Or they could rebel and go out of their way to support the alternatives. But hey, people are lazy and why learn something new and truly kick Microsoft in the balls, when you can just go to TPB to get your warez and strenghten Microsoft's network effect on the cheap.
No, if people truly cared about punishing Microsoft they'd be using Linux, the BSDs or hell, even Minix. People who pirate Windows are nothing more than cheapskates, no matter how they try to paint it.
There are, essentially, two kinds of progress: that of taking something that came before and making it better, and that of taking two things that came before and making them work together.
Plus, your argument "he's 15, therefore this doesn't work", well, doesn't work. Provide substantial criticisms or take your angst elsewhere, thank you.
That'd be old SCO then, the infamous jerks are new SCO, formerly known as Caldera Linux before they bought old SCO's rights over UNIX and trademarks for their name, hired a complete idiot as CEO and changed their name to SCO while old SCO changed theirs to Tarantella, were later bought by Sun, who were later bought by Oracle.
How about an article about slashdotters' obsession over the media's obsession over Apple's obsession about secrecy? These things wouldn't get posted if people didn't read them, y'know.
And yes, I'm aware I'm part of the problem as well, but its always fun to watch the Apple fanboys 'in their own turf', so to speak;)
a) The highest quality mobile development toolchain available, supported by the device developer b) Multiple direct development support incidents for your own coding problems from the same engineers that develop the OS c) Distribution directly to every single device capable of running your application through all worldwide carriers with a single route of direct payment
is vastly greater than $99.
Sure, but the negative value of
d) Inability to allow people from accessing your application without going through a third-party's approval process
is vastly greater than $99.
Also, VS.NET > XCode, so it could easily be argued that the platform you can't get a) is Apple's, not Microsoft's.
The problem with the 14+14 system is that it's still far too long for software. Think about it, of all the Microsoft OSes the only one on the public domain today would be the very first edition of DOS that Bill Gates sold to IBM. We'd have to wait for another 11 years to get Windows 3.1 and that thing is barely useful outside of a museum *today*, while for the first version of Photoshop (y'know, the one that ran on monochrome Macs) we'd still have 7 years to go.
Personally I prefer what many studies have shown to be the ideal length: 15 years, and if you want more than that, sucks to be you. It's still not-ideal for software, but less than that would probably hurt books more than it'd help software, and we'd still have some degree of usable 'abandonware' hitting the public domain.
Some people shouldn't be allowed to own a computer. And I'd be extremely glad if a law was passed prohibiting any idiot using a cellphone or TV while driving from ever touching a driving wheel in their lifetime.
And customers are nothing without food, but we ain't asking the cows on this one.
Consider the network effect - the more users there are in the network, the more valuable the network becomes, and alternatives become less valueable. Same thing here. If all the users are using the solution that is most convenient for them, regardless of license, that's the most valuable place for the publishers to be.
Users go to where the publishers are, not the other way around. UNIX have always been the superior OS, but since Windows had more apps (for purely historical reasons), guess which system people used.
- available to be implemented by anyone and everyone without paying a cent or even asking for permission, with a BSD implementation available to all for free.
vs
- full of patents held by the big names of the industry, available under per-user licensing fees and any implementation not blessed by them exposes itself and anyone who uses it to big, very costly lawsuits in the US.
And when we're talking about a proposed standard for the entirety of the world wide web, things like that do matter.
The reference implementation of Theora, like that of Vorbis is under a BSD-style license to help it gain wider adoption, so your point is valid even for propietary browser makers such as Opera.
And it'd be the Unix Wars all over again. And just like last time, there'll come a system that promises some degree of standardization, and everyone will jump ship to it while the old companies die along with their 'trade secrets'.
We at Slashdot don't poke fun at lawyers for being idiots, we poke fun at them for being unethical, corrupt scumbags who'll do anything so long as they get paid for it (with NYCL being a rare exception). And dismissing juries because they know too much about the law fits *precisely* within that conception.
KDE4 was introduced far too soon in the major distros and even promoted to the "default" Desktop Environment in some of them, while still being horribly buggy and crashing all the time. The haste to make the GNU/Linux desktop look cool just made it look bad.
Then blame the distro makers, the KDE devs had perfectly good reasons to release it as 4.0 but the distro makers had none to put it in, lest of all as the default desktop.
Personally, I'd be more than happy with a Desktop Environment that was, say, 5 years old, without bells, whistles, or Compiz, but was *maintained* well -- nay, maintained *aggressively* -- in order to have almost every bug squashed.
Try Xfce then, or IceWM. Though I suspect your attitude of "stability over features" will dissapear soon afterwards;) but I'm fairly happy with Xfce, they make a few changes here and there but overall the focus is in making what is there already to work well, rather than innovate everywhere.
The problem is, the worst of the Apple experience is over-simplified, lacking in features and compatibility, and "is different just to be different" because it only has a Steve Jobs to set the vision and nobody with the ability to tell him to STFU and do it properly. That's not a problem in the F/OSS world, and I'm not willing to trade that just to have a more 'user-oriented' experience.
In Windows 7, you can select the "classic" appearance for the desktop to get the Windows-95 look and feel.
Have you tried it? I have, and it feels less like Win2K and more like a Windows-like KDE2 skin. As far as I know Vista is the same, so it could easily be argued that the Win95 desktop's continuity ended with XP.
Moreover, learning takes time and money. If your company has 100,000 employees, then training them to use a new desktop can cost millions of dollars.
You've got any sources for that? I've heard about employees needing training to switch applications (Word Perfect to MS Office and such), but never for just a switch in desktops, so I'm curious to see whether its truly a concern, or normal people simply don't care as long as the apps stay the same. MS' regular desktop redesigns certainly suggest the latter.
You've never downloaded 'questionable' material just to see what was the problem with it? BDSM, bukkake, bestiality, snuff films, coprophagia and yes, even child porn have passed through my hard-drives, even though I find all of them disgusting.
I'd post anonymously but frankly, I don't give a fsck, it's been years since I've had any of that stuff and if some cop decided to tap my internet connection they'd only see download of various patches and traffic from the odd online game. Perhaps he's lying, perhaps he's not, but his statement doesn't sound too far-fetched so I'm willing to give him the benefit of doubt.
The vast majority of time people spend on their *lives* is wasted in stupid, distracting ways. That the trend continues on the internet should surprise nobody.
And if what you want is serendipity, nothing beats random clicking around off Wikipedia. Only there you can start reading about apples and end up in an article about Mesopotamian deities, which may sound random and stupid but actually is a great way to broaden one's horizons.
No, the whole point of a library is getting access to material of any kind of topic I could ever be interested in, without paying millions to purchase each and every one of them. The fact that they (usually) filter out (most of) the crap is just a side benefit.
It's just that the Internet is so much better at providing free access that the filtering is the only thing libraries have still going for them, but it wasn't always like that.
I can sit down with pen and paper and make a caveman drawing but I cannot sit down at my computer and make a Contra clone for an NES emulator? Why? Because the tools that represent pen and paper in this analogy are not open to me. They are closed and guarded by law and by obfuscation. I can look at a Picasso and begin to imitate the colors and angles and feel. I can play a Playstation One game but not imitate.
While it does not invalidate your point, perhaps you're just looking at the wrong era. I remember during the '80s when PC magazines would have a "software of the day" thing where they'd give you the entire source-code (all of two pages!) for a cool app or game so not only was it possible for you to reproduce it and, perhaps, improve on it, it was *expected* from you to do so. The sheer awesomeness of it was one of the factors that drove me into programming, in fact.
Slashdot Mirror
Or they could rebel and go out of their way to support the alternatives. But hey, people are lazy and why learn something new and truly kick Microsoft in the balls, when you can just go to TPB to get your warez and strenghten Microsoft's network effect on the cheap.
No, if people truly cared about punishing Microsoft they'd be using Linux, the BSDs or hell, even Minix. People who pirate Windows are nothing more than cheapskates, no matter how they try to paint it.
There are, essentially, two kinds of progress: that of taking something that came before and making it better, and that of taking two things that came before and making them work together.
Plus, your argument "he's 15, therefore this doesn't work", well, doesn't work. Provide substantial criticisms or take your angst elsewhere, thank you.
That'd be old SCO then, the infamous jerks are new SCO, formerly known as Caldera Linux before they bought old SCO's rights over UNIX and trademarks for their name, hired a complete idiot as CEO and changed their name to SCO while old SCO changed theirs to Tarantella, were later bought by Sun, who were later bought by Oracle.
So yeah, its messy.
How about an article about slashdotters' obsession over the media's obsession over Apple's obsession about secrecy? These things wouldn't get posted if people didn't read them, y'know.
And yes, I'm aware I'm part of the problem as well, but its always fun to watch the Apple fanboys 'in their own turf', so to speak ;)
It strikes me that the value of
a) The highest quality mobile development toolchain available, supported by the device developer
b) Multiple direct development support incidents for your own coding problems from the same engineers that develop the OS
c) Distribution directly to every single device capable of running your application through all worldwide carriers with a single route of direct payment
is vastly greater than $99.
Sure, but the negative value of
d) Inability to allow people from accessing your application without going through a third-party's approval process
is vastly greater than $99.
Also, VS.NET > XCode, so it could easily be argued that the platform you can't get a) is Apple's, not Microsoft's.
The problem with the 14+14 system is that it's still far too long for software. Think about it, of all the Microsoft OSes the only one on the public domain today would be the very first edition of DOS that Bill Gates sold to IBM. We'd have to wait for another 11 years to get Windows 3.1 and that thing is barely useful outside of a museum *today*, while for the first version of Photoshop (y'know, the one that ran on monochrome Macs) we'd still have 7 years to go.
Personally I prefer what many studies have shown to be the ideal length: 15 years, and if you want more than that, sucks to be you. It's still not-ideal for software, but less than that would probably hurt books more than it'd help software, and we'd still have some degree of usable 'abandonware' hitting the public domain.
I do like your transition idea though.
Some people shouldn't be allowed to own a computer. And I'd be extremely glad if a law was passed prohibiting any idiot using a cellphone or TV while driving from ever touching a driving wheel in their lifetime.
It's far from dead, and nobody on the real world cares about that. Seriously, stop beating that dead horse already, 'kay?
But publishers are nothing without customers, no?
And customers are nothing without food, but we ain't asking the cows on this one.
Consider the network effect - the more users there are in the network, the more valuable the network becomes, and alternatives become less valueable. Same thing here. If all the users are using the solution that is most convenient for them, regardless of license, that's the most valuable place for the publishers to be.
Users go to where the publishers are, not the other way around. UNIX have always been the superior OS, but since Windows had more apps (for purely historical reasons), guess which system people used.
It's not "a little better", it's:
- available to be implemented by anyone and everyone without paying a cent or even asking for permission, with a BSD implementation available to all for free.
vs
- full of patents held by the big names of the industry, available under per-user licensing fees and any implementation not blessed by them exposes itself and anyone who uses it to big, very costly lawsuits in the US.
And when we're talking about a proposed standard for the entirety of the world wide web, things like that do matter.
The reference implementation of Theora, like that of Vorbis is under a BSD-style license to help it gain wider adoption, so your point is valid even for propietary browser makers such as Opera.
Because most good sci-fi still has half a century or so before going out of copyright. Though for that there's always dead tree versions.
Where did our society go so wrong as to call acting on one's principles "juvenile wish fulfillment"?
Plagiarism has been informally called "stealing" for decades. Still incorrect, but a bit less so than the RIAA.
And it'd be the Unix Wars all over again. And just like last time, there'll come a system that promises some degree of standardization, and everyone will jump ship to it while the old companies die along with their 'trade secrets'.
We at Slashdot don't poke fun at lawyers for being idiots, we poke fun at them for being unethical, corrupt scumbags who'll do anything so long as they get paid for it (with NYCL being a rare exception). And dismissing juries because they know too much about the law fits *precisely* within that conception.
KDE4 was introduced far too soon in the major distros and even promoted to the "default" Desktop Environment in some of them, while still being horribly buggy and crashing all the time. The haste to make the GNU/Linux desktop look cool just made it look bad.
Then blame the distro makers, the KDE devs had perfectly good reasons to release it as 4.0 but the distro makers had none to put it in, lest of all as the default desktop.
Personally, I'd be more than happy with a Desktop Environment that was, say, 5 years old, without bells, whistles, or Compiz, but was *maintained* well -- nay, maintained *aggressively* -- in order to have almost every bug squashed.
Try Xfce then, or IceWM. Though I suspect your attitude of "stability over features" will dissapear soon afterwards ;) but I'm fairly happy with Xfce, they make a few changes here and there but overall the focus is in making what is there already to work well, rather than innovate everywhere.
The problem is, the worst of the Apple experience is over-simplified, lacking in features and compatibility, and "is different just to be different" because it only has a Steve Jobs to set the vision and nobody with the ability to tell him to STFU and do it properly. That's not a problem in the F/OSS world, and I'm not willing to trade that just to have a more 'user-oriented' experience.
In Windows 7, you can select the "classic" appearance for the desktop to get the Windows-95 look and feel.
Have you tried it? I have, and it feels less like Win2K and more like a Windows-like KDE2 skin. As far as I know Vista is the same, so it could easily be argued that the Win95 desktop's continuity ended with XP.
Moreover, learning takes time and money. If your company has 100,000 employees, then training them to use a new desktop can cost millions of dollars.
You've got any sources for that? I've heard about employees needing training to switch applications (Word Perfect to MS Office and such), but never for just a switch in desktops, so I'm curious to see whether its truly a concern, or normal people simply don't care as long as the apps stay the same. MS' regular desktop redesigns certainly suggest the latter.
Yes. Every other format can work as a separate codec, but only one is needed as a baseline.
You've never downloaded 'questionable' material just to see what was the problem with it? BDSM, bukkake, bestiality, snuff films, coprophagia and yes, even child porn have passed through my hard-drives, even though I find all of them disgusting.
I'd post anonymously but frankly, I don't give a fsck, it's been years since I've had any of that stuff and if some cop decided to tap my internet connection they'd only see download of various patches and traffic from the odd online game. Perhaps he's lying, perhaps he's not, but his statement doesn't sound too far-fetched so I'm willing to give him the benefit of doubt.
The vast majority of time people spend on their *lives* is wasted in stupid, distracting ways. That the trend continues on the internet should surprise nobody.
And if what you want is serendipity, nothing beats random clicking around off Wikipedia. Only there you can start reading about apples and end up in an article about Mesopotamian deities, which may sound random and stupid but actually is a great way to broaden one's horizons.
No, the whole point of a library is getting access to material of any kind of topic I could ever be interested in, without paying millions to purchase each and every one of them. The fact that they (usually) filter out (most of) the crap is just a side benefit.
It's just that the Internet is so much better at providing free access that the filtering is the only thing libraries have still going for them, but it wasn't always like that.
I can sit down with pen and paper and make a caveman drawing but I cannot sit down at my computer and make a Contra clone for an NES emulator? Why? Because the tools that represent pen and paper in this analogy are not open to me. They are closed and guarded by law and by obfuscation. I can look at a Picasso and begin to imitate the colors and angles and feel. I can play a Playstation One game but not imitate.
While it does not invalidate your point, perhaps you're just looking at the wrong era. I remember during the '80s when PC magazines would have a "software of the day" thing where they'd give you the entire source-code (all of two pages!) for a cool app or game so not only was it possible for you to reproduce it and, perhaps, improve on it, it was *expected* from you to do so. The sheer awesomeness of it was one of the factors that drove me into programming, in fact.
The remaining 95% doesn't make any income from selling CDs either.