You make something really, *really* hot. It's fairly interesting, see here.
Re:That's one way KDE/GNOME should emulate Windows
on
A Real Bill Gates Rant
·
· Score: 1
Answer: Apple's OSX. Even after a major major incompatibility step introduced (from PowerPC to Intel architecture), Apple's OSX still beats [desktop] Linux installations combined in every metric. Beat that.
Umm, why? if market share is your degree of success then the aim should be on Windows, which still holds more than 90% of the world's desktop computers (and, if I may also add, is the topic of this article, therefore returning your comment to the land of on-topicness).
In case you do not know, Apple's stuff just works most of the time. I have never met a Joe Public who gets confused by the way things are implemented on Apple's platform.
Then you must haven't met many Joe Publics;) the failings of OSX's one-and-only GUI are fairly well-documented all around the 'net, many of which bite normal users without prior Mac experience.
I know that the Linux way of doing things has not helped much on the desktop. See point above.
OSX's hasn't, either, so your proof fails at that point. And we all know Windows attained its market share by means other than pure quality, so you can't use *that* either.
Yes, folks will be alienated but they will come back after seeing the advantages. Again see point above.
Prove it. I'd be really interested in this one in particular, seeing as not only did I left Gnome and KDE for some of the changes they made in the name "of the common user", but I absolutely despise OSX's interface, too much Mac and too little UNIX for my tastes. So convince me I'll return to Gnome and KDE once they implement the changes you propose, ought to be interesting;)
Question for you: Where do you think Linux installation numbers would be if common computer tasks were standardized in some way? I am sure you will say that installations would be way up. And that cannot be bad at all.
Define "common computer tasks" and "standardized". My own definitions would be "web browsing, music listening and video watching" and "utilizes only standard protocol formats to ensure proper interoperability between competing applications", in which case both Gnome and KDE already did a long time ago, making your question pointless.
A friendly suggestion when talking about the Nobel Prize: forget there was ever such a thing as a Literature or Peace prize, they're nothing more than a tool to give political favors, and have been so for a *really* long time.
Once you do that and remember there's no Nobel for Mathematics (for personal reasons concerning Nobel himself), most of the controversies and omissions quietly fall to the background, and the Nobel becomes respectable again.
None of those systems have been doing well in the mainstream desktop space, which is what all the excitement over Android is about.
They're doing *far* better than the ones that tried to develop alternatives to X11, aren't they? and no, Android is about the mainstream *smartphone* space, it resembles the desktop space in some ways but in others it's much closer to the embedded one. What applies to Android and the rest of the smartphones does not necessarily apply to Windows, Linux and OSX, as it should be obvious.
UNIX admins have little to do with the need for a good clean display system on portable devices and desktops. In fact the needs of geeks seem to guide the FOSS world far too much, thats why it was a big headline one or 2 Xorg releases ago that input and display devices would be hotpluggable years after everyone else solved that problem, it wasn't a dire need of the geeks in charge of the project nor anyone using it.
Agreed for the first part but X11 also brings some familiarity to the relatively large market of UNIX/Linux developers and getting more apps written for Android can only be a good thing. For the rest, all OSes will evolve differently. The problem of taking too long to adapt other products' innovations goes both ways, and in my opinion has more to do with copyright and patent laws than 'geeks' vs 'non-geeks', so it'd be a discussion best left for another day.
Re:That's one way KDE/GNOME should emulate Windows
on
A Real Bill Gates Rant
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
But for Linux to succeed even in the minutest way, it must meet Joe Public's expectations...and this can be done while at the same time meeting expectations of whoever it is at present.
Define "success", then prove meeting "Joe Public"'s expectations is a requirement for such, and *then* prove that meeting them can be done doing only changes that don't alienate any of the current users. Good luck with that, you're gonna need it.
As it stands, your post is just unsubstantiated opinion, off-topic as it pertains to Linux instead of Windows, and very likely a troll since you're using a CEO's letter to his employees to imply that the Gnome and KDE developers react badly to any criticism from 'newbies'.
For chrissakes, sales volume is not about quality;
If you wanted to talk about quality, you shouldn't have used the phrase "comercially successful".
Of course, if you had you would've been inmediately told that quality in these kind of things is completely subjective. I, personally, didn't like "Little Brother" but loved "Down and out on the Magic Kingdom" and I like most of his short stories, so I'd qualify him as a good writer overall but again, that's just me.
X11 was left behind by a number of different commercial Unix users for a reason.
How many of them are still alive, though? other than OSX which has fed on OS9's marketshare rather than UNIX's, all of the rest seem to have bit the bullet a long time ago. Meanwhile, Linux, the *BSDs and Solaris seem to be going fairly strong despite being 'stuck' with X11.
Seems like UNIX admins are still too attached to being able to run their apps remotely, among other things.
I can run basically every Linux/Unix application on my Mac
And for what is worth, I've yet to see a Linux app that can't run on FreeBSD, though I think some binary-only games had a bit of trouble with the Linux Binary Compatibility add-on but then again, that's to be expected from closed-source.
So essentially, OSX runs every Linux application except for the ones it doesn't run. Really informative, isn't it? I'll borrow a phrase from the Windows fans they use with Wine: the end user doesn't care who's fault it is, only that it doesn't work. And as long as that is true, you'd better not claim OSX can run *every* Linux app.
If I may ask, what's the rationale behind the "sold or shipped via interstate commerce" thingie? it's as if the law discriminated against people who like peanut butter. WTF!?
But what he pointed out can't be solved by setting a fuzzy limit, because there is no way to determine such fuzzy limit.
How about psychologists? like it's done, IIRC, to determine responsability on murder trials and such. Yes, it'd potentially increase the cost to prosecute such things, but I think society itself needs to learn that shouting "pedophile!" is something that should not be done lightly.
Interesting how despite having the lion's share of online music sales and having their CEO being the largest individual shareholder and member of the board of directors of Disney corp, Apple took so long in getting the DRM off their store. Took 'em even longer than Amazon, funny that.
And the rest of your post can be summed up as: "Apple makes really cool products, so STFU", which is kind of a non sequitur considering we're talking about their openness (or lack thereof) and not the alleged quality of their products.
About the only point you made worth anything is about Xcode, but considering even Microsoft, which holds a practical monopoly over the PC market, gives away their dev tools in a convenient ISO on their own website for free, it could be easily argued that they didn't have a choice in the matter.
Same here but the iPhone, like all other smartphones, is *NOT* a step in that direction. Then again not even my first Nokia fit that profile since it still had Snake, so perhaps that was a battle we lost a long time ago.
I am merely stating that it's much easier to claim a degree of fairness with your choice of support when you cover 90% of the world's computers than when you merely support 5%, even when the OSes were made by your own company.
But then again, I should've known I would be called a "troll" when defending Microsoft against Apple here in Slashdot.
this term, "morality", i don't think you understand it
I don't think you do, either, otherwise you'd know that societies can't have morals, only ethics, and no they're not the same thing. Further, while all modern ethical frameworks condemn child porn, nearly all of them also condemn censorship.
Next time, please make sure you're actually correct before being so condescending.
What you're forgetting is that Windows runs on 90% of the world's computers. OSX doesn't.
Further, even if you somehow needed to acquire Windows you can do so for free (if you're an engineering student) or very cheap (shopping around), and in no case do you need to buy a whole new computer to run it.
Perhaps they believe that different standards apply to MP3 players and cellphones, thinking the first to be just an appliance and the second as a portable multi-purpose computer. I may disagree with that personally, since I believe openness is necessary no matter the platform, but it does make some sense too.
I use Linux as my main desktop, I watch movies, edit photos, listen to music and etc on it, but I have a Windows VM for.NET development, and a separate Windows partition for gaming. I tried the Win7 beta and liked it, so if somebody asks me "are you going to upgrade to Win7?", what do you think I'd answer?
Yet as I read books on Linux using Evince instead of Windows and the turd called Adobe Reader, this doesn't affect me at all.
The problem with trying to deduce slashdotters' OS usage from that poll is that even leaving aside the multiple problems with the numbers themselves (noted by Slashdot itself below it), it doesn't even ask the right question for that purpose.
No, the reason I couldn't activate was because Valve's servers prevented me doing so. It is hence Valve's hardware and software at their end that is preventing me using the game.
Yes, per THQ's will.
It may be THQ's fault, but I'd be suprised if it was ever their intention that anyone with a copy of the game not be able to use it as it serves them no benefit.
If it served them no benefit then all companies would just ship out the games, and let individual stores start selling it as they arrive instead of having specific release dates.
It does however assist Valve in that it makes other game suppliers than themselves look bad because anyone else selling it will be selling a game that Valve has prevented working only to blame the retailer rather than accept they're imposing an artificial restriction.
It should make those retailers look bad since they're the ones violating THQ's release date, and if you disagree with that then you should complain to THQ, and perhaps to the whole gaming industry for even using the concept of release dates, but not to Valve.
Your post is off-topic as hell but I'll respond anyways: one of the main benefits of F/OSS when compared to common freeware is precisely the fact that anyone can support it, paid or otherwise. Shop around, I'm sure there's plenty of other companies offering RHEL support, perhaps even the CentOS people themselves could do it for a good enough offer.
Essentially you're bitching about restrictions THQ themselves put into the game (GFWL) and others THQ had Valve put into the game (the enforcement of the release date). Browse around and you'll see some games on Steam, such as Spore, that are sold with additional DRM built on top of Steam's, is that Valve's fault too?
Even with Steam, you'd best follow the old adage: buyer beware.
but this type of problem is much more common with scripting languages (Perl, PHP, Python, etc), and vastly harder to debug and defend against.
Any source for that? because logic says problems arising from upgrading only part of the underlying platform would be much more common with compiled languages, and judging from both DLL and dependency hell, that seems to be the case.
Cliff's Notes version of Killzone 2's online reviews: "The game is completely devoid of creativity and the story is paper thin, but other than that it's a fairly nice, fun game".
Some websites focus on the first two points, others on the last part (the ones that have been spared from the "OMG leave KZ2 alone!" cries), but they all pretty much agree on the above description. Whether that means it's a good game or whether it sucks is, of course, up to each individual.
Slashdot Mirror
You make something really, *really* hot. It's fairly interesting, see here.
Answer: Apple's OSX. Even after a major major incompatibility step introduced (from PowerPC to Intel architecture), Apple's OSX still beats [desktop] Linux installations combined in every metric. Beat that.
Umm, why? if market share is your degree of success then the aim should be on Windows, which still holds more than 90% of the world's desktop computers (and, if I may also add, is the topic of this article, therefore returning your comment to the land of on-topicness).
In case you do not know, Apple's stuff just works most of the time. I have never met a Joe Public who gets confused by the way things are implemented on Apple's platform.
Then you must haven't met many Joe Publics ;) the failings of OSX's one-and-only GUI are fairly well-documented all around the 'net, many of which bite normal users without prior Mac experience.
I know that the Linux way of doing things has not helped much on the desktop. See point above.
OSX's hasn't, either, so your proof fails at that point. And we all know Windows attained its market share by means other than pure quality, so you can't use *that* either.
Yes, folks will be alienated but they will come back after seeing the advantages. Again see point above.
Prove it. I'd be really interested in this one in particular, seeing as not only did I left Gnome and KDE for some of the changes they made in the name "of the common user", but I absolutely despise OSX's interface, too much Mac and too little UNIX for my tastes. So convince me I'll return to Gnome and KDE once they implement the changes you propose, ought to be interesting ;)
Question for you: Where do you think Linux installation numbers would be if common computer tasks were standardized in some way? I am sure you will say that installations would be way up. And that cannot be bad at all.
Define "common computer tasks" and "standardized". My own definitions would be "web browsing, music listening and video watching" and "utilizes only standard protocol formats to ensure proper interoperability between competing applications", in which case both Gnome and KDE already did a long time ago, making your question pointless.
A friendly suggestion when talking about the Nobel Prize: forget there was ever such a thing as a Literature or Peace prize, they're nothing more than a tool to give political favors, and have been so for a *really* long time.
Once you do that and remember there's no Nobel for Mathematics (for personal reasons concerning Nobel himself), most of the controversies and omissions quietly fall to the background, and the Nobel becomes respectable again.
None of those systems have been doing well in the mainstream desktop space, which is what all the excitement over Android is about.
They're doing *far* better than the ones that tried to develop alternatives to X11, aren't they? and no, Android is about the mainstream *smartphone* space, it resembles the desktop space in some ways but in others it's much closer to the embedded one. What applies to Android and the rest of the smartphones does not necessarily apply to Windows, Linux and OSX, as it should be obvious.
UNIX admins have little to do with the need for a good clean display system on portable devices and desktops. In fact the needs of geeks seem to guide the FOSS world far too much, thats why it was a big headline one or 2 Xorg releases ago that input and display devices would be hotpluggable years after everyone else solved that problem, it wasn't a dire need of the geeks in charge of the project nor anyone using it.
Agreed for the first part but X11 also brings some familiarity to the relatively large market of UNIX/Linux developers and getting more apps written for Android can only be a good thing. For the rest, all OSes will evolve differently. The problem of taking too long to adapt other products' innovations goes both ways, and in my opinion has more to do with copyright and patent laws than 'geeks' vs 'non-geeks', so it'd be a discussion best left for another day.
But for Linux to succeed even in the minutest way, it must meet Joe Public's expectations...and this can be done while at the same time meeting expectations of whoever it is at present.
Define "success", then prove meeting "Joe Public"'s expectations is a requirement for such, and *then* prove that meeting them can be done doing only changes that don't alienate any of the current users. Good luck with that, you're gonna need it.
As it stands, your post is just unsubstantiated opinion, off-topic as it pertains to Linux instead of Windows, and very likely a troll since you're using a CEO's letter to his employees to imply that the Gnome and KDE developers react badly to any criticism from 'newbies'.
For chrissakes, sales volume is not about quality;
If you wanted to talk about quality, you shouldn't have used the phrase "comercially successful".
Of course, if you had you would've been inmediately told that quality in these kind of things is completely subjective. I, personally, didn't like "Little Brother" but loved "Down and out on the Magic Kingdom" and I like most of his short stories, so I'd qualify him as a good writer overall but again, that's just me.
X11 was left behind by a number of different commercial Unix users for a reason.
How many of them are still alive, though? other than OSX which has fed on OS9's marketshare rather than UNIX's, all of the rest seem to have bit the bullet a long time ago. Meanwhile, Linux, the *BSDs and Solaris seem to be going fairly strong despite being 'stuck' with X11.
Seems like UNIX admins are still too attached to being able to run their apps remotely, among other things.
From your original post:
I can run basically every Linux/Unix application on my Mac
And for what is worth, I've yet to see a Linux app that can't run on FreeBSD, though I think some binary-only games had a bit of trouble with the Linux Binary Compatibility add-on but then again, that's to be expected from closed-source.
So essentially, OSX runs every Linux application except for the ones it doesn't run. Really informative, isn't it? I'll borrow a phrase from the Windows fans they use with Wine: the end user doesn't care who's fault it is, only that it doesn't work. And as long as that is true, you'd better not claim OSX can run *every* Linux app.
If I may ask, what's the rationale behind the "sold or shipped via interstate commerce" thingie? it's as if the law discriminated against people who like peanut butter. WTF!?
But what he pointed out can't be solved by setting a fuzzy limit, because there is no way to determine such fuzzy limit.
How about psychologists? like it's done, IIRC, to determine responsability on murder trials and such. Yes, it'd potentially increase the cost to prosecute such things, but I think society itself needs to learn that shouting "pedophile!" is something that should not be done lightly.
Interesting how despite having the lion's share of online music sales and having their CEO being the largest individual shareholder and member of the board of directors of Disney corp, Apple took so long in getting the DRM off their store. Took 'em even longer than Amazon, funny that.
And the rest of your post can be summed up as: "Apple makes really cool products, so STFU", which is kind of a non sequitur considering we're talking about their openness (or lack thereof) and not the alleged quality of their products.
About the only point you made worth anything is about Xcode, but considering even Microsoft, which holds a practical monopoly over the PC market, gives away their dev tools in a convenient ISO on their own website for free, it could be easily argued that they didn't have a choice in the matter.
Same here but the iPhone, like all other smartphones, is *NOT* a step in that direction. Then again not even my first Nokia fit that profile since it still had Snake, so perhaps that was a battle we lost a long time ago.
I am merely stating that it's much easier to claim a degree of fairness with your choice of support when you cover 90% of the world's computers than when you merely support 5%, even when the OSes were made by your own company.
But then again, I should've known I would be called a "troll" when defending Microsoft against Apple here in Slashdot.
this term, "morality", i don't think you understand it
I don't think you do, either, otherwise you'd know that societies can't have morals, only ethics, and no they're not the same thing. Further, while all modern ethical frameworks condemn child porn, nearly all of them also condemn censorship.
Next time, please make sure you're actually correct before being so condescending.
What you're forgetting is that Windows runs on 90% of the world's computers. OSX doesn't.
Further, even if you somehow needed to acquire Windows you can do so for free (if you're an engineering student) or very cheap (shopping around), and in no case do you need to buy a whole new computer to run it.
That's a valid complaint, but it's apple's toy and besides, Ballmer doesn't have a better product, anyway.
It's not, it's the toy of whoever paid for the damn thing, and Apple, like the RIAA and the MPAA, seems far too keen on forgetting that one bit.
Perhaps they believe that different standards apply to MP3 players and cellphones, thinking the first to be just an appliance and the second as a portable multi-purpose computer. I may disagree with that personally, since I believe openness is necessary no matter the platform, but it does make some sense too.
I use Linux as my main desktop, I watch movies, edit photos, listen to music and etc on it, but I have a Windows VM for .NET development, and a separate Windows partition for gaming. I tried the Win7 beta and liked it, so if somebody asks me "are you going to upgrade to Win7?", what do you think I'd answer?
Yet as I read books on Linux using Evince instead of Windows and the turd called Adobe Reader, this doesn't affect me at all.
The problem with trying to deduce slashdotters' OS usage from that poll is that even leaving aside the multiple problems with the numbers themselves (noted by Slashdot itself below it), it doesn't even ask the right question for that purpose.
No, the reason I couldn't activate was because Valve's servers prevented me doing so. It is hence Valve's hardware and software at their end that is preventing me using the game.
Yes, per THQ's will.
It may be THQ's fault, but I'd be suprised if it was ever their intention that anyone with a copy of the game not be able to use it as it serves them no benefit.
If it served them no benefit then all companies would just ship out the games, and let individual stores start selling it as they arrive instead of having specific release dates.
It does however assist Valve in that it makes other game suppliers than themselves look bad because anyone else selling it will be selling a game that Valve has prevented working only to blame the retailer rather than accept they're imposing an artificial restriction.
It should make those retailers look bad since they're the ones violating THQ's release date, and if you disagree with that then you should complain to THQ, and perhaps to the whole gaming industry for even using the concept of release dates, but not to Valve.
Your post is off-topic as hell but I'll respond anyways: one of the main benefits of F/OSS when compared to common freeware is precisely the fact that anyone can support it, paid or otherwise. Shop around, I'm sure there's plenty of other companies offering RHEL support, perhaps even the CentOS people themselves could do it for a good enough offer.
Essentially you're bitching about restrictions THQ themselves put into the game (GFWL) and others THQ had Valve put into the game (the enforcement of the release date). Browse around and you'll see some games on Steam, such as Spore, that are sold with additional DRM built on top of Steam's, is that Valve's fault too?
Even with Steam, you'd best follow the old adage: buyer beware.
but this type of problem is much more common with scripting languages (Perl, PHP, Python, etc), and vastly harder to debug and defend against.
Any source for that? because logic says problems arising from upgrading only part of the underlying platform would be much more common with compiled languages, and judging from both DLL and dependency hell, that seems to be the case.
Cliff's Notes version of Killzone 2's online reviews: "The game is completely devoid of creativity and the story is paper thin, but other than that it's a fairly nice, fun game".
Some websites focus on the first two points, others on the last part (the ones that have been spared from the "OMG leave KZ2 alone!" cries), but they all pretty much agree on the above description. Whether that means it's a good game or whether it sucks is, of course, up to each individual.
There's only one appropiate answer to your post: Woooosh! ;)