Re:Argument: Free ($$) software stops the little g
on
Opposing Open Source?
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· Score: 1
So in other words he can only sell his product to people who actually need its specific features. So.
This sounds a bit like the I have this product but I can't sell it because someone gives theirs away for free so we have to make free stuff illegal.
It is hard to compete against a free product, if you don't have some means of giving your product value when compared to it. Free software has raised the bar on quality, your compiler has to be better than GCC in order to get customers. I think this is a good thing.
Why you ask? I dunno. Maybe open/free software all the way through. Or maybe I don't like translucent blue. Or maybe I don't trust apple anymore than Microsoft. Or maybe I'm one of those crazy long haired freesoftware freaks.
Or maybe we have reached the stage now where there are two sorts of OS's. The 'consumer, easy install, no brain, looks pretty above all else, locked up propriatory' OS and the 'have to know what you are doing, I can custom compile my kernel, and tune every inch and dig around in the guts' OS. And most importantly you can used the free OS to do pretty much everything that the consumer one can do.
Thus there will be demand for Linux on Macs, because the hardware rocks but not everyone likes consumer OS's.
>>but there really can't be much demand for Linux on the new >>boxen. Can there?
I have a friend who works in a call-center for Energex (Australia's power distro). A lot (not all) of their setup is NT4 but only patched upto around SP4 because so much of their system breaks going any further.
Was there any member of the w3c who didn't support this at all?
Any company which did support it and now doesn't is just reacting to the fact that they got caught out trying to screw the entire internet community for a quick buck.
A single energy field what binds everything in the universe together. Hmm some people call it the will of god, others call it atomic forces, others again call it forces of nature. Still it makes more sense that most of the other dogma out there.
when/if you can simply tell your computer to do something aren't you simply vocalising a command-line.
Complete wimp/gui systems are the equivalent to not knowing the language and having a sign with a few phrases written on it. When you want to tell someone something you point to the appropriate phrases. Quick and easy but no where near as useful as actually learning the language.
so in other words they combine both mac and NeXT interfaces and drop some of the best UI aspects of them, only to add them back in when people go wtf.
It just that some people are going all "apple is using unix so they're on 'our side' now" and the fact of the matter is that if *nix and open-source wasn't trendy right now (thanks to linux and gnu) I very much doubt that they would have told anyone that it contained BSD code and they wouldn't have included terminal.app, no Darwin and it would be as opaque as os9 and below
1 - dock icon areas do not extend to edge of dock.
2 - dock changes size and icons move as it gets used
3 - what if you don't like grey or blue? Maybe OSX.2 will have green and OSX.3 will have purple....
4 - it has vi so when I go to the apple help and type in vi I expect to see at least something.
5 - stupid windowesque scroll bars - the scroll-bars were one of the things which NeXT got right for Steve's sake;-)
6 - way too much eye-candy, at least I can not install Enlightenment.
OSX isn't unix wedded with mac, its unix buried under mac. If anything its BaCKstep.
Most of the reports of 'we tried to use linux but everyone hated it' seem to come from laziness, lack of empathy with users and not understanding how to construct a desktop system for *their* users.
What I mean is the admins like Linux/unix and have convinced their bosses how much money they can save and so they just whack a default Redhat/Suse/Corel on all the machines and give all the staff 20minutes training telling them that gnome/kde/whatever is just like windows.
Honestly I'd recommend using KDE2.2 but you have to so heavily modify its setup and then remove the ability to change those settings to prevent users from breaking the config. Howabout removing the K menu and just having icons for the 5 or so applications that they use on the desktop or the panel. Corporate users shouldn't be to do anything more than change the colours and the background picture. They shouldn't need to change their menus or anything like that - admins do that.
These users should never have to use the commandline. They probably would only use Koffice, Kmail, Kaddress and Konqueror and maybe a couple of in-company apps. And lots of that config should be locked. How do you lock config? chown root, chmod -w. Easy. Simplify and remove options. Options are there for admins to use to customise systems for their users needs - not for users to play with. They afterall are not the 'techies', it is not their job to make these decisions.
Oh and should you need to send a document to anyother company you can print to PDF!!! If you ask a graphic artist to produce a logo for you and send you a sample, does he/she send you a photoshop document? Oh course not. He exports it to a more generically useful format. Why are documents so different?
</rant>
We are building systems based on faith and hope. We have to admit we live in a world where people try to hurt each other, perhaps you might have seen a certain event last week?
I want my information, my software, my system on my computer. If I need it available for someone else I will make it available for them. A certain amount of paranoia is healthy.
In a perfect world this might be great but we have to be realistic.
Tweaking is what admins are *for*, see city of Largo, Florida.
>Microsoft has spent years studying and improving their user interface. Most people can
>sit down at a Windows machine and start working within minutes. That's WORKING, not
>tweaking, not recompiling, not reading the MAN pages. THAT'S why purchasing
>departments buy Microsoft products, not the
I don't know about anyone else but I treat downloadable movies (ie cam rips) as previews, mainly because I'm in Australia and we get movies some times months after the US. I download the first half and watch it while the second half is downloading. If the movie is bad I'll cancel the second half. If it is an ok movie I'll watch all of it. If it is really good I'll actually pay to go and watch it when it comes out. They are not good enough quality to replace the real thing and no substitute for the big screen.
Other than this the only indicator of whether or not you are going to like a movie is the trailer, an advertisement designed to make you want to go and see it, not to help you make an informed choice.
Most games you can get a demo of, books you can read a bit of in the store or at a library, a car you can take for a test run but movies you have to just fork out the cash and hope that its good. In my mind that just isn't good enough - if the movie is worth it I will pay to see it - otherwise I'll save my money.
How about if your bank allowed you, via their website, to transfer money from your account to any other account at any other bank - probably a number of transactions free per month and then a % fee after that per transactions (gotta give them a reason).
I am assuming that people in other countries(I'm in au) have online banking facilities available to them. I honestly have no idea.
But I like the idea that all I need to know is the artists/authors/designers/whatevers account number and I can send them money. It doesn't allow for an automatic pay then receive system needed for large scale operations like amazon & co but it would be a boon for small businesses.
When you download some mp3's (or pray even ogg's) that you like you could go to the artist's site get their bank details and pay them what you think it was worth. That would be purely voluntary and they would still receive income from actual cd buyers. But then maybe their contracts would forbid them from receiving monies in this way.. just thinking as I'm writing. But small, independent acts with no contracts could hope to gain recognition and money without a contract (read ball and chain) from a record company.
And in anycase this doesn't require much more infrastructure than the banks already have in place. They just have to make it affordable to make small (>$2) payments. --
I used to think that 'crackers' did provide a valuable service by exposing vulnerbilities. But the truth of the matter is that most of them are irresponsible children crying out 'l00k @t m3 m0mmy I'm @n 31337 hax0r', with no thought as to the consequences of their actions.
Grow up, if want to be useful find a vulnerbility and then report it to the admins and the software maintainers. Don't make other peoples life hell... I wonder how many people lose jobs because of this childish behaviour. --
Slashdot Mirror
mplayer plays it just fine of my rh7.1 machine
mmmmmmmmm, mplayer...
So in other words he can only sell his product to people who actually need its specific features. So.
This sounds a bit like the I have this product but I can't sell it because someone gives theirs away for free so we have to make free stuff illegal.
It is hard to compete against a free product, if you don't have some means of giving your product value when compared to it. Free software has raised the bar on quality, your compiler has to be better than GCC in order to get customers. I think this is a good thing.
Why you ask? I dunno. Maybe open/free software all the way through. Or maybe I don't like translucent blue. Or maybe I don't trust apple anymore than Microsoft. Or maybe I'm one of those crazy long haired freesoftware freaks.
Or maybe we have reached the stage now where there are two sorts of OS's. The 'consumer, easy install, no brain, looks pretty above all else, locked up propriatory' OS and the 'have to know what you are doing, I can custom compile my kernel, and tune every inch and dig around in the guts' OS. And most importantly you can used the free OS to do pretty much everything that the consumer one can do.
Thus there will be demand for Linux on Macs, because the hardware rocks but not everyone likes consumer OS's.
>>but there really can't be much demand for Linux on the new >>boxen. Can there?
neighbour: can you download the new (insert) linux distro and put it in your shared dir?
me : sure, could you mow my lawn this afternoon?
lets build another level of possible failure into them, I'm sure we'll all rush out to buy CarXP ;-)
I have a friend who works in a call-center for Energex (Australia's power distro). A lot (not all) of their setup is NT4 but only patched upto around SP4 because so much of their system breaks going any further.
now I just have to wait a couple of days for the new galeon. ;-)
Mozilla blows - Gecko rules
Was there any member of the w3c who didn't support this at all?
Any company which did support it and now doesn't is just reacting to the fact that they got caught out trying to screw the entire internet community for a quick buck.
whoa
A single energy field what binds everything in the universe together. Hmm some people call it the will of god, others call it atomic forces, others again call it forces of nature. Still it makes more sense that most of the other dogma out there.
when/if you can simply tell your computer to do something aren't you simply vocalising a command-line.
Complete wimp/gui systems are the equivalent to not knowing the language and having a sign with a few phrases written on it. When you want to tell someone something you point to the appropriate phrases. Quick and easy but no where near as useful as actually learning the language.
so in other words they combine both mac and NeXT interfaces and drop some of the best UI aspects of them, only to add them back in when people go wtf.
It just that some people are going all "apple is using unix so they're on 'our side' now" and the fact of the matter is that if *nix and open-source wasn't trendy right now (thanks to linux and gnu) I very much doubt that they would have told anyone that it contained BSD code and they wouldn't have included terminal.app, no Darwin and it would be as opaque as os9 and below
OSX is not a good gui.
1 - dock icon areas do not extend to edge of dock.
2 - dock changes size and icons move as it gets used
3 - what if you don't like grey or blue? Maybe OSX.2 will have green and OSX.3 will have purple
4 - it has vi so when I go to the apple help and type in vi I expect to see at least something.
5 - stupid windowesque scroll bars - the scroll-bars were one of the things which NeXT got right for Steve's sake
6 - way too much eye-candy, at least I can not install Enlightenment.
OSX isn't unix wedded with mac, its unix buried under mac. If anything its BaCKstep.
Most of the reports of 'we tried to use linux but everyone hated it' seem to come from laziness, lack of empathy with users and not understanding how to construct a desktop system for *their* users.
What I mean is the admins like Linux/unix and have convinced their bosses how much money they can save and so they just whack a default Redhat/Suse/Corel on all the machines and give all the staff 20minutes training telling them that gnome/kde/whatever is just like windows.
Honestly I'd recommend using KDE2.2 but you have to so heavily modify its setup and then remove the ability to change those settings to prevent users from breaking the config. Howabout removing the K menu and just having icons for the 5 or so applications that they use on the desktop or the panel. Corporate users shouldn't be to do anything more than change the colours and the background picture. They shouldn't need to change their menus or anything like that - admins do that.
These users should never have to use the commandline. They probably would only use Koffice, Kmail, Kaddress and Konqueror and maybe a couple of in-company apps. And lots of that config should be locked. How do you lock config? chown root, chmod -w. Easy. Simplify and remove options. Options are there for admins to use to customise systems for their users needs - not for users to play with. They afterall are not the 'techies', it is not their job to make these decisions.
Oh and should you need to send a document to anyother company you can print to PDF!!! If you ask a graphic artist to produce a logo for you and send you a sample, does he/she send you a photoshop document? Oh course not. He exports it to a more generically useful format. Why are documents so different?
</rant>
<takes breath>
Gives Linux even more credulence with PHB's but might be its bane when we suddenly have our own version of the 'memorised the test questions' MCSE.
maxim.com does not go where you expect it to...
so whos in for manga-quake?
Or heman/shera quake?
Or smurf quake?
We are building systems based on faith and hope. We have to admit we live in a world where people try to hurt each other, perhaps you might have seen a certain event last week?
I want my information, my software, my system on my computer. If I need it available for someone else I will make it available for them. A certain amount of paranoia is healthy.
In a perfect world this might be great but we have to be realistic.
Tweaking is what admins are *for*, see city of Largo, Florida.
>Microsoft has spent years studying and improving their user interface. Most people can
>sit down at a Windows machine and start working within minutes. That's WORKING, not
>tweaking, not recompiling, not reading the MAN pages. THAT'S why purchasing
>departments buy Microsoft products, not the
I have a old 14 inch ktx monitor with crap dot-pitch, thus I have full screen hardware anti-aliasing on everything ;-)
I don't know about anyone else but I treat downloadable movies (ie cam rips) as previews, mainly because I'm in Australia and we get movies some times months after the US. I download the first half and watch it while the second half is downloading. If the movie is bad I'll cancel the second half. If it is an ok movie I'll watch all of it. If it is really good I'll actually pay to go and watch it when it comes out. They are not good enough quality to replace the real thing and no substitute for the big screen.
Other than this the only indicator of whether or not you are going to like a movie is the trailer, an advertisement designed to make you want to go and see it, not to help you make an informed choice.
Most games you can get a demo of, books you can read a bit of in the store or at a library, a car you can take for a test run but movies you have to just fork out the cash and hope that its good. In my mind that just isn't good enough - if the movie is worth it I will pay to see it - otherwise I'll save my money.
How about if your bank allowed you, via their website, to transfer money from your account to any other account at any other bank - probably a number of transactions free per month and then a % fee after that per transactions (gotta give them a reason).
I am assuming that people in other countries(I'm in au) have online banking facilities available to them. I honestly have no idea.
But I like the idea that all I need to know is the artists/authors/designers/whatevers account number and I can send them money. It doesn't allow for an automatic pay then receive system needed for large scale operations like amazon & co but it would be a boon for small businesses.
When you download some mp3's (or pray even ogg's) that you like you could go to the artist's site get their bank details and pay them what you think it was worth. That would be purely voluntary and they would still receive income from actual cd buyers. But then maybe their contracts would forbid them from receiving monies in this way.. just thinking as I'm writing. But small, independent acts with no contracts could hope to gain recognition and money without a contract (read ball and chain) from a record company.
And in anycase this doesn't require much more infrastructure than the banks already have in place. They just have to make it affordable to make small (>$2) payments.
--
gentlemen start your wget -r
--
I used to think that 'crackers' did provide a valuable service by exposing vulnerbilities. But the truth of the matter is that most of them are irresponsible children crying out 'l00k @t m3 m0mmy I'm @n 31337 hax0r', with no thought as to the consequences of their actions.
Grow up, if want to be useful find a vulnerbility and then report it to the admins and the software maintainers. Don't make other peoples life hell... I wonder how many people lose jobs because of this childish behaviour.
--
It is if the program was supposed to do that.
>Is it worse than software that sends pr0n to your Mom, initializes your
>harddrive, and fries your CPU?
--