I thought the big deal here was that you would have access to your docs anywhere, anytime. This would not be the case if you kept your data on local servers. Where, then, is the big advantage over MS Office? Ability to run on any machine (Office already exists on the vast majority of machines - and regardless, soon you will be able to install it on a thumbdrive and plug that into any Windows PC)? Free download (Star Office is free - hasn't even made a dent in MS dominance)? Java (write once, debug everywhere - "sorry - you have the wrong JVM, would you like to download the 145MByte update")? Hmmmm...
I guess if you lose the hardware war you fight the OS war. And when you lose the OS war, the you promote your own development language (Java) to divert people from your competitor's OS. And when that fails, you promote your own Ad-funded application suite (and OS agnosticism). And what does Sun do when that fails? Death spirals are always interesting to watch. I'm not so sure Redmond is trembling.
Your example amply demonstrates the saying "people always underestimate what can happen in 10 years, and overestimate what can happen in 1."
No doubt Mr. Kurzwiel will get some things wrong. But I believe he is probably overconservative in some of his projections. Others, of course, will never happen because of some unforseen "hard left turn" in the road ahead.
At the rate compute power is increasing, it will be child's play for machines 10 years in the future to decipher any file format - they will just "figure it out", there won't be this concept of formats per se. As usual Massachusetts (I'm a lifelong resident I am embarrassed to admit) is out in "left" field, and we tax payers are going to be stuck holding the bag.
My favorite quote is:
"Worse still, Massachusetts likes to think of itself as a bellwether state, a maverick for other states to follow. But this policy would establish a very bad precedent. We've seen government operate at its most efficient when it promotes competition. The Massachusetts policy would instead direct contracts to just a few technology providers, while many would be locked out."
Yea, Mass is a bellwether state like the Soviet Union was a bellwether country.
I'm sorry - did you say "more responsible" and "nytimes" in the same sentence? If memory serves me correctly, they got caught making up the news (not just once, but many times).
Let's not forget that this device is still a concept. And I suspect that pricepoint will need some serious subsidizing, so this is certainly not a windfall for those companies involved. The display technology is the big wild card here. I wonder what the update rate will be. Ultra-low power usually implies ultra-slow updates. This will certainly not be a good machine for any kind of gaming or multimedia. That said, a $100 laptop that you can do school work on is a significant thing...
The first year of "engineering" is pretty generic... math, physics, rhetoric... just trying to get everyone up to the same level. This guy never got to see engineering because he washed out.
Maybe I'm in the minority, but I went into engineering because I LOVE solving problems and I LOVE the challenge of doing something that hasn't been done before (or at least, wasn't done very well). It wasn't about the money. The fact that it's a well-paying (not great-paying) job is a nice bonus. Yes, there are jobs that pay much more, and yes, I could probably be very good at doing them, but ugggh, the boredom. There's a reason they pay so much more to do those jobs.... they are mind-numbing. Lawyering? Yawn. Investment banking? ZZzzzz. Medicine would be challenging, but I could never hack it. I'll take engineering, thanks.
I would never deny that there are lots of people copying lots of software. I just think as a techie you are traveling in circles that are not representative of the larger population. My assertion is proven by the numbers I quoted. There is no shortage of growth in the software market. That is not the same as saying FOSS has no effect - I'm sure it does, but I believe the effect is small, and is mostly among the more technically savvy. Now perhaps as the population becomes more computer literate things will change.
Regarding your distinction between Linux and OSS, my bad... I was being sloppy. However, elsewhere in this topic folks were advocating a Linux-based box as a way to jumpstart FOSS by giving Linux on the desktop a boost. That was the root of my comment.
And yes, there are quite a few FOSS Windows applications (I am particularly fond of WinMerge and Audacity), and there are more every day. That said, nothing you've said convinces me that "nobody buys software anymore". I think more accurately, people are buying just as much, or more as before, but they are supplementing that with FOSS. The pie is getting bigger - both FOSS's piece and Commercial SW's piece are growing. Annecdotal evidence is not enough to prove that FOSS's share of the pie is growing.
One last thing. Regarding XBOX and PS2, etc , I would submit there is a great deal of copying going on in those markets as well. Check out the modchip scene.
"not too many pay for their software in general" ???
Where can I get some of that OSS coolaid so I can ignore facts and make blatantly false blanket statements?
What software market are you talking about?
Games? Electronic Arts (ERTS) 2005 revenue $3.1B increased 6%
Office? MSFT $11B revenue increased 3%
Utilities? SYMC 3Q05 revenue increased 25% (across the board, international, across product lines)
CRM? - too lazy to look this up - trust me, it's growing -
Operating Systems? - doesn't matter because everyone says this is only because of the MSFT monopoly, but trust me, it's growing
The software market is very healthy and growing. OSS has not made a dent. Nor will it make a dent. The OSS zealots would not be the type to buy software anyhow, so it's not possible to lose sales to them.
Somebody on this thread said that some box mfgr needs to prebundle a usable system and then lookout, Linux on the desktop will take off! Baloney. Only zealots and uninformed fools will buy it. The rest will say - hmmm, let's see what games they have on the shelf that we can put on this machine. Excuse me, where's the Linux games section? You don't have one? Well, where are the Linux utilities? I'm sorry, I thought you said use "app-get"? No, I just want to buy a game for my son to use on his shiny new computer. What, I need broadband? I can download games but it will take 23 hours over my modem? No thanks!
I wish it were really as you portray it. I wish I could go to the grocery store and offer to teach the cashier how to find memory leaks in exchange for a cart full of food. I wish I could convince the electric company, and the gas companies, and the banks, and, yes, the taxman, to allow me to modify their sourcecode, or explain digital signal processing to them in trade for their products and services. Instead we use this proxy called money. Each of us does what we do in exchange for money, which we use to purchase the neccessities we need to survive. As it so happens, society values some of our services/skills more than others... so be it... I find the OSS crowd to be quite disingenuous in this regard. We both know that a large percentage of OSS work is subsidized by those nasty capitalist companies you all so despise. People work "their day jobs" writing code, some of which is based on OSS. They convince their managers to allow them to contribute their changes to the open community. There is nothing wrong with any of this. However, if those companies could not then turn around and sell their products (pay-for software - the horror), they could not then pay their engineers, who could not then afford to give away their services because they would be busy trying to put food on the table. It's all connected. It is very honorable of you to prefer open source products so that you can give more to charity. I would never criticize such a noble attitude. I just wish people would lay off bashing business, the closed source community, and, in general, capitalism. Enough already with the superior attitude. Capitalism is the engine that allows all these other things to exist, even thrive. Can't we all just get along?
Trying to understand C++ code in 50 years would be like trying to interpret the tube diagrams from the eniacs of the 1950s. I don't think that is a very strong argument. More likely the computers will be so sophisticated in 50 years, if you tell them the binary file is a document containing formatted English, they will probably be able to figure it out without human "help".
You and I both know that the overwhelming majority of people who use OSS simply download and install the binaries. They really could care less whether the source is available. They like the fact that it's free. And if free sharing of code is what you are after you must be a big Microsoft fan. They share large quantities of code in their freely available SDKs to help developers build applications. They also freely supply immense amounts of documentation, and they provide reasonably priced, best in class tools. They do this because they recognize that apps developers are crucial to their success. In this respect they are anything but a closed shop, and their amazing success attests to this approach.
That said, I do believe that the OSS model is a good model for software development. However, I do not subscribe to the notion that it is hands-down better than the "closed source" approach. I think both models have strengths and weaknesses. Frankly, I am glad for the competition that the OSS community brings - I believe that all competition is good.
Oh please! Open source isn't about freedom, it's about getting stuff free. And where I grew up I learned (many times) that you get what you pay for.
Regarding this topic: Place your bets, which document file will you still be able to read... a Word Document or "Open Document". I know which one I would bet on.
Yeah right! As I drive along on pothole-riddled roads I marvel at the efficiency of government-run infrastructures. I read a study that said that almost every bridge in my state is in dire need of repair. I wonder where the billions upon billions of tax dollars earmarked for the roads disappeared to? Mark my words, if the government supplies "free wireless" we will have the most expensive, most unreliable, most snooped-upon wireless networks on the planet. This is because there is an inherent problem with government run things -- there is no competition. You may whine about your ISP, but you do have choices. And over time the bad ones get weeded out or they shape up. With government you have no choice, so the "service" degrades and degrades until it becomes a laughing stock. Then some brilliant politician comes along and says "let's privatize" and s/he is viewed as a visionary.
I installed FireFox before its first release, and have kept it up to date. My intention was to abandon IE and all it's security problems. However, I had so many problems with so many different sites (OK, I know - blame MS, not FireFox, but that doesn't matter to me nor to most users who just want things to work) that I reverted to IE. I do use FireFox however when I am "venturing into the vast unknown" but for most of my browsing, when going to sites I know and trust, I use IE. This has worked out nicely for me as I suffer a minimum of frustrations and an minimum of "contaminations". This is kind of like driving along with your doors unlocked and your windows open (pun intended) and then, when you enter a neighborhood that doesn't look so friendly, rolling up the windows and locking the doors. If FireFox always worked well with all the web sites I visited I would switch over to it - but so far I have not found that to be the case.
Are you implying there are no legitimate uses for a mechanism that allows web sites to download things to your PC? What is the ratio of "malicious" web sites doing nasty things versus "benevolent" web sites doing useful things? You completely ignore the positive benefits of such a feature. Should only "the technical elite" be "allowed" to use such a capability? I do not agree that allowing web sites (notice the lack of the malicious modifier) to download content to your PC indicates incompetence -- naivity maybe.
Everything in life involves tradeoffs. I cannot help but draw a comparison to what happened Sept 11, 2001. We (the US) have an extremely open society. One big benefit we derive from that openness is a very dynamic economy. Useful products and services spring up "as if by magic" because they can. We have thrived with minimumal government oversight - and arguably we have thrived BECAUSE we have minimumal oversight. Then 9/11 happened. Was that due to gross incompetence on the government's part? Since most terrorism (I'll use the western USA-centric definition) is caused by radical Islamics, wouldn't it have made more sense for the gov't to not allow such individuals into the country? The default was to assume innocense? This attack cost many people their lives (and less importantly, many others fortunes). Incompetence on a grand scale? Or naivity? Or is it just that the evil-doers are always looking for ways to exploit the masses - they use the very technology we produce to do it. The world changed after 9/11 and we will lose some of freedoms as a result. The world changed after the first malicious web site downloaded a virus, and with SP2 we lose some freedoms. And before that people freely downloaded emailed attachments - gross incompetence allowing email attachments to be downloaded without a virus scan?
It just looks like incompetence and "evil-doing" because the world and our perspective have changed.
Look, regardless of what we call that life-bearing probe some intelligent entity lobbed at us, we can be certain it would be smart enough to make sure that some of the payload reached the surface and began multiplying.
If MS is guilty of anything it is in making their OS far too wide open in order to encourage and enable 3rd party developers. If anything they (and we) are victims of their success in striving for that openness and flexibility. Many of the mechanisms exploited by malware producers have legitimate uses as well. Of course Windows has also been subject to buffer overflow exploits and the like that derive from imperfect implementations, but I submit that those types of problems are pervasive in the software industry, in all platforms and products. Those problems are a reflection on the state of the art of the tools we use. Ultimately one could construe those problems as a deficiency of the programming languages and compilers we use to build our applications. And the last time I checked it is just as easy to code a buffer overflow susceptibility with gcc as it is with Visual C++, so don't try to blame MS exclusively for those problems.
Nevermind the bandwidth. How about the storage? I have dabbled with the audio podcasts and have found the content, ummmm, uneven at best, and a huge waste of bandwidth and storage more often than not. I can only imagine how much storage space and internet bandwidth will be wasted with people downloading crappy videos that they will never watch. Portable audio makes sense because listening to audio is a background activity (you can do it while walking, driving, even working). Video is a foreground activity. You sit down to watch a movie or program. Because it is a foreground activity you want/demand high quality video (both technically in terms of video quality and content-wise). Podcasts necessarily compromise video quality to compress into the meager (by video standards) available bandwidth and storage. And because podcasting is sort of "broadcasting for the rest of us", programming put together on a shoestring, I suspect the quality of the content will be nothing to write home about either. Nothing to see here (pun intended), please move on.
They are a target for spyware BECAUSE they created a standard... nothing is more tempting to those vermin than 100 million desktops. In some sort of perverse way your statement is accurate. If we all still were running 97 different flavors of Unix, Solaris, etc probably viruses would never have become a problem. But I, as an application developer, shudder at the thought of having to crank out and test 97 different versions of each application I write. Thank you Microsoft for bringing some sanity to an out-of-control situation.
Evil and evil? Puh-leeze! Let's see, I'm guessing AOL is evil because they brought the internet to the common person, forcing the technical elite to share their bandwidth? And MS is evil because they had the nerve to standardize computing (and hence affordable) so Joe Average could buy one, set it up, and buy and install software, thereby preventing the technical elite from sitting in their glass rooms deciding who could get access to 1% of their precious computer resources.
That said, regarding the possible merger of AOL and MS, all I can say is "what is MS thinking?" Perhaps they see that huge AOL subscriber base (paying a monthly fee!) who are running a fat client and see the potential for selling them music (ala iTunes), video on demand, and Pay-for online gaming. Hmmm, maybe this isn't such a dumb move after all.
A few folks have mentioned MythTV as a TIVO alternative. I actually built a system using Snapstream Beyond TV as a replacement for my TIVO. It is Windows based, supports a wide range of off-the-shelf hardware (you can even have more than 1 tuner for recording multiple programs at once, not that there is ever that much worth recording), and there is no monthly fee to access program data. All in all it works pretty well - it shares alot of the usability of TIVO (they copied well I think). However, that said, I have been unable to convince my wife to stop using TIVO and start using the homebrew. She really loves her TIVO. I have to admit TIVO is slightly easier to use and more friendly for the non-techie. And boy is it reliable (Linux inside) - we are on our third year and the thing just keeps on going and going (well, I did have to replace the hard drive - thank you TIVO hacking sites). Anyhow, sometimes there is more to a product than the simple checkbox specifications.
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I thought the big deal here was that you would have access to your docs anywhere, anytime. This would not be the case if you kept your data on local servers. Where, then, is the big advantage over MS Office? Ability to run on any machine (Office already exists on the vast majority of machines - and regardless, soon you will be able to install it on a thumbdrive and plug that into any Windows PC)? Free download (Star Office is free - hasn't even made a dent in MS dominance)? Java (write once, debug everywhere - "sorry - you have the wrong JVM, would you like to download the 145MByte update")? Hmmmm ...
I guess if you lose the hardware war you fight the OS war. And when you lose the OS war, the you promote your own development language (Java) to divert people from your competitor's OS. And when that fails, you promote your own Ad-funded application suite (and OS agnosticism). And what does Sun do when that fails? Death spirals are always interesting to watch. I'm not so sure Redmond is trembling.
Your example amply demonstrates the saying "people always underestimate what can happen in 10 years, and overestimate what can happen in 1." No doubt Mr. Kurzwiel will get some things wrong. But I believe he is probably overconservative in some of his projections. Others, of course, will never happen because of some unforseen "hard left turn" in the road ahead.
At the rate compute power is increasing, it will be child's play for machines 10 years in the future to decipher any file format - they will just "figure it out", there won't be this concept of formats per se. As usual Massachusetts (I'm a lifelong resident I am embarrassed to admit) is out in "left" field, and we tax payers are going to be stuck holding the bag. My favorite quote is: "Worse still, Massachusetts likes to think of itself as a bellwether state, a maverick for other states to follow. But this policy would establish a very bad precedent. We've seen government operate at its most efficient when it promotes competition. The Massachusetts policy would instead direct contracts to just a few technology providers, while many would be locked out." Yea, Mass is a bellwether state like the Soviet Union was a bellwether country.
I'm sorry - did you say "more responsible" and "nytimes" in the same sentence? If memory serves me correctly, they got caught making up the news (not just once, but many times).
Let's not forget that this device is still a concept. And I suspect that pricepoint will need some serious subsidizing, so this is certainly not a windfall for those companies involved. The display technology is the big wild card here. I wonder what the update rate will be. Ultra-low power usually implies ultra-slow updates. This will certainly not be a good machine for any kind of gaming or multimedia. That said, a $100 laptop that you can do school work on is a significant thing ...
The first year of "engineering" is pretty generic ... math, physics, rhetoric ... just trying to get everyone up to the same level. This guy never got to see engineering because he washed out.
Maybe I'm in the minority, but I went into engineering because I LOVE solving problems and I LOVE the challenge of doing something that hasn't been done before (or at least, wasn't done very well). It wasn't about the money. The fact that it's a well-paying (not great-paying) job is a nice bonus. Yes, there are jobs that pay much more, and yes, I could probably be very good at doing them, but ugggh, the boredom. There's a reason they pay so much more to do those jobs .... they are mind-numbing. Lawyering? Yawn. Investment banking? ZZzzzz. Medicine would be challenging, but I could never hack it. I'll take engineering, thanks.
Silly people. Blu-Ray wins because it's a way cooler name. End of thread.
I would never deny that there are lots of people copying lots of software. I just think as a techie you are traveling in circles that are not representative of the larger population. My assertion is proven by the numbers I quoted. There is no shortage of growth in the software market. That is not the same as saying FOSS has no effect - I'm sure it does, but I believe the effect is small, and is mostly among the more technically savvy. Now perhaps as the population becomes more computer literate things will change.
... I was being sloppy. However, elsewhere in this topic folks were advocating a Linux-based box as a way to jumpstart FOSS by giving Linux on the desktop a boost. That was the root of my comment.
Regarding your distinction between Linux and OSS, my bad
And yes, there are quite a few FOSS Windows applications (I am particularly fond of WinMerge and Audacity), and there are more every day. That said, nothing you've said convinces me that "nobody buys software anymore". I think more accurately, people are buying just as much, or more as before, but they are supplementing that with FOSS. The pie is getting bigger - both FOSS's piece and Commercial SW's piece are growing. Annecdotal evidence is not enough to prove that FOSS's share of the pie is growing.
One last thing. Regarding XBOX and PS2, etc , I would submit there is a great deal of copying going on in those markets as well. Check out the modchip scene.
Huh?
"not too many pay for their software in general" ???
Where can I get some of that OSS coolaid so I can ignore facts and make blatantly false blanket statements?
What software market are you talking about?
Games? Electronic Arts (ERTS) 2005 revenue $3.1B increased 6%
Office? MSFT $11B revenue increased 3%
Utilities? SYMC 3Q05 revenue increased 25% (across the board, international, across product lines)
CRM? - too lazy to look this up - trust me, it's growing -
Operating Systems? - doesn't matter because everyone says this is only because of the MSFT monopoly, but trust me, it's growing
The software market is very healthy and growing. OSS has not made a dent. Nor will it make a dent. The OSS zealots would not be the type to buy software anyhow, so it's not possible to lose sales to them.
Somebody on this thread said that some box mfgr needs to prebundle a usable system and then lookout, Linux on the desktop will take off! Baloney. Only zealots and uninformed fools will buy it. The rest will say - hmmm, let's see what games they have on the shelf that we can put on this machine. Excuse me, where's the Linux games section? You don't have one? Well, where are the Linux utilities? I'm sorry, I thought you said use "app-get"? No, I just want to buy a game for my son to use on his shiny new computer. What, I need broadband? I can download games but it will take 23 hours over my modem? No thanks!
I wish it were really as you portray it. I wish I could go to the grocery store and offer to teach the cashier how to find memory leaks in exchange for a cart full of food. I wish I could convince the electric company, and the gas companies, and the banks, and, yes, the taxman, to allow me to modify their sourcecode, or explain digital signal processing to them in trade for their products and services. Instead we use this proxy called money. Each of us does what we do in exchange for money, which we use to purchase the neccessities we need to survive. As it so happens, society values some of our services/skills more than others ... so be it ... I find the OSS crowd to be quite disingenuous in this regard. We both know that a large percentage of OSS work is subsidized by those nasty capitalist companies you all so despise. People work "their day jobs" writing code, some of which is based on OSS. They convince their managers to allow them to contribute their changes to the open community. There is nothing wrong with any of this. However, if those companies could not then turn around and sell their products (pay-for software - the horror), they could not then pay their engineers, who could not then afford to give away their services because they would be busy trying to put food on the table. It's all connected. It is very honorable of you to prefer open source products so that you can give more to charity. I would never criticize such a noble attitude. I just wish people would lay off bashing business, the closed source community, and, in general, capitalism. Enough already with the superior attitude. Capitalism is the engine that allows all these other things to exist, even thrive. Can't we all just get along?
Trying to understand C++ code in 50 years would be like trying to interpret the tube diagrams from the eniacs of the 1950s. I don't think that is a very strong argument. More likely the computers will be so sophisticated in 50 years, if you tell them the binary file is a document containing formatted English, they will probably be able to figure it out without human "help".
You and I both know that the overwhelming majority of people who use OSS simply download and install the binaries. They really could care less whether the source is available. They like the fact that it's free. And if free sharing of code is what you are after you must be a big Microsoft fan. They share large quantities of code in their freely available SDKs to help developers build applications. They also freely supply immense amounts of documentation, and they provide reasonably priced, best in class tools. They do this because they recognize that apps developers are crucial to their success. In this respect they are anything but a closed shop, and their amazing success attests to this approach. That said, I do believe that the OSS model is a good model for software development. However, I do not subscribe to the notion that it is hands-down better than the "closed source" approach. I think both models have strengths and weaknesses. Frankly, I am glad for the competition that the OSS community brings - I believe that all competition is good.
Oh please! Open source isn't about freedom, it's about getting stuff free. And where I grew up I learned (many times) that you get what you pay for. Regarding this topic: Place your bets, which document file will you still be able to read ... a Word Document or "Open Document". I know which one I would bet on.
Yeah right! As I drive along on pothole-riddled roads I marvel at the efficiency of government-run infrastructures. I read a study that said that almost every bridge in my state is in dire need of repair. I wonder where the billions upon billions of tax dollars earmarked for the roads disappeared to? Mark my words, if the government supplies "free wireless" we will have the most expensive, most unreliable, most snooped-upon wireless networks on the planet. This is because there is an inherent problem with government run things -- there is no competition. You may whine about your ISP, but you do have choices. And over time the bad ones get weeded out or they shape up. With government you have no choice, so the "service" degrades and degrades until it becomes a laughing stock. Then some brilliant politician comes along and says "let's privatize" and s/he is viewed as a visionary.
I installed FireFox before its first release, and have kept it up to date. My intention was to abandon IE and all it's security problems. However, I had so many problems with so many different sites (OK, I know - blame MS, not FireFox, but that doesn't matter to me nor to most users who just want things to work) that I reverted to IE. I do use FireFox however when I am "venturing into the vast unknown" but for most of my browsing, when going to sites I know and trust, I use IE. This has worked out nicely for me as I suffer a minimum of frustrations and an minimum of "contaminations". This is kind of like driving along with your doors unlocked and your windows open (pun intended) and then, when you enter a neighborhood that doesn't look so friendly, rolling up the windows and locking the doors. If FireFox always worked well with all the web sites I visited I would switch over to it - but so far I have not found that to be the case.
Finally Microsoft admits it -- Windows has Open Sores.
Are you implying there are no legitimate uses for a mechanism that allows web sites to download things to your PC? What is the ratio of "malicious" web sites doing nasty things versus "benevolent" web sites doing useful things? You completely ignore the positive benefits of such a feature. Should only "the technical elite" be "allowed" to use such a capability? I do not agree that allowing web sites (notice the lack of the malicious modifier) to download content to your PC indicates incompetence -- naivity maybe. Everything in life involves tradeoffs. I cannot help but draw a comparison to what happened Sept 11, 2001. We (the US) have an extremely open society. One big benefit we derive from that openness is a very dynamic economy. Useful products and services spring up "as if by magic" because they can. We have thrived with minimumal government oversight - and arguably we have thrived BECAUSE we have minimumal oversight. Then 9/11 happened. Was that due to gross incompetence on the government's part? Since most terrorism (I'll use the western USA-centric definition) is caused by radical Islamics, wouldn't it have made more sense for the gov't to not allow such individuals into the country? The default was to assume innocense? This attack cost many people their lives (and less importantly, many others fortunes). Incompetence on a grand scale? Or naivity? Or is it just that the evil-doers are always looking for ways to exploit the masses - they use the very technology we produce to do it. The world changed after 9/11 and we will lose some of freedoms as a result. The world changed after the first malicious web site downloaded a virus, and with SP2 we lose some freedoms. And before that people freely downloaded emailed attachments - gross incompetence allowing email attachments to be downloaded without a virus scan? It just looks like incompetence and "evil-doing" because the world and our perspective have changed.
Look, regardless of what we call that life-bearing probe some intelligent entity lobbed at us, we can be certain it would be smart enough to make sure that some of the payload reached the surface and began multiplying.
If MS is guilty of anything it is in making their OS far too wide open in order to encourage and enable 3rd party developers. If anything they (and we) are victims of their success in striving for that openness and flexibility. Many of the mechanisms exploited by malware producers have legitimate uses as well. Of course Windows has also been subject to buffer overflow exploits and the like that derive from imperfect implementations, but I submit that those types of problems are pervasive in the software industry, in all platforms and products. Those problems are a reflection on the state of the art of the tools we use. Ultimately one could construe those problems as a deficiency of the programming languages and compilers we use to build our applications. And the last time I checked it is just as easy to code a buffer overflow susceptibility with gcc as it is with Visual C++, so don't try to blame MS exclusively for those problems.
Nevermind the bandwidth. How about the storage? I have dabbled with the audio podcasts and have found the content, ummmm, uneven at best, and a huge waste of bandwidth and storage more often than not. I can only imagine how much storage space and internet bandwidth will be wasted with people downloading crappy videos that they will never watch. Portable audio makes sense because listening to audio is a background activity (you can do it while walking, driving, even working). Video is a foreground activity. You sit down to watch a movie or program. Because it is a foreground activity you want/demand high quality video (both technically in terms of video quality and content-wise). Podcasts necessarily compromise video quality to compress into the meager (by video standards) available bandwidth and storage. And because podcasting is sort of "broadcasting for the rest of us", programming put together on a shoestring, I suspect the quality of the content will be nothing to write home about either. Nothing to see here (pun intended), please move on.
They are a target for spyware BECAUSE they created a standard ... nothing is more tempting to those vermin than 100 million desktops. In some sort of perverse way your statement is accurate. If we all still were running 97 different flavors of Unix, Solaris, etc probably viruses would never have become a problem. But I, as an application developer, shudder at the thought of having to crank out and test 97 different versions of each application I write. Thank you Microsoft for bringing some sanity to an out-of-control situation.
Evil and evil? Puh-leeze! Let's see, I'm guessing AOL is evil because they brought the internet to the common person, forcing the technical elite to share their bandwidth? And MS is evil because they had the nerve to standardize computing (and hence affordable) so Joe Average could buy one, set it up, and buy and install software, thereby preventing the technical elite from sitting in their glass rooms deciding who could get access to 1% of their precious computer resources. That said, regarding the possible merger of AOL and MS, all I can say is "what is MS thinking?" Perhaps they see that huge AOL subscriber base (paying a monthly fee!) who are running a fat client and see the potential for selling them music (ala iTunes), video on demand, and Pay-for online gaming. Hmmm, maybe this isn't such a dumb move after all.
A few folks have mentioned MythTV as a TIVO alternative. I actually built a system using Snapstream Beyond TV as a replacement for my TIVO. It is Windows based, supports a wide range of off-the-shelf hardware (you can even have more than 1 tuner for recording multiple programs at once, not that there is ever that much worth recording), and there is no monthly fee to access program data. All in all it works pretty well - it shares alot of the usability of TIVO (they copied well I think). However, that said, I have been unable to convince my wife to stop using TIVO and start using the homebrew. She really loves her TIVO. I have to admit TIVO is slightly easier to use and more friendly for the non-techie. And boy is it reliable (Linux inside) - we are on our third year and the thing just keeps on going and going (well, I did have to replace the hard drive - thank you TIVO hacking sites). Anyhow, sometimes there is more to a product than the simple checkbox specifications.