It wouldn't be hard to sneak into the campus bookstore and tear out that sheet from a dozen or so copies of the book. You don't even have to 'steal' them. Just put them somewhere else in the bookstore.
So you want Spanish language students in Kansas to translate OSS software to Spanish so that Spanish-speaking people around the world will more freely adopt it? I think that to the contrary, native speakers should do that work. And largely they are.
OSS isn't an 'American' phenomena, in fact it is very international in scope. It isn't an act of charity by the West, it's a bootstrap opportunity for the people of the developing world themselves.
Closed source by it's very expensive nature only serves to keep people down.
Closed source does not by nature have to be expensive. That isn't one of it's essential properties. It can be very cheap and widely used.
You, for example, are running your OSS on a system which has BIOS firmware for which you don't have the source code. (cradle your head tight in your arms to keep it from exploding).
No evolution is far more complex than mere 'survival of the fittest.' If it were simply a matter of adaptation, there would be only one highly 'adapted' species of life.
There are mechanisms that divide populations so different groupings can diverge and evolve into separate species, etc. It's far, far more complex than any layman explanation.
256 has not really been a standard entry level amount of RAM for almost 10 years now.
Ten years ago 256 MB of RAM was an unusual amount of memory to have in a PC. Typical users had 32 or 64MB. The typical motherboard of 1996 was a Pentium I motherboard that would have four slots for 72pin SIMMs. The really expensive SIMMs were 32M. Nothing bigger than 32M SIMMs were supported in most of said motherboards. So people with lots of money had 128MB and most everybody else had 32-64.
Maybe you weren't around yet. But, then, why are you talking about something you don't know?
Minix was (and still mostly is) an academic exercise. It's an OS wrapped around a textbook for teaching Operating System concepts. It was never intended as 'production' code. At the time, it was one of the few 'real' operating systems for which the full source was readily available for people to learn from. Linus owes Tannenbaum and Minix a lot more than most casual observers of the 'conflict' acknowledge.
Could be. I don't like anything that starts with an asterick, perhaps. I run NetBSD at home, mostly, though I've now got a machine (Sun Blade 100) worthy of a current release of Solaris. I don't consider myself or any home-UNIX user to be a 'consumer.'
I was a 'Linux noob' back in 1994. Made the jump from Slackware to a BSD back in the kernal 2.0 days. The security model won't sail in the mainstream. It's a great system for techies, but mom isn't ever going to get it.
Even Windows 2000, while one of the better MS operating systems, still didn't live up to expectations.
It didn't?? I, personally, see no reason to ever upgrade to XP. W2K is a 'plateau' Microsoft product, just like Office 4.3 on WFWG 3.11 was. It took a LOT of improvement for Microsoft to come up with something 'more' that was worth upgrading to. Many businesses sat on Office 4.3 for years and years, while Microsoft languished, shipping shovelware nobody wanted.
Windows XP is just now 'emerging' at many corporate sites, and not really because anybody is clamoring for it.
The one Windows machine left in my personal machine room has W2K running.
Re:Mr. Thurrott forgives Microsoft
on
How Vista Disappoints
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
I hate to just post what some will interpret as flamebait, but on the surface, not one single consumer wants the UNIX security model, either. What people want is a computer they can easily add to and change to suit their purpose. No security model addresses that. With Windows, it's either an out-of-control insecure nest of spyware, viruses and trojans, or the new DRM model of locked-down-no-fun. With the freenixes, it's locked-down-no-fun or months of learning how to get around 'the barriers' of 'the rest of the world' and DRM.
The 'PC Revolution' came about when an MS-DOS machine could be had at low cost and could do the now-considered-limited things that a PC in that era could accomplish. Which was VERY liberating at the time, because the only other computers to be had were locked-down multiuser systems that the regular person wasn't even allowed to be in the same room with.
The Microsoft 'a computer on every desk and in every home' was a cool aspiration. The fact that it's now time for those computers to no longer have much (if any) software from Microsoft doesn't make it a less cool aspiration.
To a person who liked writing graphical programs in GW-Basic, who got into the hardware and learned how to do cool low-level things with, say, Turbo C 2.0, any modern system makes your computer do less than it could before. Simply because hardware abstraction and a modern 'security model' took that all away.
It's point-of-view and what you want to do with the gear that determines 'more' and 'less.' To some people 'more' is a DRM-enabled system they can download crappy TV shows onto.
it allows people to easily find the features that have been in there since Office 97 but nobody knew how to get at them. It vastly lowers the learning curve for the product.
How are they going to sell that to the people who 'lead' at most companies? (the people who've known how to use the features in Office 97 since... well, a few weeks after the release event) The 'poor fools' who can't find the features are generally the last people to have any say in upgrading at a business, and the least likely to flash the plastic to buy a new version retail for themselves personally.
Oh, come off it! All Office 95 was, was a good reason to reinstall MS Office 4 (or Lotus Smart Suite) It was Office 97 before Microsoft had ANYTHING to offer in a 32 bit capable Office Suite.
For him to mention BSoD in his submission was just tired rhetoric. Yea I'm sure people are still running Windows 98 out there and seeing BSoD
It is perhaps a pedantic point, but there never, ever, was a Blue Screen of Death on Windows 98. the BSOD was an NT-only phenomenon, a 'core dump to screen' system crash. It was most common on NT 4.0 and almost entirely disappeared with Windows 2000 (NT 5.0). People who talk about Windows 98 and 'BSoD' obviously don't know at all what they're talking about.
I used the data displayed in a BSoD on NT 4.0 several times to figure out what had crashed the system (in one instance, it was the absence of media in the zip drive! NT 4 would crash from something like THAT)
The sound can't 'mysteriously disappear' in the X Window System. It would have to appear first.
I remember right before the X Consortium crumbled that they were working on a multimedia-rich version of X called 'Broadway.' Unfortunately the consortium crumbled, and there's no 'architecture' to work on now (it's no conincidence that the central architecture of Open Source OSes is scattered. the protocols it's GUI is based on is frozen in the year 1993).
Actually, one of the signs of a good school is one where there isn't enough interest in the student body to even get enough people together to play varsity football. Other fitness activites and casual sports are fine. Football? Surely you jest!
Turn the stadium into a place to play concerts. Turn the 'coaches' into groundskeepers.
It's the old 'I don't understand computers therefore I'll play dumb' routine.
Actually, it's the old 'I am not a hopeless nerd who interacts on a near social level with a crummy piece of hardware and thus I don't "understand" this arcane piece of equipment' routine.
Most people aren't capable of servicing the office photocopier, either. There's a blue collar guy with a toolbox to take care of that.
Now, it seems that both you and I agree that advertisers on the web are sleazeballs. The problem that comes into being is that some of said sleazeballs wear a suit and necktie to work each day. So there will be a concerted effort to 'clean up' (so to speak) this problem. When you're running a well-established swindle racket, part of your job is to slap down competitors who operate less smoothly operating rackets who will wreck it for you.
In other words, Microsoft has a good market for this tool, besides the victims.
I tried it and indeed it popped up a save dialogue. I don't have Wine installed, though, so I am fairly safe. It isn't really a 'popup' in the sense most people think, of course, just a query from Mozilla asking how to handle that file time. Could be dangerous for people who run the wrong OS and have already selected the 'Always perform this action' to get the 'popup' to stop bugging them.
Goes with the baggage, I guess, of running an insecure OS where anything with an.exe extension runs as root on many, many, workstations.
if there had been no Microsoft, there would be no advancement in computing.
That's a ridiculous notion. But it is worth expanding on a little. One of the best things Microsoft did for 'computing' in the last decade was continually push the 'bloatware' envelope. By producing turgid bloated apps and 'Desktop Environments' they forced rapid obsolescence of hardware in many large enterprises. Which drove a rapid hardware obsolesence cycle. End result? At least from where I am sitting, it meant lots of 'old' machines for Linux and BSD operating systems.
A good parallel to this is in WalMart. In my community, there is a building that now has a thriving flea market operating out of it. Lots and lots of vendor booths with a ton of options for all sorts of purchases. That building was constructed by WalMart, who after a time moved to a new, bigger building. People bemoan what WalMart does to 'Main Street' but in at least some instances their entry and motion within a local marketplace eventually drives down the cost of retail space to the point where small innovative marketplaces can grow.
I liken this to the same thing that Microsoft has done: driven the computing hardware market into becoming a broad and cheap commodity business. Which free (in all senses) OSes can and do expand into. I'm typing this on a machine running NetBSD that is a Dell PIII box that I paid less than $10 for at an auction. It was no longer suitable at the school it came from to run Windows Bloatedness.
To roughly paraphrase the dolphins in a Douglass Adams book: "So long, Bill Gates, and thanks for all the hardware."
That's really the main way that I see Microsoft as 'advancing computing.' They are trailing edge in almost all ways. Anything 'cool' they do, they buy in or copy from somewhere else.
While of historical value, it is erroneous to just consider the contents of any sect's "gospel" a 'fact' just because you'd like to get a few Christians upset.:)
Ah, but baiting Christians is considered marvelous intellectual sport. Often by the same people who bemoan intolerance when any other religion is derided.
Does anybody else reading this thread know of a single real hard-boiled creationist?
One gets the feeling that a 'true creationist' is somebody made up to have fun poking at. Yes, there are a few still out there who believe in the literal 'Genesis' story.
Do you know of any? I don't. I think it's a dead horse that a bunch of people seem to have a need to flog.
Yes, it was the Stalinists who pioneered the practice of branding all political opponents as insane and putting them in 'institutions.
How refreshing that you probably have zero chance of ever having any state power.
I've known more Marxists than anybody else I know. Likely more than you. Unless you shill 'The Militant' on the street on Tuesday nights. How many Trotskyites do you know? Are you aquainted with any of the 'Cadre' organisations in the United States? Have you engaged in a critique of Ultra Left tendencies, or perhaps you exhibit said tendencies? Do you know what adopting a 'Mass Line' approach means? Do you even know what Dialectical Materialism is? What is Democractic Centralism, and why is it necessary? Do you know which 'branch' of Marxism the Shining Path movement in Peru favors? Can you explain the Chinese support of Pol Pot? What were the dynamics of the Chinese invasion of Vietnam? Do you personally know anybody who has participated in a Party-to-Party delegation in a visit to the People's Republic of China?
Quit living in a comic book world where everybody to your right is a dumb fuck. It makes YOU look like the dumb fuck, dude.
Unless you are a historican of Political Economy 'speaking knowledgably about Marxism' is anachronistic. Anybody, by definition, who speaks favorably about Marxism as if it's anything but a historical footnote is pushing an agenda.
Now, rest back in your armchair and tell us some more. . .
Are you a DeLeonist? A Trotskyite? What flavor of dead ideology do you favor?
Slashdot Mirror
It wouldn't be hard to sneak into the campus bookstore and tear out that sheet from a dozen or so copies of the book. You don't even have to 'steal' them. Just put them somewhere else in the bookstore.
So you want Spanish language students in Kansas to translate OSS software to Spanish so that Spanish-speaking people around the world will more freely adopt it? I think that to the contrary, native speakers should do that work. And largely they are.
OSS isn't an 'American' phenomena, in fact it is very international in scope. It isn't an act of charity by the West, it's a bootstrap opportunity for the people of the developing world themselves.
Closed source by it's very expensive nature only serves to keep people down.
Closed source does not by nature have to be expensive. That isn't one of it's essential properties. It can be very cheap and widely used.
You, for example, are running your OSS on a system which has BIOS firmware for which you don't have the source code. (cradle your head tight in your arms to keep it from exploding).
Again, you're parodying your opponent. Which is dangerous, if you want to be considered a credible participant in the discussion.
No evolution is far more complex than mere 'survival of the fittest.' If it were simply a matter of adaptation, there would be only one highly 'adapted' species of life.
There are mechanisms that divide populations so different groupings can diverge and evolve into separate species, etc. It's far, far more complex than any layman explanation.
256 has not really been a standard entry level amount of RAM for almost 10 years now.
Ten years ago 256 MB of RAM was an unusual amount of memory to have in a PC. Typical users had 32 or 64MB. The typical motherboard of 1996 was a Pentium I motherboard that would have four slots for 72pin SIMMs. The really expensive SIMMs were 32M. Nothing bigger than 32M SIMMs were supported in most of said motherboards. So people with lots of money had 128MB and most everybody else had 32-64.
Maybe you weren't around yet. But, then, why are you talking about something you don't know?
Minix was (and still mostly is) an academic exercise. It's an OS wrapped around a textbook for teaching Operating System concepts. It was never intended as 'production' code. At the time, it was one of the few 'real' operating systems for which the full source was readily available for people to learn from. Linus owes Tannenbaum and Minix a lot more than most casual observers of the 'conflict' acknowledge.
Maybe *nixes aren't just your thing?
Could be. I don't like anything that starts with an asterick, perhaps. I run NetBSD at home, mostly, though I've now got a machine (Sun Blade 100) worthy of a current release of Solaris. I don't consider myself or any home-UNIX user to be a 'consumer.'
I was a 'Linux noob' back in 1994. Made the jump from Slackware to a BSD back in the kernal 2.0 days. The security model won't sail in the mainstream. It's a great system for techies, but mom isn't ever going to get it.
Even Windows 2000, while one of the better MS operating systems, still didn't live up to expectations.
It didn't?? I, personally, see no reason to ever upgrade to XP. W2K is a 'plateau' Microsoft product, just like Office 4.3 on WFWG 3.11 was. It took a LOT of improvement for Microsoft to come up with something 'more' that was worth upgrading to. Many businesses sat on Office 4.3 for years and years, while Microsoft languished, shipping shovelware nobody wanted.
Windows XP is just now 'emerging' at many corporate sites, and not really because anybody is clamoring for it.
The one Windows machine left in my personal machine room has W2K running.
I hate to just post what some will interpret as flamebait, but on the surface, not one single consumer wants the UNIX security model, either. What people want is a computer they can easily add to and change to suit their purpose. No security model addresses that. With Windows, it's either an out-of-control insecure nest of spyware, viruses and trojans, or the new DRM model of locked-down-no-fun. With the freenixes, it's locked-down-no-fun or months of learning how to get around 'the barriers' of 'the rest of the world' and DRM.
The 'PC Revolution' came about when an MS-DOS machine could be had at low cost and could do the now-considered-limited things that a PC in that era could accomplish. Which was VERY liberating at the time, because the only other computers to be had were locked-down multiuser systems that the regular person wasn't even allowed to be in the same room with.
The Microsoft 'a computer on every desk and in every home' was a cool aspiration. The fact that it's now time for those computers to no longer have much (if any) software from Microsoft doesn't make it a less cool aspiration.
To a person who liked writing graphical programs in GW-Basic, who got into the hardware and learned how to do cool low-level things with, say, Turbo C 2.0, any modern system makes your computer do less than it could before. Simply because hardware abstraction and a modern 'security model' took that all away.
It's point-of-view and what you want to do with the gear that determines 'more' and 'less.' To some people 'more' is a DRM-enabled system they can download crappy TV shows onto.
it allows people to easily find the features that have been in there since Office 97 but nobody knew how to get at them. It vastly lowers the learning curve for the product.
How are they going to sell that to the people who 'lead' at most companies? (the people who've known how to use the features in Office 97 since... well, a few weeks after the release event) The 'poor fools' who can't find the features are generally the last people to have any say in upgrading at a business, and the least likely to flash the plastic to buy a new version retail for themselves personally.
Oh, come off it! All Office 95 was, was a good reason to reinstall MS Office 4 (or Lotus Smart Suite) It was Office 97 before Microsoft had ANYTHING to offer in a 32 bit capable Office Suite.
Office 95 was scary, man.
For him to mention BSoD in his submission was just tired rhetoric. Yea I'm sure people are still running Windows 98 out there and seeing BSoD
It is perhaps a pedantic point, but there never, ever, was a Blue Screen of Death on Windows 98. the BSOD was an NT-only phenomenon, a 'core dump to screen' system crash. It was most common on NT 4.0 and almost entirely disappeared with Windows 2000 (NT 5.0). People who talk about Windows 98 and 'BSoD' obviously don't know at all what they're talking about.
I used the data displayed in a BSoD on NT 4.0 several times to figure out what had crashed the system (in one instance, it was the absence of media in the zip drive! NT 4 would crash from something like THAT)
The sound can't 'mysteriously disappear' in the X Window System. It would have to appear first.
I remember right before the X Consortium crumbled that they were working on a multimedia-rich version of X called 'Broadway.' Unfortunately the consortium crumbled, and there's no 'architecture' to work on now (it's no conincidence that the central architecture of Open Source OSes is scattered. the protocols it's GUI is based on is frozen in the year 1993).
'Go Big Red!'
'Smash State'
(yeah, ra ra, play ball!)
Every person in their mid 20's should go through a 'Bakunin' stage. Just like many 17 year olds have gone through a 'Beatles' stage.
No, you're just the typical 'armchair revolutionary' intellectual. Do you consider the Marquise DeSade a 'revolutionary', too? And Sigmund Freud?
There's a whole school of what Stalin referred to as 'useful idiots' like you out there.
Really, though, we're just trolling each other.
Apparently.
Actually, one of the signs of a good school is one where there isn't enough interest in the student body to even get enough people together to play varsity football. Other fitness activites and casual sports are fine. Football? Surely you jest!
Turn the stadium into a place to play concerts. Turn the 'coaches' into groundskeepers.
It's the old 'I don't understand computers therefore I'll play dumb' routine.
Actually, it's the old 'I am not a hopeless nerd who interacts on a near social level with a crummy piece of hardware and thus I don't "understand" this arcane piece of equipment' routine.
Most people aren't capable of servicing the office photocopier, either. There's a blue collar guy with a toolbox to take care of that.
Now, it seems that both you and I agree that advertisers on the web are sleazeballs. The problem that comes into being is that some of said sleazeballs wear a suit and necktie to work each day. So there will be a concerted effort to 'clean up' (so to speak) this problem. When you're running a well-established swindle racket, part of your job is to slap down competitors who operate less smoothly operating rackets who will wreck it for you.
In other words, Microsoft has a good market for this tool, besides the victims.
I tried it and indeed it popped up a save dialogue. I don't have Wine installed, though, so I am fairly safe. It isn't really a 'popup' in the sense most people think, of course, just a query from Mozilla asking how to handle that file time. Could be dangerous for people who run the wrong OS and have already selected the 'Always perform this action' to get the 'popup' to stop bugging them.
.exe extension runs as root on many, many, workstations.
Goes with the baggage, I guess, of running an insecure OS where anything with an
if there had been no Microsoft, there would be no advancement in computing.
That's a ridiculous notion. But it is worth expanding on a little. One of the best things Microsoft did for 'computing' in the last decade was continually push the 'bloatware' envelope.
By producing turgid bloated apps and 'Desktop Environments' they forced rapid obsolescence of hardware in many large enterprises. Which drove a rapid hardware obsolesence cycle. End result? At least from where I am sitting, it meant lots of 'old' machines for Linux and BSD operating systems.
A good parallel to this is in WalMart. In my community, there is a building that now has a thriving flea market operating out of it. Lots and lots of vendor booths with a ton of options for all sorts of purchases. That building was constructed by WalMart, who after a time moved to a new, bigger building. People bemoan what WalMart does to 'Main Street' but in at least some instances their entry and motion within a local marketplace eventually drives down the cost of retail space to the point where small innovative marketplaces can grow.
I liken this to the same thing that Microsoft has done: driven the computing hardware market into becoming a broad and cheap commodity business. Which free (in all senses) OSes can and do expand into. I'm typing this on a machine running NetBSD that is a Dell PIII box that I paid less than $10 for at an auction. It was no longer suitable at the school it came from to run Windows Bloatedness.
To roughly paraphrase the dolphins in a Douglass Adams book: "So long, Bill Gates, and thanks for all the hardware."
That's really the main way that I see Microsoft as 'advancing computing.' They are trailing edge in almost all ways. Anything 'cool' they do, they buy in or copy from somewhere else.
While of historical value, it is erroneous to just consider the contents of any sect's "gospel" a 'fact' just because you'd like to get a few Christians upset. :)
Ah, but baiting Christians is considered marvelous intellectual sport. Often by the same people who bemoan intolerance when any other religion is derided.
Does anybody else reading this thread know of a single real hard-boiled creationist?
One gets the feeling that a 'true creationist' is somebody made up to have fun poking at. Yes, there are a few still out there who believe in the literal 'Genesis' story.
Do you know of any? I don't. I think it's a dead horse that a bunch of people seem to have a need to flog.
I see.
Yes, it was the Stalinists who pioneered the practice of branding all political opponents as insane and putting them in 'institutions.
How refreshing that you probably have zero chance of ever having any state power.
I've known more Marxists than anybody else I know. Likely more than you. Unless you shill 'The Militant' on the street on Tuesday nights. How many Trotskyites do you know? Are you aquainted with any of the 'Cadre' organisations in the United States? Have you engaged in a critique of Ultra Left tendencies, or perhaps you exhibit said tendencies? Do you know what adopting a 'Mass Line' approach means? Do you even know what Dialectical Materialism is? What is Democractic Centralism, and why is it necessary? Do you know which 'branch' of Marxism the Shining Path movement in Peru favors? Can you explain the Chinese support of Pol Pot? What were the dynamics of the Chinese invasion of Vietnam? Do you personally know anybody who has participated in a Party-to-Party delegation in a visit to the People's Republic of China?
Quit living in a comic book world where everybody to your right is a dumb fuck. It makes YOU look like the dumb fuck, dude.
Unless you are a historican of Political Economy 'speaking knowledgably about Marxism' is anachronistic. Anybody, by definition, who speaks favorably about Marxism as if it's anything but a historical footnote is pushing an agenda.
Now, rest back in your armchair and tell us some more. . .
Are you a DeLeonist? A Trotskyite? What flavor of dead ideology do you favor?