Wow, that's interesting, I never thought of it that way.:)
I usually update my system every 6 months or so. And I imagined something like that might be true. Office was very useful around the '97 release. The last time I tried exporting HTML I think was on 2000 and it added in a bunch of CSS and javascript and crap that renderred the resulting HTML file useless. It would have been faster to just cut and paste it into an HTML editor and click save. It frustrated me deeply for a few minutes, but I got through it using my favorite HTML editor, vi.
Actually, now that I think about it, Open Office might have also produced useless HTML. Yep, similar problems, but at least OOo conforms to HTML standards.
Personally I think they should use CSS properly (not like I know how), but create a style sheet for the document and use
tags and a lot of white space instead of embedding a stupid tag in every line. Meta tags don't need to be completed so thoroughly, possibly build in options to set those for the document or something. Just seems like a bunch of monkeys could come up with a better solution.
New features that Apple got for free from the OSS community. New features that have been in use in OSS systems for years. It is incompetence on Apple's part that they weren't in the initial release of 10.0.
I don't care what other people think. If you're selling me a commercial product I expect it to be complete and finished. If it is not I would be willing to accept free updates until you complete and hope for a discount on the unfinished product. Apple lies and tells us their products are superior, when, in fact, they are not. But that's normal for any corporation, so it doesn't bother me. I just refuse to hand over my money to any business that expects it can run this way. Personally I prefer to give (sometimes thousands) to companies that contribute to the community for free and expect nothing for it. I support them because they are the reason I've been getting free updates for the last 5 years. My OS has supported every piece of hardware I have purchased even if the hardware manufacturer hasn't released any documentation to the community.
There are better alternatives. Yes, like OSS. I manage 300+ GB of data with a Linux based network that cost me a couple thousand dollars. It would cost me $10,000 to setup anything comparable with Apple hardware and I'd still be waiting to pay for the "features"/updates to make use of about half my content.
Don't get me wrong, I love OSX and recommend that above all else for corporate desktop use, but I'm not willing to be Apple's bitch while they try to figure out how to make money with OSS software. RedHat has been doing it for years and I hear no financial excuses from them why they should charge for the #1 Linux distro. RedHat is a commercial entity too, last time I checked, so what's Apple's excuse? Maybe they just don't play nicely enough with the community to get the developement support they need. Which is why their customers are paying for it. Hell, even Mandrake does that to some extent. Its not a bad thing, really, its just not right.
I upgrade bi-annually on average. It hardly ever impacts my performance and costs me a little time. I use Linux. Haha! Oh, and my HTML exporting features actually export usable HTML. But use what you like.
That doesn't sound like a very good deal considering all of OSX costs around $100. But then I guess you got to buy patches and minor (feature completing) updates. So I guess they get your money's worth either way.
You mean torture them.. I'm embarassed that my government can't even treat criminals like they are human. And people like you probably think a terrorist, because of the terror he commits, is no longer human. It doesn't matter whether you think a terrorist is human or not, the facts are that detaining and torturing a criminal suspected of terrorism to get a confession is an act of terrorism in itself.
You know what the funny thing is? We'd rather say it costs too much money than to raise the bar on the quality of life for everyone. We'd rather save our money than feed a starving family. The funny thing is a single human life (when put in the proper environment) is worth more than all the money in the world because they are a human, fully capable of being intelligent, creative and productive (as opposed to a dog or any other animal). But we deserve whatever we get either way.
Alternatively the moment you developed a portable audio product that did not incorporate my open audio standard, ogg, you lost a potential customer. I have no problem listening to my music across various platforms, devices and networks. And I have no problem not paying corporations who develop products without putting even the slightest amount of thought into them or their customer's needs.
Actually I'm in the process of transferring all my family films to ogm, the ogg media stream format. Ever heard of it? Not surprised. Its better than avi, wmv, quicktime, and rm, but you'll probably never use it until its "the next big thing", kinda like xvid. There's a huge difference between an audio/video codec and a phsyical product that relies on capitalism to perpetuate itself. Ogg will replace mp3s in the near future, its only a matter of time. Hint... people like me aren't supporting, sharing or using mp3s anymore than we have to.
But I have to admit you have a good point about competition, it is always good for us consumers. Although I think competition would be better if Microsoft stopped being so anti-competitive. If they didn't go out of their way, for example, to develope new hardware for the PC that only works with Windows.
If winning means producing a better product, and that is what I'm arguing, then you'll want to use their product and not any other. If they win (over Linux), that means they made something better than Linux.
This is capitalism fool. Winning means you make the most money and beat out your competition financially. Has nothing to do with the quality of your product. You should know that by now.
My comment about Microsoft's competition being anti-compeititive fell of deaf ears. You simply don't understand the destruction Microsoft has caused to our computer industry. The only thing that has a chance at competiting is not competing on the grounds of capitalism. They had to develope a license so liberal that it is virtually communism and give away their product for FREE. That's what I mean by anti-competitive. Linux is also anti-competitive towards corporations like Microsoft, which is why I don't have anything to worry about. But it does not change the fact that without Linux we'd have 2 choices, Microsoft or Apple.
Apple is understandable since they build their own hardware, just like Sun. But why is there no alternative for the PC than Microsoft, even when one, Be, developed an OS far superior in technical merit. Because Microsoft forces distributors to sign NDAs and various licenses prohibiting them from selling competing products if they want to also sell Microsoft products. That's anti-competitive if anything is.
I don't care how friendly you say you are if you kill or enslave everyone who talks to your friends I won't have anything to do with you. I'm sorry, but this is not business as usual. This is capitalism at its best, or worst depending on how you look at it.
First let me state that I want companies like Microsoft to fail. IMHO it would be better to leave all these security holes hidden, so when hackers do discover them we'll never know what direction they may be hacking from, only that they'll be hacking windows. It'll get a bad reputation for not being secure and people will not want to use it... er wait a minute..
If we continue to constructively criticize Microsoft they might fix their product as recommended and then where would we be. Its hard enough to build a stable secure platform that can compete with the monopoly's feature set let alone its ease of use. Normally I recommend constructive criticism, but in Microsoft's case I think its best to ignore them and let them figure it out on their own.
That's nothing. I wake and bake at around 9am, roll my ass into work at around 10:30 (supposed to get there by 9? I forget), and take a nice long lunch at around 11. After a couple hours I get back to work around 2, finish up a few things and head home at 4:20. Now I'm a professional and I hardly play video games.;)
Another perspective might say that Microsoft is doomed because of Linux and possibly OSX, which run across all these platforms, and consumers win from all the competition between IBM, Intel and AMD for 64-bit computing. We have some very nice chips coming to market next year, let's hope all the companies bringing them to us survive that long in this hostile American market.
Yeah yeah yeah, but what if Microsoft wins? They'll go right back to the same crappy service and products as they had before because they're only concerned about money. It is not in their best interest to create a stable, secure, standards compliant OS if they can sell you something that looks like one and save a bundle in developement costs. What happens when Linux goes away? You have no more free software.
Oh and since when has Microsoft ever played a seriously fair game of ball? I have yet to see an ethical action from that company.
But I guess its more important to have new stuff come out every year like.NET, XP and longhorn. The advancements and the technology are simply amazing, aren't they. I don't know what we'd do without Microsoft. We'd be lost.
Their type of competition is anti-competitive. How much better would our technology be if corps like BeOS would have been allowed to compete. Their product was argueably superior but lost out because of the usual ignorance on the consumer's part and Microsoft's anti-competitive behavior. I suggest you read up on it sometime it might surprise you.
Microsoft should have been broken up. But at least in all honesty on a long enough time line there is no way any single corporation can compete with GNU/Linux.
Re:WHY IS BUSH BASHING INSIGHTFUL?
on
Kevin Free
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
We have an obligation to treat people like they are human beings whether they act like it or not. I don't trust my government to treat me like a human being when they accuse me of being a criminal, drug user, terrorist, pirate, etc. Labels are the first step in oppressive behavior. Its right in front of your eyes, man.
Are you one of those millions of people that want me dead? I'm certainly not on your side, unless of course you love me and care for me and want to give me the proper environment to learn and work in. But you're a heartless old republican.:( Nope, I'm not on your side.
perhaps all objects get the property of melting point and your lava gets a temperature.. Maybe the temperature is not constant over the entire surface as well, since water or other objects could cool parts of the lava flow. This is why a thorough and complex physics engine needs to be developed.
I believe it is also nurtured by environment. If we put the average American into an environment that was more educational and engaging, they would become more intelligent than they were because of the stimulation. Right now our goal has been to dumb down our technology and make it easy to use. I don't know what effect this will have on society.
I agree that it is extremely important that all humans are taught the concepts of rates of change. If we apply differential calculus and computer networks to business we get efficiency and virtual automation (1 human does the work of 100..)
But can the average person understand or remember differential calculus? Probably not the way we teach things today. Our educational system leaves much to be desired. This stuff has to be fun to learn instead of a chore and everyone should be encouraged to attend/participate.
I guess all I'm saying is education is not encouraged. Just the basic skills required for labor. This is so 20th century. Hope it doesn't take us another 5000 years to finally grow a brain.
Maybe so, but much of the graphics technology we take for granted was pioneered by SGI. Their engineers and technology built 3DFX and Nvidia and revolutionized the PC industry. Silicon Graphics can still easily build systems to run circles around PCs for real-time graphics. Their buses, memory and design are usually far more efficient. We'll forget they ever made the O2, for now. But they could never compete with the PC price/performance ratio. Cheap PCs have mass bandwidth, but are really inefficient, buggy and hard to scale (GB+ clusters and the right software might strongarm even this obstacle). Although I bet it is extremely difficult to outclass SGI's supercomputers. Perhaps IBM or NEC have a chance, but any cluster of PCs would be laughed at today.
But you have to admit, this is what tax paying Americans deserve. We don't have any freedom and we're lied to all the time. Why now just accept the truth that they know what's best for us. I think we should be taxed but never given any information about how that money is divided up or handed out, so long as it goes to pay for schools and roads, etc. I wouldn't even mind a little higher tax if they could make the stuff on TV entertaining again. Maybe have the Olympics 2 times a year. And when is Pizza Hut gonna finally put its logo on ISS, they need the money y'know? If we really want to live this cheap outsourced commercial lifestyle then I say more power to them. I hope we pay more taxes to these secret closed source deals than we did originally. Personally I want our actions to one day finally bite us in the butt where there's no denying our unethical and/or immoral behaviors. Until we let the system eat itself alive people will go on believing its a perfectly good and healthy system to work in. Given modern technology I think there are better options.
Um, don't call me sonny, oldtimer. I'll be retired long before you or your children.
Yes I'm radical, but in a good way. If you could see that then maybe we could help eachother get the work done so no one has to do it. Ever heard of this little thing called automation?
I believe they are including additional features in the install so something like PostgreSQL could be upgraded at a later time than the distro, assumings its dependencies are backwards compatible.
Re:Put blame where it belongs...
on
New Red Hat Beta
·
· Score: 2
Yeah, the menus suck, but let's face it, the menus have always sucked in Linux. At least its getting better.
Slashdot Mirror
Wow, that's interesting, I never thought of it that way. :)
I usually update my system every 6 months or so. And I imagined something like that might be true. Office was very useful around the '97 release. The last time I tried exporting HTML I think was on 2000 and it added in a bunch of CSS and javascript and crap that renderred the resulting HTML file useless. It would have been faster to just cut and paste it into an HTML editor and click save. It frustrated me deeply for a few minutes, but I got through it using my favorite HTML editor, vi.
Actually, now that I think about it, Open Office might have also produced useless HTML. Yep, similar problems, but at least OOo conforms to HTML standards.
Personally I think they should use CSS properly (not like I know how), but create a style sheet for the document and use tags and a lot of white space instead of embedding a stupid tag in every line. Meta tags don't need to be completed so thoroughly, possibly build in options to set those for the document or something. Just seems like a bunch of monkeys could come up with a better solution.
new features like logging on file systems
New features that Apple got for free from the OSS community. New features that have been in use in OSS systems for years. It is incompetence on Apple's part that they weren't in the initial release of 10.0.
I don't care what other people think. If you're selling me a commercial product I expect it to be complete and finished. If it is not I would be willing to accept free updates until you complete and hope for a discount on the unfinished product. Apple lies and tells us their products are superior, when, in fact, they are not. But that's normal for any corporation, so it doesn't bother me. I just refuse to hand over my money to any business that expects it can run this way. Personally I prefer to give (sometimes thousands) to companies that contribute to the community for free and expect nothing for it. I support them because they are the reason I've been getting free updates for the last 5 years. My OS has supported every piece of hardware I have purchased even if the hardware manufacturer hasn't released any documentation to the community.
There are better alternatives. Yes, like OSS. I manage 300+ GB of data with a Linux based network that cost me a couple thousand dollars. It would cost me $10,000 to setup anything comparable with Apple hardware and I'd still be waiting to pay for the "features"/updates to make use of about half my content.
Don't get me wrong, I love OSX and recommend that above all else for corporate desktop use, but I'm not willing to be Apple's bitch while they try to figure out how to make money with OSS software. RedHat has been doing it for years and I hear no financial excuses from them why they should charge for the #1 Linux distro. RedHat is a commercial entity too, last time I checked, so what's Apple's excuse? Maybe they just don't play nicely enough with the community to get the developement support they need. Which is why their customers are paying for it. Hell, even Mandrake does that to some extent. Its not a bad thing, really, its just not right.
I upgrade bi-annually on average. It hardly ever impacts my performance and costs me a little time. I use Linux. Haha! Oh, and my HTML exporting features actually export usable HTML. But use what you like.
That doesn't sound like a very good deal considering all of OSX costs around $100. But then I guess you got to buy patches and minor (feature completing) updates. So I guess they get your money's worth either way.
Let me make this more simple for you. I oppose your very existence and I live right next door.
putting the proverbial thumbscrews to them
You mean torture them.. I'm embarassed that my government can't even treat criminals like they are human. And people like you probably think a terrorist, because of the terror he commits, is no longer human. It doesn't matter whether you think a terrorist is human or not, the facts are that detaining and torturing a criminal suspected of terrorism to get a confession is an act of terrorism in itself.
Are you human?
You know what the funny thing is? We'd rather say it costs too much money than to raise the bar on the quality of life for everyone. We'd rather save our money than feed a starving family. The funny thing is a single human life (when put in the proper environment) is worth more than all the money in the world because they are a human, fully capable of being intelligent, creative and productive (as opposed to a dog or any other animal). But we deserve whatever we get either way.
That's it exactly, companies only care about the TCO. If it doesn't cost money then its free. Ideology has no place in business as far as I can tell.
Yeah, iPods are nice, but I've decided long ago I won't purchase products that don't do exactly what I want. They'll figure it out sometime soon.
Alternatively the moment you developed a portable audio product that did not incorporate my open audio standard, ogg, you lost a potential customer. I have no problem listening to my music across various platforms, devices and networks. And I have no problem not paying corporations who develop products without putting even the slightest amount of thought into them or their customer's needs.
Actually I'm in the process of transferring all my family films to ogm, the ogg media stream format. Ever heard of it? Not surprised. Its better than avi, wmv, quicktime, and rm, but you'll probably never use it until its "the next big thing", kinda like xvid. There's a huge difference between an audio/video codec and a phsyical product that relies on capitalism to perpetuate itself. Ogg will replace mp3s in the near future, its only a matter of time. Hint... people like me aren't supporting, sharing or using mp3s anymore than we have to.
But I have to admit you have a good point about competition, it is always good for us consumers. Although I think competition would be better if Microsoft stopped being so anti-competitive. If they didn't go out of their way, for example, to develope new hardware for the PC that only works with Windows.
If winning means producing a better product, and that is what I'm arguing, then you'll want to use their product and not any other. If they win (over Linux), that means they made something better than Linux.
This is capitalism fool. Winning means you make the most money and beat out your competition financially. Has nothing to do with the quality of your product. You should know that by now.
My comment about Microsoft's competition being anti-compeititive fell of deaf ears. You simply don't understand the destruction Microsoft has caused to our computer industry. The only thing that has a chance at competiting is not competing on the grounds of capitalism. They had to develope a license so liberal that it is virtually communism and give away their product for FREE. That's what I mean by anti-competitive. Linux is also anti-competitive towards corporations like Microsoft, which is why I don't have anything to worry about. But it does not change the fact that without Linux we'd have 2 choices, Microsoft or Apple.
Apple is understandable since they build their own hardware, just like Sun. But why is there no alternative for the PC than Microsoft, even when one, Be, developed an OS far superior in technical merit. Because Microsoft forces distributors to sign NDAs and various licenses prohibiting them from selling competing products if they want to also sell Microsoft products. That's anti-competitive if anything is.
I don't care how friendly you say you are if you kill or enslave everyone who talks to your friends I won't have anything to do with you. I'm sorry, but this is not business as usual. This is capitalism at its best, or worst depending on how you look at it.
First let me state that I want companies like Microsoft to fail. IMHO it would be better to leave all these security holes hidden, so when hackers do discover them we'll never know what direction they may be hacking from, only that they'll be hacking windows. It'll get a bad reputation for not being secure and people will not want to use it... er wait a minute..
If we continue to constructively criticize Microsoft they might fix their product as recommended and then where would we be. Its hard enough to build a stable secure platform that can compete with the monopoly's feature set let alone its ease of use. Normally I recommend constructive criticism, but in Microsoft's case I think its best to ignore them and let them figure it out on their own.
That's nothing. I wake and bake at around 9am, roll my ass into work at around 10:30 (supposed to get there by 9? I forget), and take a nice long lunch at around 11. After a couple hours I get back to work around 2, finish up a few things and head home at 4:20. Now I'm a professional and I hardly play video games. ;)
Yeah, c'mon people, stop bashing poor Microsoft. Its not like they are a monopoly or anything.
Another perspective might say that Microsoft is doomed because of Linux and possibly OSX, which run across all these platforms, and consumers win from all the competition between IBM, Intel and AMD for 64-bit computing. We have some very nice chips coming to market next year, let's hope all the companies bringing them to us survive that long in this hostile American market.
Yeah yeah yeah, but what if Microsoft wins? They'll go right back to the same crappy service and products as they had before because they're only concerned about money. It is not in their best interest to create a stable, secure, standards compliant OS if they can sell you something that looks like one and save a bundle in developement costs. What happens when Linux goes away? You have no more free software.
.NET, XP and longhorn. The advancements and the technology are simply amazing, aren't they. I don't know what we'd do without Microsoft. We'd be lost.
Oh and since when has Microsoft ever played a seriously fair game of ball? I have yet to see an ethical action from that company.
But I guess its more important to have new stuff come out every year like
Their type of competition is anti-competitive. How much better would our technology be if corps like BeOS would have been allowed to compete. Their product was argueably superior but lost out because of the usual ignorance on the consumer's part and Microsoft's anti-competitive behavior. I suggest you read up on it sometime it might surprise you.
Microsoft should have been broken up. But at least in all honesty on a long enough time line there is no way any single corporation can compete with GNU/Linux.
We have an obligation to treat people like they are human beings whether they act like it or not. I don't trust my government to treat me like a human being when they accuse me of being a criminal, drug user, terrorist, pirate, etc. Labels are the first step in oppressive behavior. Its right in front of your eyes, man.
:( Nope, I'm not on your side.
Are you one of those millions of people that want me dead? I'm certainly not on your side, unless of course you love me and care for me and want to give me the proper environment to learn and work in. But you're a heartless old republican.
perhaps all objects get the property of melting point and your lava gets a temperature.. Maybe the temperature is not constant over the entire surface as well, since water or other objects could cool parts of the lava flow. This is why a thorough and complex physics engine needs to be developed.
I believe it is also nurtured by environment. If we put the average American into an environment that was more educational and engaging, they would become more intelligent than they were because of the stimulation. Right now our goal has been to dumb down our technology and make it easy to use. I don't know what effect this will have on society.
I agree that it is extremely important that all humans are taught the concepts of rates of change. If we apply differential calculus and computer networks to business we get efficiency and virtual automation (1 human does the work of 100..)
But can the average person understand or remember differential calculus? Probably not the way we teach things today. Our educational system leaves much to be desired. This stuff has to be fun to learn instead of a chore and everyone should be encouraged to attend/participate.
I guess all I'm saying is education is not encouraged. Just the basic skills required for labor. This is so 20th century. Hope it doesn't take us another 5000 years to finally grow a brain.
Maybe so, but much of the graphics technology we take for granted was pioneered by SGI. Their engineers and technology built 3DFX and Nvidia and revolutionized the PC industry. Silicon Graphics can still easily build systems to run circles around PCs for real-time graphics. Their buses, memory and design are usually far more efficient. We'll forget they ever made the O2, for now. But they could never compete with the PC price/performance ratio. Cheap PCs have mass bandwidth, but are really inefficient, buggy and hard to scale (GB+ clusters and the right software might strongarm even this obstacle). Although I bet it is extremely difficult to outclass SGI's supercomputers. Perhaps IBM or NEC have a chance, but any cluster of PCs would be laughed at today.
But you have to admit, this is what tax paying Americans deserve. We don't have any freedom and we're lied to all the time. Why now just accept the truth that they know what's best for us. I think we should be taxed but never given any information about how that money is divided up or handed out, so long as it goes to pay for schools and roads, etc. I wouldn't even mind a little higher tax if they could make the stuff on TV entertaining again. Maybe have the Olympics 2 times a year. And when is Pizza Hut gonna finally put its logo on ISS, they need the money y'know?
If we really want to live this cheap outsourced commercial lifestyle then I say more power to them. I hope we pay more taxes to these secret closed source deals than we did originally. Personally I want our actions to one day finally bite us in the butt where there's no denying our unethical and/or immoral behaviors. Until we let the system eat itself alive people will go on believing its a perfectly good and healthy system to work in. Given modern technology I think there are better options.
Um, don't call me sonny, oldtimer. I'll be retired long before you or your children.
Yes I'm radical, but in a good way. If you could see that then maybe we could help eachother get the work done so no one has to do it. Ever heard of this little thing called automation?
I believe they are including additional features in the install so something like PostgreSQL could be upgraded at a later time than the distro, assumings its dependencies are backwards compatible.
Yeah, the menus suck, but let's face it, the menus have always sucked in Linux. At least its getting better.