers can draw up a sensible policy. I have this impression too. This is a way of defending themselves from people like Godfrey, whose first reaction to personal insults and defamation is a lawsuit, not a strict censorship policy. From the few things I've heard about L.G., the lawsuits are very rewarding indeed (is that slanderous already?), due to the ill-defined laws regarding ISP liability.