As another bike geek, I have to agree with you. The beauty of the bicycle is in its simplicity,not in how complicated you can make it. You can leave all that stuff off my bike thank you, maybe even make it a single speed.... Of course we can leave that for another discussion.
Re:Does Jobs bugger everything all to hell?
on
Looking Back At NeXT
·
· Score: 1
We have to remeber that Jobs isn't an engineer, he's the front man for his company. All of the inovation that comes from within Apple, Next, Pixar, are from the employees that work there. Jobs is good about hiring smart people with good ideas, they may not be his ideas, but he is smart enough to sometimes see them. Jobs is such a big personality, that we sometimes think his companies are just a one man show.
When you have monopoly power, like MS does, you can choose for the market, by squashing any alternatives.
This is patently false. A monopoly cannot choose for the market, and cannot squash all the alternatives either. the single most important alternative is of course choosing none of the above. We could go on and on discussing this, but there is much already much written on Monopoly power in the economics section of your local book store.
Look: standards come in two flavors: de jure standards and de facto standards. De facto standards are established by markets. While ideally, this means that customers flocked to this standard becuase of the superiority of the code, MS has demostrated time and time again that it is their market and anticompetitive behaviour that establishes this de facto standards. This means that engineering specifications are ignored.
de facto standards happen because people(the market) like them and use them. At the end of the day, it is the market that determines the standards, if the de jure standards don't meet the market needs, what's the point? Micrsoft can add non-standard technologies to their products because they believe that people want them and will use them. It's time that we in the open source community begin to understand this, then we can begin creating de facto standards ourselves, and can compete with microsoft. Otherwise all we are doing is complaining about economic laws, and that's like complaining about gravity binding us to the earth. Let's begin to understand this and move past the complaining phase.
Warrick's statements regarding open source and selling services creates an incentive to produce a complicated and difficult to use product is compelling. Is this a side effect of the GPL software business model? I think Warrick's examples such as sendmail are pretty good in showing just how difficult an open source product can be. To me this in one of the biggest questions that need to be answered before the "open source business model" can make into the mainstream.
I think that FIN is more of a long term PR campaign by Microsoft. After all their fate is in the hand of the judicial branch, so lobbying politicians is pointless in that respect. There has been a lot of talk about Microsoft growing a negative image because of the trial, FIN could be an attempt to negate that a bit. Also the future past the trial could be influenced as new judges are appointed. As for there being Windows developer culture, yes there is, we don't see it because we aren't in it. But I have friends that are, and they are many, but they are a little less vocal.
Now that you know it suits your needs, you're going to buy it, right? That's what piracy defenders always say, they want to try things out before they buy them. Yeah, they have whole rows of shrinked rapped boxes of software sitting on the shelf because what's the point in opening it up? They already have the software.
MP3's can be close enough to CD quality so that there is little value added from buying the CD. This is the important concept to consider, since this is part of the process someone goes through when the deceide to steal or buy a song.
You can pay for your mp3 by buying the CD, then ripping it to mp3. No most of the time you can't buy just one song, but you asked how you can pay, and this is how. Not to hard really. I doubt that most of use would agree though that not being able to buy just one song gives someone the right to steal it. Mp3s are going to change the music industry, for better or for worse, but it is going to change it.
Yep, and the great thing about napster, is that it allows me find new independent music and artists, and steal their music as well as the popular stuff.
Yes, let's be realistic as the subject line reads. I never have to *buy* music again. That should and and does scare the hell out of anyone connected to making a living selling music.
You missed a link in the chain of how we get a mega-corporation, people buy their stuff. Corporations are slaves to the consumer, thus if nobody buys their stuff, then they go away, and problem solved. Next time you want to buy somethng you wan't, tell yourself No, because if you buy it you will be supporting mega corporations that produce what people want. And we don't want that now do we....
With the recent release of xfree86 4.0, and the proliferation of hardware accelerated 3d, maybe it's time to consider using the opengl api for a GUI system. I'm not talking about some starnge ultra 3d thing, but the opengl API's offer a lot of possibilities that don't exist in QT or GTk. This would give the opportunity to look at GUI's differently.
Yep, and after RMS's ideas destroy the ability of programmers to make a living, we'll all be asking "would you like fries with that", and coding at night for free. It's perfectly all right to subscribe to RMS's philosophy, but you must also accept the side effects as well(disincentives, freeriding, etc). *sigh* to bad these things are so complicated, trying to educate people is like banging your head against the wall.
HOw do you know this? Is this posted on Apples web site? the JDK2 on Mac OSX would be great, apple would then have a pretty good server side product as well as a client.
The MacOS is the reason that I don't think that OSX will really catch on with the "geek" crowd. It's a difference in philosophy really, todays X WM's philosophy is that who knows better what kind of UI works better for you then YOU? This is the reverse of MacOS, Steve tells you that this is best for you, and either you believe it or you don't. This philosophy doesn't fit well with the spirit of *nix and i've got a feeling that others here will agree. I would bet that the people who buy OSX are probably those who want something like NT for the mac.
Here is a real life theory test. You personaly don't trade with anyone else. Then try it with your city, then the sate. The advantages of trading become obvious. Also it is easy to understand what a corporation wants, they want to maximize shareholder wealth. Once you understand what that means, everthing makes a lot of sense.
The industrialized world knows full well how Nike makes their shoes. This doesn't seem to have any effect on consumer choice. The bottom line is pretty dark, we want our "stuff" and we want it cheap. Another driving force is we want our 401ks and retirment packages to grow forcing corporations to deliever. It is easy to point fingers at a "golden arch" or some faceless logo. The root of the probelm is you, your neighbor, the kid buying the happy meal, and on and on.....
The fact of the matter is that coporations are only successfull because people buy their products(M$ included). Corporations are simply a collection of contracts. When it comes down to it, these protestor's problems aren't really with the corporations, but with the people who purchase their products. These kinds of econmic relationships are not always easy to understand, and it is much easier to trash the local McDonalds then it is to attack the kid buying the happy meal. I also diagree that the protestors were of one mind (anti-corporation), I heard an interview of a guy who was all for going back to the hunter-gatherer society. Not only did he want to go back to that himself, but he also seemed hell bent on taking all of us with him.
Sun doesn't care? How do you know this? If Sun pissess off all their developers, their technologies are sunk. The changes from 1.x to 2.x were no doubt put into place after much thought about the advantages that it gives to developers. Sun has to care what developers think, if they don't they get cast aside for better things.
How exactly do you see VB taking over the server? As far as I know VB is a win32 only technology, so that means NT only, no UNIX. Maybe your assuming NT dominance in the future? Just wondering what you saw that made you so scared.........
Yes the technology to rip off DVD's wholesale will come. The way I see it, DVD's as far as customer acceptance goes, is still young. This leads me to believe that the industry will see abandoning the technology as a viable solution to DVD theft. I wouldn't be at all suprised if the number of movies that come out on DVDs slowly falls off and there is an introduction of a new replacement technology. Now is the time to do it, before DVD's become mainstream.
I guess that not only do I not see a proprietary fork as bad, but I also see them as smaller threat then a free fork. The very fact that the original software is free makes it difficult to compete for users against it. If someone just closes up the source, and tries to sell it for $500 they'll go no where. Proprietary forks are going to have to add something substantial enough to overcome that free/open advantage, and if they can do this, more power to them, they are making better software. Maybe those things should have been, and still could be added to the free source. I also don't see why developers are going to abandon the free project for the proprietary one. Has this happened to FreeBSD? Are developers leaving Linux for Solaris, HP-UX, AIX? The fact that the original source will *always* remain open, regardless of what others do, is very very powerful. I guess it is a matter of opinion, I see that GPL at worst as being a tool to restrict other peoples freedom. I just don't like the idea of a community that uses the GPL to force membership.
For some reason many people believe that if linux was not under the GPL, that we would wake some morning and no one could find the source for it. "Oh shoot someone must have extended it commercialy during the night." I'm not sure where this leap of logic came from, but it is clear that people need to be more educated about the different types of software licences. Speaking of which is there any good places that run through BSD, GPL, LGPL, MPL, all the other L's?
Slashdot Mirror
As another bike geek, I have to agree with you. The beauty of the bicycle is in its simplicity,not in how complicated you can make it. You can leave all that stuff off my bike thank you, maybe even make it a single speed.... Of course we can leave that for another discussion.
We have to remeber that Jobs isn't an engineer, he's the front man for his company. All of the inovation that comes from within Apple, Next, Pixar, are from the employees that work there. Jobs is good about hiring smart people with good ideas, they may not be his ideas, but he is smart enough to sometimes see them. Jobs is such a big personality, that we sometimes think his companies are just a one man show.
This is patently false. A monopoly cannot choose for the market, and cannot squash all the alternatives either. the single most important alternative is of course choosing none of the above. We could go on and on discussing this, but there is much already much written on Monopoly power in the economics section of your local book store.
de facto standards happen because people(the market) like them and use them. At the end of the day, it is the market that determines the standards, if the de jure standards don't meet the market needs, what's the point? Micrsoft can add non-standard technologies to their products because they believe that people want them and will use them. It's time that we in the open source community begin to understand this, then we can begin creating de facto standards ourselves, and can compete with microsoft. Otherwise all we are doing is complaining about economic laws, and that's like complaining about gravity binding us to the earth. Let's begin to understand this and move past the complaining phase.
Warrick's statements regarding open source and selling services creates an incentive to produce a complicated and difficult to use product is compelling. Is this a side effect of the GPL software business model? I think Warrick's examples such as sendmail are pretty good in showing just how difficult an open source product can be. To me this in one of the biggest questions that need to be answered before the "open source business model" can make into the mainstream.
I think that FIN is more of a long term PR campaign by Microsoft. After all their fate is in the hand of the judicial branch, so lobbying politicians is pointless in that respect. There has been a lot of talk about Microsoft growing a negative image because of the trial, FIN could be an attempt to negate that a bit. Also the future past the trial could be influenced as new judges are appointed. As for there being Windows developer culture, yes there is, we don't see it because we aren't in it. But I have friends that are, and they are many, but they are a little less vocal.
Now that you know it suits your needs, you're going to buy it, right? That's what piracy defenders always say, they want to try things out before they buy them. Yeah, they have whole rows of shrinked rapped boxes of software sitting on the shelf because what's the point in opening it up? They already have the software.
MP3's can be close enough to CD quality so that there is little value added from buying the CD. This is the important concept to consider, since this is part of the process someone goes through when the deceide to steal or buy a song.
You can pay for your mp3 by buying the CD, then ripping it to mp3. No most of the time you can't buy just one song, but you asked how you can pay, and this is how. Not to hard really. I doubt that most of use would agree though that not being able to buy just one song gives someone the right to steal it. Mp3s are going to change the music industry, for better or for worse, but it is going to change it.
Yep, and the great thing about napster, is that it allows me find new independent music and artists, and steal their music as well as the popular stuff.
Yes, let's be realistic as the subject line reads. I never have to *buy* music again. That should and and does scare the hell out of anyone connected to making a living selling music.
You missed a link in the chain of how we get a mega-corporation, people buy their stuff. Corporations are slaves to the consumer, thus if nobody buys their stuff, then they go away, and problem solved. Next time you want to buy somethng you wan't, tell yourself No, because if you buy it you will be supporting mega corporations that produce what people want. And we don't want that now do we....
With the recent release of xfree86 4.0, and the proliferation of hardware accelerated 3d, maybe it's time to consider using the opengl api for a GUI system. I'm not talking about some starnge ultra 3d thing, but the opengl API's offer a lot of possibilities that don't exist in QT or GTk. This would give the opportunity to look at GUI's differently.
Yep, and after RMS's ideas destroy the ability of programmers to make a living, we'll all be asking "would you like fries with that", and coding at night for free. It's perfectly all right to subscribe to RMS's philosophy, but you must also accept the side effects as well(disincentives, freeriding, etc). *sigh* to bad these things are so complicated, trying to educate people is like banging your head against the wall.
HOw do you know this? Is this posted on Apples web site? the JDK2 on Mac OSX would be great, apple would then have a pretty good server side product as well as a client.
The MacOS is the reason that I don't think that OSX will really catch on with the "geek" crowd. It's a difference in philosophy really, todays X WM's philosophy is that who knows better what kind of UI works better for you then YOU? This is the reverse of MacOS, Steve tells you that this is best for you, and either you believe it or you don't. This philosophy doesn't fit well with the spirit of *nix and i've got a feeling that others here will agree. I would bet that the people who buy OSX are probably those who want something like NT for the mac.
Here is a real life theory test. You personaly don't trade with anyone else. Then try it with your city, then the sate. The advantages of trading become obvious. Also it is easy to understand what a corporation wants, they want to maximize shareholder wealth. Once you understand what that means, everthing makes a lot of sense.
The industrialized world knows full well how Nike makes their shoes. This doesn't seem to have any effect on consumer choice. The bottom line is pretty dark, we want our "stuff" and we want it cheap. Another driving force is we want our 401ks and retirment packages to grow forcing corporations to deliever. It is easy to point fingers at a "golden arch" or some faceless logo. The root of the probelm is you, your neighbor, the kid buying the happy meal, and on and on.....
The fact of the matter is that coporations are only successfull because people buy their products(M$ included). Corporations are simply a collection of contracts. When it comes down to it, these protestor's problems aren't really with the corporations, but with the people who purchase their products. These kinds of econmic relationships are not always easy to understand, and it is much easier to trash the local McDonalds then it is to attack the kid buying the happy meal. I also diagree that the protestors were of one mind (anti-corporation), I heard an interview of a guy who was all for going back to the hunter-gatherer society. Not only did he want to go back to that himself, but he also seemed hell bent on taking all of us with him.
Sun doesn't care? How do you know this? If Sun pissess off all their developers, their technologies are sunk. The changes from 1.x to 2.x were no doubt put into place after much thought about the advantages that it gives to developers. Sun has to care what developers think, if they don't they get cast aside for better things.
How exactly do you see VB taking over the server? As far as I know VB is a win32 only technology, so that means NT only, no UNIX. Maybe your assuming NT dominance in the future? Just wondering what you saw that made you so scared.........
I downloaded the win32 version, and thus far all attempts to get the proxy server to work have failed :( It looks so cool to, I really want it to work.
Yes the technology to rip off DVD's wholesale will come. The way I see it, DVD's as far as customer acceptance goes, is still young. This leads me to believe that the industry will see abandoning the technology as a viable solution to DVD theft. I wouldn't be at all suprised if the number of movies that come out on DVDs slowly falls off and there is an introduction of a new replacement technology. Now is the time to do it, before DVD's become mainstream.
I guess that not only do I not see a proprietary fork as bad, but I also see them as smaller threat then a free fork. The very fact that the original software is free makes it difficult to compete for users against it. If someone just closes up the source, and tries to sell it for $500 they'll go no where. Proprietary forks are going to have to add something substantial enough to overcome that free/open advantage, and if they can do this, more power to them, they are making better software. Maybe those things should have been, and still could be added to the free source. I also don't see why developers are going to abandon the free project for the proprietary one. Has this happened to FreeBSD? Are developers leaving Linux for Solaris, HP-UX, AIX? The fact that the original source will *always* remain open, regardless of what others do, is very very powerful. I guess it is a matter of opinion, I see that GPL at worst as being a tool to restrict other peoples freedom. I just don't like the idea of a community that uses the GPL to force membership.
For some reason many people believe that if linux was not under the GPL, that we would wake some morning and no one could find the source for it. "Oh shoot someone must have extended it commercialy during the night." I'm not sure where this leap of logic came from, but it is clear that people need to be more educated about the different types of software licences. Speaking of which is there any good places that run through BSD, GPL, LGPL, MPL, all the other L's?