"The thing about Linux is, you can talk about a free, open operating system all you want, but you can't take that idea of free and open and put it into a capitalist system and maintain it as though it is some kind of hippie commune or ashram, because if you can do it like that, at that point I'm like, 'Pass the hookah please!'"
"I'm all for open source, and competition serves everyone's interest. But if Linux is really to take its place alongside Windows... then the vendors in this space cannot act like a bunch of hippies in a '60s commune or ashram. There really is no such thing as a free lunch."
She has a definite predisposal not to like open-source, right down to rejecting its philosophy and its ability to exist in a capitalist system... yet claims to be unbiased when her organization concludes that an open-source product inferior. She hates name-calling... but calls open-source developers communists and hippies.
As far as I'm concerned, she's getting what's coming to her.
rather open submission style that happens to be very similar to Wikipedia
Umm...no? Wikipedia allows anyone to edit instantly without any interference, and contributors own the content they create (though it's fair to mention that under the GFDL, Wikipedia can distribute it).
but a laundry list of rights that Microsoft assumes when you contribute is displayed in a way to render potential contributors with a strong feeling of vulnerability
If you were to use your precious spare time to write articles for Encarta, wouldn't you want to know that MS actually owned the articles? Remember, most people don't read EULAs, TOS, and the like. Often, they assume that such documents are benign even when they are not (MS has been guilty of this many a time...); this is exactly the sort of ingnorance Slashdot tries to fight.
Save everyones time and don't make little pitiful stabs at Microsoft when they can't possibly defend themselves in this arena tailored to encourage only those thoughts which agree with yours (the average Slashdot regular) that often aren't neccessarily fair
This is manipulative rhetoric and misrepresents the nature of Slashdot. Slashdot, as you're no doubt finding out from seeing your post modded up, is "tailored" only to let users do what they want--write and submit stories, mod, etc. The majority (myself included) are anti-MS trolls, but don't blame the site for what is essentially human nature. Slashdot is just the messenger.
So censor me and give me my negative moderation because I don't conform to the Slashdot norm, reinforce my point.
On a more positive note, I guess reverse psychology still works, even when it's blatantly obvious and calculated! ^_^
--h.m.
MSN is to freely-edited Encarta as Google is to Wikipedia? Remember, Google is considering hosting parts of Wikipedia and relies on Wikipedia for many of its factual answers. Presumably, MS wants its own (proprietary, of course) equivalent for MSN search. As usual, Google is the innovator and MS is playing catch-up so that it won't be at a disadvantage. (And as usual, MS is wrapping its product in onerous licensing restrictions at the expense of users.)
Meh! I posted the above, but apparently the great Slashdot didn't see fit to log me on even though I told it to. I'm certainly not afraid to criticize dead conservatives.
Anyway, one more observation on this topic: conservatives tried to excuse all of the above inconsistencies by saying thay they were for the sake of fighting communism. What are we doing today to keep the charade going? Fighting terrorism! That's really the most relevant parallel between 1984 and today's situation: just like Ingsoc, the U.S. always needs an enemy.
I still don't see how the credit card company could be irresponsible enough to have LOST it, or just how this "Slashdot" recovery service works, but my browser says I'm at www.americanexpress.com, so here goes...the number is...
I don't know, you never can tell how crazy far-right those Java programmers are... them and their "non-free" interpreter. I for one thought we lived in a more enlightened time.
(Note: post title assumes skips a "counter-," assuming your responses were the counter-counter-counter attack. What the original attack was I've quite forgotten by now.)
Wow. I'm kind of new to Slashdot so it's still really novel to me to get intelligent responses to my writing so quickly.
It's only when you can't "vote with your feet" to punish a company for stupid decisions that really serious problems arise.
This is the essense of the problem with MS. Not that they are a business, but that they have a monopoly. And the goodness of The Mozilla Foundation is not that they are non-profit, but that they are trying to offer a viable alternative to one part of the monopoly.
I agree. I got carried away in my post; I probably came across as a utopian Slashdot commie (and got modded up by utopian Slashdot commies, for that matter ^_^). There's nothing wrong with self-interest, or capitalism...but MS takes these things to extremes that hurt all involved. Effective, moderate, "enlightened" self-interest considers how cooperation may benefit both parties; MS seems more like a childish playground bully in search of territory and prestige.
Or maybe, just maybe, there were already dozens of popup blockers written by 3rd parties available for IE for years.
I use IE exclusively and haven't seen a pop-up ad (flash or otherwise) for over 3 years.
A valid point, but...what is that axiom..."98% of users never change the default?" People have been able to turn of ActiveX for years as well, but that didn't help the spyware problem very much. Slashdotters generally know what they're talking about (OK...most of the time...), but don't forget just because you're here that the vast majority of users are intimidated and confounded by their computers.
You're being silly.
Guilty as charged.
If MS is, in fact, the evil corporation that you claim they are and "they put business interest first," then they had no reason _not_ to put a popup blocker in IE. Their customers are not the pernicious websites...
Yes, but I argued, and still contend, that they felt like they couldn't discriminate against popup advertising--not obscene or duplicitous popups, let's say, but the semi-benevolent kind you used to see at online news outlets. Microsoft, I think, believes that most or almost all businesses are at some level benevolent, even without checks placed on them to make sure they display the kind of healthy self-interest I descibed above. Hence "trusted computing." Hence ActiveX being able to wreak freaking havoc on the whole OS so that commercial websites can develop "interactive content." "Yep, surely they spend their days slaving away for the consumer, just like we do." *wink*
They just chose to not focus on delivering a customer desired feature for whatever reason (likely simple stupidity and assumption of superiority).
Short of dragging Gates in here, I can't disprove this. But could MS really be "stupid" for the entire duration of the popup problem, which has been growing steadily worse for years? Did it take that one episode of Aqua Teen Hunger force to clear it up for them? Again, it's possible, but unlikely. Also, you split an infinitive in there. Nyaaaaaah.
Because they "won the browser war". When 80-90% of the world uses your browser for a couple of years, you don't feel inspired to improve on it much.
This may also be true, and I can't disprove it either. However, it wouldn't have been "much" of a fix; MS made tons of (futile ^_^) security fixes, which probably involved complex testing, in that same timespan that it didn't give IE a simple popup blocker. Thus it did not consider a popup blocker necessary, which raises the question "Why?," which I attempted to answer.
Moving on... I think I've already addressed the issues in Pxtl's and minairia's posts. jesterzog's had the most insight of the bunch, and not just because of the mod points (which, I'm
Absolutely correct... and IE could have had a popup blocker all along; it's not like it would be hard for MS to code. So why didn't they? Probably because they believed in the ridiculous philosophy that intrusive popups are a legitimate source of ad revenue. It was, or should have been obvious to them what their consumers wanted, but MS being a business (unlike the Mozilla Foundation), put business interests first. This is the same reason that Windows Media Player is loaded with DRM. MS only caved on the popup blocking issue because FF, which included blocking by default, started gaining market share as IE's reputation tanked. Self-interest alone drives IE's development, whereas FOSS developers tend to actually care about the people who use their programs.
Advertisers may not be that worried about Firefox in particular. Remember that it still only has 5% market share or so against the IE monolith, thus a smart advertiser would spend more resources exploiting IE. When Firefox becomes more popular, that's when we really have to start worrying.
However, couldn't there be a definitive end to this battle in which one browser essentially stops popup windows completely? There are only so many ways to load the damn things, after all. I thought (correct me if I'm wrong) that popups have gotten more press in the last month or so because more people started using Flash to open them. That quickly got blocked by a FF extension. The recent renewal of interest in the issue doesn't necessarily mean that popups are impossible to get rid of.
That article is basically a troll. The Special Olympics (as well as many other organizations, I'm sure) has a very similar logo; it's a common and intuitive design and impossible to call a ripoff. Aside from that, the logo is cool but ultimately unimportant to Ubuntu, and that article implies that MS ripped something significant.
As funny as the block of nonsense text in the abstract is, don't neglect to look at the authors: "Jack Napier, Corresponding Author Contact Information, E-mail The Corresponding Author, Seto Kaiba and Yuffie Kisaragi."
Seto Kaiba is from YuGiOh and Yuffie Kisaragi is from the venerable Final Fantasy VII (one of the highlights of my adolescence). I did a Google search on Jack Napier and it returned some highly questionable results. IMDB http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0621023/ confirms that he is a porn star.
semantic gripes with TFA
on
The PC Is Not Dead
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
"As processing power, network bandwidth, storage capacity, and advanced software continue to evolve at rates that meet or beat Moore's Law..."
Is it just me or does Moore's Law say nothing about networking, storage, or software? And also, hasn't the pace of technology been not quite keeping up with the Law recently? For example, despite other enhancements such as faster buses, CPU clock speed seems to have hovered around 3 GHz for a while.
Hmm... if Bill Gates can be this intellectually lazy, maybe Linux has a shot after all.
1. There's a deficit of incentive here. Why would POLITICIANS (let that word sink in a bit) make any effort to limit corporations' profits?
2. A society like the one you speak of would produce people as ill-informed, immature, and reactionary as you are, judging from your comment. Keep believing that all authority is "fascist." See where that gets you. Parents, churches, and governments are imperfect, sometimes painfully so, but don't tell me that "Love thy neighbor," "All men are created equal," and the like are not genuinely good ideas.
Looking at all these change highlights makes me question the development process of these huge window managers--GNOME as well as KDE. Why do they spend so much effort developing new apps for every common task? For example, why is there a KOffice and GNOME Office when I can just use OpenOffice instead? Why Kopete, when I could use Gaim? It seems that the developers' time would be better spent improving the core functions of the window manager.
Indeed. VCL (Voluntary Collective Licensing) is the way to go. Customers pay ASCAP or some neutral third party a flat fee every month, which then distributes the cash to labels in proportion to the popularity of each label's songs on the network.
ISPs could easily collect the fee, selling it as an "extra" service, like premium cable. And since the resulting network would be sponsored by the labels, they could develop something uber-fast, making it actually more efficient than FastTrack or BitTorrent or what-have-you. For $10 a month, it would be easier than piracy, and if most Internet users signed up for it, there would be little incentive to pirate from friends. Also, because customers would be transferring the files to each other, the labels would have to pay very, very little to distribute potentially a lot more music than they are doing now.
iMesh and Kazaa use the FastTrack network, a propietary technology developed by a Swedish company. They need to pay this company licensing fees to use the network, which is probably why no exact open-source, adware-free equivalents exist... unless you count the hacked "light" versions of these two that have the adware removed but can still access FastTrack.
Nearly every KDE desktop and icon theme I have seen is either a ripoff of OS X or is far worse aesthetically than even the much-derided Windows XP theme. But GNOME, with the Clear Look engine installed, is beautiful. GNOME gets my desktop until KDE gets rid of those ugly gradients for good.
If software really is moving toward a "zero" price point, is it inevitable that we will have to abandon the "information economy" altogether? Will the government respond by passing some draconian law against free software?
I could envision open-source becoming a "mainstream" political issue if one day Linux threatened the existence of a corporate monolith like Microsoft. Would Republicans, ironically enough, support free software and innovation in the name of reduced government intervention, or would they make even bigger hypocrites of themselves by favoring proprietary software? There's so much GDP growth and so many campaign contributions at stake...
Here's hoping it infects those poor braindead souls who do nothing but send text messages during class... Seriously, as anyone in high school knows, this is an epidemic. It may soon cause our school's administration to ban cell phones despite their legitimate uses.
Slashdot Mirror
Certainly. I got it from an AC post that was first modded down as a troll. But commentary on it is "+4 interesting"? Mods...WTF?
From the Wikipedia article on DiDio:
"The thing about Linux is, you can talk about a free, open operating system all you want, but you can't take that idea of free and open and put it into a capitalist system and maintain it as though it is some kind of hippie commune or ashram, because if you can do it like that, at that point I'm like, 'Pass the hookah please!'"
"I'm all for open source, and competition serves everyone's interest. But if Linux is really to take its place alongside Windows... then the vendors in this space cannot act like a bunch of hippies in a '60s commune or ashram. There really is no such thing as a free lunch."
She has a definite predisposal not to like open-source, right down to rejecting its philosophy and its ability to exist in a capitalist system... yet claims to be unbiased when her organization concludes that an open-source product inferior. She hates name-calling... but calls open-source developers communists and hippies.
As far as I'm concerned, she's getting what's coming to her.
rather open submission style that happens to be very similar to Wikipedia
Umm...no? Wikipedia allows anyone to edit instantly without any interference, and contributors own the content they create (though it's fair to mention that under the GFDL, Wikipedia can distribute it).
but a laundry list of rights that Microsoft assumes when you contribute is displayed in a way to render potential contributors with a strong feeling of vulnerability
If you were to use your precious spare time to write articles for Encarta, wouldn't you want to know that MS actually owned the articles? Remember, most people don't read EULAs, TOS, and the like. Often, they assume that such documents are benign even when they are not (MS has been guilty of this many a time...); this is exactly the sort of ingnorance Slashdot tries to fight.
Save everyones time and don't make little pitiful stabs at Microsoft when they can't possibly defend themselves in this arena tailored to encourage only those thoughts which agree with yours (the average Slashdot regular) that often aren't neccessarily fair
This is manipulative rhetoric and misrepresents the nature of Slashdot. Slashdot, as you're no doubt finding out from seeing your post modded up, is "tailored" only to let users do what they want--write and submit stories, mod, etc. The majority (myself included) are anti-MS trolls, but don't blame the site for what is essentially human nature. Slashdot is just the messenger.
So censor me and give me my negative moderation because I don't conform to the Slashdot norm, reinforce my point.
On a more positive note, I guess reverse psychology still works, even when it's blatantly obvious and calculated! ^_^ --h.m.
MSN is to freely-edited Encarta as Google is to Wikipedia? Remember, Google is considering hosting parts of Wikipedia and relies on Wikipedia for many of its factual answers. Presumably, MS wants its own (proprietary, of course) equivalent for MSN search. As usual, Google is the innovator and MS is playing catch-up so that it won't be at a disadvantage. (And as usual, MS is wrapping its product in onerous licensing restrictions at the expense of users.)
"I offer $500 to the first person to publicly report a verifiable security hole in the latest version of djbdns."
(djbdns being the software written by the author of the "rant" above.)
Now if only MS were so generous. ^_^
A welcome change. Before, it delivered only lies.
...great until the first time the house catches fire, dad has a heart attack, or there's bad guys in the cellar!
For using AOL...they deserve all of the above.
Meh! I posted the above, but apparently the great Slashdot didn't see fit to log me on even though I told it to. I'm certainly not afraid to criticize dead conservatives.
Anyway, one more observation on this topic: conservatives tried to excuse all of the above inconsistencies by saying thay they were for the sake of fighting communism. What are we doing today to keep the charade going? Fighting terrorism! That's really the most relevant parallel between 1984 and today's situation: just like Ingsoc, the U.S. always needs an enemy.
I still don't see how the credit card company could be irresponsible enough to have LOST it, or just how this "Slashdot" recovery service works, but my browser says I'm at www.americanexpress.com, so here goes...the number is...
"I'm not a white-space extremist."
(Did anyone else almost misinterpret that?)
I don't know, you never can tell how crazy far-right those Java programmers are... them and their "non-free" interpreter. I for one thought we lived in a more enlightened time.
(Note: post title assumes skips a "counter-," assuming your responses were the counter-counter-counter attack. What the original attack was I've quite forgotten by now.)
Wow. I'm kind of new to Slashdot so it's still really novel to me to get intelligent responses to my writing so quickly.
It's only when you can't "vote with your feet" to punish a company for stupid decisions that really serious problems arise.
This is the essense of the problem with MS. Not that they are a business, but that they have a monopoly. And the goodness of The Mozilla Foundation is not that they are non-profit, but that they are trying to offer a viable alternative to one part of the monopoly.
I agree. I got carried away in my post; I probably came across as a utopian Slashdot commie (and got modded up by utopian Slashdot commies, for that matter ^_^). There's nothing wrong with self-interest, or capitalism...but MS takes these things to extremes that hurt all involved. Effective, moderate, "enlightened" self-interest considers how cooperation may benefit both parties; MS seems more like a childish playground bully in search of territory and prestige.
Or maybe, just maybe, there were already dozens of popup blockers written by 3rd parties available for IE for years.
I use IE exclusively and haven't seen a pop-up ad (flash or otherwise) for over 3 years.
A valid point, but...what is that axiom..."98% of users never change the default?" People have been able to turn of ActiveX for years as well, but that didn't help the spyware problem very much. Slashdotters generally know what they're talking about (OK...most of the time...), but don't forget just because you're here that the vast majority of users are intimidated and confounded by their computers.
You're being silly.
Guilty as charged.
If MS is, in fact, the evil corporation that you claim they are and "they put business interest first," then they had no reason _not_ to put a popup blocker in IE. Their customers are not the pernicious websites...
Yes, but I argued, and still contend, that they felt like they couldn't discriminate against popup advertising--not obscene or duplicitous popups, let's say, but the semi-benevolent kind you used to see at online news outlets. Microsoft, I think, believes that most or almost all businesses are at some level benevolent, even without checks placed on them to make sure they display the kind of healthy self-interest I descibed above. Hence "trusted computing." Hence ActiveX being able to wreak freaking havoc on the whole OS so that commercial websites can develop "interactive content." "Yep, surely they spend their days slaving away for the consumer, just like we do." *wink*
They just chose to not focus on delivering a customer desired feature for whatever reason (likely simple stupidity and assumption of superiority).
Short of dragging Gates in here, I can't disprove this. But could MS really be "stupid" for the entire duration of the popup problem, which has been growing steadily worse for years? Did it take that one episode of Aqua Teen Hunger force to clear it up for them? Again, it's possible, but unlikely. Also, you split an infinitive in there. Nyaaaaaah.
Because they "won the browser war". When 80-90% of the world uses your browser for a couple of years, you don't feel inspired to improve on it much.
This may also be true, and I can't disprove it either. However, it wouldn't have been "much" of a fix; MS made tons of (futile ^_^) security fixes, which probably involved complex testing, in that same timespan that it didn't give IE a simple popup blocker. Thus it did not consider a popup blocker necessary, which raises the question "Why?," which I attempted to answer.
Moving on... I think I've already addressed the issues in Pxtl's and minairia's posts. jesterzog's had the most insight of the bunch, and not just because of the mod points (which, I'm
Absolutely correct... and IE could have had a popup blocker all along; it's not like it would be hard for MS to code. So why didn't they? Probably because they believed in the ridiculous philosophy that intrusive popups are a legitimate source of ad revenue. It was, or should have been obvious to them what their consumers wanted, but MS being a business (unlike the Mozilla Foundation), put business interests first. This is the same reason that Windows Media Player is loaded with DRM. MS only caved on the popup blocking issue because FF, which included blocking by default, started gaining market share as IE's reputation tanked. Self-interest alone drives IE's development, whereas FOSS developers tend to actually care about the people who use their programs.
Advertisers may not be that worried about Firefox in particular. Remember that it still only has 5% market share or so against the IE monolith, thus a smart advertiser would spend more resources exploiting IE. When Firefox becomes more popular, that's when we really have to start worrying.
However, couldn't there be a definitive end to this battle in which one browser essentially stops popup windows completely? There are only so many ways to load the damn things, after all. I thought (correct me if I'm wrong) that popups have gotten more press in the last month or so because more people started using Flash to open them. That quickly got blocked by a FF extension. The recent renewal of interest in the issue doesn't necessarily mean that popups are impossible to get rid of.
That article is basically a troll. The Special Olympics (as well as many other organizations, I'm sure) has a very similar logo; it's a common and intuitive design and impossible to call a ripoff. Aside from that, the logo is cool but ultimately unimportant to Ubuntu, and that article implies that MS ripped something significant.
As funny as the block of nonsense text in the abstract is, don't neglect to look at the authors: "Jack Napier, Corresponding Author Contact Information, E-mail The Corresponding Author, Seto Kaiba and Yuffie Kisaragi."
Seto Kaiba is from YuGiOh and Yuffie Kisaragi is from the venerable Final Fantasy VII (one of the highlights of my adolescence). I did a Google search on Jack Napier and it returned some highly questionable results. IMDB http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0621023/ confirms that he is a porn star.
Our overlords are urchins??
"As processing power, network bandwidth, storage capacity, and advanced software continue to evolve at rates that meet or beat Moore's Law..."
Is it just me or does Moore's Law say nothing about networking, storage, or software? And also, hasn't the pace of technology been not quite keeping up with the Law recently? For example, despite other enhancements such as faster buses, CPU clock speed seems to have hovered around 3 GHz for a while.
Hmm... if Bill Gates can be this intellectually lazy, maybe Linux has a shot after all.
1. There's a deficit of incentive here. Why would POLITICIANS (let that word sink in a bit) make any effort to limit corporations' profits?
2. A society like the one you speak of would produce people as ill-informed, immature, and reactionary as you are, judging from your comment. Keep believing that all authority is "fascist." See where that gets you. Parents, churches, and governments are imperfect, sometimes painfully so, but don't tell me that "Love thy neighbor," "All men are created equal," and the like are not genuinely good ideas.
Looking at all these change highlights makes me question the development process of these huge window managers--GNOME as well as KDE. Why do they spend so much effort developing new apps for every common task? For example, why is there a KOffice and GNOME Office when I can just use OpenOffice instead? Why Kopete, when I could use Gaim? It seems that the developers' time would be better spent improving the core functions of the window manager.
Indeed. VCL (Voluntary Collective Licensing) is the way to go. Customers pay ASCAP or some neutral third party a flat fee every month, which then distributes the cash to labels in proportion to the popularity of each label's songs on the network.
ISPs could easily collect the fee, selling it as an "extra" service, like premium cable. And since the resulting network would be sponsored by the labels, they could develop something uber-fast, making it actually more efficient than FastTrack or BitTorrent or what-have-you. For $10 a month, it would be easier than piracy, and if most Internet users signed up for it, there would be little incentive to pirate from friends. Also, because customers would be transferring the files to each other, the labels would have to pay very, very little to distribute potentially a lot more music than they are doing now.
Crap. I just re-read the article...for you obsessive nerd types out there, I realize the company is in fact Dutch, not Swedish.
iMesh and Kazaa use the FastTrack network, a propietary technology developed by a Swedish company. They need to pay this company licensing fees to use the network, which is probably why no exact open-source, adware-free equivalents exist... unless you count the hacked "light" versions of these two that have the adware removed but can still access FastTrack.
More about FastTrack here
Nearly every KDE desktop and icon theme I have seen is either a ripoff of OS X or is far worse aesthetically than even the much-derided Windows XP theme. But GNOME, with the Clear Look engine installed, is beautiful. GNOME gets my desktop until KDE gets rid of those ugly gradients for good.
If software really is moving toward a "zero" price point, is it inevitable that we will have to abandon the "information economy" altogether? Will the government respond by passing some draconian law against free software?
I could envision open-source becoming a "mainstream" political issue if one day Linux threatened the existence of a corporate monolith like Microsoft. Would Republicans, ironically enough, support free software and innovation in the name of reduced government intervention, or would they make even bigger hypocrites of themselves by favoring proprietary software? There's so much GDP growth and so many campaign contributions at stake...
Here's hoping it infects those poor braindead souls who do nothing but send text messages during class... Seriously, as anyone in high school knows, this is an epidemic. It may soon cause our school's administration to ban cell phones despite their legitimate uses.