As long as apple has OS X tied to relatively expensive computers that force the purchase of a monitor unless you're willing to go totally underpowered (mini) or overpowered (servers) and requires you to have apple hardware to run OS X (without hacks yes I know they exist) then they will be a niche OS. Don't get me wrong..I love my iMac but I could have had linux up and running on a box with the same specs for 1/4 - 1/2 the price and used an existing monitor.
You may not like my comment about how to make money with free software... but its not offtopic. I made the post a bit tongue in cheek but the reality is..those have been the primary ways (not winning contests) of making money on free software. In short its monetized by regular businesses or those who make money prostelitizing it.
First way: (the redhat method)
Step 1: wait:
for a commercial product to be successful after years of money is spent designing and coding it. keep waiting until someone decides to clone that product on his own for curiosity or because of a belief in free software
Step 2: collect it into a distribution. Hire some people to 'support' it.
Step 3:Profit
Alternately (the stalman method):
1: convince people free software is a great idea
2: collect large speaking fees discussing the work done by others who have taken up your cause.
3: profit
Obama will tell Petraeus that he should begin withdrawing troops as safely as possible to bring down our presence in Iraq delaying only if there is an on the ground situational need to do so.
Barring the Iraqi's kicking us out, as it increasingly seems they want to, McCain will stay until Petraeus can say that we've "won", even though Petraeus himself has said he didn't know he could ever declare victory in Iraq. This effectively abdicates his role as commander in chief to Petreaus. This is significant because the POTUS has a far broader range of things to consider. The cost of the war in lives and treasure and how that effects our economy is the prime example. If we bankrupt ourselves "winning" then did we really win?
The big question here is what happens when the commercial vendors of this stuff are gone?
What happens when no one pays for the usability testing that so often the open source software guys can't afford? Right now that's fine. There's a commercial version whose vendor did the usability testing to copy. (look at window managers for example.. 'ooh I can skin it to look like a 'mac' or 'windows'... both of whom spend millions and take years making sure that the placement/feel etc of icons work for the average user only to have the open source guy jump out shrug and say "that's nothing I can copy that in an afternoon". But what happens when there's nothing to copy? When the user testing is done by every poor guy who's downloading the thing and just needs to get some work done?
And think about the IDE situation. Eclipse is a special case that was effectively created by IBM, not some rogue group of "for the people" programmers, but IBM. And they wanted to make inroads into a developer market that was at the time leaning heavily microsoft sure but more they wanted a single, non-microsoft, platform they could develop on and for so that they didn't have to deal with 2, 10, or even a hundred open source IDE's competing for dominance. Instead they created eclipse as a foundation on which they could put many of their products (like many of the Rational line) and by doing so have to target only one environment. They eliminated licensing fees and internal development costs for the tool now sharing that burden with a number of other companies in the 'eclipse foundation'. It's pure genius. They eliminate 100's of millions in licensing fees worldwide and the need for all the developers they would otherwise have to hire to maintain the tools internally all while making sure a steady stream of fanatic OSS developers are familiar with the platform for both using and developing rational tools. Even better than vastly redusing the costs then sharing what's left with other companies is that many people will actually donate their time to doing fixes etc so that IBM doesn't have to pay anything at all.
Murder and assault are illegal and should be. However, in the US we've introduced the idea of 'hate' crimes that are crimes above and beyond the actions taken. These crimes are based not on your actions but who the victim is and your possible feelings about the victim.
Worse even though you may be found not guilty of the Murder/assault there have been cases where people are re-tried under the thought-crime.. er. uh. excuse me hate-crime statute even though it seems to violate double jeopardy protection.
Even more on point as far as this article are concerned the FBI ran an sting that resulted in arrests for simply following links they put out there to catch people looking for child porn. Hope they remembered to disallow fasterfox from doing pre-fetch on the sites to avoid people who got a click away and had their browser commit the crime for them.
There's a reason the US has the worlds largest prison population by percentage.
Open source can be nice because it allows the customer of a particular piece of software who isn't big enough to get a modification made to have the ability to do it.
Free software is another matter. This is a corporation's dream. Software that is created by individuals free of charge that the corporation can redistribute or sell support contracts for? Priceless. Redhat? IBM? They don't have to write the software, but they are enriched by the distribution and support of it. Yes there may be a net positive result to the economy when small businesses use the software but make no mistake the value of doing the actual programming starts to tend towards zero. Add outsourcing and offshoring and it will be only hobbyists that produce software.
Interesting that the 'egalitarian' giving of software tends to hurt those who give it (who might sell their skills otherwise) and enrich those who would formerly have had to pay for the software.
Reasons it's not ready:
1) Single vendor lock-in
2) Mac's aren't immune to spyware/viruses they just aren't as heavily targeted... yet.
3) Price. You pay a hefty premium for that stylish apple logo and while individuals might be OK paying it most businesses won't be. Oh and having to replace your screen every time you get a new PC.. great for apple.. lousy for businesses. And Mac mini's really aren't an alternative there..and the bigger machines are overkill upwards of $2.5K each..
4) Moves like going to OS-X love it if you want but the only reason apple got away with OS-X is because it didn't have many PC's in corporate environments. Can you imagine the uproar if Microsoft had announced vista would have been as big a departure from XP as OS-X was from OS-9? Fear of apple doing something like this in the future (see point 1) will chill many a business even thinking about it.
5) Oh and the point about new hardware being on cheaper intel pc's.. just reinforces point 4... businesses just love tracking things like that, needing to buy new copies of software because their only supplier just twisted their arm.
Mike
Or anything with DRM or the new spyware 'feature' from EA . I have better things to do with my time and the game I want to play when I shell out $50 is the one in the box not the get around our DRM game. So I'm sitting out in protest. I know too many people will put up with it, or worse purchase it with no idea their computer is being infected with this stuff, and we'll be stuck with DRM and spyware forever but it's all I can do. If you want the horrible gory details of my experience with BF2 and it's DRM read on.
I bought battlefield 1942, battlefield vietnam, battlefield 2 and it's expantsion special forces and with each version the DRM got worse and worse until finally with BF2 I spent more time dealing with the DRM than playing the game. A friend and I bought 3 copies of the game 1 each for me, him and his wife. The first couple times were ok. Then we got the first patch. Suddenly his PC would complain about not being licensed to play the game. Even though between us we'd spent $150 for the privilege. So we uninstalled and reinstalled and everything went ok... A few more hours of playing then we had to give it up for a bit of time due to schedules etc. The odd thing is each time a patch came out we had to repeat the same procedure on at least one of the PC's. Given the length of time it takes to install, this got old really quickly. Eventually we got to the point where we were installing the game, about 3 patches (we had the incremental ones) then the special forces update and another patch (actually I think it was reapplying one of the earlier patches since it actually came out after SF but there was a bug and SF would overwrite something from the patch).
So two of us sit down to play. One of us gets the dreaded message. Uninstalling and reinstalling takes about an hour, unfortunately all the time we had to play. So I go back the next day to play again... This time all three of us. I'm up and running. But, the dreaded message pops up for him. Frustrated, we turn to the internet. Naturally we've done this before... but why not... Finally the problem comes to light. My friend likes to keep multiple accounts on his machine with different access rights. unfortunately not having administrator rights doesn't seem to be an option for battlefield so he gave the accounts he created to play that privilege. But, since so many things in windows require admin. sometimes he'd be logged in as that on one of his pc's and install the patches while he was waiting for something else to finish. To save time. So, turns out there's a bug in the DRM software that gets 'confused' when you install the patches under a different install than the previous versions. The resulting behavior isn't an error though. Instead you simply get told you're a criminal and that you can't play. The fix? what we were doing. Completely uninstall and reinstall everything. By the time we finished that process only took an hour or so each time.
Mike
DRM and the constant obsession with games that push the envelope are killing it.
Personally I'd rather play a console game than have to worry about all of the issues associated with DRM. I won't go into too many details since it's been done here already: See The Problems With Game Copy Protection
But, I personally spent 2 hours trying to run battlefield 2 only to find out that the reason it kept complaining about my CD key was that I'd installed one of the patches as administrator while I'd installed the game and it's expansion pack as myself (yes.. doing so was an oversight on my part..) but the DRM in that case made a game I'd legitimately paid for unplayable until I uninstalled 2 expansions, the game itself then reinstalled everything in the proper order, under the same account, with a couple patches thrown in for good measure...
Second Reason: patches... Console games just work... PC games on the other hand still have bugs rolling out years after release... Yes this can be good... But often its an excuse to release it before it's done.
Next add the fact that playing a new games at any decent resolution can require a video card upgrade, which can cost as much as a 'next-gen' console for the single component.
Toss in a side of a possible memory or CPU upgrade to play.
Throw in the necessary maintenance of the PC (latest video driver/sound driver/chipset driver etc) and it's no wonder that PC gaming is on the decline.
Why spend a fortune in time and money to get a system that can run the latest games only to be irritated by an unfinished game who's DRM makes it harder than it should be to play?
The author praises this episode of half life while denigrating Sin. My experience can't have been more opposite. The random floating forcefield puzzles and ridiculous "roller coaster ride" from which you emerge unscathed that begin this episode pulled me right out of the story. I'm not a fan of monstrous buildings with arbitrarily unsafe places just to give you a reason to jump around like a jedi knight to turn the 'story' into a 'game'. Seriously, I hate jump or die levels. Further, I should probably not use the term 'story' to refer to half life anymore. Instead, it's more like a maze. You keep moving forward to find the cheese and solve the puzzle you are presented with at any given moment. Not much else really matters like WHY you are doing anything. You can't ask Alex, for example, WHY you are doing anything. You simply plod forward killing 'bad guys' and moving forward... Mostly because the game doesn't let you do anything else... not because you firmly believe in the cause of one side or the other. Potentially interesting moral dilemna's are hinted at, like is working with the combine the only way to save some of us? But they're never really explored and you have no choice in any case.
I don't want to say everything about the game is bad. I really did enjoy it and the negative tone here is to balance the article. The game is beautiful and in many respects fun if more mindless than it could be, though frankly I really find the situations where you are alone far more interesting than standing with Alex as she yammers about pretty much nothing before getting around to pushing whatever button obviously needs to be pushed but can't be pushed by you. She simply becomes a 'pacer' half the time that keeps you from moving forward more quickly. Sometimes this is fine because the game does look amazing as I said before, but others it's just... ok... I know you need to push that button/drop that forcefield... now do it already!
Sin on the other hand at least gave me a short term goal. I was injected with something that is altering me by someone I know to be untrustworthy. While it's not all that unique (far cry) it is at least motivational, something seriously lacking in Half Life. The story goes on to have you working with someone far more interesting (admittedly in my opinion) than Alex who does nothing more than provide something to stare at until she eventually decides to unlock whatever door or elevator you happen to be near so that you can proceed through the maze that makes up the game.
Actually people buy Apple precicely because of the hardware. Or more specifically their control of the hardware. The fact that Apple is the sole supplier of Apple hardware is a major factor in the software being what it is. There is no concern for unsupported third party motherboards/bios/video cards etc. No worry about thousands upon thousands of various systems often put together from the cheapest parts by someone on a budget. Instead they can test on the few systems that they produced and sold at a premium.
Windows often has stability issues because it runs on every hobbled together piece of hardware out there not to mention the desire to support bleeding edge hardware to keep users happy.
The spyware thing is also a red-herring. If you really care what the Apple users are doing call both of them and ask;-) But seriously, if you want to track user's behavior you aim for the largest installed base. That is currently (good or bad) windows users. It's not because the mac is inherently better at preventing it.
It's quite possible that the reason that we don't see apple rushing head long into porting OS-X to everything intel is precicely because they don't want to support every odd hardware configuration out there. Better to put out a product that is 'unsupported' on such hardware but usually runs... that way they get more sales to those who are curious without having to support them or take the blame if it doesn't work...
because we'll never know what would have happened in the absence of MS. Could be that without microsoft a plethora of different non-compatible OS's would have emerged resulting in the developers of applications on each of those platforms having to charge more to recoup their investments... But there's no way to calculate the losses based on that scenario... let alone determine what effect that has had on hardware prices.
Or In an alternate scenario maybe we'd live in the idyllic world of the linux zealots like Stallman and all work day jobs at a retail store, then donate our free time to making free software for everyone. In this case the the monopoly is costing the entire $40 billion of microsoft's profit.
Slashdot Mirror
As long as apple has OS X tied to relatively expensive computers that force the purchase of a monitor unless you're willing to go totally underpowered (mini) or overpowered (servers) and requires you to have apple hardware to run OS X (without hacks yes I know they exist) then they will be a niche OS. Don't get me wrong..I love my iMac but I could have had linux up and running on a box with the same specs for 1/4 - 1/2 the price and used an existing monitor.
You may not like my comment about how to make money with free software... but its not offtopic. I made the post a bit tongue in cheek but the reality is..those have been the primary ways (not winning contests) of making money on free software. In short its monetized by regular businesses or those who make money prostelitizing it.
First way: (the redhat method)
Step 1: wait:
for a commercial product to be successful after years of money is spent designing and coding it. keep waiting until someone decides to clone that product on his own for curiosity or because of a belief in free software
Step 2: collect it into a distribution. Hire some people to 'support' it.
Step 3:Profit
Alternately (the stalman method):
1: convince people free software is a great idea
2: collect large speaking fees discussing the work done by others who have taken up your cause.
3: profit
Osama said at one point that his goal was to bankrupt the US by drawing them into this kind of conflict.
Bush took the bait hook line and sinker and now McCain plans to continue where he left off.
Why on earth would they be afraid of Dubya. His rashness has been their strongest ally. He's tremendously easy to manipulate.
I disagree that they have no differences.
Obama will tell Petraeus that he should begin withdrawing troops as safely as possible to bring down our presence in Iraq delaying only if there is an on the ground situational need to do so.
Barring the Iraqi's kicking us out, as it increasingly seems they want to, McCain will stay until Petraeus can say that we've "won", even though Petraeus himself has said he didn't know he could ever declare victory in Iraq. This effectively abdicates his role as commander in chief to Petreaus. This is significant because the POTUS has a far broader range of things to consider. The cost of the war in lives and treasure and how that effects our economy is the prime example. If we bankrupt ourselves "winning" then did we really win?
The big question here is what happens when the commercial vendors of this stuff are gone?
What happens when no one pays for the usability testing that so often the open source software guys can't afford? Right now that's fine. There's a commercial version whose vendor did the usability testing to copy. (look at window managers for example.. 'ooh I can skin it to look like a 'mac' or 'windows'... both of whom spend millions and take years making sure that the placement/feel etc of icons work for the average user only to have the open source guy jump out shrug and say "that's nothing I can copy that in an afternoon". But what happens when there's nothing to copy? When the user testing is done by every poor guy who's downloading the thing and just needs to get some work done?
And think about the IDE situation. Eclipse is a special case that was effectively created by IBM, not some rogue group of "for the people" programmers, but IBM. And they wanted to make inroads into a developer market that was at the time leaning heavily microsoft sure but more they wanted a single, non-microsoft, platform they could develop on and for so that they didn't have to deal with 2, 10, or even a hundred open source IDE's competing for dominance. Instead they created eclipse as a foundation on which they could put many of their products (like many of the Rational line) and by doing so have to target only one environment. They eliminated licensing fees and internal development costs for the tool now sharing that burden with a number of other companies in the 'eclipse foundation'. It's pure genius. They eliminate 100's of millions in licensing fees worldwide and the need for all the developers they would otherwise have to hire to maintain the tools internally all while making sure a steady stream of fanatic OSS developers are familiar with the platform for both using and developing rational tools. Even better than vastly redusing the costs then sharing what's left with other companies is that many people will actually donate their time to doing fixes etc so that IBM doesn't have to pay anything at all.
Murder and assault are illegal and should be. However, in the US we've introduced the idea of 'hate' crimes that are crimes above and beyond the actions taken. These crimes are based not on your actions but who the victim is and your possible feelings about the victim.
Worse even though you may be found not guilty of the Murder/assault there have been cases where people are re-tried under the thought-crime.. er. uh. excuse me hate-crime statute even though it seems to violate double jeopardy protection.
Even more on point as far as this article are concerned the FBI ran an sting that resulted in arrests for simply following links they put out there to catch people looking for child porn. Hope they remembered to disallow fasterfox from doing pre-fetch on the sites to avoid people who got a click away and had their browser commit the crime for them.
There's a reason the US has the worlds largest prison population by percentage.
Open source can be nice because it allows the customer of a particular piece of software who isn't big enough to get a modification made to have the ability to do it. Free software is another matter. This is a corporation's dream. Software that is created by individuals free of charge that the corporation can redistribute or sell support contracts for? Priceless. Redhat? IBM? They don't have to write the software, but they are enriched by the distribution and support of it. Yes there may be a net positive result to the economy when small businesses use the software but make no mistake the value of doing the actual programming starts to tend towards zero. Add outsourcing and offshoring and it will be only hobbyists that produce software. Interesting that the 'egalitarian' giving of software tends to hurt those who give it (who might sell their skills otherwise) and enrich those who would formerly have had to pay for the software.
Reasons it's not ready: 1) Single vendor lock-in 2) Mac's aren't immune to spyware/viruses they just aren't as heavily targeted... yet. 3) Price. You pay a hefty premium for that stylish apple logo and while individuals might be OK paying it most businesses won't be. Oh and having to replace your screen every time you get a new PC.. great for apple.. lousy for businesses. And Mac mini's really aren't an alternative there..and the bigger machines are overkill upwards of $2.5K each.. 4) Moves like going to OS-X love it if you want but the only reason apple got away with OS-X is because it didn't have many PC's in corporate environments. Can you imagine the uproar if Microsoft had announced vista would have been as big a departure from XP as OS-X was from OS-9? Fear of apple doing something like this in the future (see point 1) will chill many a business even thinking about it. 5) Oh and the point about new hardware being on cheaper intel pc's.. just reinforces point 4... businesses just love tracking things like that, needing to buy new copies of software because their only supplier just twisted their arm. Mike
Or anything with DRM or the new spyware 'feature' from EA . I have better things to do with my time and the game I want to play when I shell out $50 is the one in the box not the get around our DRM game. So I'm sitting out in protest. I know too many people will put up with it, or worse purchase it with no idea their computer is being infected with this stuff, and we'll be stuck with DRM and spyware forever but it's all I can do. If you want the horrible gory details of my experience with BF2 and it's DRM read on. I bought battlefield 1942, battlefield vietnam, battlefield 2 and it's expantsion special forces and with each version the DRM got worse and worse until finally with BF2 I spent more time dealing with the DRM than playing the game. A friend and I bought 3 copies of the game 1 each for me, him and his wife. The first couple times were ok. Then we got the first patch. Suddenly his PC would complain about not being licensed to play the game. Even though between us we'd spent $150 for the privilege. So we uninstalled and reinstalled and everything went ok... A few more hours of playing then we had to give it up for a bit of time due to schedules etc. The odd thing is each time a patch came out we had to repeat the same procedure on at least one of the PC's. Given the length of time it takes to install, this got old really quickly. Eventually we got to the point where we were installing the game, about 3 patches (we had the incremental ones) then the special forces update and another patch (actually I think it was reapplying one of the earlier patches since it actually came out after SF but there was a bug and SF would overwrite something from the patch). So two of us sit down to play. One of us gets the dreaded message. Uninstalling and reinstalling takes about an hour, unfortunately all the time we had to play. So I go back the next day to play again... This time all three of us. I'm up and running. But, the dreaded message pops up for him. Frustrated, we turn to the internet. Naturally we've done this before... but why not... Finally the problem comes to light. My friend likes to keep multiple accounts on his machine with different access rights. unfortunately not having administrator rights doesn't seem to be an option for battlefield so he gave the accounts he created to play that privilege. But, since so many things in windows require admin. sometimes he'd be logged in as that on one of his pc's and install the patches while he was waiting for something else to finish. To save time. So, turns out there's a bug in the DRM software that gets 'confused' when you install the patches under a different install than the previous versions. The resulting behavior isn't an error though. Instead you simply get told you're a criminal and that you can't play. The fix? what we were doing. Completely uninstall and reinstall everything. By the time we finished that process only took an hour or so each time. Mike
DRM and the constant obsession with games that push the envelope are killing it.
Personally I'd rather play a console game than have to worry about all of the issues associated with DRM. I won't go into too many details since it's been done here already: See The Problems With Game Copy Protection But, I personally spent 2 hours trying to run battlefield 2 only to find out that the reason it kept complaining about my CD key was that I'd installed one of the patches as administrator while I'd installed the game and it's expansion pack as myself (yes.. doing so was an oversight on my part..) but the DRM in that case made a game I'd legitimately paid for unplayable until I uninstalled 2 expansions, the game itself then reinstalled everything in the proper order, under the same account, with a couple patches thrown in for good measure...
Second Reason: patches... Console games just work... PC games on the other hand still have bugs rolling out years after release... Yes this can be good... But often its an excuse to release it before it's done.
Next add the fact that playing a new games at any decent resolution can require a video card upgrade, which can cost as much as a 'next-gen' console for the single component.
Toss in a side of a possible memory or CPU upgrade to play.
Throw in the necessary maintenance of the PC (latest video driver/sound driver/chipset driver etc) and it's no wonder that PC gaming is on the decline.
Why spend a fortune in time and money to get a system that can run the latest games only to be irritated by an unfinished game who's DRM makes it harder than it should be to play?
The author praises this episode of half life while denigrating Sin. My experience can't have been more opposite. The random floating forcefield puzzles and ridiculous "roller coaster ride" from which you emerge unscathed that begin this episode pulled me right out of the story. I'm not a fan of monstrous buildings with arbitrarily unsafe places just to give you a reason to jump around like a jedi knight to turn the 'story' into a 'game'. Seriously, I hate jump or die levels. Further, I should probably not use the term 'story' to refer to half life anymore. Instead, it's more like a maze. You keep moving forward to find the cheese and solve the puzzle you are presented with at any given moment. Not much else really matters like WHY you are doing anything. You can't ask Alex, for example, WHY you are doing anything. You simply plod forward killing 'bad guys' and moving forward... Mostly because the game doesn't let you do anything else... not because you firmly believe in the cause of one side or the other. Potentially interesting moral dilemna's are hinted at, like is working with the combine the only way to save some of us? But they're never really explored and you have no choice in any case.
I don't want to say everything about the game is bad. I really did enjoy it and the negative tone here is to balance the article. The game is beautiful and in many respects fun if more mindless than it could be, though frankly I really find the situations where you are alone far more interesting than standing with Alex as she yammers about pretty much nothing before getting around to pushing whatever button obviously needs to be pushed but can't be pushed by you. She simply becomes a 'pacer' half the time that keeps you from moving forward more quickly. Sometimes this is fine because the game does look amazing as I said before, but others it's just... ok... I know you need to push that button/drop that forcefield... now do it already!
Sin on the other hand at least gave me a short term goal. I was injected with something that is altering me by someone I know to be untrustworthy. While it's not all that unique (far cry) it is at least motivational, something seriously lacking in Half Life. The story goes on to have you working with someone far more interesting (admittedly in my opinion) than Alex who does nothing more than provide something to stare at until she eventually decides to unlock whatever door or elevator you happen to be near so that you can proceed through the maze that makes up the game.
Actually people buy Apple precicely because of the hardware. Or more specifically their control of the hardware. The fact that Apple is the sole supplier of Apple hardware is a major factor in the software being what it is. There is no concern for unsupported third party motherboards/bios/video cards etc. No worry about thousands upon thousands of various systems often put together from the cheapest parts by someone on a budget. Instead they can test on the few systems that they produced and sold at a premium. Windows often has stability issues because it runs on every hobbled together piece of hardware out there not to mention the desire to support bleeding edge hardware to keep users happy. The spyware thing is also a red-herring. If you really care what the Apple users are doing call both of them and ask ;-) But seriously, if you want to track user's behavior you aim for the largest installed base. That is currently (good or bad) windows users. It's not because the mac is inherently better at preventing it.
It's quite possible that the reason that we don't see apple rushing head long into porting OS-X to everything intel is precicely because they don't want to support every odd hardware configuration out there. Better to put out a product that is 'unsupported' on such hardware but usually runs... that way they get more sales to those who are curious without having to support them or take the blame if it doesn't work...
because we'll never know what would have happened in the absence of MS. Could be that without microsoft a plethora of different non-compatible OS's would have emerged resulting in the developers of applications on each of those platforms having to charge more to recoup their investments... But there's no way to calculate the losses based on that scenario... let alone determine what effect that has had on hardware prices. Or In an alternate scenario maybe we'd live in the idyllic world of the linux zealots like Stallman and all work day jobs at a retail store, then donate our free time to making free software for everyone. In this case the the monopoly is costing the entire $40 billion of microsoft's profit.