If NeoWatch ran on Windows 95 and 98, chances are that it itself is prior art for the "invention". You can't patent something more than a year after it has been published.
That will just get you a contempt of court charge. It doesn't matter whether you are right, it matters whether you can convince a court that you are right.
but unless we can come up with a better system that will help promote the advancement of arts and sciences without trampling on the rights of inventors and creators, this is the only system we've got.
There is no evidence that the current system promotes the advancement of arts and sciences, or engineering for that matter.
In fact, quite to the contrary, in software, we have pretty clear indiciations that patents are not required for advancement in software, and that they may actually be harmful.
The best thing to do would be to take a hard look at the patent system and figure out how it can be rid of the badly-working parts and how to improve the parts that work well. Then perhaps we can have a fair and equitable system of patents.
We don't have unlimited time. Software patents have been around for only about a decade now and they are already causing lots of damage. The burden is on people like you to come up with a system that demonstrably works, or we really should scrap the entire system.
Granting people and companies 20 year monopolies is something extraordinary. The burden of proof that this is something we should do is on people like you who want to keep some form of the system. If you can't come up with clear and convincing evidence, we should scrap it.
Wow what a load of flame bait. Apparently in the socialist paradise known as slashdot its bad for a company to work to make money.
Microsoft has been convicted multiple times in a court of law of monopolistic business practices. It is clear that they have made a large chunk of their money by illegal means, and chances are they wouldn't even be around without their monopolistic practices. The only reason they haven't been punished more harshly so far and been prosecuted on more of their misdeeds is because doing so is legally tricky and takes a lot of time, money, and political support.
The operating system on it may not be very stable or the best, but microsoft enabled it.
That's a rewriting of history. Microsoft killed numerous companies that actually had decent usable products at the time and replaced it with the piece of shit that Windows was. Microsoft is only now barely reaching the level of functionality, stability, and usability that other companies and products had decades ago.
What Microsoft has done is dumbed down computers so that they're useable by the average person. We may hate it
No, what we "hate" is that Microsoft has been so slow at achieving this, and whatever progress Microsoft has made on it has largely been by driving other companies out of business and pilfering their ideas. Even today, most of Microsoft's products are either bought by them or copied from competitors.
I'm proud to act in my own self interest. Any other motivation is just stupid and illogical.
Guess what? Bill Gates didn't make this contribution to pacify angry Slashbots like yourself.
Of course, Gates did it to pacify angry Slashbots like myself. As well as lots of other critics.
You see, the kids who benefit from these vaccines aren't going to give a shit about your pissy little gripes about Gates' business practices.
The kids who benefit from those vaccines would benefit even more if the US would live up to its commitments on foreign aid, rather than the peanut handouts that some semi-legal business tycoons occasionally deign to hand out for their pet causes in order to make themselves feel good. After living up to its commitments, then we can talk about "charity".
So why not, for once, set aside your consipracy theories about ulterior motives, and acknowledge that Gates did a Good Thing(tm) here?
Gates is doing a "Good Thing here", but it doesn't even come close to making up for the financial harm that he has caused.
And, more generally, donations like Gates are a poor excuse for the harm that the US and Europe are causing in developing nations.
No matter how awful the desktop alternatives may be (and they are pretty awful), you can't force a new desktop on people without a lot of pain and resistance. People are attached to their desktop. People feel comfortable with their desktop. Their desktop is a security blanket for people.
The best thing to do is to make the switch gradually, one application at a time. Switch people over to Firefox. Then Thunderbird. Then OpenOffice. Make sure they know about a lot of free, fun goodies that run on both Windows and Linux. All of those are improvements from a security point of view anyway.
Eventually, it won't matter much to users anymore whether they run Windows underneath all that FOSS, and then you can switch.
Moderators are actively suppressing dissent from your opinion as "flamebait" and "troll". I find that a pretty sad statement about the ability to debate in this forum.
Apparently, there are a lot of Microsoft-friendly folks here who simply don't want to have to justify their beliefs.
As mentioned in comments upthread, adobe has made available the entire pdf spec. Sure, they could change it anytime, but that would just break a great standard, and the goodwill of millions around the world.
Unfortunately, that has already happened: there are parts of PDF Adobe has not documented or specified, and they do keep changing it. Third party PDF implementations keep breaking whenever Adobe decides to put something new into the PDF spec. Furthermore, it is unclear what patents they actually have on it.
Adobe/PDF is better than most proprietary file formats, but it really should undergo true standardization some time soon.
Standard bodies move so slowly that they are useless for developing the first solution to any problem or adding a major new feature. C and Javascript were long in use before ANSI or ECMA looked at them.
Quite right. What's your point? The stuff Massachusetts needs (document and data interchange formats) have been in use for 1-2 decades. Open standards either exist or are being created.
So, let there be ANSI.DOC2007 and Microsoft can make any changes they want after that - so long as they are required to fully document/unpatent their current format and support all current features when saving to.DOC2007 to the best approximation allowed by the standard.
I think that's the point, except that.DOC will never be a standard (it's technically infeasible). But the MS Office XML may be, if Microsoft submits it to ISO or ANSI. And that's why MA enacted this sort of legislation.
While i dont use MS products Bill Gates is a very generous person compared to many other billionaires,
If you believe (as I and many other do) that Gates got his billions through questionable and at times illegal business practices, he is being generous with other people's money.
and an article ofhis generosity should not be turned into a flame war.
You seem to imply that any criticism of the man or his behavior is a "flame war". I disagree: a rational analysis of the man's behavior is perfectly appropriate, and the position that his donation should not be interpreted as "generosity" is a valid and rational position, even if you disagree with it.
Furthermore, I think it's naive to think that this donation wasn't carefully timed and analyzed by Gates's advisers in terms of tax and PR consequences. And you have to keep in mind that a large part of the cost of this donation will be paid for by tax payers anyway. These points suggest that, even if you think that Gates got his wealth legitimately, there are strong utilitarian components to his donation.
No, we all still lose, because the money Gates is donating didn't come out of thin air, it came out of your and my pockets. And Gates is only donating a tiny fraction of the money he took from us to good causes; the rest sits in his bank accounts and the bank accounts of other early Microsoft employees.
If you want to help children in need, donate your money and fight Microsoft's monopoly and business practices; in the end, that's far more efficient.
But don't piss on a $750 million donation to some of the worst off on this planet;
The donation is nice. It should make no difference, though, in one's assessment of Gates's character or business practices. Gates remains a modern robber baron, whose business practices have caused economic harm far in excess of what he is donating.
And you're pretty naive if you think that this move wasn't carefully planned both financially (tax breaks) and with Microsoft's PR department (Gates's popularity/reputation needs a boost).
Okay, here's the thing though: Nobody I know has a "GNOME desktop" or "KDE desktop!" [...] There's absolutely NO way you could possibly say that's more consistent than a Mac OS X desktop!
Gnome and KDE each provide a complete, consistent set of applications. Most non-hacker types stick to either one or the other without ever mixing anything. In fact, many distributions only install one or the other desktop.
In my experience, most people have a mix of QT and GTK,
Well, maybe most Linux users you know are hacker types. Even if they do, the two desktops are getting quite well integrated, so that if you run a Gnome application under KDE, it will pick up the KDE L&F.
Now, I admit that there are inconsistencies between Aqua and brushed metal, but at least they work the same way. You can't say that about the different toolkits on Linux,
Actually, some of the most serious inconsistencies on the Mac are between Carbon and Cocoa, which handle files and key bindings differently, and between UNIX and HFS file systems. But, yes, appearance wise, the differences between Aqua and metal are jarring and confusing.
How?? Aside from not being able to run WINE and having an underpowered graphics card, I have yet to find anything that my Linux PCs can do that my iBook cannot. And it's much less of a hassle than maintaining my other computers
Installing packages like TeX, TeXMacs, Gnome, Mono, X11, etc. is a royal pain on the Mac. There isn't even a consistent way of installing software on the Mac: almost every software install is different, and most packages need to be downloaded and updated by hand. Then you have the problem that software like TeX or Gnome may have been packaged multiple times and conflict when you install it. Software installation and maintenance on the Macintosh is a bloody mess, worse even than Windows.
On a distribution like Debian or SuSE, software installation isn't even an issue: you tell it at startup what kind of machine you want to install, and everything else is automatic, including updates and maintenance.
Much maligned for his business practices, is this proof that sometimes the ends justify the means?
So, by analogy, if a Mafia boss donates one percent of his ill-gotten gains, that justifies his crimes?
Let's see if the Linux community can match his generosity."
The Linux community is about public service and cooperation; by creating billions of dollars worth in free software, the Linux community has matched Bill Gates's "generosity" many times over already. And unlike Bill Gates, members of the Linux community paid for it with their own time and money. Bill Gates is just giving back a fraction of the money he stole.
It's like some kid infatuated with his brand-new honda bragging about how it can pull stumps as well as a farm tractor.
Thanks for making the point so clearly: most people and businesses need Hondas a lot more than they need a farm tractor. The Honda is simply the more efficient and cost-effective vehicle for the day-to-day tasks most people have. And when it comes to databases, things are analogous.
I think the general point is that (we) doubt sincerely that it's EVIL HOOMANZ that are the cause.
Well, and you are missing the point. Even if there were no evidence of a connection between human activity and global temperature increases, it wouldn't matter for the argument.
The artificial emission of CO2 into the atmosphere will invariably lead to a temperature increase; that is elementary physics--there is simply no serious scientific doubt on that point. Neither is there on the fact that that temperature increase will have catastrophic consequences at some point. The only question is the point in time at which it is going to happen. But one way or another, it's going to happen some time this century unless we massively reduce our CO2 emissions.
Sorry, but the enviro-left been screaming that the sky is falling (mainly because of dirty capitalist pigs) for the last FORTY YEARS. You're suprised that nobody takes you seriously?
I'm sorry that people like you have trouble with the concept that environmental might take centuries to fully manifest itself. People like you apparently can't think beyond the next tank full of gas and McFatty meal, but don't make your limited foresight the standard by which everybody else has to think.
You're basically saying "let's assume I'm right, so we have to do things MY way, right?"
No, he is saying "Given that there is almost universal agreement among experts on these points, why do people cling to the belief that things are different?"
And practically speaking, it's not difficult to write an application that can run natively on OS X and on Windows or Linux with GNUStep.
Not if it actually uses a lot of Cocoa functionality. Cocoa is and remains controlled by Apple, which means it's proprietary. Furthermore, GNUstep just isn't a realistic choice for writing applications because almost nobody actually uses it on their desktop.
The inadequacies of the X toolkit are what caused this horrible mess of redundant libraries (CDE, GTK, QT, FLTK, etc.) that we have now
That's incorrect. The reason the standard X11 toolkit (Motif) didn't catch on more widely was that it was proprietary and commercial. Other than that, it was actually ahead of both Windows and Macintosh.
Qt, FLTK, and wxWindows are cross-platform toolkits. They are as much Windows and Macintosh toolkits as they are X11 toolkits. You might take their existence as evidence for the "inadequacy" of the Macintosh toolkits as well.
Don't you realize that the single most important reason why some UNIX geeks get Macs is beacuse there's one single dominant API on the platform, and the desktop is consistent?
I realize that Macintosh advocates often claim that, but it is technically false, and I suspect the number of "UNIX geeks" that actually do that is rather small.
It is technically false because the Macintosh has one of the most inconsistent GUIs of any machine out of the box: three APIs (Carbon, Cocoa, Java), and several inconsistent looks. Neither Windows, Gnome, nor KDE have that level of inconsistency out of the box. And it only gets worse when you start installing applications on it, because many Macintosh applications use cross-platform toolkits (Mozilla, Qt, wxWindows, FLTK, MFC, etc.)--far more so than a Windows, Gnome, or KDE desktop.
As for the number of "UNIX geeks" using a Macintosh, I think that's hard to tell. Many UNIX geeks (myself included) use a Macintosh laptop because PC vendors are so braindead when it comes to supporting Linux on laptops. A Macintosh laptop gives me a UNIX shell out of the box and can be made to run Mozilla and TeX fairly easily, which is mostly what I want to run when I travel. Don't kid yourself into thinking that that translates into a lot of enthusiasm for the Macintosh platform. I wouldn't dream of putting a Macintosh on my desk as my primary computing platform--it is way too limited and too much of a hassle.
1. db2 just set the world record for transaction speed - at about 50,000 transactions a second. Last I heard mysql was trumpeting 800 transactions a second with innodb. Not sure about postgresql.
I seriously doubt that those benchmarks were on the same hardware, so the comparison makes no sense.
2. with partitioning, parallelism, and clustering, you can get subsecond response time from db2 *adhoc* queries against tables containing over a terrabyte of data. Postgresql, Mysql, and Firebird aren't even in the ballpark here.
First of all, at least learn the correct metric prefixes before you start spouting benchmark data.
Now, yes, with clustering and keeping stuff in memory, you can get good response times. That's not some deep, fundamental property of the database, it's a simple add-on that sits on top of the database. I believe there are already solutions like that for PostgreSQL and MySQL, although they are not quite as flexible as those for DB2 yet. But very few people need that sort of thing.
So, on a big project where the database is critical - you will actually *save* money going with a commercial database.
Or maybe not. With a commercial database, you may have much more downtime because the commercial vendor is taking months to fix a critical software problem that you yourself could fix instantly if you only had the source. And with a commercial database you are in a real bind if the vendor makes incompatible changes or discontinues the product altogether.
You see, the cost savings from open source software aren't a result of the software not costing anything, they are a result of reduced risk. Let me stat that again: open source software has substantially lower risk than commercial software and that is where your cost savings come from with open source software.
6. Consistency: since most organizations will require a commercial database for their most demanding applications - and they can benefit from a complexity reduction by using the same database on all applications.
You're kidding yourself if you think that any large organization can consistently deploy a single platform for everything. And if you choose a commercial database like DB2 consistently for every database deployment in your organization, licensing costs are going to be a major issue.
Not to say that the open source solutions aren't great: they are, and can pick up much of the database work these days. But there's still a huge case to be made for commercial products
DB2 is actually a decent database with some advanced functionality. People may want to use it for specific applications. But your arguments for why and when people should use it are pretty naive. People who need DB2 will know it; for almost everybody else, one of the FOSS databases is fine. And if you stick to SQL standards, it's actually pretty easy to move between them (imagine that).
AFAIK, those effects have been gone for years; I stopped encountering them sometime in the mid- to late- 90s.
In the late 90's, your AIX system was still hosed if you ran out of disk space during a SMIT operation: not only was the system critically dependent on ODM, SMIT and the ODM library were also so poorly written that they couldn't cope with this common system state. So, no, whatever dependencies there were on ODM weren't fixed at that time.
some of the things IBM originally put into AIX to "industrialize" it were things that folks complained Aren't The Unix Way, but they've ended up in other Unices as the years go on. LVM, enhanced security, dynamic kernel, a systems management interface, etc. Yet, 15+ years later, I still hear complaints about how different & not-nomral-Unix AIX is. Whatever.
That, too, is just BS. LVM is rarely used even on Linux--convenient as it may seem to users, it is just one of the technically most stupid ways of managing disk space imaginable. And IBM can hardly take credit for GUI-based management (which they got woefully wrong with SMIT, both technically and in terms of user interface) or dynamically loadable kernel modules.
AIX has always been incompatible in ways that range from merely annoying to seriously bad. Many of their decisions were indeed driven by the desires of their mainframe customers, but that still doesn't make those features good ideas.
And although I thankfully don't have to deal with AIX anymore, I doubt it's much different today. Trying to portray the p.o.s. that AIX was/is as some kind of progenitor of modern UNIX or Linux systems is ridiculous.
By the way, the "limited amount of native Macintosh software" isn't really all that limited -- Abiword, BitTorrent, Frozen Bubble, LyX, Mplayer, Nethack, Neverball, Nvu, StepMania, VLC, etc. are all Free Software apps with native OS X implementations;
You can't even tell native from non-native applications. I don't know about all of those, but Nvu uses the Mozilla toolkit (not native), Frozen Bubble uses SDL (a cross-platform gaming library).
Blender, Firefox, and Thunderbird are native to the extent that they don't require X11
As you are saying: they are not native applications.
Not all of the Cocoa API is proprietary, you know -- a big chunk of it is the OpenStep API, an open standard.
OpenStep has never been standardized and there is no open standards documentation of it (in fact, I know of no freely distributable, complete documentation). Furthermore, the Cocoa APIs are entirely under Apple's control.
So, it is simply incorrect to say that "the OpenStep API is an open standard"; it is nothing of the sort.
There's even a Free Software implementation called GNUStep.
Yes, and you can see how popular that is compared to the other choices.
In reality, Cocoa is only hanging on to dear life because it is propped up by Apple marketing and happens to ship with Macintosh. If it actually had to compete on its merits and performance with X11, it would just lose.
Sure, Microsoft's entry into those markets caused prices to tumble: Microsoft knows how to undercut competitors. But those markets were ripe for the picking: some company would have entered them quickly.
The problem is that with Microsoft's entry, prices have stopped falling. Microsofts undercuts competitors to drive them out of business, but once they have a monopoly, they hold prices constant or even raise them. It's standard monopoly behavior: first, you give up profit for acquiring the monopoly, then you reap your rewards many times over. Internationally, it's known as "dumping". While in the short term, it may cause prices to fall, it is not something that's good for customers.
Yep, you're exactly right -- but have you considered the possibility that Apple wants it that way?
Of course, Apple wants it that way: they want to tie developers and users to their own, proprietary platform. And they know full well that if running X11 applications were easy, native Macintosh applications would disappear because there is just so much great X11 software out there.
The question is: do you really want to go Apple's proprietary route or not? And are you happy with the limited amount of native Macintosh software that is out there?
People on the apple side want a system that "just works". Something that lets them do their job quickly and efficiently, with minimal initial effort.
Trouble is: it's a marketing myth that OS X is that system. OS X gives you a nice out-of-box experience, but afterwards, it's a lot of work to maintain, configure, install applications on, and maintain. Macintosh systems don't "just work" unless you do very little with them.
And, of course, you can get an even nicer out-of-box experience than a Mac if you buy a PC with Linux pre-installed, because unlike the Mac, the Linux system comes with a complete complement of applications.
Now, the reason mac users are so vocal is because they see how much quicker you can get to work with a mac and then they see all the time linux users have to invest in tweaking their desktop
Mac users believe that they work so much quicker with Macintosh, but they are wrong. They are confusing a simplistic system with a simple system.
They don't understand that for linux desktop users the tweaking isn't a burden, but a pleasure
Bullshit. Linux users just want to get work done, and they find that Linux is a more effective and efficient way of doing that than either Macintosh or Windows.
Macintosh is an OK machine if you are a simple user with simple needs. But Macintosh users shouldn't project their ignorance on the rest of the world.
Slashdot Mirror
If NeoWatch ran on Windows 95 and 98, chances are that it itself is prior art for the "invention". You can't patent something more than a year after it has been published.
I call bullshit on McAfee.
That will just get you a contempt of court charge. It doesn't matter whether you are right, it matters whether you can convince a court that you are right.
but unless we can come up with a better system that will help promote the advancement of arts and sciences without trampling on the rights of inventors and creators, this is the only system we've got.
There is no evidence that the current system promotes the advancement of arts and sciences, or engineering for that matter.
In fact, quite to the contrary, in software, we have pretty clear indiciations that patents are not required for advancement in software, and that they may actually be harmful.
The best thing to do would be to take a hard look at the patent system and figure out how it can be rid of the badly-working parts and how to improve the parts that work well. Then perhaps we can have a fair and equitable system of patents.
We don't have unlimited time. Software patents have been around for only about a decade now and they are already causing lots of damage. The burden is on people like you to come up with a system that demonstrably works, or we really should scrap the entire system.
Granting people and companies 20 year monopolies is something extraordinary. The burden of proof that this is something we should do is on people like you who want to keep some form of the system. If you can't come up with clear and convincing evidence, we should scrap it.
Wow what a load of flame bait. Apparently in the socialist paradise known as slashdot its bad for a company to work to make money.
Microsoft has been convicted multiple times in a court of law of monopolistic business practices. It is clear that they have made a large chunk of their money by illegal means, and chances are they wouldn't even be around without their monopolistic practices. The only reason they haven't been punished more harshly so far and been prosecuted on more of their misdeeds is because doing so is legally tricky and takes a lot of time, money, and political support.
The operating system on it may not be very stable or the best, but microsoft enabled it.
That's a rewriting of history. Microsoft killed numerous companies that actually had decent usable products at the time and replaced it with the piece of shit that Windows was. Microsoft is only now barely reaching the level of functionality, stability, and usability that other companies and products had decades ago.
What Microsoft has done is dumbed down computers so that they're useable by the average person. We may hate it
No, what we "hate" is that Microsoft has been so slow at achieving this, and whatever progress Microsoft has made on it has largely been by driving other companies out of business and pilfering their ideas. Even today, most of Microsoft's products are either bought by them or copied from competitors.
I'm proud to act in my own self interest. Any other motivation is just stupid and illogical.
Then you are a sociopath.
Guess what? Bill Gates didn't make this contribution to pacify angry Slashbots like yourself.
Of course, Gates did it to pacify angry Slashbots like myself. As well as lots of other critics.
You see, the kids who benefit from these vaccines aren't going to give a shit about your pissy little gripes about Gates' business practices.
The kids who benefit from those vaccines would benefit even more if the US would live up to its commitments on foreign aid, rather than the peanut handouts that some semi-legal business tycoons occasionally deign to hand out for their pet causes in order to make themselves feel good. After living up to its commitments, then we can talk about "charity".
So why not, for once, set aside your consipracy theories about ulterior motives, and acknowledge that Gates did a Good Thing(tm) here?
Gates is doing a "Good Thing here", but it doesn't even come close to making up for the financial harm that he has caused.
And, more generally, donations like Gates are a poor excuse for the harm that the US and Europe are causing in developing nations.
No matter how awful the desktop alternatives may be (and they are pretty awful), you can't force a new desktop on people without a lot of pain and resistance. People are attached to their desktop. People feel comfortable with their desktop. Their desktop is a security blanket for people.
The best thing to do is to make the switch gradually, one application at a time. Switch people over to Firefox. Then Thunderbird. Then OpenOffice. Make sure they know about a lot of free, fun goodies that run on both Windows and Linux. All of those are improvements from a security point of view anyway.
Eventually, it won't matter much to users anymore whether they run Windows underneath all that FOSS, and then you can switch.
Moderators are actively suppressing dissent from your opinion as "flamebait" and "troll". I find that a pretty sad statement about the ability to debate in this forum.
Apparently, there are a lot of Microsoft-friendly folks here who simply don't want to have to justify their beliefs.
Does this mean that pdf is not open enough ?
Yes.
As mentioned in comments upthread, adobe has made available the entire pdf spec. Sure, they could change it anytime, but that would just break a great standard, and the goodwill of millions around the world.
Unfortunately, that has already happened: there are parts of PDF Adobe has not documented or specified, and they do keep changing it. Third party PDF implementations keep breaking whenever Adobe decides to put something new into the PDF spec. Furthermore, it is unclear what patents they actually have on it.
Adobe/PDF is better than most proprietary file formats, but it really should undergo true standardization some time soon.
Standard bodies move so slowly that they are useless for developing the first solution to any problem or adding a major new feature. C and Javascript were long in use before ANSI or ECMA looked at them.
.DOC2007 and Microsoft can make any changes they want after that - so long as they are required to fully document/unpatent their current format and support all current features when saving to .DOC2007 to the best approximation allowed by the standard.
.DOC will never be a standard (it's technically infeasible). But the MS Office XML may be, if Microsoft submits it to ISO or ANSI. And that's why MA enacted this sort of legislation.
Quite right. What's your point? The stuff Massachusetts needs (document and data interchange formats) have been in use for 1-2 decades. Open standards either exist or are being created.
So, let there be ANSI
I think that's the point, except that
While i dont use MS products Bill Gates is a very generous person compared to many other billionaires,
If you believe (as I and many other do) that Gates got his billions through questionable and at times illegal business practices, he is being generous with other people's money.
and an article ofhis generosity should not be turned into a flame war.
You seem to imply that any criticism of the man or his behavior is a "flame war". I disagree: a rational analysis of the man's behavior is perfectly appropriate, and the position that his donation should not be interpreted as "generosity" is a valid and rational position, even if you disagree with it.
Furthermore, I think it's naive to think that this donation wasn't carefully timed and analyzed by Gates's advisers in terms of tax and PR consequences. And you have to keep in mind that a large part of the cost of this donation will be paid for by tax payers anyway. These points suggest that, even if you think that Gates got his wealth legitimately, there are strong utilitarian components to his donation.
No, we all still lose, because the money Gates is donating didn't come out of thin air, it came out of your and my pockets. And Gates is only donating a tiny fraction of the money he took from us to good causes; the rest sits in his bank accounts and the bank accounts of other early Microsoft employees.
If you want to help children in need, donate your money and fight Microsoft's monopoly and business practices; in the end, that's far more efficient.
But don't piss on a $750 million donation to some of the worst off on this planet;
The donation is nice. It should make no difference, though, in one's assessment of Gates's character or business practices. Gates remains a modern robber baron, whose business practices have caused economic harm far in excess of what he is donating.
And you're pretty naive if you think that this move wasn't carefully planned both financially (tax breaks) and with Microsoft's PR department (Gates's popularity/reputation needs a boost).
Okay, here's the thing though: Nobody I know has a "GNOME desktop" or "KDE desktop!" [...] There's absolutely NO way you could possibly say that's more consistent than a Mac OS X desktop!
Gnome and KDE each provide a complete, consistent set of applications. Most non-hacker types stick to either one or the other without ever mixing anything. In fact, many distributions only install one or the other desktop.
In my experience, most people have a mix of QT and GTK,
Well, maybe most Linux users you know are hacker types. Even if they do, the two desktops are getting quite well integrated, so that if you run a Gnome application under KDE, it will pick up the KDE L&F.
Now, I admit that there are inconsistencies between Aqua and brushed metal, but at least they work the same way. You can't say that about the different toolkits on Linux,
Actually, some of the most serious inconsistencies on the Mac are between Carbon and Cocoa, which handle files and key bindings differently, and between UNIX and HFS file systems. But, yes, appearance wise, the differences between Aqua and metal are jarring and confusing.
How?? Aside from not being able to run WINE and having an underpowered graphics card, I have yet to find anything that my Linux PCs can do that my iBook cannot. And it's much less of a hassle than maintaining my other computers
Installing packages like TeX, TeXMacs, Gnome, Mono, X11, etc. is a royal pain on the Mac. There isn't even a consistent way of installing software on the Mac: almost every software install is different, and most packages need to be downloaded and updated by hand. Then you have the problem that software like TeX or Gnome may have been packaged multiple times and conflict when you install it. Software installation and maintenance on the Macintosh is a bloody mess, worse even than Windows.
On a distribution like Debian or SuSE, software installation isn't even an issue: you tell it at startup what kind of machine you want to install, and everything else is automatic, including updates and maintenance.
Much maligned for his business practices, is this proof that sometimes the ends justify the means?
So, by analogy, if a Mafia boss donates one percent of his ill-gotten gains, that justifies his crimes?
Let's see if the Linux community can match his generosity."
The Linux community is about public service and cooperation; by creating billions of dollars worth in free software, the Linux community has matched Bill Gates's "generosity" many times over already. And unlike Bill Gates, members of the Linux community paid for it with their own time and money. Bill Gates is just giving back a fraction of the money he stole.
It's like some kid infatuated with his brand-new honda bragging about how it can pull stumps as well as a farm tractor.
Thanks for making the point so clearly: most people and businesses need Hondas a lot more than they need a farm tractor. The Honda is simply the more efficient and cost-effective vehicle for the day-to-day tasks most people have. And when it comes to databases, things are analogous.
I think the general point is that (we) doubt sincerely that it's EVIL HOOMANZ that are the cause.
Well, and you are missing the point. Even if there were no evidence of a connection between human activity and global temperature increases, it wouldn't matter for the argument.
The artificial emission of CO2 into the atmosphere will invariably lead to a temperature increase; that is elementary physics--there is simply no serious scientific doubt on that point. Neither is there on the fact that that temperature increase will have catastrophic consequences at some point. The only question is the point in time at which it is going to happen. But one way or another, it's going to happen some time this century unless we massively reduce our CO2 emissions.
Sorry, but the enviro-left been screaming that the sky is falling (mainly because of dirty capitalist pigs) for the last FORTY YEARS. You're suprised that nobody takes you seriously?
I'm sorry that people like you have trouble with the concept that environmental might take centuries to fully manifest itself. People like you apparently can't think beyond the next tank full of gas and McFatty meal, but don't make your limited foresight the standard by which everybody else has to think.
You're basically saying "let's assume I'm right, so we have to do things MY way, right?"
No, he is saying "Given that there is almost universal agreement among experts on these points, why do people cling to the belief that things are different?"
ZFS is a core feature of the Solaris 10 kernel. This isn't ./configure;make;make install stuff, people. Please, just stop posting such ignorance.
IBM and SGI managed to make their high-end file systems available in Linux.
And since when has UFS been common across UNIX, BSD, and Linux...never!
Not that it matters, but AFAIK, Linux, BSD, and many UNIX vendors do support UFS.
And practically speaking, it's not difficult to write an application that can run natively on OS X and on Windows or Linux with GNUStep.
Not if it actually uses a lot of Cocoa functionality. Cocoa is and remains controlled by Apple, which means it's proprietary. Furthermore, GNUstep just isn't a realistic choice for writing applications because almost nobody actually uses it on their desktop.
The inadequacies of the X toolkit are what caused this horrible mess of redundant libraries (CDE, GTK, QT, FLTK, etc.) that we have now
That's incorrect. The reason the standard X11 toolkit (Motif) didn't catch on more widely was that it was proprietary and commercial. Other than that, it was actually ahead of both Windows and Macintosh.
Qt, FLTK, and wxWindows are cross-platform toolkits. They are as much Windows and Macintosh toolkits as they are X11 toolkits. You might take their existence as evidence for the "inadequacy" of the Macintosh toolkits as well.
Don't you realize that the single most important reason why some UNIX geeks get Macs is beacuse there's one single dominant API on the platform, and the desktop is consistent?
I realize that Macintosh advocates often claim that, but it is technically false, and I suspect the number of "UNIX geeks" that actually do that is rather small.
It is technically false because the Macintosh has one of the most inconsistent GUIs of any machine out of the box: three APIs (Carbon, Cocoa, Java), and several inconsistent looks. Neither Windows, Gnome, nor KDE have that level of inconsistency out of the box. And it only gets worse when you start installing applications on it, because many Macintosh applications use cross-platform toolkits (Mozilla, Qt, wxWindows, FLTK, MFC, etc.)--far more so than a Windows, Gnome, or KDE desktop.
As for the number of "UNIX geeks" using a Macintosh, I think that's hard to tell. Many UNIX geeks (myself included) use a Macintosh laptop because PC vendors are so braindead when it comes to supporting Linux on laptops. A Macintosh laptop gives me a UNIX shell out of the box and can be made to run Mozilla and TeX fairly easily, which is mostly what I want to run when I travel. Don't kid yourself into thinking that that translates into a lot of enthusiasm for the Macintosh platform. I wouldn't dream of putting a Macintosh on my desk as my primary computing platform--it is way too limited and too much of a hassle.
1. db2 just set the world record for transaction speed - at about 50,000 transactions a second. Last I heard mysql was trumpeting 800 transactions a second with innodb. Not sure about postgresql.
I seriously doubt that those benchmarks were on the same hardware, so the comparison makes no sense.
2. with partitioning, parallelism, and clustering, you can get subsecond response time from db2 *adhoc* queries against tables containing over a terrabyte of data. Postgresql, Mysql, and Firebird aren't even in the ballpark here.
First of all, at least learn the correct metric prefixes before you start spouting benchmark data.
Now, yes, with clustering and keeping stuff in memory, you can get good response times. That's not some deep, fundamental property of the database, it's a simple add-on that sits on top of the database. I believe there are already solutions like that for PostgreSQL and MySQL, although they are not quite as flexible as those for DB2 yet. But very few people need that sort of thing.
So, on a big project where the database is critical - you will actually *save* money going with a commercial database.
Or maybe not. With a commercial database, you may have much more downtime because the commercial vendor is taking months to fix a critical software problem that you yourself could fix instantly if you only had the source. And with a commercial database you are in a real bind if the vendor makes incompatible changes or discontinues the product altogether.
You see, the cost savings from open source software aren't a result of the software not costing anything, they are a result of reduced risk. Let me stat that again: open source software has substantially lower risk than commercial software and that is where your cost savings come from with open source software.
6. Consistency: since most organizations will require a commercial database for their most demanding applications - and they can benefit from a complexity reduction by using the same database on all applications.
You're kidding yourself if you think that any large organization can consistently deploy a single platform for everything. And if you choose a commercial database like DB2 consistently for every database deployment in your organization, licensing costs are going to be a major issue.
Not to say that the open source solutions aren't great: they are, and can pick up much of the database work these days. But there's still a huge case to be made for commercial products
DB2 is actually a decent database with some advanced functionality. People may want to use it for specific applications. But your arguments for why and when people should use it are pretty naive. People who need DB2 will know it; for almost everybody else, one of the FOSS databases is fine. And if you stick to SQL standards, it's actually pretty easy to move between them (imagine that).
AFAIK, those effects have been gone for years; I stopped encountering them sometime in the mid- to late- 90s.
In the late 90's, your AIX system was still hosed if you ran out of disk space during a SMIT operation: not only was the system critically dependent on ODM, SMIT and the ODM library were also so poorly written that they couldn't cope with this common system state. So, no, whatever dependencies there were on ODM weren't fixed at that time.
some of the things IBM originally put into AIX to "industrialize" it were things that folks complained Aren't The Unix Way, but they've ended up in other Unices as the years go on. LVM, enhanced security, dynamic kernel, a systems management interface, etc. Yet, 15+ years later, I still hear complaints about how different & not-nomral-Unix AIX is. Whatever.
That, too, is just BS. LVM is rarely used even on Linux--convenient as it may seem to users, it is just one of the technically most stupid ways of managing disk space imaginable. And IBM can hardly take credit for GUI-based management (which they got woefully wrong with SMIT, both technically and in terms of user interface) or dynamically loadable kernel modules.
AIX has always been incompatible in ways that range from merely annoying to seriously bad. Many of their decisions were indeed driven by the desires of their mainframe customers, but that still doesn't make those features good ideas.
And although I thankfully don't have to deal with AIX anymore, I doubt it's much different today. Trying to portray the p.o.s. that AIX was/is as some kind of progenitor of modern UNIX or Linux systems is ridiculous.
By the way, the "limited amount of native Macintosh software" isn't really all that limited -- Abiword, BitTorrent, Frozen Bubble, LyX, Mplayer, Nethack, Neverball, Nvu, StepMania, VLC, etc. are all Free Software apps with native OS X implementations;
You can't even tell native from non-native applications. I don't know about all of those, but Nvu uses the Mozilla toolkit (not native), Frozen Bubble uses SDL (a cross-platform gaming library).
Blender, Firefox, and Thunderbird are native to the extent that they don't require X11
As you are saying: they are not native applications.
Not all of the Cocoa API is proprietary, you know -- a big chunk of it is the OpenStep API, an open standard.
OpenStep has never been standardized and there is no open standards documentation of it (in fact, I know of no freely distributable, complete documentation). Furthermore, the Cocoa APIs are entirely under Apple's control.
So, it is simply incorrect to say that "the OpenStep API is an open standard"; it is nothing of the sort.
There's even a Free Software implementation called GNUStep.
Yes, and you can see how popular that is compared to the other choices.
In reality, Cocoa is only hanging on to dear life because it is propped up by Apple marketing and happens to ship with Macintosh. If it actually had to compete on its merits and performance with X11, it would just lose.
Sure, Microsoft's entry into those markets caused prices to tumble: Microsoft knows how to undercut competitors. But those markets were ripe for the picking: some company would have entered them quickly.
The problem is that with Microsoft's entry, prices have stopped falling. Microsofts undercuts competitors to drive them out of business, but once they have a monopoly, they hold prices constant or even raise them. It's standard monopoly behavior: first, you give up profit for acquiring the monopoly, then you reap your rewards many times over. Internationally, it's known as "dumping". While in the short term, it may cause prices to fall, it is not something that's good for customers.
Yep, you're exactly right -- but have you considered the possibility that Apple wants it that way?
Of course, Apple wants it that way: they want to tie developers and users to their own, proprietary platform. And they know full well that if running X11 applications were easy, native Macintosh applications would disappear because there is just so much great X11 software out there.
The question is: do you really want to go Apple's proprietary route or not? And are you happy with the limited amount of native Macintosh software that is out there?
People on the apple side want a system that "just works". Something that lets them do their job quickly and efficiently, with minimal initial effort.
Trouble is: it's a marketing myth that OS X is that system. OS X gives you a nice out-of-box experience, but afterwards, it's a lot of work to maintain, configure, install applications on, and maintain. Macintosh systems don't "just work" unless you do very little with them.
And, of course, you can get an even nicer out-of-box experience than a Mac if you buy a PC with Linux pre-installed, because unlike the Mac, the Linux system comes with a complete complement of applications.
Now, the reason mac users are so vocal is because they see how much quicker you can get to work with a mac and then they see all the time linux users have to invest in tweaking their desktop
Mac users believe that they work so much quicker with Macintosh, but they are wrong. They are confusing a simplistic system with a simple system.
They don't understand that for linux desktop users the tweaking isn't a burden, but a pleasure
Bullshit. Linux users just want to get work done, and they find that Linux is a more effective and efficient way of doing that than either Macintosh or Windows.
Macintosh is an OK machine if you are a simple user with simple needs. But Macintosh users shouldn't project their ignorance on the rest of the world.