this is one of these things which amuses me. i sometimes do some freelance work for a foundation building company in town and am amazed by the number of computers sitting about the place. everybody has at least one. even the secretaries at the front desk have two each. i haven't yet worked out what a secretary needs to do with a computer apart from read and answer e-mails. i don't believe that secretaries have become more productive since the computer became common-place. i know that if you give a secretary a new word processor, their productivity will go down sharpy for a long time while they are trying out the fonts and pretty colors and stuff.
what i'm trying to say, is, that using computers can be a two-edged sword. yes, it is nice to have a huge database programm helping the office workers look stuff up, but don't be surprised if their memories get worse and they forget how to work efficiently.
another thing i'd like to say, is, that in certain fields development of proprietary software results in software which is under a beautiful surface far worse than open source stuff. i recently had the chance to compare the print-outs of finale with lilypond. now lilypond hasn't even got a graphical user interface, but you can write music for it to set using any text editor you want and you can read the files it saves (it's a sort of mark-up language in ascii 7-bit). finale on the other hand has the most beautiful graphical user interface i have ever seen (apart from some problems with updating backgrounds after you've moved a window, which probably have more to do with windows than with finale). when you save a file it gets encrypted and zipped. when you print it it's full of mistakes. lilypond's print-outs are often indistinguishable from a generic handset print.
finale employs full time a team of many hundred and the software costs many hundred dollars a shot. lilypond employs a team of i think it's five people part-time and the software is free.
my point is, software is not necessarily difficult. yes, operating systems are difficult. if you want to do everything multi-threaded, that's difficult too. but a cad application which you can train an educated, knowledgeable person to use to help them design whatever it is they design - that's not impossible. lilypond of course stands on the shoulders of a particular giant (latex). i don't know anything about the field of cad. where would one start? a development of vector graphics? i dunno.
try to understand how the software you use works. once you've understood that, you can in theory write it yourself.
howie
i wonder how much your company would have to invest to develop similar software for linux. if you think about it, let's say this company has 100 computers, all running windows and this specialist software. specialist software tends to be expensive costing many hundred dollars per license. windows comes with the machine, but upgrades are expensive. anti-virus software costs a certain amount each year. software upgrades cost a certain amount. could not some of this money be invested in developing free software (in collaboration with other companies in similar fields)? how long would it take, and how much money would have to be spent? would it be possible to develop it using a couple of full time programmers and a bounty system?
i can't see this not saving money in the long run.
large amounts of computers in china are sold as white boxes. for the average person, the cost of installing a legal copy of windows xp and microsoft office etc. would be prohibitively high.
what you are suggesting could only be supported by rms if he abandoned his ideals and visions.
the hoops envolved are moral hoops. where can i see the source-code of the java-compiler? how do i know it does not contain any malevolent features? how can i improve it if it has a problem? how can i add a feature or change it if a friend asks for my help?
because i want to know what my computer does, i am not free to download the jre. to do so would be to give up a part of the control over my computer.
howie
a lot of the problems had with GNU/linux come because it is either illegal or impossible for GNU/linux to solve these problems. illegal because of patents or similar, and impossible because the hardware manufacturer doesn't release the specs for the hardware.
blaming linux for this is a bit like shooting someone in the leg and then saying to others 'you don't want to work with him, he's a cripple'
you know, there is such a thing as a no-win situation, which is also justifiably no-win. microsoft have manouvered themselves into a moral hole, and there is no easy way out. the one possibility, which would put the linux crowd to rest, would be if microsoft improved their operating system to make the majority of anti-spyware/virus/malware etc. software redundant. microsoft however appears unwilling or unable to do this and instead is adding another layer of protection, rather than seeing to it that the underlying software is safe.
however, that would in no way be enough for the GNU crowd. the GNU crowd says, quite justifiably in my opinion, how can we trust software, when we don't know what it does? the windows xp operating system itself has spyware built in. is there any reason to believe that this will change for windows vista?
in the eyes of GNU-people, and in the eyes of any foreign (i.e. non-microsoft) company or government, the usage of non-free software is a gamble.
as someone wrote earlier, if you're microsoft, you're dammed if you do and you're dammed if you don't. and rightly so.
avg free is free software. the general opinion is therefore that it can't be as good as software which you pay money for and shouldn't be taken seriously.
if i were more cynical, i would maybe consider the option that magazines often get certain presents from a company if they decide to review the company's software; the value of the presents being proportional to the result of the review.
it's possible there aren't any drivers for your wifi, graphics card and modem for gnu/linux. what you're doing is shooting someone in the legs and then laughing at them because they can't walk.
the corpse bride actually did okay, it was a very cheap film to make.
a couple of points:
the majority of people in the cinema go there on a date or as a family outing. in these cases the idea of cinema an sich is probably just as important as the exact film. these ticket-sales are not influenced by having films to download
money not spent on buying cds and dvds is spent elsewhere. the argument that 'illegal downloading costs the industry 100 billion dollars (finger in mouth corner) per year' is pretty close to a broken-window-fallacy.
(related to 1) i would probably not lend my bf my usb-stick for his birthday with the comment 'oh, here's a usb stick. i downloaded some oggs for you. happy birthday'
if the recording industry gets its way and draconian punishments for copyright infringement are enforced, people may well stop copying. what sort of effect does this have? in no way is the effect positive. the people don't have the money to buy it, so the recording industry won't get any more money
how bad is it for the recording industry, that an unloved spotty teenager has illegal copies of 300 films on his harddrives? he wouldn't have bought them anyway. no sales have been lost. as long as enough money is brought in by cinema sales, marketing (the main source of revenue) and product placement, why does the film and music industry care?
you know, i tend to vote with my money. i often copy a film or watch it at a friend's house and then decide if it's so good that i want the film makers to get my money for it. i then and only then go out and buy it. i don't like spending money on something without knowing if i like it or not.
'Wal-Mart will go to any means to sell a computer $0.99 cheaper than the guy down the street'
i don't buy it, and here's why.
back when i was young (let's take the year 2002 as an example). every computer in the store ran winxp and microsoft office etc. and did that with a pentium 3 1/2 and 256MB-RAM. if walmart wanted to offer a cheaper pc, they'd buy up these old components and offer a pc for about 200 dollars. as far as i know, they don't, but then i don't ever go into a walmart, so i wouldn't really know...
you know, a friend of mine, nice chap, used to work for a supermarket somewhere in the north of england. anyway, they had a large amount of product#1 (i think it was pasta sauce) which was the supermarket's own brand and they couldn't sell it, because the brand everybody knew and read about in the paper was only 20p more expensive. anyway, they got a call through from central office to increase the price of the supermarket's own brand to 50p more than the expensive, posh brand. they did this and were subsequently shocked to the very core of their being to see the supermarket's own brand being bought and consumed like the proverbial hot cakes.
so what do we learn from this tale? in some instances, the public equates price with quality.
my mother was the same, she'd shop around town trying to find the shop where the thing she wanted to buy was the most expensive, before spending my father's money on it (thinking about it, that may have other reasons)
i was thinking about useability of GUIs recently. has the average office worker really got more productive since the GUI has been the norm for a computer? does the secretary type more letters etc.? or do they spend hours playing with the formatting? i'm always amazed myself how much more work i can manage when i shut Xwindows down
this is another reason why open source software is making such incredible progress. you are allowed (and encouraged) to look at the work or others and incorporate it into your own work.
how much would einstein have achieved, if the work of maxwell, michelson and morley et al. had not been available to view?
i think this is one of those times when one starts to think about what is actually important in computer design for other people. i think, if i were blind, i'd be able to operate a unix shell quite well, if it had a programm which read letters and another program which read words. these programms could be started with the shell. then you have a computer which can be used by a blind person. i admit, the visual aspect of structuring texts would have to be replaced (maybe replacing tabbing for brackets with another way of expressing the environment, for example pitch (every tab from the start of a line would increase the pitch of the voice by a certain amount))
which blind person needs a graphical user interface? which sighted person needs one for that matter? i must admit to finding it nice when programming having 10 different shells open on one screen, so i can refer to what's written there.
the more you think about it, the more you see the advantage of emacs and vi as text-editors. one can go back or forward 50 words, search for the next instance of a particular word and go there, all from the keyboard. tools like this would be perfect for blind people.
place cd in drive. cd is not recognised by bios during system boot.
turn computer off and start again. cd recognised this time
cd does some weird stuff to begin with (loading system kernel? -unlikely). this crashes - try again
cd gets to a welcome screen. doesn't recognise hard-drive, installation impossible
since i don't have a floppy drive i sort of gave up at this point. some one told me later, that the cd can also read in drivers for a s-ata hard drive from the usb-port, but at that stage i'd already put a suse-linux 9.1-64 cd in the drive, which installed without difficulties in one go and also gave me support for the 64-bit command set.
windows xp may be good if you have standard middle-of-the-range hardwarefrom the year 2000, but nowadays it's a nightmare to install. of course, once it is installed, you can find all the drivers you need, but some people just don't get that far (me included).
believe me, the german grammer checker is horrible. it frequently breaks correct sentences. then you have to go back over it again, or ask the secretary why it got mangled...
doc format is sooo wierd. let me give you a comparison so you can see why.
let's say i'm a government and i want to store information. what i do is go to a foreign country and hire a team of translators to translate the things i want to store in a language which nobody knows and nobody speaks apart from these translators. the language isn't written down anywhere, you can't buy books about it. these translators cost me so and so many thousand dollars each year, although i could employ local scribes which speak my language and cost nothing. then i force anybody who wants to read these documents to go to this same foreign country and employ their own team of translators who speak a language nobody understands and nobody can understand.
if you were storing important things, would you trust them? i wouldn't. i'd want to be able to look at the stored document and know what it says.
about a year ago i bought a 64-bit white box computer and wanted to install windows and suse9.1 on it. anyway. i placed the xp disk in the drive after screwing the computer together and it refused to install. it couldn't find my harddrive. turns out that windows xp doesn't support s-ata hard drives. that left me with a problem, because i didn't have a disk drive and i also didn't have space to install it. i eventually just put the suse9.1 dvd in the drive and it installed in all its 64-bit glory without a problem. everything apart form the 3d-driver support (for proprietary reasons).
heck it, windows xp didn't even install on my dell-box from the year 2000. fortunately i have a diskdrive on that computer and was able to go into town and download the right drivers from the net. it took me a couple of days, but i finally got it running. then the dvd-drive broke and i replaced it with a new one. xp then stopped working, refusing even to boot in 'abgesicherter modus'. wtf?
since then i've totally given up on microsoft. to think that i had to pay money for this crap...
if you're still using the cd, it seems reasonable for the computer to remind you of this fact before a command to have the cd removed is followed, mainly because this command could come from a number of sources, not just from pressing the eject button.
windows itself doesn't let me do shut off connections to my pcmcia cards. the result? i can remove the card from the slot, but any problems it had before removal are still there afterwards, and it's pretty impossible to know which process is using it. under linux you can work it out for yourself and then kill the process.
i do hate to burst your bubble, but computers are complex things. trying to convince people they aren't (which is what windows and os-x do) only works up to a point. then you have to know what you're doing. that's one of the reasons why the more difficult the task, the more likely you are to find a *nix computer doing it (e.g. supercomputers)
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this is one of these things which amuses me. i sometimes do some freelance work for a foundation building company in town and am amazed by the number of computers sitting about the place. everybody has at least one. even the secretaries at the front desk have two each. i haven't yet worked out what a secretary needs to do with a computer apart from read and answer e-mails. i don't believe that secretaries have become more productive since the computer became common-place. i know that if you give a secretary a new word processor, their productivity will go down sharpy for a long time while they are trying out the fonts and pretty colors and stuff.
what i'm trying to say, is, that using computers can be a two-edged sword. yes, it is nice to have a huge database programm helping the office workers look stuff up, but don't be surprised if their memories get worse and they forget how to work efficiently.
another thing i'd like to say, is, that in certain fields development of proprietary software results in software which is under a beautiful surface far worse than open source stuff. i recently had the chance to compare the print-outs of finale with lilypond. now lilypond hasn't even got a graphical user interface, but you can write music for it to set using any text editor you want and you can read the files it saves (it's a sort of mark-up language in ascii 7-bit). finale on the other hand has the most beautiful graphical user interface i have ever seen (apart from some problems with updating backgrounds after you've moved a window, which probably have more to do with windows than with finale). when you save a file it gets encrypted and zipped. when you print it it's full of mistakes. lilypond's print-outs are often indistinguishable from a generic handset print.
finale employs full time a team of many hundred and the software costs many hundred dollars a shot. lilypond employs a team of i think it's five people part-time and the software is free.
my point is, software is not necessarily difficult. yes, operating systems are difficult. if you want to do everything multi-threaded, that's difficult too. but a cad application which you can train an educated, knowledgeable person to use to help them design whatever it is they design - that's not impossible. lilypond of course stands on the shoulders of a particular giant (latex). i don't know anything about the field of cad. where would one start? a development of vector graphics? i dunno.
try to understand how the software you use works. once you've understood that, you can in theory write it yourself.
howie
i wonder how much your company would have to invest to develop similar software for linux. if you think about it, let's say this company has 100 computers, all running windows and this specialist software. specialist software tends to be expensive costing many hundred dollars per license. windows comes with the machine, but upgrades are expensive. anti-virus software costs a certain amount each year. software upgrades cost a certain amount. could not some of this money be invested in developing free software (in collaboration with other companies in similar fields)? how long would it take, and how much money would have to be spent? would it be possible to develop it using a couple of full time programmers and a bounty system?
i can't see this not saving money in the long run.
large amounts of computers in china are sold as white boxes. for the average person, the cost of installing a legal copy of windows xp and microsoft office etc. would be prohibitively high.
what you are suggesting could only be supported by rms if he abandoned his ideals and visions.
the hoops envolved are moral hoops. where can i see the source-code of the java-compiler? how do i know it does not contain any malevolent features? how can i improve it if it has a problem? how can i add a feature or change it if a friend asks for my help?
because i want to know what my computer does, i am not free to download the jre. to do so would be to give up a part of the control over my computer.
howie
how about starting by removing patents from medications in the third world?
well, there is the possibility that it will use open source software, so not enslaving the people to a criminal monopoly.
a lot of the problems had with GNU/linux come because it is either illegal or impossible for GNU/linux to solve these problems. illegal because of patents or similar, and impossible because the hardware manufacturer doesn't release the specs for the hardware.
blaming linux for this is a bit like shooting someone in the leg and then saying to others 'you don't want to work with him, he's a cripple'
howie
you know, there is such a thing as a no-win situation, which is also justifiably no-win. microsoft have manouvered themselves into a moral hole, and there is no easy way out. the one possibility, which would put the linux crowd to rest, would be if microsoft improved their operating system to make the majority of anti-spyware/virus/malware etc. software redundant. microsoft however appears unwilling or unable to do this and instead is adding another layer of protection, rather than seeing to it that the underlying software is safe.
however, that would in no way be enough for the GNU crowd. the GNU crowd says, quite justifiably in my opinion, how can we trust software, when we don't know what it does? the windows xp operating system itself has spyware built in. is there any reason to believe that this will change for windows vista?
in the eyes of GNU-people, and in the eyes of any foreign (i.e. non-microsoft) company or government, the usage of non-free software is a gamble.
as someone wrote earlier, if you're microsoft, you're dammed if you do and you're dammed if you don't. and rightly so.
avg free is free software. the general opinion is therefore that it can't be as good as software which you pay money for and shouldn't be taken seriously.
if i were more cynical, i would maybe consider the option that magazines often get certain presents from a company if they decide to review the company's software; the value of the presents being proportional to the result of the review.
it's possible there aren't any drivers for your wifi, graphics card and modem for gnu/linux. what you're doing is shooting someone in the legs and then laughing at them because they can't walk.
howie
software in a gnu/linux/bsd distribution:
- comes from many different companies and individuals.
- is designed to work using commonly defined system calls.
- is available in its entirety in source code
- tends to change with each new distribution, of which there are hundreds which can be freely downloaded
software installed per default on the microsoft windows operating system however:- is made by one criminal company
- can work using secret, optimised system calls so giving it an innate advantage over software from other companies/individuals
- is not available as source code, so you have no idea what the software actually does
- is part of only one distribution, for which microsoft can stop the support whenever it sees fit
- cannot be freely copied, modified, installed
- is covered by patents
- tends to save per default in file formats which are proprietary and therefore cannot be supported by another software
- tends to only support proprietary file formats
i think the differences are clear.please feel free to continue the list yourself.
howie
a couple of points:
- the majority of people in the cinema go there on a date or as a family outing. in these cases the idea of cinema an sich is probably just as important as the exact film. these ticket-sales are not influenced by having films to download
- money not spent on buying cds and dvds is spent elsewhere. the argument that 'illegal downloading costs the industry 100 billion dollars (finger in mouth corner) per year' is pretty close to a broken-window-fallacy.
- (related to 1) i would probably not lend my bf my usb-stick for his birthday with the comment 'oh, here's a usb stick. i downloaded some oggs for you. happy birthday'
- if the recording industry gets its way and draconian punishments for copyright infringement are enforced, people may well stop copying. what sort of effect does this have? in no way is the effect positive. the people don't have the money to buy it, so the recording industry won't get any more money
how bad is it for the recording industry, that an unloved spotty teenager has illegal copies of 300 films on his harddrives? he wouldn't have bought them anyway. no sales have been lost. as long as enough money is brought in by cinema sales, marketing (the main source of revenue) and product placement, why does the film and music industry care? you know, i tend to vote with my money. i often copy a film or watch it at a friend's house and then decide if it's so good that i want the film makers to get my money for it. i then and only then go out and buy it. i don't like spending money on something without knowing if i like it or not.i don't buy it, and here's why.
back when i was young (let's take the year 2002 as an example). every computer in the store ran winxp and microsoft office etc. and did that with a pentium 3 1/2 and 256MB-RAM. if walmart wanted to offer a cheaper pc, they'd buy up these old components and offer a pc for about 200 dollars. as far as i know, they don't, but then i don't ever go into a walmart, so i wouldn't really know...
howie
so what do we learn from this tale? in some instances, the public equates price with quality.
my mother was the same, she'd shop around town trying to find the shop where the thing she wanted to buy was the most expensive, before spending my father's money on it (thinking about it, that may have other reasons)
i was thinking about useability of GUIs recently. has the average office worker really got more productive since the GUI has been the norm for a computer? does the secretary type more letters etc.? or do they spend hours playing with the formatting? i'm always amazed myself how much more work i can manage when i shut Xwindows down
whatever, i hope everybody is well.
how much would einstein have achieved, if the work of maxwell, michelson and morley et al. had not been available to view?
howie
i think this is one of those times when one starts to think about what is actually important in computer design for other people. i think, if i were blind, i'd be able to operate a unix shell quite well, if it had a programm which read letters and another program which read words. these programms could be started with the shell. then you have a computer which can be used by a blind person. i admit, the visual aspect of structuring texts would have to be replaced (maybe replacing tabbing for brackets with another way of expressing the environment, for example pitch (every tab from the start of a line would increase the pitch of the voice by a certain amount))
which blind person needs a graphical user interface? which sighted person needs one for that matter? i must admit to finding it nice when programming having 10 different shells open on one screen, so i can refer to what's written there.
the more you think about it, the more you see the advantage of emacs and vi as text-editors. one can go back or forward 50 words, search for the next instance of a particular word and go there, all from the keyboard. tools like this would be perfect for blind people.
spend time focusing on the software you want to write.
i often wonder who this great nebulous 'they' is, when people write about opensource.
since i don't have a floppy drive i sort of gave up at this point. some one told me later, that the cd can also read in drivers for a s-ata hard drive from the usb-port, but at that stage i'd already put a suse-linux 9.1-64 cd in the drive, which installed without difficulties in one go and also gave me support for the 64-bit command set.
windows xp may be good if you have standard middle-of-the-range hardwarefrom the year 2000, but nowadays it's a nightmare to install. of course, once it is installed, you can find all the drivers you need, but some people just don't get that far (me included).
not a good idea.
let's say i'm a government and i want to store information. what i do is go to a foreign country and hire a team of translators to translate the things i want to store in a language which nobody knows and nobody speaks apart from these translators. the language isn't written down anywhere, you can't buy books about it. these translators cost me so and so many thousand dollars each year, although i could employ local scribes which speak my language and cost nothing. then i force anybody who wants to read these documents to go to this same foreign country and employ their own team of translators who speak a language nobody understands and nobody can understand.
if you were storing important things, would you trust them? i wouldn't. i'd want to be able to look at the stored document and know what it says.
howie
heck it, windows xp didn't even install on my dell-box from the year 2000. fortunately i have a diskdrive on that computer and was able to go into town and download the right drivers from the net. it took me a couple of days, but i finally got it running. then the dvd-drive broke and i replaced it with a new one. xp then stopped working, refusing even to boot in 'abgesicherter modus'. wtf?
since then i've totally given up on microsoft. to think that i had to pay money for this crap...
howie
i imagine if you export the presentation as an html-file, all the pictures will be stored as jpegs in one file inside this html-file.
windows itself doesn't let me do shut off connections to my pcmcia cards. the result? i can remove the card from the slot, but any problems it had before removal are still there afterwards, and it's pretty impossible to know which process is using it. under linux you can work it out for yourself and then kill the process.
i do hate to burst your bubble, but computers are complex things. trying to convince people they aren't (which is what windows and os-x do) only works up to a point. then you have to know what you're doing. that's one of the reasons why the more difficult the task, the more likely you are to find a *nix computer doing it (e.g. supercomputers)
howie
because a linux distribution isn't putting anybody out of a job by bundling software with the distribution.