... because I was starting to get the impression you were a shill too, reading the volumes of your posts on this subject, which mostly keep repeating the same thing. Now I understand better where you are coming from.
I still think you are wrong though. The simple issue is one of contract. You can't change contracts retroactively. You can't sell your widget for $99 on monday, then wake up friday and realise that you took a loss, go back and add another charge to your customers credit card to make up for it. That's credit card fraud, and the fact that you were losing money under the original agreement is not a defence.
Netpliance has every right to change their offer - that is NOT the issue. The issue is that they cannot change it *retroactively.* You are clearly putting yourself in their shoes in evaluating this, and that's fine, but you also need to look at it from another perspective to get the whole story - the perspective of someone that saw their original offer, realised it was a great deal and ordered - and then found charges he did not agree to added to his bill without his consent.
It's not the customer who needs to "suck it up" in this case, it's netpliance. They need to suck it up and fulfil their obligations to the "handful" (your term) of people that ordered these before they changed their offer, under the terms they agreed to, and get on with their business.
I'm betting it's just a handful of people, and while I do agree that one is too many, I hardly think this should be the topic of a front-page Slashdot article.
I would bet that it was more than a handful of people - if it had been a literal handful (5) I really don't think Netpliance would have even become aware of it, let alone changing their agreement in mid stride to stop it. It must have been enough people that they perceived a threat to their revenue model. And I would bet that most of the people that bought these intending to use them without the ISP service went there from here - from earlier Slashdot articles. That being the case a follow up article on how this is playing out seems perfectly reasonable to me.
Please try to comprehend what people write before you criticize them.
He didn't say the Spindletop case involved the APSL, he said if Spindletop had based their project on Darwin instead of GNU/Linux Apple could have just yanked their license.
You sound like a freak with a small brain and a big mouth.
Right. People need to remember that the 'X' in 'MacOS X' is not an X as in X Windowing system. It's just a funky latin way to state a version number./p>
It's confusing too, and needlessly so. From now on I'm writing it OS 10.
He never once says that people should be forced to give anything away, you need to read more carefully. He argues against the concept of ownership in software, yes, but he never mentions using force against those who disagree. The use of force is in the current situation, where you can be fined and even jailed for copying something you own, not in the situation he proposes.
Define what it is that got copied? The colours? Been done. The monitor in the box? Been done. The mouse? Bad idea, probably been done but if so it was by an idiot... what I am saying is what is actually new in the iMac?
When the public sees an iMac-esque computer, what do they think of? Apple's iMacs, that's what. It's not that I feel Apple should be able to control who uses what cases, I just think that companies like eMachines that are blatently stealing Apple's designs... well, I think they're theives. Am I wrong?
I think you are quite correct. Apple has spent enourmous funds in researching ergonomics and other less functional matters to develop this warm fuzzy design. I even like parts of it. The folks being sued in this case are copying things that Apple developed at their own expense, and yes I think there is something wrong there. But...
How can you define what they did as wrong without creating a slippery slope that is going to wind up extending far beyond this case?
>Yeap, and the X window system stole it from gates. your point?
I won't claim to be authoritative on this, although the discussion might just spurr me to go look it up, but I seem to remember that X has been around for 17 years, no?
I do know, from personal experience, that when windows first came out, I was admining a lab that used dos (I installed windows on all the machines about a year later when it finally became stable enough for us to use) and I was also taking a C class, and my instructor in that class had an X workstation in her office...
I'm therefore quite certain that X was around for quite awhile before the MS version of it came to be...
Any way to adapt the crt from an imac to fit a "PC"? (PC in quotes cause... face it, macs are Personal Computers too. But no one says IBM clone anymore, so I'm at a loss as to how else to phrase it..:^)
TANSTAAFL is one of those rare absolute truths of the universe, and Heinlein was a god to me. Hence your post caught my attention. However, on a couple of points I think you are slightly wrong...
1. There was no soldering involved. If you had read the articles linked before responding you would have realised that. The hack was a simple matter of overwriting flash memory with the desired boot image.
2. They have every right to offer the hardware under whatever terms they wish. They do not have the right to retroactively change the terms on customers that had already ordered. This is wrong, and from other posts it seems that this is indeed what they did. If I had ordered one of these things already I would be rather upset. Remember, they didn't originally say we will sell it to you at this price on the condition that you agree to pay us monthly for our overpriced service for x months afterwards - they tried to get sly and claim there were no strings attached - smug and secure in the knowledge that your would have to buy that service because they wrote the firmware to make the thing useless if you didn't.
Well, that joke was on them it turns out, and quite understandably they got mad. They changed the rules. Fine, they can do that. BUT NOT RETROACTIVELY. Anyone that ordered one of these before the change was announced has a valid contract for the delivery of the original model with no strings attached the best I can tell. "Free lunch?" Maybe. But if I offer a free lunch to increase my cocktail sales, I will have to make good on it, even to those that don't drink, no? I think Heinlein even mentioned that little fact...
Despite the fact that I share the "common/. viewpoint" when it comes to fair use, I don't think that I should be able to keep copies of, or distribute copies of, things that I don't have to rights to. That means music, movies, or whatever. If people want to give their work away for free, that's great. But forcing them to do so isn't right. This is my big gripe about RMS, incidently.
Where has RMS said that anyone should be forced to give away their work?
X isn't designed to be fast sleek or elegant. It's designed to be stable flexible and powerful. It is that.
How much of a performance hit the flexibility costs seems to be a subject of great debate. Not being an X hacker all I can offer is subjective, anecdotal evidence - on my box, certain things are noticeably slower, but other things are noticeably faster, I don't see any significant overall speed advantage to win32 over X on my hardware, just some fairly minor trade-offs going both ways.
Of course X itself is flexible enough to adapt to a lot of situations - if I stuck a larger window manager on X I could make it slower than win32, and if I stuck a smaller one on I could speed it up a bit too.
There are downsides to flexibility, to be sure, but there are advantages too. If you really don't like X, why not make something you like better? X isn't a part of linux, remember that. It's one of many open source programs that you can run if you choose.
NO DOUBT SILLY AOL KIDDIE TRY GET WAREZ THROUGH GNUTELLA AND BE IN DEEP SHIT!!!
No doubt they will. Right now they do the same thing from websites. I remember back when you had to get your trojan laden and/or viral warez from the local BBS. Will this be any different? I doubt it.
Without W4R3Z K1DD13Z where would all the anti-virus vendors be? The unemployment line, burger king maybe?
It's just a binary win32 release atm. The developers intended to release the source under GPL once they got it to the 1.0 release. Not been able to find out whether or not they are still going to be able to do that. The website posted has enough information that it will be easy enough to clone if they can't though.
OOG HEAR THAT ANY FILE TYPE SUPPORTED... THIS INCLUDE.EXE AND.ZIP AND LIKE??? IF SO, OOG FEAR GNUTELLA OPEN BACKDOOR IN USER COMPUTER AND LEAVE USER VULNERABLE TO VIRUS AND TROJAN!!! OOG NO LIKE BE HACKED BY SCRIPT CAVEKIDDIE!!!
Then Oog should not use Gnutella to download executables. No warez for Oog! Stick to mp3s and text files and Oog be fine though...
like" windows my ass...it's obvious you've never even fired KDE except to snort at it. Gotta have your useless, shiny CPU-consuming themes, eh? Gotta love the speed of the Gnome panel segfaulting.
I can't speak for him, but I used the latest version for two weeks, and the one before it for about the same time earlier, each time I tried a sizeable chunk of the themes on themes.org, as well as creating my own themes (good point to kde is that this is easy to do, in comparison to the competition, I'm especially fond of that aspect of Kwm - E could learn a lot from it there.) But it's true, no matter what you do, it's still a windows look-alike, it's just got better theming. And beyond the aesthetics, the panel and taskbar have the same faults as the MSWin taskbar - between the two, even when "hidden" they occupy two entire edges of the screen - PRIME screen real estate which a good UI could accomplish *so* much more with than just a taskbar and launchpad for a few apps.
Gnome has it's problems too, and no shortage of them, but on the whole, on my machine at least, it's beating KDE on all fronts - it looks better, it's faster, and it's better designed. The gnome panels, for example, easily hide themselves in the corners - very easy spots to get to, no matter where you are, yet they leave the screen edge free for other things. And sure, GNOME/E can be far more bloated than KDE if you decide to use a huge pixmap theme, but the solution is obvious and easy, just don't do it.
And no, I am not a "gnome zealot" or whatever, in fact after using gnome/E for about a month I went back to plain old WindowMaker - it's everything I really need with less overhead. It will run the odd app, whether kde or gnome or whatever - just fine, and the UI may not be fancy but it gets the job done very nicely. The root menu is the only launcher I need, and so much quicker and easier to access than the KDE or Gnome equivelants, and the dock is a much better use of the screen edge than a taskbar. If I need a task list that's there too, it's a middle button click on the root window, I forget the default keyboard shortcut for it but you can remap it to whatever you want. In short, I have no vested interest in the KDE/Gnome holy war at all (if anything I'm pissed at both of them for not supporting GNUStep instead:P) so take my words for whatever they are worth - but don't write them off as biased.
...don't confuse being better than X with being good. Don't confuse the fact that you are already familiar with it to being easy to use for those who are not. I love X, but from a useability standpoint it's the bottom of the pile, and only that fact, and the fact that many of us got used to MSWin before we switched to linux (even a bad UI seems good once you get used to it) could possibly make MSWin look like a good UI.
You don't have to run the Gnome desktop to run Gnome apps. Gnome is more than just a desktop environment, but an suite of libraries and applications which (hopefully) make a programmer's job easier and tries to enforce some uniformness in user-interfaces. Same with KDE. There is *nothing* stopping anyone from using Gnome apps under KDE or any other WM or desktop.
I do this constantly - using KDE and GNOME apps under WindowMaker, alongside xterms, a wine desktop, and some other X apps (netscape for instance.) I would be happier with a GNUStep version of each of course, but hey, it's free:^)
One must admit that Microsoft have it going on when it comes to ease-of-use and app consistency. If you want to make Linux easy-to-use, make it work like Windows.
Honestly, no. MSWin has overall superiority over Linux in that area, true, but that is saying more about how poor Linux offerings in that area are than how good MS is at it. MS seems easy to use to most people, but only because most people are used to using it.
If you want to see good GUI design, you should look at Mac (not OS X, the older Macs) or better yet at NeXT. NeXT is ancient history by computer standards now, and they still haven't been equaled.
Still, for gnome to be following MS in some ways is not all bad - particularly since they are concentrating on making work alikes for DDE and OLE and some of the "killer apps" instead of slavishly copying the horrid look and feel of MSWin like another project I sha'n't name.
Their point about the "duty of candor" is important I think. I hope their countersuit is spectacularly successful, and inspires a rash of similar ones - maybe that would get this patent nonsense back under control, at least a little.
The profit motive and innovation existed long before patents, and there is no reason to suspect they wouldn't exist without patents.
Very true. The purpose of the clause of the constitution that authorises the creation of patents was to encourage inventors not to keep their inventions secret but rather to give them a legally protected time-limited monopoly, in exchange for revealing their invention publically and making it available to all after the monopoly term ended.
That wasn't a horrible idea, IMOP, but it's definately being abused horribly at present. The worst part is there is a bit of truth to Bezo's contention that Amazon and other companies must abuse the system simply to protect themselves from others abusing it.
Perhaps abolishing patents is not the right answer - but abolishing software patents in particular should be considered. Given the purpose of patents in the first place, it definately follows that fairly obvious applications of pre-existing technology (one-click shopping?) should certainly not be patentable. But as long as they are, businesses are pretty much forced to grab as many as they can, if only as a defence against the other guy doing it...
Slashdot Mirror
...from the user info. I wonder what is going on with all the reporting if so though?
... because I was starting to get the impression you were a shill too, reading the volumes of your posts on this subject, which mostly keep repeating the same thing. Now I understand better where you are coming from.
I still think you are wrong though. The simple issue is one of contract. You can't change contracts retroactively. You can't sell your widget for $99 on monday, then wake up friday and realise that you took a loss, go back and add another charge to your customers credit card to make up for it. That's credit card fraud, and the fact that you were losing money under the original agreement is not a defence.
Netpliance has every right to change their offer - that is NOT the issue. The issue is that they cannot change it *retroactively.* You are clearly putting yourself in their shoes in evaluating this, and that's fine, but you also need to look at it from another perspective to get the whole story - the perspective of someone that saw their original offer, realised it was a great deal and ordered - and then found charges he did not agree to added to his bill without his consent.
It's not the customer who needs to "suck it up" in this case, it's netpliance. They need to suck it up and fulfil their obligations to the "handful" (your term) of people that ordered these before they changed their offer, under the terms they agreed to, and get on with their business.
I'm betting it's just a handful of people, and while I do agree that one is too many, I hardly think this should be the topic of a front-page Slashdot article.
I would bet that it was more than a handful of people - if it had been a literal handful (5) I really don't think Netpliance would have even become aware of it, let alone changing their agreement in mid stride to stop it. It must have been enough people that they perceived a threat to their revenue model. And I would bet that most of the people that bought these intending to use them without the ISP service went there from here - from earlier Slashdot articles. That being the case a follow up article on how this is playing out seems perfectly reasonable to me.
Please try to comprehend what people write before you criticize them.
He didn't say the Spindletop case involved the APSL, he said if Spindletop had based their project on Darwin instead of GNU/Linux Apple could have just yanked their license.
You sound like a freak with a small brain and a big mouth.
Right back at you, anonymous coward.
Right. People need to remember that the 'X' in 'MacOS X' is not an X as in X Windowing system. It's just a funky latin way to state a version number./p>
It's confusing too, and needlessly so. From now on I'm writing it OS 10.
He never once says that people should be forced to give anything away, you need to read more carefully. He argues against the concept of ownership in software, yes, but he never mentions using force against those who disagree. The use of force is in the current situation, where you can be fined and even jailed for copying something you own, not in the situation he proposes.
Define what it is that got copied? The colours? Been done. The monitor in the box? Been done. The mouse? Bad idea, probably been done but if so it was by an idiot... what I am saying is what is actually new in the iMac?
When the public sees an iMac-esque computer, what do they think of? Apple's iMacs, that's what. It's not that I feel Apple should be able to control who uses what cases, I just think that companies like eMachines that are blatently stealing Apple's designs... well, I think they're theives. Am I wrong?
I think you are quite correct. Apple has spent enourmous funds in researching ergonomics and other less functional matters to develop this warm fuzzy design. I even like parts of it. The folks being sued in this case are copying things that Apple developed at their own expense, and yes I think there is something wrong there. But...
How can you define what they did as wrong without creating a slippery slope that is going to wind up extending far beyond this case?
>Yeap, and the X window system stole it from gates. your point?
I won't claim to be authoritative on this, although the discussion might just spurr me to go look it up, but I seem to remember that X has been around for 17 years, no?
I do know, from personal experience, that when windows first came out, I was admining a lab that used dos (I installed windows on all the machines about a year later when it finally became stable enough for us to use) and I was also taking a C class, and my instructor in that class had an X workstation in her office...
I'm therefore quite certain that X was around for quite awhile before the MS version of it came to be...
What's he doing with all the monitor hardware?
Any way to adapt the crt from an imac to fit a "PC"? (PC in quotes cause... face it, macs are Personal Computers too. But no one says IBM clone anymore, so I'm at a loss as to how else to phrase it.. :^)
TANSTAAFL is one of those rare absolute truths of the universe, and Heinlein was a god to me. Hence your post caught my attention. However, on a couple of points I think you are slightly wrong...
1. There was no soldering involved. If you had read the articles linked before responding you would have realised that. The hack was a simple matter of overwriting flash memory with the desired boot image.
2. They have every right to offer the hardware under whatever terms they wish. They do not have the right to retroactively change the terms on customers that had already ordered. This is wrong, and from other posts it seems that this is indeed what they did. If I had ordered one of these things already I would be rather upset. Remember, they didn't originally say we will sell it to you at this price on the condition that you agree to pay us monthly for our overpriced service for x months afterwards - they tried to get sly and claim there were no strings attached - smug and secure in the knowledge that your would have to buy that service because they wrote the firmware to make the thing useless if you didn't.
Well, that joke was on them it turns out, and quite understandably they got mad. They changed the rules. Fine, they can do that. BUT NOT RETROACTIVELY. Anyone that ordered one of these before the change was announced has a valid contract for the delivery of the original model with no strings attached the best I can tell. "Free lunch?" Maybe. But if I offer a free lunch to increase my cocktail sales, I will have to make good on it, even to those that don't drink, no? I think Heinlein even mentioned that little fact...
Despite the fact that I share the "common /. viewpoint" when it comes to fair use, I don't think that I should be able to keep copies of, or distribute copies of, things that I don't have to rights to. That means music, movies, or whatever. If people want to give their work away for free, that's great. But forcing them to do so isn't right. This is my big gripe about RMS, incidently.
Where has RMS said that anyone should be forced to give away their work?
Got an idea? Develop it. If people find it useful it will grow. This ain't MS, no one decides where "we" are going to go, we each do that ourselves.
X isn't designed to be fast sleek or elegant. It's designed to be stable flexible and powerful. It is that.
How much of a performance hit the flexibility costs seems to be a subject of great debate. Not being an X hacker all I can offer is subjective, anecdotal evidence - on my box, certain things are noticeably slower, but other things are noticeably faster, I don't see any significant overall speed advantage to win32 over X on my hardware, just some fairly minor trade-offs going both ways.
Of course X itself is flexible enough to adapt to a lot of situations - if I stuck a larger window manager on X I could make it slower than win32, and if I stuck a smaller one on I could speed it up a bit too.
There are downsides to flexibility, to be sure, but there are advantages too. If you really don't like X, why not make something you like better? X isn't a part of linux, remember that. It's one of many open source programs that you can run if you choose.
NO DOUBT SILLY AOL KIDDIE TRY GET WAREZ THROUGH GNUTELLA AND BE IN DEEP SHIT!!!
No doubt they will. Right now they do the same thing from websites. I remember back when you had to get your trojan laden and/or viral warez from the local BBS. Will this be any different? I doubt it.
Without W4R3Z K1DD13Z where would all the anti-virus vendors be? The unemployment line, burger king maybe?
It's just a binary win32 release atm. The developers intended to release the source under GPL once they got it to the 1.0 release. Not been able to find out whether or not they are still going to be able to do that. The website posted has enough information that it will be easy enough to clone if they can't though.
OOG HEAR THAT ANY FILE TYPE SUPPORTED... THIS INCLUDE .EXE AND .ZIP AND LIKE??? IF SO, OOG FEAR GNUTELLA OPEN BACKDOOR IN USER COMPUTER AND LEAVE USER VULNERABLE TO VIRUS AND TROJAN!!! OOG NO LIKE BE HACKED BY SCRIPT CAVEKIDDIE!!!
Then Oog should not use Gnutella to download executables. No warez for Oog! Stick to mp3s and text files and Oog be fine though...
My only question is how do you compile a vcr tape? Is this some old school unix trick?
Old school yes, but not Unix specific. It's called typing. :^)
Sorry, I just couldn't resist.
like" windows my ass...it's obvious you've never even fired KDE except to snort at it. Gotta have your useless, shiny CPU-consuming themes, eh? Gotta love the speed of the Gnome panel segfaulting.
I can't speak for him, but I used the latest version for two weeks, and the one before it for about the same time earlier, each time I tried a sizeable chunk of the themes on themes.org, as well as creating my own themes (good point to kde is that this is easy to do, in comparison to the competition, I'm especially fond of that aspect of Kwm - E could learn a lot from it there.) But it's true, no matter what you do, it's still a windows look-alike, it's just got better theming. And beyond the aesthetics, the panel and taskbar have the same faults as the MSWin taskbar - between the two, even when "hidden" they occupy two entire edges of the screen - PRIME screen real estate which a good UI could accomplish *so* much more with than just a taskbar and launchpad for a few apps.
Gnome has it's problems too, and no shortage of them, but on the whole, on my machine at least, it's beating KDE on all fronts - it looks better, it's faster, and it's better designed. The gnome panels, for example, easily hide themselves in the corners - very easy spots to get to, no matter where you are, yet they leave the screen edge free for other things. And sure, GNOME/E can be far more bloated than KDE if you decide to use a huge pixmap theme, but the solution is obvious and easy, just don't do it.
And no, I am not a "gnome zealot" or whatever, in fact after using gnome/E for about a month I went back to plain old WindowMaker - it's everything I really need with less overhead. It will run the odd app, whether kde or gnome or whatever - just fine, and the UI may not be fancy but it gets the job done very nicely. The root menu is the only launcher I need, and so much quicker and easier to access than the KDE or Gnome equivelants, and the dock is a much better use of the screen edge than a taskbar. If I need a task list that's there too, it's a middle button click on the root window, I forget the default keyboard shortcut for it but you can remap it to whatever you want. In short, I have no vested interest in the KDE/Gnome holy war at all (if anything I'm pissed at both of them for not supporting GNUStep instead :P) so take my words for whatever they are worth - but don't write them off as biased.
...don't confuse being better than X with being good. Don't confuse the fact that you are already familiar with it to being easy to use for those who are not. I love X, but from a useability standpoint it's the bottom of the pile, and only that fact, and the fact that many of us got used to MSWin before we switched to linux (even a bad UI seems good once you get used to it) could possibly make MSWin look like a good UI.
The Interface Hall of Shame
You don't have to run the Gnome desktop to run Gnome apps. Gnome is more than just a desktop environment, but an suite of libraries and applications which (hopefully) make a programmer's job easier and tries to enforce some uniformness in user-interfaces. Same with KDE. There is *nothing* stopping anyone from using Gnome apps under KDE or any other WM or desktop.
I do this constantly - using KDE and GNOME apps under WindowMaker, alongside xterms, a wine desktop, and some other X apps (netscape for instance.) I would be happier with a GNUStep version of each of course, but hey, it's free :^)
One must admit that Microsoft have it going on when it comes to ease-of-use and app consistency. If you want to make Linux easy-to-use, make it work like Windows.
Honestly, no. MSWin has overall superiority over Linux in that area, true, but that is saying more about how poor Linux offerings in that area are than how good MS is at it. MS seems easy to use to most people, but only because most people are used to using it.
If you want to see good GUI design, you should look at Mac (not OS X, the older Macs) or better yet at NeXT. NeXT is ancient history by computer standards now, and they still haven't been equaled.
Still, for gnome to be following MS in some ways is not all bad - particularly since they are concentrating on making work alikes for DDE and OLE and some of the "killer apps" instead of slavishly copying the horrid look and feel of MSWin like another project I sha'n't name.
Their point about the "duty of candor" is important I think. I hope their countersuit is spectacularly successful, and inspires a rash of similar ones - maybe that would get this patent nonsense back under control, at least a little.
This is interesting. I suspected something of that kind, can you provide a source for that?
The profit motive and innovation existed long before patents, and there is no reason to suspect they wouldn't exist without patents.
Very true. The purpose of the clause of the constitution that authorises the creation of patents was to encourage inventors not to keep their inventions secret but rather to give them a legally protected time-limited monopoly, in exchange for revealing their invention publically and making it available to all after the monopoly term ended.
That wasn't a horrible idea, IMOP, but it's definately being abused horribly at present. The worst part is there is a bit of truth to Bezo's contention that Amazon and other companies must abuse the system simply to protect themselves from others abusing it.
Perhaps abolishing patents is not the right answer - but abolishing software patents in particular should be considered. Given the purpose of patents in the first place, it definately follows that fairly obvious applications of pre-existing technology (one-click shopping?) should certainly not be patentable. But as long as they are, businesses are pretty much forced to grab as many as they can, if only as a defence against the other guy doing it...