Oopsie, the RIAA didn't stay on the ball, and now their business model that THEY CREATED is turning against them.
Very true, although I think it might be even bigger than that. It's not just the business model that the RIAA created, it's the model that all of society has created for us. It's like that one (great).sig around... "I'm not merely a consumer or taxpayer. I am a citizen of the United States." Well, we're looked at as just that... consumers. We have been trained extensively to consume shit. It's not about buying things, or else they'd call us "customers". No... we're consumers, we're meant to suck up as much as they give us and beg for more. This is the way to sell us more crap than if we were merely meant to buy it. Consuming it gives us motivation to buy more and more.
The problem is that the model has totally backfired here. We've been programmed to consume so much that we're all doing it far too well for them now. We can consume and consume and consume all we want now without them acting as our (drug) dealers. We're not taught to buy our stuff, we're taught to devour it. Hence, no one sees any problem with not buying CD's because we've been taught that the purpose is not to buy as much as we can, but to have as much as we can. This is why people fill up their hard drives with MP3's and movies and why my roomate has cases and cases full of burned CD's.
I think this also explains why companies are more focused on regaining control than on increasing sales. Rather than add extras to the CD's to make them worth buying, or dropping the price, they try to regain control of access. It's stemming consumption at will that matters. Before it was good enough to control what bands got promoted via radio. Then it was MTV. Now it's bigger than that. Because people can download whatever they can make their own playlists. Granted, a lot of it is the stuff that the record companies are pushing heavily, but a lot of it is stuff they wouldn't expect, like older favorites that aren't the flavor of the month. Suddenly radio and MTV doesn't hold as much sway any more, and their control is weakened. At the end of the day, this is what it's about. It's not so much about profit in itself, but about control, because control guarantees profit.
We've all been trained too well, including the RIAA themselves. We've all been brainwashed in to consuming everything. The RIAA has been brainwashed the same way, which is why they're so focused on the control aspect. Finding ways to increase sales would suit them better than what they're doing. Unfortunately, I doubt they'll see the light until someone stands up and shows it to them with a spreadsheet and a stock quote.
Careful man... some of the younger trolls might start hitting you up for your sister's name and phone number. I mean... she uses Linux and hates Windows!;-)
I just bought Grim Fandango for $10 at Best Buy, and man is it great. Adventure games might have died with this baby, but if you havnen't played it yet you must pick it up! It makes me long for the days of Space Quest and the like.
I'm hoping that they have really cheap student pricing for the thing. I love the beta, and it's replaced Abiword as my Linux word processor (I'm still rooting for Abisoft though, Go! Go! Go!) and I'm pretty comfy using it in place of MS Office, which is something I wasn't comfortable doing before. I wouldn't mind paying the $50 bucks, but I'll use OpenOffice before I pay $99. Here's hoping the student discount pays off!
In theory, this would work. But don't we know the.doc file format already? It's just a collection of COM objects. The problem isn't that the file format isn't documented. It is. The problem is that you have to emulate a massive chunk of windows just to view an Excel file.
No... the monopoly problem goes way way beyond the simple "Document it and it'll be fine" solution. We need to get some real business and legal restrictions. OEM's need to be allowed to alter the desktop as they wish. They need to be able to install alternative OS's on their machines. There needs to be some serious inquiry in to.net and passport in general. And there needs to be a whole boatload of other things done at the sales and finance level that I don't even know how to approach.
We tend to focus on the technical side of things here at/., and as a result we forget the contradiction right in front of our faces. On the one hand, some say "Microsoft's products are shoddy" and "nothing wins on technical merit" and then other people say "if you give us the file format, we'll win". The solution to this problem is not a purely technical one. We need real restrictions on how these people operate. There is some fundamentally wrong things in the way they do business, and statutes need to be set up so that no one else can do these kinds of things again.
Well, is this really bashing? I think it's more bringing to attention a security flaw that may have slipped by. This one happens to be interesting because of the politics involved, as well as the fact that the same security flaw affects just about all of us (which is a testament to Free Software in itself.) That doesn't make it bashing though, it just means that everyone running Windows will likely have to patch their systems the same way that the Linux users did.
But then, bashing slashdot these days has become even more popular than bashing MS.
Yes, Having Some Rationale Is A Good Thing
on
Penguin2Apple
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
If you are using Linux because of an irrational devotion to the "open source - free speech and free beer" ideology, then moving to Mac OS X would be a violation of your principles.
Ok, I could mod you down as the flamebait you are for this comment, but I'd rather respond instead.
A devotion to Free Software and free speech is far from irrational for many of us. I've told my story before, and it applies specifically to the Macintosh, so you might be interested.
I was a major Mac zealot for many a year. I believed, and still do, that the Mac was the best OS out there for a lot of reasons, most of them the reasons you state. I didn't have to mess with registries or himem or config.sys or anything of that sort, I was just able to get my work done. Granted, I was a student and not doing anything very heavy duty, but I was able to get on the internet, get my hardware working, play lots of games, and write documents all very easily. Yes, the Mac was fantastic and I could do a lot with it and was far more productive on it that my friends with PC's.
But then the dark times came. You see, back around '95-'98 or so, Apple really looked bad. Copland was nowhere to be seen and we were stuck with our crashy old OS (mine was pretty stable, but I had to work very very hard at it) with shitty multitasking. I was still very productive, but that was because I really knew what I was doing.
But in many ways that was the least of our problems.
Software vendors were disappearing in droves. I saw Mac software drop and drop from the shelves, and only-Mac stores either start selling PC products or shut down entirely. Microsoft's last Office product was crap (they later made amends with Office 98) and the games were also disappearing right out from under us. You could almost sense a deep-seated depression in the community as our apps dwindled down to those peddled by Adobe and Macromedia.
So where do I come in to this one? Well, I didn't use Adobe or Macromedia products. My copy of ClarisWorks didn't work well on friends' Office docs, I couldn't buy new games, and I couldn't afford much beyond the basic items to begin programming software.
Yes, this last was a big deal for me, because I really wanted to help. I wanted to contribute, to help heal the community by providing missing pieces. I'd seen great technologies like OpenDoc and QuickDrawGX float away, and I wanted to provide something, some way of helping. But I couldn't. The books in the store were expensive, limited, and I couldn't afford many anyway. The Apple developer docs were hundreds upon hundreds of dollars (although I later got a full CD of them for $100, but this was still very pricey) and I could only afford the cheapest tools out there. I couldn't possibly understand why Apple wasn't helping me... didn't they want people to write for their system?
So I finally broke down and tried this Linux thing my friend had been telling me about for a few years. I switched to the PC because I was sick of my crashy MP3 player and lack of searching tools (Sherlock wasn't going to help me download music!) and a complete lack of games like Quake II and Starcraft, which have since come out on the Mac. But i mainly bought a PC to try out Linux. I didn't know about Free Software when I did it, and I didn't know that all the source code was there, all I knew was that anything was better than Windows, and I was deeply disgruntled with my Mac.
This probably sounds a little absurd to you too, but think of it this way. What if the company that you depend on for all your computing needs, a company that you have invested thousands of dollars in software and documentation and time in to learning suddenly abandoned you? What then? All your practicality of "best bang/buck ratio" has suddenly gone down the drain because the system becomes a lot less useful. I could only watch as my platform became more and more inferior, first with Office, then with gaming, then with Web browsing, then with MP3 searching and playing. What next, when would my platform become totally useless?
Now, Apple is doing very very well now, and I applaud everything they've done since Jobs came back on board. But that feeling still lingers on me. What happens if they abandon me? How far in to insignificance do I want to slide? A devotion to Linux and Free Software means that I can help myself, that the community can and will help itself. We may be a step or two behind Microsoft or Apple in some areas, but we're self-reliant, and we're not slaves to anyone else. This is the rationale behind Free Software. This is why a devotion to it is both useful and practical. And this is why I'll stick with Linux despite Apple's wonderful product and Microsoft's overwhelming support. I never want to be helpless again.
Who Compiles From Source?
on
Penguin2Apple
·
· Score: 2
Much better to have to download source, tweak it until it works, and compile it to install under linux.
When was the last time you honestly had to do this? Five years ago? Seriously... who doesn't use the package tools these days? Granted, you have to learn apt-get or dselect or RPM or RedCarpet, but software installs on linux are really easy these days when you overcome this (relatively simple) initial hurdle. It might not be "double click to install" but it's nearly as easy, and very clean to uninstall.
About the only time you would have to compile and tweak source is if you do a CVS pull of an app, which you wouldn't really be able to do at all given the Windows/Mac cultures. Sure, I love to be able to do a CVS pull of unreleased software, but it's by no means required for my day to day software management. Plus I can always package up the source myself and keep it friendly within the package manager. Say what you will about software installs in linux, but it's not really that hard any more.
You're right, the cost of Windows is not "oppressive", but it is still substantial when you have hundreds or thousands of desktops around. Say what you will, but these people are out to make money, and if they're paying $100k ops people and $10k per seat, they should be getting the best value out of their OS. If you're paying $10k per seat, it's not out of the question to request that the Solaris version of an app be ported to Linux. And for the amount of money that is being paid to the ops people, they could make the transition pretty easy. Now whether or not that really would be a useful replacement is still up in the air, but without a port of those critical apps neither of us will be sure.
You'd think that the financial sector would be the first non-tech sector to really start using Linux. I mean, it's free! These are people who devote their entire lives to making money. Shouldn't they realize the obvious cost benefits of running Linux?
Ok, I don't own a PS/2. I have a PS/1, most of the games for which I haven't beaten (Linux is my toy instead;-) so this may be my reason to get a PS/2. I can finally play GTA3 and still mess around with Linux. It'd also be a nice way to play with OpenGL stuff too. Wow... I'll have to seriously ponder this one! Sure, my opinion doesn't reflect market forces, but what the hell do I care? It's a PS/2! Plus, I can play stuff like frozen bubble and chromium on it and never leave Linux. Fuck the market and the big picture and Sony's potential revenue. I want one!
But you free software zealots wanted the source code so you could copy their cool ideas over into Linux, not so you could keep Be and BeOS alive and well. The end effect would be the same for fans of BeOS.
But that way we would all have BeOS's cool features with or without Be. If Linux matched BeOS with the support of its codebase, would you still be upset just because it would be named Linux?
And for those of you who would want to keep the Be name alive and well, with the source code you could have. Your loss as well as ours. Did anyone win in this scenario besides Microsoft and Apple?
You know... I would kill for a port of Appleworks to Linux. I cut my teeth on Appleworks (nee Clarisworks), and didn't switch to Office until I got a PC many years down the line. And at that point I still wanted a copy of Appleworks. If they can't sell Appleworks on Windows, perhaps for Linux? One thing that I've never seen is a Works package for Linux, which is probably a function of the fact that everyone thinks of MS's stinking pile of shit works program when they think of Works. Appleworks is such an amazing program. Do you think this kind of port would constitute a danger to Apple from MS? It is a great program that deserves more attention.
The point of my post was to point out that Apple does not have a heart of gold in doing what they do. They won't make these ports of Aqua and DPDF simply because they don't give a shit about this community beyond the point that it helps them. Not that this is unexpected, but it certaintly isn't something to hold up and glorify.
And I really don't know how you can accuse a community that gives away an entire operating system of greed. Apple got a hell of a lot from the open/free community including glib, gcc, perl, apache, and an entire UNIX subsytem that they emblazon rather large in their feature list.
No, they're not necessarily obligated to give anything back, and I applaud what they did with Darwin, but let's be frank about it. What they gave back with Darwin was no better than a Linux implementation, and in many ways it's worse. They didn't give any piece away that would have really helped anyone else. Remember, any changes and improvements that you make in Darwin get rolled back in to OSX to help it out. So you do wind up helping OSX users and yourself in the process, but Apple is certaintly not doing anyone any favors with this move. There's no charity involved, and they don't deserve heaps of praise.
Well, they're certaintly not encouraging anyone to port their OSX apps to Linux or BSD. I wouldn't mind Quicktime player or iTunes or iPhoto or iDVD or Aqua or their Display PS drivers or Applescript on Linux, and this doesn't even touch on encouraging third parties to port their apps over. Granted, they've got the Darwin stuff and QT Streaming Server, but that doesn't help us all that much. Hell, all the Darwin people are just running XFree anyhow.
This brings up a fairly interesting point though. Why is it that we as a community don't encourage ports to Linux? When we lack an app, it's always a replacement we want. I just downloaded a game called "egoboo" for Linux, and it's a really nicely done 3d nethack type game. When I opened up the readme file though, it said it was for Direct3D! Someone has ported a great piece of work for the community. Why don't we encourage more people to write their programs using Qt and OpenGL and SDL so that we can make use of them too? Shareware/Freeware authors want a wide audience, and encouraging the use of cross-platform stuff could be a real boon to us all. Perhaps a motion to do this is what we need to start with? I mean, Apple sure as hell isn't going to encourage anyone to port stuff to Linux, we'll have to do it ourselves.
What do you guys think? I know classically, Linux versions of apps generally suck, like the Kazaa Linux crap for instance. But what about other programs? I'd love to see Triallian personally. Any thoughts?
Why not? If you want to throw the "Information Wants to Be Free" argument at me, be my guest, although it's pretty useless since I never made that argument and never will.
I never said you couldn't like the features of OSX. It's a great system with a lot of nice features. However, you are still bound and gagged by Apple. Want to run Aqua on non-Apple hardware? Not a chance in hell, as useful as this would be. Want to learn about how their features are coded so that you can gain understanding from them in an academic sense? No chance. Want to help speed up OSX (yes, the speed problems are in aqua) just to show all those naysayers on slashdot how fast it really can be? No chance.
And as for cookies, you can enjoy them the same way you can enjoy OSX, but if you wanted to actually do something with the cookies, you probably couldn't without the recipe. You could certaintly get another cookie recipe, which makes your example rather stupid, but for the sake of argument I'll assume that Nieman-Marcus is the only one that makes this particular kind of cookie... hell, we can even call it an AquaCookie if you'd like. Now, what do you do when Nieman-Marcus decides to stop making aqua cookies with Chocolate chips, which are your favorite kind? How about if start using peanut oil to make them, and you're allergic? You can't do much of anything without the recipe. Now, since this is the real world with a billion cookie-suppliers, you could simply go somewhere else. But this is the computer world that you're trying to make a point about, and in this world you simply don't have that kind of freedom. You have Apple, Microsoft, and UNIX. That's it.
So you can throw your sad little references to arguments I never made, and you can come up with your pithy little analogies, but the sad fact is that you, as an OSX user, are completely under Apple's thumb if you choose to stick with their OS. I am not. I am free to do as I choose, while you are a slave. A well treated slave, with plush couches and wonderful music... but a slave nevertheless. I hope you enjoy it, but I'm not running back to Apple no matter how slick their cage may be. It's not about information wanting to be free at all. It's about me wanting to be free, which is something you may never understand.
It makes me really happy to know that really soon, the Mac world will be able to say with pride "we have a network transparent windowing system that will allow you to display apps running on our platform on any other platform with a given server with complete transparency and no additional programming. Oh... and it's fully extendable too." Yes, soon. Any day now. Really.
While everyone else is griping about how arrogant Jef sounds, I'd like to point out that this is very much what the KDE and Gnome projects are doing. Granted, they're not succeeding as completely as Apple is on their own system, but then it's a totall different system of development. That said, you can get a fairly consistent UI using either one of these environments. Stick with Konqueror, Kmail, and Koffice for a consistent KDE interface. Likewise, you can stick with Galeon, Evolution, and Gnome Office for a consistent Gnome interface. Granted, you may not have the best apps available in all cases, but you'll get your consistent UI.
What I think is really interesting about this is the fact that most of us use apps from both environments, mixing and matching per our preferences. I personally use both Konqui and Mozilla, Kmail, xmms, and gaim combined with kyahoo, as well as StarOffice 6 in a KDE desktop, but that's just me.
The fact is, that a consistent UI doesn't wind up being that important when it comes to application functionality. People learn to use their apps. This isn't just the case in the Linux world, people still use the weird Kai interfaces for instance, or the quirky winamp UI. Hell, even the big boys break their own rules with their media players, and no one really cares that much. The fact is, if the program has a good amount of functionality, the user will learn the UI (witness the shitty UI in Napster) to access what the app offers.
But then again... I am posting this fairly drunk at a very weird hour, which is always a bad idea, so take it as you will.
If you really have to ask that, then you must have never hacked on a GPL'ed piece of software in your life. When you've got the source, you can do whatever you want with it, the sky's the limit. And just because you yourself can't think of anything clever to do, that doesn't mean someone else can't.
Do you have the source code to this true alpha-blended, updates-as-you-solid-drag-it-around transparency? Just a question. If so, good job getting it. If not, then you'll never pry it from Apple's grip.
I would want to see Samuel L. Jackson saying "hold on to yer butts!" in the movie every time he's about to unleash his genius plan to stop the mutant scorpions, but I doubt he'd do a B flick.
Tarkin is very very much in the planning phase right now, so if you've got any knowledge of video compression or wavelets in general, now's the time to hop on! If you've got the time to learn wavelet encoding and read a bunch of papers, this will be a great project. I don't have time personally to do much more than follow the mailing list (which has seen a lot of traffic in the last few days) but there's a lot of people on this project who really know their stuff. It's a good chance to learn from them.
That said, the definitions for the project aren't certain at all right now. No one knows if it's going to be for streaming video or just plain compressed video. There's even been talk of using it as a professional editing standard, but that's not likely to be a focus. Right now, Tarkin is so new it's scary. It's going to be an exciting project to follow, but don't expect anything too soon.
Slashdot Mirror
Very true, although I think it might be even bigger than that. It's not just the business model that the RIAA created, it's the model that all of society has created for us. It's like that one (great)
The problem is that the model has totally backfired here. We've been programmed to consume so much that we're all doing it far too well for them now. We can consume and consume and consume all we want now without them acting as our (drug) dealers. We're not taught to buy our stuff, we're taught to devour it. Hence, no one sees any problem with not buying CD's because we've been taught that the purpose is not to buy as much as we can, but to have as much as we can. This is why people fill up their hard drives with MP3's and movies and why my roomate has cases and cases full of burned CD's.
I think this also explains why companies are more focused on regaining control than on increasing sales. Rather than add extras to the CD's to make them worth buying, or dropping the price, they try to regain control of access. It's stemming consumption at will that matters. Before it was good enough to control what bands got promoted via radio. Then it was MTV. Now it's bigger than that. Because people can download whatever they can make their own playlists. Granted, a lot of it is the stuff that the record companies are pushing heavily, but a lot of it is stuff they wouldn't expect, like older favorites that aren't the flavor of the month. Suddenly radio and MTV doesn't hold as much sway any more, and their control is weakened. At the end of the day, this is what it's about. It's not so much about profit in itself, but about control, because control guarantees profit.
We've all been trained too well, including the RIAA themselves. We've all been brainwashed in to consuming everything. The RIAA has been brainwashed the same way, which is why they're so focused on the control aspect. Finding ways to increase sales would suit them better than what they're doing. Unfortunately, I doubt they'll see the light until someone stands up and shows it to them with a spreadsheet and a stock quote.
Careful man... some of the younger trolls might start hitting you up for your sister's name and phone number. I mean... she uses Linux and hates Windows! ;-)
I just bought Grim Fandango for $10 at Best Buy, and man is it great. Adventure games might have died with this baby, but if you havnen't played it yet you must pick it up! It makes me long for the days of Space Quest and the like.
I'm hoping that they have really cheap student pricing for the thing. I love the beta, and it's replaced Abiword as my Linux word processor (I'm still rooting for Abisoft though, Go! Go! Go!) and I'm pretty comfy using it in place of MS Office, which is something I wasn't comfortable doing before. I wouldn't mind paying the $50 bucks, but I'll use OpenOffice before I pay $99. Here's hoping the student discount pays off!
In theory, this would work. But don't we know the .doc file format already? It's just a collection of COM objects. The problem isn't that the file format isn't documented. It is. The problem is that you have to emulate a massive chunk of windows just to view an Excel file.
.net and passport in general. And there needs to be a whole boatload of other things done at the sales and finance level that I don't even know how to approach.
/., and as a result we forget the contradiction right in front of our faces. On the one hand, some say "Microsoft's products are shoddy" and "nothing wins on technical merit" and then other people say "if you give us the file format, we'll win". The solution to this problem is not a purely technical one. We need real restrictions on how these people operate. There is some fundamentally wrong things in the way they do business, and statutes need to be set up so that no one else can do these kinds of things again.
No... the monopoly problem goes way way beyond the simple "Document it and it'll be fine" solution. We need to get some real business and legal restrictions. OEM's need to be allowed to alter the desktop as they wish. They need to be able to install alternative OS's on their machines. There needs to be some serious inquiry in to
We tend to focus on the technical side of things here at
Just wanted to say that this was a wonderful post. Kudos.
Well, is this really bashing? I think it's more bringing to attention a security flaw that may have slipped by. This one happens to be interesting because of the politics involved, as well as the fact that the same security flaw affects just about all of us (which is a testament to Free Software in itself.) That doesn't make it bashing though, it just means that everyone running Windows will likely have to patch their systems the same way that the Linux users did.
But then, bashing slashdot these days has become even more popular than bashing MS.
Ok, I could mod you down as the flamebait you are for this comment, but I'd rather respond instead.
A devotion to Free Software and free speech is far from irrational for many of us. I've told my story before, and it applies specifically to the Macintosh, so you might be interested.
I was a major Mac zealot for many a year. I believed, and still do, that the Mac was the best OS out there for a lot of reasons, most of them the reasons you state. I didn't have to mess with registries or himem or config.sys or anything of that sort, I was just able to get my work done. Granted, I was a student and not doing anything very heavy duty, but I was able to get on the internet, get my hardware working, play lots of games, and write documents all very easily. Yes, the Mac was fantastic and I could do a lot with it and was far more productive on it that my friends with PC's.
But then the dark times came. You see, back around '95-'98 or so, Apple really looked bad. Copland was nowhere to be seen and we were stuck with our crashy old OS (mine was pretty stable, but I had to work very very hard at it) with shitty multitasking. I was still very productive, but that was because I really knew what I was doing.
But in many ways that was the least of our problems.
Software vendors were disappearing in droves. I saw Mac software drop and drop from the shelves, and only-Mac stores either start selling PC products or shut down entirely. Microsoft's last Office product was crap (they later made amends with Office 98) and the games were also disappearing right out from under us. You could almost sense a deep-seated depression in the community as our apps dwindled down to those peddled by Adobe and Macromedia.
So where do I come in to this one? Well, I didn't use Adobe or Macromedia products. My copy of ClarisWorks didn't work well on friends' Office docs, I couldn't buy new games, and I couldn't afford much beyond the basic items to begin programming software.
Yes, this last was a big deal for me, because I really wanted to help. I wanted to contribute, to help heal the community by providing missing pieces. I'd seen great technologies like OpenDoc and QuickDrawGX float away, and I wanted to provide something, some way of helping. But I couldn't. The books in the store were expensive, limited, and I couldn't afford many anyway. The Apple developer docs were hundreds upon hundreds of dollars (although I later got a full CD of them for $100, but this was still very pricey) and I could only afford the cheapest tools out there. I couldn't possibly understand why Apple wasn't helping me... didn't they want people to write for their system?
So I finally broke down and tried this Linux thing my friend had been telling me about for a few years. I switched to the PC because I was sick of my crashy MP3 player and lack of searching tools (Sherlock wasn't going to help me download music!) and a complete lack of games like Quake II and Starcraft, which have since come out on the Mac. But i mainly bought a PC to try out Linux. I didn't know about Free Software when I did it, and I didn't know that all the source code was there, all I knew was that anything was better than Windows, and I was deeply disgruntled with my Mac.
This probably sounds a little absurd to you too, but think of it this way. What if the company that you depend on for all your computing needs, a company that you have invested thousands of dollars in software and documentation and time in to learning suddenly abandoned you? What then? All your practicality of "best bang/buck ratio" has suddenly gone down the drain because the system becomes a lot less useful. I could only watch as my platform became more and more inferior, first with Office, then with gaming, then with Web browsing, then with MP3 searching and playing. What next, when would my platform become totally useless?
Now, Apple is doing very very well now, and I applaud everything they've done since Jobs came back on board. But that feeling still lingers on me. What happens if they abandon me? How far in to insignificance do I want to slide? A devotion to Linux and Free Software means that I can help myself, that the community can and will help itself. We may be a step or two behind Microsoft or Apple in some areas, but we're self-reliant, and we're not slaves to anyone else. This is the rationale behind Free Software. This is why a devotion to it is both useful and practical. And this is why I'll stick with Linux despite Apple's wonderful product and Microsoft's overwhelming support. I never want to be helpless again.
When was the last time you honestly had to do this? Five years ago? Seriously... who doesn't use the package tools these days? Granted, you have to learn apt-get or dselect or RPM or RedCarpet, but software installs on linux are really easy these days when you overcome this (relatively simple) initial hurdle. It might not be "double click to install" but it's nearly as easy, and very clean to uninstall.
About the only time you would have to compile and tweak source is if you do a CVS pull of an app, which you wouldn't really be able to do at all given the Windows/Mac cultures. Sure, I love to be able to do a CVS pull of unreleased software, but it's by no means required for my day to day software management. Plus I can always package up the source myself and keep it friendly within the package manager. Say what you will about software installs in linux, but it's not really that hard any more.
You're right, the cost of Windows is not "oppressive", but it is still substantial when you have hundreds or thousands of desktops around. Say what you will, but these people are out to make money, and if they're paying $100k ops people and $10k per seat, they should be getting the best value out of their OS. If you're paying $10k per seat, it's not out of the question to request that the Solaris version of an app be ported to Linux. And for the amount of money that is being paid to the ops people, they could make the transition pretty easy. Now whether or not that really would be a useful replacement is still up in the air, but without a port of those critical apps neither of us will be sure.
You'd think that the financial sector would be the first non-tech sector to really start using Linux. I mean, it's free! These are people who devote their entire lives to making money. Shouldn't they realize the obvious cost benefits of running Linux?
Ok, I don't own a PS/2. I have a PS/1, most of the games for which I haven't beaten (Linux is my toy instead ;-) so this may be my reason to get a PS/2. I can finally play GTA3 and still mess around with Linux. It'd also be a nice way to play with OpenGL stuff too. Wow... I'll have to seriously ponder this one! Sure, my opinion doesn't reflect market forces, but what the hell do I care? It's a PS/2! Plus, I can play stuff like frozen bubble and chromium on it and never leave Linux. Fuck the market and the big picture and Sony's potential revenue. I want one!
But that way we would all have BeOS's cool features with or without Be. If Linux matched BeOS with the support of its codebase, would you still be upset just because it would be named Linux?
And for those of you who would want to keep the Be name alive and well, with the source code you could have. Your loss as well as ours. Did anyone win in this scenario besides Microsoft and Apple?
You know... I would kill for a port of Appleworks to Linux. I cut my teeth on Appleworks (nee Clarisworks), and didn't switch to Office until I got a PC many years down the line. And at that point I still wanted a copy of Appleworks. If they can't sell Appleworks on Windows, perhaps for Linux? One thing that I've never seen is a Works package for Linux, which is probably a function of the fact that everyone thinks of MS's stinking pile of shit works program when they think of Works. Appleworks is such an amazing program. Do you think this kind of port would constitute a danger to Apple from MS? It is a great program that deserves more attention.
The point of my post was to point out that Apple does not have a heart of gold in doing what they do. They won't make these ports of Aqua and DPDF simply because they don't give a shit about this community beyond the point that it helps them. Not that this is unexpected, but it certaintly isn't something to hold up and glorify.
And I really don't know how you can accuse a community that gives away an entire operating system of greed. Apple got a hell of a lot from the open/free community including glib, gcc, perl, apache, and an entire UNIX subsytem that they emblazon rather large in their feature list.
No, they're not necessarily obligated to give anything back, and I applaud what they did with Darwin, but let's be frank about it. What they gave back with Darwin was no better than a Linux implementation, and in many ways it's worse. They didn't give any piece away that would have really helped anyone else. Remember, any changes and improvements that you make in Darwin get rolled back in to OSX to help it out. So you do wind up helping OSX users and yourself in the process, but Apple is certaintly not doing anyone any favors with this move. There's no charity involved, and they don't deserve heaps of praise.
Well, they're certaintly not encouraging anyone to port their OSX apps to Linux or BSD. I wouldn't mind Quicktime player or iTunes or iPhoto or iDVD or Aqua or their Display PS drivers or Applescript on Linux, and this doesn't even touch on encouraging third parties to port their apps over. Granted, they've got the Darwin stuff and QT Streaming Server, but that doesn't help us all that much. Hell, all the Darwin people are just running XFree anyhow.
This brings up a fairly interesting point though. Why is it that we as a community don't encourage ports to Linux? When we lack an app, it's always a replacement we want. I just downloaded a game called "egoboo" for Linux, and it's a really nicely done 3d nethack type game. When I opened up the readme file though, it said it was for Direct3D! Someone has ported a great piece of work for the community. Why don't we encourage more people to write their programs using Qt and OpenGL and SDL so that we can make use of them too? Shareware/Freeware authors want a wide audience, and encouraging the use of cross-platform stuff could be a real boon to us all. Perhaps a motion to do this is what we need to start with? I mean, Apple sure as hell isn't going to encourage anyone to port stuff to Linux, we'll have to do it ourselves.
What do you guys think? I know classically, Linux versions of apps generally suck, like the Kazaa Linux crap for instance. But what about other programs? I'd love to see Triallian personally. Any thoughts?
Rob buddy, you'd just better pray that Kathleen didn't read this one.
Why not? If you want to throw the "Information Wants to Be Free" argument at me, be my guest, although it's pretty useless since I never made that argument and never will.
I never said you couldn't like the features of OSX. It's a great system with a lot of nice features. However, you are still bound and gagged by Apple. Want to run Aqua on non-Apple hardware? Not a chance in hell, as useful as this would be. Want to learn about how their features are coded so that you can gain understanding from them in an academic sense? No chance. Want to help speed up OSX (yes, the speed problems are in aqua) just to show all those naysayers on slashdot how fast it really can be? No chance.
And as for cookies, you can enjoy them the same way you can enjoy OSX, but if you wanted to actually do something with the cookies, you probably couldn't without the recipe. You could certaintly get another cookie recipe, which makes your example rather stupid, but for the sake of argument I'll assume that Nieman-Marcus is the only one that makes this particular kind of cookie... hell, we can even call it an AquaCookie if you'd like. Now, what do you do when Nieman-Marcus decides to stop making aqua cookies with Chocolate chips, which are your favorite kind? How about if start using peanut oil to make them, and you're allergic? You can't do much of anything without the recipe. Now, since this is the real world with a billion cookie-suppliers, you could simply go somewhere else. But this is the computer world that you're trying to make a point about, and in this world you simply don't have that kind of freedom. You have Apple, Microsoft, and UNIX. That's it.
So you can throw your sad little references to arguments I never made, and you can come up with your pithy little analogies, but the sad fact is that you, as an OSX user, are completely under Apple's thumb if you choose to stick with their OS. I am not. I am free to do as I choose, while you are a slave. A well treated slave, with plush couches and wonderful music... but a slave nevertheless. I hope you enjoy it, but I'm not running back to Apple no matter how slick their cage may be. It's not about information wanting to be free at all. It's about me wanting to be free, which is something you may never understand.
It makes me really happy to know that really soon, the Mac world will be able to say with pride "we have a network transparent windowing system that will allow you to display apps running on our platform on any other platform with a given server with complete transparency and no additional programming. Oh... and it's fully extendable too." Yes, soon. Any day now. Really.
While everyone else is griping about how arrogant Jef sounds, I'd like to point out that this is very much what the KDE and Gnome projects are doing. Granted, they're not succeeding as completely as Apple is on their own system, but then it's a totall different system of development. That said, you can get a fairly consistent UI using either one of these environments. Stick with Konqueror, Kmail, and Koffice for a consistent KDE interface. Likewise, you can stick with Galeon, Evolution, and Gnome Office for a consistent Gnome interface. Granted, you may not have the best apps available in all cases, but you'll get your consistent UI.
What I think is really interesting about this is the fact that most of us use apps from both environments, mixing and matching per our preferences. I personally use both Konqui and Mozilla, Kmail, xmms, and gaim combined with kyahoo, as well as StarOffice 6 in a KDE desktop, but that's just me.
The fact is, that a consistent UI doesn't wind up being that important when it comes to application functionality. People learn to use their apps. This isn't just the case in the Linux world, people still use the weird Kai interfaces for instance, or the quirky winamp UI. Hell, even the big boys break their own rules with their media players, and no one really cares that much. The fact is, if the program has a good amount of functionality, the user will learn the UI (witness the shitty UI in Napster) to access what the app offers.
But then again... I am posting this fairly drunk at a very weird hour, which is always a bad idea, so take it as you will.
If you really have to ask that, then you must have never hacked on a GPL'ed piece of software in your life. When you've got the source, you can do whatever you want with it, the sky's the limit. And just because you yourself can't think of anything clever to do, that doesn't mean someone else can't.
Do you have the source code to this true alpha-blended, updates-as-you-solid-drag-it-around transparency? Just a question. If so, good job getting it. If not, then you'll never pry it from Apple's grip.
Well, he did do Episode I...
Subject says it all. Congratulations Rob and Kathleen! And best wishes!
Tarkin is very very much in the planning phase right now, so if you've got any knowledge of video compression or wavelets in general, now's the time to hop on! If you've got the time to learn wavelet encoding and read a bunch of papers, this will be a great project. I don't have time personally to do much more than follow the mailing list (which has seen a lot of traffic in the last few days) but there's a lot of people on this project who really know their stuff. It's a good chance to learn from them.
That said, the definitions for the project aren't certain at all right now. No one knows if it's going to be for streaming video or just plain compressed video. There's even been talk of using it as a professional editing standard, but that's not likely to be a focus. Right now, Tarkin is so new it's scary. It's going to be an exciting project to follow, but don't expect anything too soon.