>If you can't afford a car, because of collusion and price
>fixing, is it OK to steal a car from the dealer?
I think most people would agree that producing your own car exactly like the one at the dealer is an entirely fair way of dealing with collusion and price fixing. And the auto manufacturers would scream the same bloody murder as the record companies, but it wouldn't make them any less obsolete.
>However, if that person who downloads music for free
>would have bought the CD had it not been available for
>download, then yes, the artist has lost something.
However, if that person who reads a bad review would have bought the CD had it not been available for review, then yes, the artist has lost something. Thus, the reviewer is guilty of "stealing".
However, if that person whose car has broken down would have bought the CD had be been able to get to the store, then yes, the artist has lost something. Thus, the car manufacturer is guilty of "stealing".
However, if that person who checked the CD out of the library would have bought the CD had it not been available for lending, then yes, the artist has lost something. Thus, the entire library system is guilty of "stealing".
We live in a (supposedly) capitalist society. When your business model fails due to an advancement in technology, you change your business model. Put the blame where you want to, then adapt or die. But you don't buy laws to enforce the continued existence of your business model in the face of its obsolescence. That creates what's called a "command economy", and the former Soviet states lived in one. If you compare their economies and that portion of ours that revolves around "intangible goods", especially the growth of their respective black markets, the similarities are getting scary.
>Granted, in electronic form, the work can be reproduced
>for almost zero cost. However, this fact doesn't put food
>on the table for the artist or author.
In any field that doesn't involve imaginary property, demanding favors from the government because you were making a lot of money but now can't "put food on the table" is called corporate welfare at best, graft at worst. It may keep things going for a short time... until some developing country who isn't afraid of getting blown up finds a way to make billions of dollars by commoditizing American "intangible goods". It may even be one of those former Soviet states.
I recorded all 13 hours of B5 Crusade last fall sometime, and to fit them on two CD's I had to use DivX and cut out all the commercials. I don't care that much about quality, it just has to be watchable. Even at 200Kbps, DivX still looked better than the VHS copy of the episodes I had previously.
Anyway, I captured at VCD resolution, keyframe once a second, bitrate cranked all the way up. Virtualdub has some pretty decent key bindings, so it's easy to get into a rhythm: find a keyframe in the black before a commercial, mark, find a keyframe in the black before the show resumes, mark, delete. Each of those steps requires one keypress. With 5 commercial breaks per episode it took almost as long to type that description of the process as it did to edit a whole hour towards the end. And I was doing all this on a TV with an 800x600 scan converted display, so visual cues were pretty poor.
I compressed the episodes I didn't like more than the ones I did, played with the frame rate (divx 3 sadly, opendivx/divx 4 was crashing on me at the time), gamma correction and a few other things, and managed to get six on one CD, seven on the other. I never posted them anywhere but if a friend asked for a copy of a Crusade episode he'd never seen, I wouldn't think twice.
That was the only real TV project I've done so far, so I expect there are kids in college out there who do this kind of thing every night, a lot faster and better quality than I ever could. I wouldn't be so quick to dismiss that article, because I think it's already happening now.
How many of your users cost you essentially nothing in bandwidth but keep sending you that 30 bucks a month?
My bet is, more than 10 for every one of those nasty music traders. If not, what are you still doing in business?
Finally, this article was about a Canadian ISP providing a new more expensive level of access with basically no caps; most American broadband ISP's have had bandwidth caps in place for a year or two now, and don't even offer a "premium option." So your defensive posture is kinda unwarranted here, but still curious.
>Let's say you have some bad users which are using
>512kb/s continuously.
Let's say you do. 512Kb/s is 64 kilobytes per second. 86400 seconds in a day, 30 days in a month.... these users are downloading 165 gigabytes per month! Whoa!
>and one user using a total of 1000Kb/s
Wow, 324GB per month! Most cable providers I hear whining about heavy users complain that they're downloading 10 or 20 GB per month.
The reality is, virtually no heavy users are also sustained users. People don't just sit there watching multiple streaming videos and you can't blame the baby Napsters either because 324GB is like the entire recorded output of all RIAA artists put together in MP3 form.
>I don't think it is fair for people to expect everyone else
>to pay for their bandwidth.
I know what you're saying. Health insurance and food labeling should also be illegal, and rural telephone users should pay for every last inch of cable needed to connect them. It's only fair. Every road needs to be a toll road because subsidizing access through taxes isn't fair to the people without driver's licenses, and people who feel they need to be defended should buy guns, hire bodyguards and live in the basement. Heard it all before. Next....
It makes PERFECT financial sense to offer a plan that's a little more expensive, but guarantees you'll never pay for "overage" or usage fees. I never, ever use up my cell minutes each month, yet I would gladly pay twice what I do now for the knowledge that I could *never* run out of minutes if such a thing were offered. I pay 25 bucks a month for a "premium" Usenet account with a 10GB cap, so right there you have my minimum expectation of bandwidth -- even though I seldom use it. I also pay for unlimited local phone service, even though I probably place about 5 calls a month. And I would happily pay 80 bucks Canadian (actually not much more than the 50 US I'm paying now) to never be hassled again about how much data I send or receive. "All you can eat" is the American way of life, and every time it's implemented in a truly mass-market way, someone makes a mint.
In fact, I think the response to this article is much ado about nothing. Bravo Rogers.
The Dreamcast was actually already dead by the time the network adaptor came out. Hardly any were ever shipped and by then no one was buying the console anyway. The whole online gaming thing never had a chance to play out, which is sad because it'll discourage the current systems from doing too much with it.
More generally, Sega at that point was where Atari was with the Jaguar - they knew it was their last chance at competing in the console market, they probably knew they were already doomed, and they actually couldn't afford the development and marketing costs to get out the peripheral they needed (network interface for DC, CD-ROM drive for Jaguar) before they faded into obscurity. Both were great systems and both have spawned fanatical homebrew and aftermarket communities.
It'll be interesting to see what happens with the PS2, XBox and Gamecube. Only once in history have there been three viable consoles in the US, and that was in Christmas 1982 -- just months before the whole gaming industry collapsed. Nowadays everything is so 3D oriented that I think anything capable of running a Quake 3 style engine will do all right, so success depends on who you cut deals with. But for players it still comes down to the games.
And on that note, Chu Chu Rocket can paste Metal Gear Solid any day of the week as far as I'm concerned;)
Shareware was alive and well once upon a time. Back in 1985 I was a high school student using a Commodore 64, and the 50 bucks I made on $5 registrations or my MacPaint to Doodle converter program was a nice bonus to my supermarket job. Most shareware authors I knew were pretty much in the same boat, writing software for the same reasons free software writers do now, distributing the whole thing via Q-Link (now AOL) and including a readme saying "If you like this please send me $5, here's my address..." I didn't complain when someone else wrote a program to do it 10 times faster, and that person didn't complain when someone eventually wrote a real time MacPaint viewer with nifty pan and print features. Everyone realized shareware was about sharing and maybe getting something back for your efforts, not about starting a home-based business.
Around 1990 I started using PC's. There was this organization around then called the ASP (Association of Shareware Publishers) and to belong, your software had to fit certain requirements which amounted to distributing the full version for free and asking for voluntary payments. A lot of neat games and apps were distributed under ASP's terms. Apparently some people actually made a living this way. Then Windows came along and everything changed.
Somewhere along the line, the ASP changed their credo to include the notions of crippleware, non-functional demo versions, deliberately annoying "nag screens" with countdown timers, and time-bombed software that wrote random sectors to your hard disk so you couldn't just reinstall. The concept of shareware was so deeply ingrained in Windows culture as a leftover from DOS that what used to be shareware started becoming known as "freeware" or worse, "free software."
Before long, the ASP was a memory and the Windows shareware world devolved into something resembling a.... well, a bazaar, only one full of shysters who were more interested in taking your money than providing working code. You had shareware font catalogers that GPF'ed on certain fonts, shareware terminals with emulation bugs that never got fixed, shareware image viewers that promised to be twice as fast if you registered them and didn't come through. Yet they stifled the growth of both commercial and free software, as they often filled very vertical niches and were "good enough" to scratch a few people's itches. And in all this, you didn't find shareware houses becoming much more successful than the ASP-style shareware authors of the late 80's and early 90's. The real result: users began to accept the idea that software is intrinsically annoying. This, more than monopoly power or anything else, is how WPA came to be viable in the software market.
I run Linux now, and the few programs I use based on weird permutations of the shareware model (Codeweavers Crossover; Transgaming WineX) aren't even called shareware. I've registered them both anyway and use them primarily to run proprietary Windows stuff. I still write and release some simple software off hours now and then, most often GPL'ed. But I still know a lot of Windows users, and the notion of shareware has become so warped that there are actually programs out there like Serials2K which provide no function except a searchable database of registration codes for all the nagged, timebombed, and crippled shareware apps out there. Despite this, every two-bit Windows author with a copy of Visual Studio or Delphi thinks he's going to write the next Paint Shop Pro and codes some dumb registration scheme into his apps. I've known at least three underworked programmers working for New York State who created shareware products on the clock in hopes of starting the next Microsoft. The really clever ones engage in a little arms race with the pirates, putting in "cracker traps" (done more artfully by Maxis in the earliest versions of SimCity) or installing hidden virus-like backup measures in the event their code is patched.
As a result, unless you run cygwin, there's very little free software (in the FSF sense) out there for Windows, and a little bit of "freeware", but the de facto standard is to run shareware along with Serials2K or frequent trips to Astalavista. Shareware is viewed as something to be routed around, not to support with cash.
Ironically, one of the few companies who has really turned a buck on shareware in the last decade is id, and their distributions of Doom, Wolf3D et al. were shareware in the classic ASP sense: this is the real deal, but if you'd like more, or you want a nice box, pay us. Even Red Hat has turned a profit lately, and they're selling stuff anyone can download legally without paying.
Shareware has already changed into a euphemism for "limited demo". It's almost entirely unnecessary for Linux and increasing support for Unix-like code under Win32 and OSX will reduce shareware's appeal for those users as good-enough free equivalents become available (for example, compare the GPL'ed VirtualDub to its many shareware competitors.) Even in emulation, one of the more elitist "shareware subcultures", releasing source is the rule nowadays; the closed-source authors seem fewer and more apologetic every month. Then there's the problem of customer alienation - no big deal if your company has $80 billion in the bank, but if not, enforced registration schemes just beg to be broken.
Shareware's growing futility, demonstrated by Ambrosia's protests, makes it seem likely that it'll be a part of history before long.
Physically isolating your PC to reduce fan noise is also something you need to do if you're doing something with a microphone. But as soon as you get your signal into digital you're free of generation loss and noise. I can't emphasize the importance of outboard recording enough.
While I've never played a Loki title on any OS, I'm certainly not glad to see Loki go out of business. But their business model was "release year-old games at full price when most of the audience has already paid for it on the same machine." That's right, without the 'community spirit' angle their pitch boiled down to "pay another 50 bucks so you don't have to reboot."
It's easy to blame the end users since there is nothing to be done about it except whine on slashdot. It's not so easy to recognize flawed business models and avoid those mistakes in the future. And trying to grow the Linux gaming market from nothing by brute force is just not the right way to go. Realizing your technology is transitional and marketing it that way might be, so we'll see how transgaming.com does.
We who can send off $100 checks to the FSF and EFF now and then can also afford to spend gratuitously to support Linux. Most users won't, especially in a recession. Companies need to adjust their plans accordingly.
My local paper did a story on this which I think the Daily News picked up on and glossed over some important details. The $230 a month figure refers only to what they're hoping to make off of people participating in their new video on demand service, which they're test marketing here in Albany and in a few other cities.
The local phone service is something they plan to roll out later this year, in conjunction with those Linux-based Moxi set-tops, but the $230 figure is purely what they hope to make off of people paying 4 bucks a pop to pick from 100 UHF-level movies like Mrs. Doubtfire and Caddyshack. After hitting the "buy" button you'd be able to view the movie for 8 whole hours.
We pay about $110 a month for digital cable (comes with HBO and Showtime) and a cable modem, so we'd have to view 30 of those 100 movies each month to be their desired average subscriber. Or we could drive 5 minutes to our choice of video stores and pick one of a thousand DVD's, 99 cents for 48 hours.
As a digital cable and occasional Nielsen household, we are not impressed. I would bet they'll make a little money off of this and then their revenues will skyrocket when they quietly introduce pr0n-on-demand in a few months.
This was a front page article in Friday or Saturday's paper (prominent enough that it made me wonder if AOLTW owned a piece of the paper,) but there doesn't seem to be any reference to it on timesunion.com.
Why, I'm running it right now, have been running it for 3 or 4 days in fact. Let's do a real basic search.
lynx http://localhost:8888/KSK@gpl.txt
Couldn't retrieve key: KSK@gpl.txt
Hops To Live: 25
Error: Route not Found
Attempts were made to contact 8 nodes.
* 8 were totally unreachable.
The request couldn't even make it off of
your node. Try again, perhaps with gpl.txt
to help your node learn about others.
It isn't my net connection because the various Gnutella clients work fine. I really like the idea of Freenet, but for people who just want to share files, there's a reason why they run stuff like Limewire and Kazaa. They're ready for prime time.
A better question might be "why aren't we using the GPL version of Limewire" but in that case the answer is "because limewire.com offers a shiny setup.exe". And the same kind of thing will undoubtedly happen with Freenet if it ever gets as far as someone packaging a pretty Windows client.
This is the second step towards the time where developing countries have equal footing with those who depend on the notion of imaginary property. The first step was countries like Brazil legislating mandatory patent licenses for certain drugs so they could produce their own at a far lower cost than the prices American drug companies demanded.
You can also see it in games like the one China's playing where Linux gets preloaded on PC's and buyers stop at the next shop to pick up a pirated copy of Windows anyway. I'd rather see them keeping Linux, but either way, they're not stuck paying a huge American company a tribute on every locally built PC.
If the Ukraine gives in, then it'll take a little longer. But I bet we see more of this as high tech moves into Africa and the other former Soviet states. There's not so much of a difference between bleeding edge and last year's gear anymore, except in price.
How long before the US bombs someone for pirating Windows? How long 'til the major producers of our clothes and VCR's start openly ignoring American patents and copyrights, knowing we're not set up for manufacturing anymore and are screwed without them?
It's a dangerous game, basing your whole economy on the idea that other countries are too afraid of you to copy your stuff for pennies on the dollar. It only works until they're not afraid of you anymore...
Microsoft would have plastered the X10 ability all over the cardboard box the console came in, along with pictures of racially integrated kids with awful haircuts playing together in the family room while 3D spaceships and soccer players came zooming out of the TV at them, and faked up screenshots on the back of all the titles that hadn't been released yet and a convenient plastic handle for all those times you wanted to pack up your machine in its original console and take it to your friend's house. They would also have "Can be converted into a REAL COMPUTER!*" in 72 point type on the back, followed by a much smaller "*Using optional Super X-Pander Module, coming in Fall 1983."
And best of all, in six months they'd be in Chapter 11.
My partner and I have an Officejet G55 -- a random all-in-one we got cheap at Staples which TurboPrint doesn't even support, along with any other OfficeJets -- hooked up to his Win98 box and shared out. While installing Mandrake Linux 8.0, I was able to choose it from a huge, well-organized selection of HP printers and set up the Samba connection (the installer called it something like a "Win95/NT networking connection") all without ever touching a command line. It printed a test page and everything was beautiful. Our past printers -- Deskjet 500, Deskjet 560C, Canon BJC-6000 -- have all worked with similar ease and they were all bought because they were cheap Windows-compatible printers.
That really makes 19 bucks for a tarball and command-line lpr look kinda stupid. What is this, 1994?
The GBA runs at about 16MHz and has no FPU or 3D acceleration. That's still fast enough to get Doom going on that little screen, but at a third of the price of an ipaq and Hanaho gamepad extension I'd want more than 1/13 of the oomph.
Of course if you prefer other kinds of games rather than first person shooters, as I do, the GBA is a better choice just by virtue of having a few thousand Gameboy and Gameboy Color games out there for it. Not to mention a perfect port of Chu Chu Rocket. And the homebrew community rocks.
OK, I've said this before and I'll say it again: I haven't compiled a Linux kernel on a workstation since about 1996. I use a distro with decent hardware support, and the only devices in my possession that I've found not to work with it simply don't have Linux drivers (or Mac drivers, or Win2K/XP drivers for that matter.) Sure, there's plenty of hardware with Windows drivers but not Linux drivers; six years ago there was plenty of hardware that worked great under DOS but Windows wouldn't recognize it. Things change.
Now, I've never tried a USB hard disk under Linux so I wouldn't know about that aspect. I would know, however, that the actual Windows install procedure goes more like this:
"Plug it in, and Windows will search for a driver. Then Windows will gravely warn you that it is unsupported hardware and that a third party driver may fuck your system forever. At this point you pop a Paxil and call your husband/nephew/daughter/friend/employee. If they are unavailable, you click on Browse and search through directories until you realize you have no idea what file you'd be looking for. Cancel out of the Windows driver routine and try putting the hardware manufacturer's driver disk in. Run through the setup program. Reboot. Reboot again unless you know enough to unplug the hard disk because it didn't get detected since the driver wasn't finished installing yet, then plug it in again. Finally, a drive letter may appear."
I agree that totally command-line-free use is necessary for Linux to ever be a viable non-corporate desktop. If a novice user has to use a command line even once, it's too often. Thankfully, we are pretty close to that if not already there. Most software can be installed by double clicking on an RPM file, and the stuff that can't be probably shouldn't be installed by a novice user anyway. The default workstation install in Mandrake didn't even install a compiler when last I checked.
However, even after running only Linux on every workstation I use regularly for the last 2 years, I still spend a great deal of time supporting friends' and relatives' Windows boxes. Either their 98 machine with 512MB keeps running out of RAM, or their Win2K registry got corrupted, or they've got the last surviving Word macro virus, or the game demo they downloaded from "somewhere" has hosed their machine, or simply "I closed my welcome to windows screen and now I can't get it back." Then there's "I have this error message saying there was a problem with my clock" which turned out to be the daylight savings time thing in Win95.
ANY novice computer user requires handholding. I suspect the amount of handholding is pretty much equivalent no matter what OS they're running. It doesn't matter whether the online help is manpages or Clippy(tm); to the novice user all help functions are invisible, not relevant, just another reason to call you and me. The best we can do is throw icons on their desktop or in a folder so they'll know how to start the three programs they want to run. As soon as they get their first unexpected dialog box we get a phone call. The only users I've known who required no support at all are my stepdad and a CEO I used to work for, both of whom use their machines exclusively for sol.exe.
This is not meant to belittle novice computer users; it's a reality check. The competition between Windows and Linux for "the other 95%" isn't a matter of who's got the more user friendly environment; it's all about whose shit stinks less. And that's the best we can hope for: to stink less.
Most of the bigger companies I've been familiar with are still forced to keep a couple of DOS boxes around to talk to this vendor or that bureau, so keeping a Windows box or two around to run legacy apps is to be expected. In a pinch, those same boxes can be used to handle the few MSOffice documents not readable by StarOffice 6.
"Mega apps in Excel", meanwhile, are no different than the "mega apps in Lotus 1-2-3" from a decade ago. People have hired me to reimplement that kind of thing in dBase, Excel, VB, and more recently LAMP. Generally the biggest hurdle is the lack of design, not the complexity, and it ends up being much more cost-effective to turn it into a real app. Lately the craze seems to be "oh my god, our business is running on a couple of Access MDB's, let's make it into a web app." No one *wants* to keep their entire business in a big set of macros just for the sake of doing so, and there's a fiduciary incentive for *not* doing so after a certain point.
And then, after the third or fourth software audit, each resulting in thousands of dollars spent replacing a small handful of misplaced or obsolete licenses, "the reality of business" starts looking pretty different to the guys in corner offices. Believe me, Microsoft is Tux the penguin's best friend right now in corporate America.
I built a pretty similar machine last January, though unfortunately I had to use Win98 because of driver issues. You should really go for an external VGA scan converter rather than using the All In Wonder's video outputs, because as far as I know there's no Linux support for its TV output and under Windows, all DVD players put Macrovision on the output signal if the DVD calls for it. I'm still using my AIW's video output and last week I finally rented my first disc that Macrovisioned the display (The Mummy Returns). It was inconvenient to rip it to the hard disk and strip off the Macrovision, which took an hour or so, and for my trouble I made a DivX4 CD of it. Of course, none of this matters if you have a TV or monitor with something other than an antenna for input, but I don't.
I actually use the machine mainly for timeshifting, though the capture software that comes with the AIW Radeon pretty much sucks ass. It either generates MPEG-1 files which lose audio sync after an hour or so, or huge MPEG-2 files which limit me to a couple hours of recording time due to FAT32, and which I can't edit using Virtualdub. You can select AVI if you want to record directly to DivX4, but then it seems to encode in MPEG anyway and transcode to AVI, creating the same sync problem. There is a patched version of VirtualDub out there that does time shifting but I can't get it to record, and I've yet to try any of the commercial DVR programs. Ironically, assuming the capture support is there, it may be easier to redo the thing in Linux using OpenDIVX assuming my Athlon 900 is fast enough.
I see a lot of complaining about using DivX to archive videos. Here's the thing. Not all of us aren't trying to burn our own DVD's at home or be l33t h4x0r p1r4t3z. Some of us are just trying to replace old VHS VCR's. I got all 13 episodes of B5-Crusade on two CDR's (the 9 episodes I like at 300Kbps, the four I don't like at 200) and the quality was A LOT better than if I had used two VHS T-160's. That will hold me until I can buy the whole series on DVD like I'm doing with The Prisoner, and since I'm not spreading them across the internet I really don't care what anyone else thinks about the quality.
OK, I'll admit that the one child I've tried Tux Racer out on enjoyed it a lot. But most people who aren't hardcore gamers will find even the free version pretty enjoyable.
I couldn't care less about Half-life or Diablo, and don't get me started about Super 3D Virtua Kick The Shit Out Of Rendered Anime Guys Champion Edition. I play a lot of MAME and newer games with outstanding gameplay like Bomberman, Myst, Quake 2, and Chu Chu Rocket. As far as racing goes I haven't really seen anything since Road Rash that was fun, and really Road Blasters was pretty much the pinnacle of fantasy driving experience. I can't imagine myself ever playing a snowboarding game, but Tux Racer is kinda pretty, whimsical, easy to pick up in 30 seconds and put down when you're bored with it, and satisfying.
Playing it with adult family members leads me to the same conclusion. For the 80% of the population who's never touched a Playstation 2, games like Tux Racer are an embarassment of riches. Finding out that it "just comes with Linux" just makes them sort of stare blankly and then a month later ask me if they should run Linux instead of Windows. (I still haven't answered "yes" to anyone because things like Reader Rabbit and American Greetings don't work under WINE yet.)
I'm not sure it'll make it if it ever gets to retail shelves, even with all the extra nice stuff I see in the screenshots -- I kind of expect to see it in the 10 dollar bin at Staples or computer shows pretty quickly -- but the vast middle ground of people who like games but not enough to know what "CTF" stands for or buy a Playstation are the perfect market for Tux Racer.
At any rate, I'm going to pick up a copy just so my partner and I can race each other in real time instead of having to take turns.
Offending the moderates is only bad...
on
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...when most of the population is moderate.
From where the FSF sits, most of the population is still using captive software. So they have elected to become the polar opposite of Microsoft. I don't know whether that's a good thing or not, but it's necessary in any political struggle.
Taking free software as a social movement, the next step would normally be an MLK to RMS' Malcolm X. We've had a short list of could-be's, like Linus and Miguel. (Not so much ESR, whom I see as sort of a Log Cabin geek.) I'm sure Michael Robertson has acquiring that role on this year's todo list as well.
But when the extreme positions are still boring and irrelevant to most people, taking the moderate view is a good way to be ignored. I actually don't think the copyright debate is mature enough yet that we on the free software side could accept leadership by moderation. If a challenger to RMS were to appear tomorrow preaching compromise and BSDness and "why can't we all just get along", the only lasting effect would be to widen the schism so that people outside the community might actually notice one existed.
On top of that, it's a lot harder to consider the FSF/RMS as the spokesmodel for the entire free software or open source movement than it is to consider Microsoft/billg the figurehead of proprietary software. If people really found the GPL that stifling, BSD would be bigger than Linux by now and we'd be having this same discussion about someone else.
Really, at this point the FSF's function is not to promote their own goals directly, but to get other people to react to them. And if you look at their underlying strategy, it's always been that kind of political judo. Lately they've been pushing Microsoft to become so insular and reactive that it's bringing people around to the free software way of thinking. It's a slow process but a real activist knows that change takes a while. Real activists also understand that the whole point of their own movement is to make their own leadership roles unnecessary. I think that the main players in the FSF are real activists.
Finally, don't forget that 24 years ago it was Bill Gates who was the underdog, writing scathing letters to all those who dared to share their software. He didn't make many friends back then, but a couple decades later it turns out he really didn't need to.
I only bring this up because while cable and DSL are primarily pushed as consumer products, many many businesses are using them as a cheap source of office bandwidth. Going back to dialup for them is just not an option at all.
My company and one of its clients each came in yesterday morning to find their connections to the outside world gone. They both use the local cable monopoly's high speed service. They separately called in to inquire about the status and in each case was told, "Everything's fine here, it must be on your end." When a coworker of mine called back to inform them one of our clients was down too, the rep actually hung up on him.
We'll be springing for a T1 through a different carrier in the near future; our business is too dependent on the net to be subject to such a lack of support and accountability. We've made a similar recommendation to the client.
That said, I use a cable modem at home and usually have no trouble with it. I'm still just as glad I live in an area with multiple high speed providers. Things look completely different now than when I first got the line in 1997.
You kinda have it backwards. It's the chicken and the egg thing. Without this kind of program, users go, "I would switch to Linux except I can't use plugin X." Developers go, "I don't need to bother to develop for Linux because no one's using it."
With these programs, some users will go, "Hey, Linux will work with all the good web sites now." Developers *still* go, "I don't need to bother to develop for Linux because no one's using it." The users don't care because they've got their plugins. Linux still gains ground.
If enough of these programs come out (Crossover, WineX, Lindows?) and enough Windows programs can be run under Linux "well enough", more and more users can go, "Hey, all my programs work well enough under Linux and it's free."
Pretty soon developers go, "Hey, there sure are a lot of Linux users now. Maybe we better release our next product with a native version so it feels faster and less buggy and more websites will use it because it'll deliver more users than Microsoft alone."
Yes, this plan is how OS/2 and Amiga and doubtless others failed. Thing is, they weren't free and it wasn't 2001.
The original poster enclosed phrases in quotes and you didn't. Certain phrases made up of words that are common by themselves (like "bill gates" or "linux developer") get orders of magnitude more hits without the quotes.
>There's no "i have to get Emacs21 out by the
>end of july". It's done when its done.
Of course, when Microsoft blows a release date you don't have the option of grabbing the new version out of cvs and hiring someone to finish it yourself.
Magazine ads are part of the draw
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Sure, I skip the Microsoft ads in PC magazines and the perfume ads in entertainment magazines, but at least part of the enjoyment I get out of reading them is the 'interesting' ads. They're the ones that include details about the product they're selling without laying on the buzzwords. Compare that to banner ads, even many on slashdot, that seem to be pitching a particular product but take you to the advertiser's front page without explanation.
Also, notice how ads in magazines NEVER look like this: "Is Your Credit Card Company Ripping You Off?", "Punch The Monkey And Win $20", "Is Your Internet Connection Fast Enough?", or "You have ONE message waiting."
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>If you can't afford a car, because of collusion and price
>fixing, is it OK to steal a car from the dealer?
I think most people would agree that producing your own car exactly like the one at the dealer is an entirely fair way of dealing with collusion and price fixing. And the auto manufacturers would scream the same bloody murder as the record companies, but it wouldn't make them any less obsolete.
>However, if that person who downloads music for free
>would have bought the CD had it not been available for
>download, then yes, the artist has lost something.
However, if that person who reads a bad review would have bought the CD had it not been available for review, then yes, the artist has lost something. Thus, the reviewer is guilty of "stealing".
However, if that person whose car has broken down would have bought the CD had be been able to get to the store, then yes, the artist has lost something. Thus, the car manufacturer is guilty of "stealing".
However, if that person who checked the CD out of the library would have bought the CD had it not been available for lending, then yes, the artist has lost something. Thus, the entire library system is guilty of "stealing".
We live in a (supposedly) capitalist society. When your business model fails due to an advancement in technology, you change your business model. Put the blame where you want to, then adapt or die. But you don't buy laws to enforce the continued existence of your business model in the face of its obsolescence. That creates what's called a "command economy", and the former Soviet states lived in one. If you compare their economies and that portion of ours that revolves around "intangible goods", especially the growth of their respective black markets, the similarities are getting scary.
>Granted, in electronic form, the work can be reproduced
>for almost zero cost. However, this fact doesn't put food
>on the table for the artist or author.
In any field that doesn't involve imaginary property, demanding favors from the government because you were making a lot of money but now can't "put food on the table" is called corporate welfare at best, graft at worst. It may keep things going for a short time... until some developing country who isn't afraid of getting blown up finds a way to make billions of dollars by commoditizing American "intangible goods". It may even be one of those former Soviet states.
I recorded all 13 hours of B5 Crusade last fall sometime, and to fit them on two CD's I had to use DivX and cut out all the commercials. I don't care that much about quality, it just has to be watchable. Even at 200Kbps, DivX still looked better than the VHS copy of the episodes I had previously.
Anyway, I captured at VCD resolution, keyframe once a second, bitrate cranked all the way up. Virtualdub has some pretty decent key bindings, so it's easy to get into a rhythm: find a keyframe in the black before a commercial, mark, find a keyframe in the black before the show resumes, mark, delete. Each of those steps requires one keypress. With 5 commercial breaks per episode it took almost as long to type that description of the process as it did to edit a whole hour towards the end. And I was doing all this on a TV with an 800x600 scan converted display, so visual cues were pretty poor.
I compressed the episodes I didn't like more than the ones I did, played with the frame rate (divx 3 sadly, opendivx/divx 4 was crashing on me at the time), gamma correction and a few other things, and managed to get six on one CD, seven on the other. I never posted them anywhere but if a friend asked for a copy of a Crusade episode he'd never seen, I wouldn't think twice.
That was the only real TV project I've done so far, so I expect there are kids in college out there who do this kind of thing every night, a lot faster and better quality than I ever could. I wouldn't be so quick to dismiss that article, because I think it's already happening now.
How many of your users cost you essentially nothing in bandwidth but keep sending you that 30 bucks a month?
My bet is, more than 10 for every one of those nasty music traders. If not, what are you still doing in business?
Finally, this article was about a Canadian ISP providing a new more expensive level of access with basically no caps; most American broadband ISP's have had bandwidth caps in place for a year or two now, and don't even offer a "premium option." So your defensive posture is kinda unwarranted here, but still curious.
>Let's say you have some bad users which are using
>512kb/s continuously.
Let's say you do. 512Kb/s is 64 kilobytes per second. 86400 seconds in a day, 30 days in a month.... these users are downloading 165 gigabytes per month! Whoa!
>and one user using a total of 1000Kb/s
Wow, 324GB per month! Most cable providers I hear whining about heavy users complain that they're downloading 10 or 20 GB per month.
The reality is, virtually no heavy users are also sustained users. People don't just sit there watching multiple streaming videos and you can't blame the baby Napsters either because 324GB is like the entire recorded output of all RIAA artists put together in MP3 form.
>I don't think it is fair for people to expect everyone else
>to pay for their bandwidth.
I know what you're saying. Health insurance and food labeling should also be illegal, and rural telephone users should pay for every last inch of cable needed to connect them. It's only fair. Every road needs to be a toll road because subsidizing access through taxes isn't fair to the people without driver's licenses, and people who feel they need to be defended should buy guns, hire bodyguards and live in the basement. Heard it all before. Next....
It makes PERFECT financial sense to offer a plan that's a little more expensive, but guarantees you'll never pay for "overage" or usage fees. I never, ever use up my cell minutes each month, yet I would gladly pay twice what I do now for the knowledge that I could *never* run out of minutes if such a thing were offered. I pay 25 bucks a month for a "premium" Usenet account with a 10GB cap, so right there you have my minimum expectation of bandwidth -- even though I seldom use it. I also pay for unlimited local phone service, even though I probably place about 5 calls a month. And I would happily pay 80 bucks Canadian (actually not much more than the 50 US I'm paying now) to never be hassled again about how much data I send or receive. "All you can eat" is the American way of life, and every time it's implemented in a truly mass-market way, someone makes a mint.
In fact, I think the response to this article is much ado about nothing. Bravo Rogers.
The Dreamcast was actually already dead by the time the network adaptor came out. Hardly any were ever shipped and by then no one was buying the console anyway. The whole online gaming thing never had a chance to play out, which is sad because it'll discourage the current systems from doing too much with it.
;)
More generally, Sega at that point was where Atari was with the Jaguar - they knew it was their last chance at competing in the console market, they probably knew they were already doomed, and they actually couldn't afford the development and marketing costs to get out the peripheral they needed (network interface for DC, CD-ROM drive for Jaguar) before they faded into obscurity. Both were great systems and both have spawned fanatical homebrew and aftermarket communities.
It'll be interesting to see what happens with the PS2, XBox and Gamecube. Only once in history have there been three viable consoles in the US, and that was in Christmas 1982 -- just months before the whole gaming industry collapsed. Nowadays everything is so 3D oriented that I think anything capable of running a Quake 3 style engine will do all right, so success depends on who you cut deals with. But for players it still comes down to the games.
And on that note, Chu Chu Rocket can paste Metal Gear Solid any day of the week as far as I'm concerned
It just doesn't know it yet.
Shareware was alive and well once upon a time. Back in 1985 I was a high school student using a Commodore 64, and the 50 bucks I made on $5 registrations or my MacPaint to Doodle converter program was a nice bonus to my supermarket job. Most shareware authors I knew were pretty much in the same boat, writing software for the same reasons free software writers do now, distributing the whole thing via Q-Link (now AOL) and including a readme saying "If you like this please send me $5, here's my address..." I didn't complain when someone else wrote a program to do it 10 times faster, and that person didn't complain when someone eventually wrote a real time MacPaint viewer with nifty pan and print features. Everyone realized shareware was about sharing and maybe getting something back for your efforts, not about starting a home-based business.
Around 1990 I started using PC's. There was this organization around then called the ASP (Association of Shareware Publishers) and to belong, your software had to fit certain requirements which amounted to distributing the full version for free and asking for voluntary payments. A lot of neat games and apps were distributed under ASP's terms. Apparently some people actually made a living this way. Then Windows came along and everything changed.
Somewhere along the line, the ASP changed their credo to include the notions of crippleware, non-functional demo versions, deliberately annoying "nag screens" with countdown timers, and time-bombed software that wrote random sectors to your hard disk so you couldn't just reinstall. The concept of shareware was so deeply ingrained in Windows culture as a leftover from DOS that what used to be shareware started becoming known as "freeware" or worse, "free software."
Before long, the ASP was a memory and the Windows shareware world devolved into something resembling a.... well, a bazaar, only one full of shysters who were more interested in taking your money than providing working code. You had shareware font catalogers that GPF'ed on certain fonts, shareware terminals with emulation bugs that never got fixed, shareware image viewers that promised to be twice as fast if you registered them and didn't come through. Yet they stifled the growth of both commercial and free software, as they often filled very vertical niches and were "good enough" to scratch a few people's itches. And in all this, you didn't find shareware houses becoming much more successful than the ASP-style shareware authors of the late 80's and early 90's. The real result: users began to accept the idea that software is intrinsically annoying. This, more than monopoly power or anything else, is how WPA came to be viable in the software market.
I run Linux now, and the few programs I use based on weird permutations of the shareware model (Codeweavers Crossover; Transgaming WineX) aren't even called shareware. I've registered them both anyway and use them primarily to run proprietary Windows stuff. I still write and release some simple software off hours now and then, most often GPL'ed. But I still know a lot of Windows users, and the notion of shareware has become so warped that there are actually programs out there like Serials2K which provide no function except a searchable database of registration codes for all the nagged, timebombed, and crippled shareware apps out there. Despite this, every two-bit Windows author with a copy of Visual Studio or Delphi thinks he's going to write the next Paint Shop Pro and codes some dumb registration scheme into his apps. I've known at least three underworked programmers working for New York State who created shareware products on the clock in hopes of starting the next Microsoft. The really clever ones engage in a little arms race with the pirates, putting in "cracker traps" (done more artfully by Maxis in the earliest versions of SimCity) or installing hidden virus-like backup measures in the event their code is patched.
As a result, unless you run cygwin, there's very little free software (in the FSF sense) out there for Windows, and a little bit of "freeware", but the de facto standard is to run shareware along with Serials2K or frequent trips to Astalavista. Shareware is viewed as something to be routed around, not to support with cash.
Ironically, one of the few companies who has really turned a buck on shareware in the last decade is id, and their distributions of Doom, Wolf3D et al. were shareware in the classic ASP sense: this is the real deal, but if you'd like more, or you want a nice box, pay us. Even Red Hat has turned a profit lately, and they're selling stuff anyone can download legally without paying.
Shareware has already changed into a euphemism for "limited demo". It's almost entirely unnecessary for Linux and increasing support for Unix-like code under Win32 and OSX will reduce shareware's appeal for those users as good-enough free equivalents become available (for example, compare the GPL'ed VirtualDub to its many shareware competitors.) Even in emulation, one of the more elitist "shareware subcultures", releasing source is the rule nowadays; the closed-source authors seem fewer and more apologetic every month. Then there's the problem of customer alienation - no big deal if your company has $80 billion in the bank, but if not, enforced registration schemes just beg to be broken.
Shareware's growing futility, demonstrated by Ambrosia's protests, makes it seem likely that it'll be a part of history before long.
Seriously, whether you buy a $16 sound card with SPDIF jacks and a used Minidisc recorder for A/D, or a full fledged USB outboard A/D and mixer (another link in case ebay flakes), that is the single thing you can do to most improve analog recordings on your PC.
Physically isolating your PC to reduce fan noise is also something you need to do if you're doing something with a microphone. But as soon as you get your signal into digital you're free of generation loss and noise. I can't emphasize the importance of outboard recording enough.
While I've never played a Loki title on any OS, I'm certainly not glad to see Loki go out of business. But their business model was "release year-old games at full price when most of the audience has already paid for it on the same machine." That's right, without the 'community spirit' angle their pitch boiled down to "pay another 50 bucks so you don't have to reboot."
It's easy to blame the end users since there is nothing to be done about it except whine on slashdot. It's not so easy to recognize flawed business models and avoid those mistakes in the future. And trying to grow the Linux gaming market from nothing by brute force is just not the right way to go. Realizing your technology is transitional and marketing it that way might be, so we'll see how transgaming.com does.
We who can send off $100 checks to the FSF and EFF now and then can also afford to spend gratuitously to support Linux. Most users won't, especially in a recession. Companies need to adjust their plans accordingly.
My local paper did a story on this which I think the Daily News picked up on and glossed over some important details. The $230 a month figure refers only to what they're hoping to make off of people participating in their new video on demand service, which they're test marketing here in Albany and in a few other cities.
The local phone service is something they plan to roll out later this year, in conjunction with those Linux-based Moxi set-tops, but the $230 figure is purely what they hope to make off of people paying 4 bucks a pop to pick from 100 UHF-level movies like Mrs. Doubtfire and Caddyshack. After hitting the "buy" button you'd be able to view the movie for 8 whole hours.
We pay about $110 a month for digital cable (comes with HBO and Showtime) and a cable modem, so we'd have to view 30 of those 100 movies each month to be their desired average subscriber. Or we could drive 5 minutes to our choice of video stores and pick one of a thousand DVD's, 99 cents for 48 hours.
As a digital cable and occasional Nielsen household, we are not impressed. I would bet they'll make a little money off of this and then their revenues will skyrocket when they quietly introduce pr0n-on-demand in a few months.
This was a front page article in Friday or Saturday's paper (prominent enough that it made me wonder if AOLTW owned a piece of the paper,) but there doesn't seem to be any reference to it on timesunion.com.
lynx http://localhost:8888/KSK@gpl.txt
It isn't my net connection because the various Gnutella clients work fine. I really like the idea of Freenet, but for people who just want to share files, there's a reason why they run stuff like Limewire and Kazaa. They're ready for prime time.
A better question might be "why aren't we using the GPL version of Limewire" but in that case the answer is "because limewire.com offers a shiny setup.exe". And the same kind of thing will undoubtedly happen with Freenet if it ever gets as far as someone packaging a pretty Windows client.
This is the second step towards the time where developing countries have equal footing with those who depend on the notion of imaginary property. The first step was countries like Brazil legislating mandatory patent licenses for certain drugs so they could produce their own at a far lower cost than the prices American drug companies demanded.
You can also see it in games like the one China's playing where Linux gets preloaded on PC's and buyers stop at the next shop to pick up a pirated copy of Windows anyway. I'd rather see them keeping Linux, but either way, they're not stuck paying a huge American company a tribute on every locally built PC.
If the Ukraine gives in, then it'll take a little longer. But I bet we see more of this as high tech moves into Africa and the other former Soviet states. There's not so much of a difference between bleeding edge and last year's gear anymore, except in price.
How long before the US bombs someone for pirating Windows? How long 'til the major producers of our clothes and VCR's start openly ignoring American patents and copyrights, knowing we're not set up for manufacturing anymore and are screwed without them?
It's a dangerous game, basing your whole economy on the idea that other countries are too afraid of you to copy your stuff for pennies on the dollar. It only works until they're not afraid of you anymore...
Microsoft would have plastered the X10 ability all over the cardboard box the console came in, along with pictures of racially integrated kids with awful haircuts playing together in the family room while 3D spaceships and soccer players came zooming out of the TV at them, and faked up screenshots on the back of all the titles that hadn't been released yet and a convenient plastic handle for all those times you wanted to pack up your machine in its original console and take it to your friend's house. They would also have "Can be converted into a REAL COMPUTER!*" in 72 point type on the back, followed by a much smaller "*Using optional Super X-Pander Module, coming in Fall 1983."
And best of all, in six months they'd be in Chapter 11.
My partner and I have an Officejet G55 -- a random all-in-one we got cheap at Staples which TurboPrint doesn't even support, along with any other OfficeJets -- hooked up to his Win98 box and shared out. While installing Mandrake Linux 8.0, I was able to choose it from a huge, well-organized selection of HP printers and set up the Samba connection (the installer called it something like a "Win95/NT networking connection") all without ever touching a command line. It printed a test page and everything was beautiful. Our past printers -- Deskjet 500, Deskjet 560C, Canon BJC-6000 -- have all worked with similar ease and they were all bought because they were cheap Windows-compatible printers.
That really makes 19 bucks for a tarball and command-line lpr look kinda stupid. What is this, 1994?
The GBA runs at about 16MHz and has no FPU or 3D acceleration. That's still fast enough to get Doom going on that little screen, but at a third of the price of an ipaq and Hanaho gamepad extension I'd want more than 1/13 of the oomph.
;)
Of course if you prefer other kinds of games rather than first person shooters, as I do, the GBA is a better choice just by virtue of having a few thousand Gameboy and Gameboy Color games out there for it. Not to mention a perfect port of Chu Chu Rocket. And the homebrew community rocks.
On the other hand the ipaq can run MAME
OK, I've said this before and I'll say it again: I haven't compiled a Linux kernel on a workstation since about 1996. I use a distro with decent hardware support, and the only devices in my possession that I've found not to work with it simply don't have Linux drivers (or Mac drivers, or Win2K/XP drivers for that matter.) Sure, there's plenty of hardware with Windows drivers but not Linux drivers; six years ago there was plenty of hardware that worked great under DOS but Windows wouldn't recognize it. Things change.
Now, I've never tried a USB hard disk under Linux so I wouldn't know about that aspect. I would know, however, that the actual Windows install procedure goes more like this:
"Plug it in, and Windows will search for a driver. Then Windows will gravely warn you that it is unsupported hardware and that a third party driver may fuck your system forever. At this point you pop a Paxil and call your husband/nephew/daughter/friend/employee. If they are unavailable, you click on Browse and search through directories until you realize you have no idea what file you'd be looking for. Cancel out of the Windows driver routine and try putting the hardware manufacturer's driver disk in. Run through the setup program. Reboot. Reboot again unless you know enough to unplug the hard disk because it didn't get detected since the driver wasn't finished installing yet, then plug it in again. Finally, a drive letter may appear."
I agree that totally command-line-free use is necessary for Linux to ever be a viable non-corporate desktop. If a novice user has to use a command line even once, it's too often. Thankfully, we are pretty close to that if not already there. Most software can be installed by double clicking on an RPM file, and the stuff that can't be probably shouldn't be installed by a novice user anyway. The default workstation install in Mandrake didn't even install a compiler when last I checked.
However, even after running only Linux on every workstation I use regularly for the last 2 years, I still spend a great deal of time supporting friends' and relatives' Windows boxes. Either their 98 machine with 512MB keeps running out of RAM, or their Win2K registry got corrupted, or they've got the last surviving Word macro virus, or the game demo they downloaded from "somewhere" has hosed their machine, or simply "I closed my welcome to windows screen and now I can't get it back." Then there's "I have this error message saying there was a problem with my clock" which turned out to be the daylight savings time thing in Win95.
ANY novice computer user requires handholding. I suspect the amount of handholding is pretty much equivalent no matter what OS they're running. It doesn't matter whether the online help is manpages or Clippy(tm); to the novice user all help functions are invisible, not relevant, just another reason to call you and me. The best we can do is throw icons on their desktop or in a folder so they'll know how to start the three programs they want to run. As soon as they get their first unexpected dialog box we get a phone call. The only users I've known who required no support at all are my stepdad and a CEO I used to work for, both of whom use their machines exclusively for sol.exe.
This is not meant to belittle novice computer users; it's a reality check. The competition between Windows and Linux for "the other 95%" isn't a matter of who's got the more user friendly environment; it's all about whose shit stinks less. And that's the best we can hope for: to stink less.
Most of the bigger companies I've been familiar with are still forced to keep a couple of DOS boxes around to talk to this vendor or that bureau, so keeping a Windows box or two around to run legacy apps is to be expected. In a pinch, those same boxes can be used to handle the few MSOffice documents not readable by StarOffice 6.
"Mega apps in Excel", meanwhile, are no different than the "mega apps in Lotus 1-2-3" from a decade ago. People have hired me to reimplement that kind of thing in dBase, Excel, VB, and more recently LAMP. Generally the biggest hurdle is the lack of design, not the complexity, and it ends up being much more cost-effective to turn it into a real app. Lately the craze seems to be "oh my god, our business is running on a couple of Access MDB's, let's make it into a web app." No one *wants* to keep their entire business in a big set of macros just for the sake of doing so, and there's a fiduciary incentive for *not* doing so after a certain point.
And then, after the third or fourth software audit, each resulting in thousands of dollars spent replacing a small handful of misplaced or obsolete licenses, "the reality of business" starts looking pretty different to the guys in corner offices. Believe me, Microsoft is Tux the penguin's best friend right now in corporate America.
I built a pretty similar machine last January, though unfortunately I had to use Win98 because of driver issues. You should really go for an external VGA scan converter rather than using the All In Wonder's video outputs, because as far as I know there's no Linux support for its TV output and under Windows, all DVD players put Macrovision on the output signal if the DVD calls for it. I'm still using my AIW's video output and last week I finally rented my first disc that Macrovisioned the display (The Mummy Returns). It was inconvenient to rip it to the hard disk and strip off the Macrovision, which took an hour or so, and for my trouble I made a DivX4 CD of it. Of course, none of this matters if you have a TV or monitor with something other than an antenna for input, but I don't.
I actually use the machine mainly for timeshifting, though the capture software that comes with the AIW Radeon pretty much sucks ass. It either generates MPEG-1 files which lose audio sync after an hour or so, or huge MPEG-2 files which limit me to a couple hours of recording time due to FAT32, and which I can't edit using Virtualdub. You can select AVI if you want to record directly to DivX4, but then it seems to encode in MPEG anyway and transcode to AVI, creating the same sync problem. There is a patched version of VirtualDub out there that does time shifting but I can't get it to record, and I've yet to try any of the commercial DVR programs. Ironically, assuming the capture support is there, it may be easier to redo the thing in Linux using OpenDIVX assuming my Athlon 900 is fast enough.
I see a lot of complaining about using DivX to archive videos. Here's the thing. Not all of us aren't trying to burn our own DVD's at home or be l33t h4x0r p1r4t3z. Some of us are just trying to replace old VHS VCR's. I got all 13 episodes of B5-Crusade on two CDR's (the 9 episodes I like at 300Kbps, the four I don't like at 200) and the quality was A LOT better than if I had used two VHS T-160's. That will hold me until I can buy the whole series on DVD like I'm doing with The Prisoner, and since I'm not spreading them across the internet I really don't care what anyone else thinks about the quality.
I couldn't care less about Half-life or Diablo, and don't get me started about Super 3D Virtua Kick The Shit Out Of Rendered Anime Guys Champion Edition. I play a lot of MAME and newer games with outstanding gameplay like Bomberman, Myst, Quake 2, and Chu Chu Rocket. As far as racing goes I haven't really seen anything since Road Rash that was fun, and really Road Blasters was pretty much the pinnacle of fantasy driving experience. I can't imagine myself ever playing a snowboarding game, but Tux Racer is kinda pretty, whimsical, easy to pick up in 30 seconds and put down when you're bored with it, and satisfying.
Playing it with adult family members leads me to the same conclusion. For the 80% of the population who's never touched a Playstation 2, games like Tux Racer are an embarassment of riches. Finding out that it "just comes with Linux" just makes them sort of stare blankly and then a month later ask me if they should run Linux instead of Windows. (I still haven't answered "yes" to anyone because things like Reader Rabbit and American Greetings don't work under WINE yet.)
I'm not sure it'll make it if it ever gets to retail shelves, even with all the extra nice stuff I see in the screenshots -- I kind of expect to see it in the 10 dollar bin at Staples or computer shows pretty quickly -- but the vast middle ground of people who like games but not enough to know what "CTF" stands for or buy a Playstation are the perfect market for Tux Racer.
At any rate, I'm going to pick up a copy just so my partner and I can race each other in real time instead of having to take turns.
...when most of the population is moderate.
From where the FSF sits, most of the population is still using captive software. So they have elected to become the polar opposite of Microsoft. I don't know whether that's a good thing or not, but it's necessary in any political struggle.
Taking free software as a social movement, the next step would normally be an MLK to RMS' Malcolm X. We've had a short list of could-be's, like Linus and Miguel. (Not so much ESR, whom I see as sort of a Log Cabin geek.) I'm sure Michael Robertson has acquiring that role on this year's todo list as well.
But when the extreme positions are still boring and irrelevant to most people, taking the moderate view is a good way to be ignored. I actually don't think the copyright debate is mature enough yet that we on the free software side could accept leadership by moderation. If a challenger to RMS were to appear tomorrow preaching compromise and BSDness and "why can't we all just get along", the only lasting effect would be to widen the schism so that people outside the community might actually notice one existed.
On top of that, it's a lot harder to consider the FSF/RMS as the spokesmodel for the entire free software or open source movement than it is to consider Microsoft/billg the figurehead of proprietary software. If people really found the GPL that stifling, BSD would be bigger than Linux by now and we'd be having this same discussion about someone else.
Really, at this point the FSF's function is not to promote their own goals directly, but to get other people to react to them. And if you look at their underlying strategy, it's always been that kind of political judo. Lately they've been pushing Microsoft to become so insular and reactive that it's bringing people around to the free software way of thinking. It's a slow process but a real activist knows that change takes a while. Real activists also understand that the whole point of their own movement is to make their own leadership roles unnecessary. I think that the main players in the FSF are real activists.
Finally, don't forget that 24 years ago it was Bill Gates who was the underdog, writing scathing letters to all those who dared to share their software. He didn't make many friends back then, but a couple decades later it turns out he really didn't need to.
My company and one of its clients each came in yesterday morning to find their connections to the outside world gone. They both use the local cable monopoly's high speed service. They separately called in to inquire about the status and in each case was told, "Everything's fine here, it must be on your end." When a coworker of mine called back to inform them one of our clients was down too, the rep actually hung up on him.
We'll be springing for a T1 through a different carrier in the near future; our business is too dependent on the net to be subject to such a lack of support and accountability. We've made a similar recommendation to the client.
That said, I use a cable modem at home and usually have no trouble with it. I'm still just as glad I live in an area with multiple high speed providers. Things look completely different now than when I first got the line in 1997.
You kinda have it backwards. It's the chicken and the egg thing. Without this kind of program, users go, "I would switch to Linux except I can't use plugin X." Developers go, "I don't need to bother to develop for Linux because no one's using it."
With these programs, some users will go, "Hey, Linux will work with all the good web sites now." Developers *still* go, "I don't need to bother to develop for Linux because no one's using it." The users don't care because they've got their plugins. Linux still gains ground.
If enough of these programs come out (Crossover, WineX, Lindows?) and enough Windows programs can be run under Linux "well enough", more and more users can go, "Hey, all my programs work well enough under Linux and it's free."
Pretty soon developers go, "Hey, there sure are a lot of Linux users now. Maybe we better release our next product with a native version so it feels faster and less buggy and more websites will use it because it'll deliver more users than Microsoft alone."
Yes, this plan is how OS/2 and Amiga and doubtless others failed. Thing is, they weren't free and it wasn't 2001.
The numbers do fluctuate, but not by that much.
The original poster enclosed phrases in quotes and you didn't. Certain phrases made up of words that are common by themselves (like "bill gates" or "linux developer") get orders of magnitude more hits without the quotes.
>There's no "i have to get Emacs21 out by the
>end of july". It's done when its done.
Of course, when Microsoft blows a release date you don't have the option of grabbing the new version out of cvs and hiring someone to finish it yourself.
Sure, I skip the Microsoft ads in PC magazines and the perfume ads in entertainment magazines, but at least part of the enjoyment I get out of reading them is the 'interesting' ads. They're the ones that include details about the product they're selling without laying on the buzzwords. Compare that to banner ads, even many on slashdot, that seem to be pitching a particular product but take you to the advertiser's front page without explanation.
Also, notice how ads in magazines NEVER look like this: "Is Your Credit Card Company Ripping You Off?", "Punch The Monkey And Win $20", "Is Your Internet Connection Fast Enough?", or "You have ONE message waiting."