I think a large majority of casual PC users will just use the default browser they are presented with, so until Linux makes Windows obsolete I think Firefox may hit a glass ceiling in it's market share.
However Firefox has no financial imperatives that govern its viability so this glass ceiling will not cause Firefox to die out just because it can't match or overtake IE usage.
Firefox has enough interest to sustain considerable development even at 10% market share, so even if it just treads water till Windows is deposed it will still rise to take the lion's share of browser usage stats eventually.
(unless of course some other browser replaces Firefox as the flagship alternative, like opera, but i think again that would depend on defaults in the most popular linux distros of the future.)
It doesnt mean you shouldn't try though. Imagine what would have happened if no one had protested? America might have invaded half of Asia by now if Bush thought no one cared what he did.
Just rolling over and taking it in the ass is a seriously BAD option. Resistance is rarely totally futile.
If current rates of growth are maintained then within two decades, a consumer will be able to store all of the creative works produced by every member of the human species in a $100 storage device, including realtime video capture of ones entire lifetime. The only current applications that may outstrip these storage requirements are physics systems such as weather simulations and high energy particle accelerators -- and perhaps some very large video image databases.
I have two 120 gig drives in my home pc and they are both full of porn, mp3s and tv shows i downloaded. i'm sure i could fill up any amount of storage space thrown at me.
that having been said, i fix a lot of people's PCs for them, and no novice computer user i have ever encountered has ever used more than the ~8Gb space requirement for WinXP/Office + the standard handful of other apps.
People get me to upgrade their sub GHz PCs for them quite often and i usually find that the hard disc is one of the salvageble parts from their old PC (usually they have 8GBs or more).
In domestic terms, I think hard drive size vastly outstripped software size a few years ago, and it has vastly outstripped compressed audio size now (who needs more than 500GBs of mp3s? not many people)
When hard drive size outstrips the capacity for a single person to store all the losslessly compressed video and audio they want i think we may see no more domestic application for larger storage. (I havent the faintest idea how to estimate what such a capicity may be)
Mind you, as higher net bandwidth becomes available we may see a reduction in desirability of local storage. It will probably turn out that local storage will be relegated to acting as a cache for online data. (I know i for one recently thought about deleting all the tv shows i had been hoarding, on the premise that i dont watch them very frequently, and in two years i could probably download anyone of them at the same quality in about 2 minutes anyway).
We won't be presented with a viable alternative energy infrastructure until fossil fuels get so depleted that they no longer produce a profit for big energy companies.
We all know Capitalism and ecomonics are driven by supply and demand, but it is important to realise that neither of those factors are naturally regulated any more. Before the industrial revolution supply was dominated by the relative scarcity of pretty much everything, and demand was purely about getting what you need to survive for the vast majority of people.
Since mass production was invented the scarcity of almost everything has been potentially negligable. Anything we need, we have the resources and technology to churn it out by the ton. In order for the economy to function demand must match supply as closely as possible. The sensible thing to do would be to cut back on production so that it matches the real demand. But then individual suppliers can't out-compete each other by virtue of economies of scale, so what is the alternative? Artificially increase demand. (the exceptions are monopolies and cartels which can reduce supply and increase price since they have no competitors.)
Make everything disposable so that people buy everything over and over again, and flood the public conciousness with advertising and create a culture of mindless consumption.
The more we waste, the more profit is made by somebody. This is the inevitable culture that is fostered by capitalism and economics. Its endemic. Its not a conspiracy or evilness or whatever, it is purely the way it works.
It is not coincidence that hybrid cars only become commercially available once oil peaks. And it isnt some conspiracy by the automotive industry and the oil industry. It the mechanism by which capitalism works. If we concentrated all non essential resources on figuring out cold fusion or finding some other viable energy source we would probably have it licked very very quickly. So why don't we? No one profits.
Once it is no longer possible to profit significantly from oil then we will see the right amount of effort expended on alternative energy. By then i only hope the environment isnt totally ruined.
Capitalism is an anachronism that is destroying our planet and causing pointless suffering to thousands of starving people around the world. Unless we lift ourselves out of that rut things will never get better, and i genuinely believe the human race is capable of so much more than this.
if you spent 20 hours playing an arcade game it would cost you hundreds of dollars. for $20-$40 on a domestic game you get hours and hours of game play.
Linus Torvalds has no responsibility to any of "his" users. He made linux for nothing but his own amusement, and licensed it so that anyone else could do with it as they please.(with minor restrictions)
All of this was done on his own whim, not as part of some obligation to the rest of the world. Just becuase thousands of people have come to rely on Linux doesnt mean he is under any obligation to support them. No one pays him a license fee to run linux.
Isn't that what Ubuntu is? Albeit unofficial in that it is a derivative of Debian, it seems to effectively provide what you suggest.
And I'm glad it does because I agree with you that that is exactly what we need. I was put off Debian by the fact my DSL modem wasnt directly supported by Sarge; a week of research couldn't help me fix it, but then I stumbled across FAQs that told you how to set it up on Ubuntu so I gave it a go and have had nothing but joy and satisfaction using this well supported and up to date 'desktop version' of Debian.
As for stability issues, there are the odd problems (close a terminal window without typing 'exit' and it leaves a non killable 2.2mb procces, you have to patch firefox 1.5 onto the system becuase 1.0 has bad memory leaks, a few other App memory leaks, etc) but its certainly not less stable than Windows.
They have a 6 month release schedule and everything is anchored in Debian 'unstable', but with the worst bugs removed so that desktop users have an acceptably stable system to use.
Why doesnt someone just alter the UI on GIMP to mimic Photoshop as closely as possible?
I imagine implementing an MDI would be a bit of work but simply rearranging the menus must be trivial. As far as I can tell from my dabbling with GIMP, the logic of its functionality mirrors Photoshop pretty closely, but the menus are in slightly different places. (it took me ages to work out where "auto levels" was).
It's irritating that UI preferences cause so much reluctance to make a potentially beneficial switch to FOSS but it's just human nature.
Desktop GNU/Linux adoption is happening so slowly because there is little pressure on FOSS developers to address the genuine criteria by which casual computer users evaluate their experience.
For instance McDonalds don't sell millions of burgers because they are lovingly prepared and full of nutrition. They know perfectly well what motivates people to purchase and consume food, so they invest massively in these areas (make the food addictive by packing it with salt, sugar and fat, flood the public conciousness with advertising associating your food with health, sex and happiness).
Likewise Microsoft didn't sell millions of copies of windows and office by crafting lean, robust and open code. The pump it full of features to give the public a reason to keep upgrading, and sacrificed security to make it easier to use for non-techies.
While it seems fairly certain to me that you have to cater for this public stupidity(*) in order to shift volumes of product, i think that the FOSS community has the opportunity to do this without exploiting that public stupidity, or undermining the idealistic goals underpinning the FOSS movement.
(*) i dont mean this condescendingly - i'm referring to the general human capacity for stupidity that everyone has, including me;-)
Without the financial imperative that Microsoft or McDonalds are totally dominated by, FOSS could provide the best of both worlds: stable, open, comprehensively featured, freely available software, that is also appealing on a superficial, casual level.
"Casual user" considerations can often require as much effort as the rest of the project, and as such aren't a particularly appealing expenditure of resources for a developer who is mostly concerned with producing powerful and robust software.
But as Microsoft and McDonalds have demonstrated, it is perceived value that counts in the public conciousness. In much the same way that the taste of Big Mac holds more weight than the fact it is poisonous filth, the horrific security and questionable licensing of Windows is disregarded because it takes less effort to understand how it works.
I think that commercial pressure on companies such as Red Hat, Linspire, etc will provide the pressure needed to expend sufficient resources on perceived value.
The great thing is, with the FOSS system, there doesnt need to be any trade-off. The incredible efficiency of open reusable code means the FOSS community now has the opportunity to create the software equivalent of a healthy Big Mac.
Slashdot Mirror
Can someone trump them with prior art in "the ability to delvier anything whatsoiever over the internet"?
However Firefox has no financial imperatives that govern its viability so this glass ceiling will not cause Firefox to die out just because it can't match or overtake IE usage.
Firefox has enough interest to sustain considerable development even at 10% market share, so even if it just treads water till Windows is deposed it will still rise to take the lion's share of browser usage stats eventually.
(unless of course some other browser replaces Firefox as the flagship alternative, like opera, but i think again that would depend on defaults in the most popular linux distros of the future.)
Just rolling over and taking it in the ass is a seriously BAD option. Resistance is rarely totally futile.
If current rates of growth are maintained then within two decades, a consumer will be able to store all of the creative works produced by every member of the human species in a $100 storage device, including realtime video capture of ones entire lifetime. The only current applications that may outstrip these storage requirements are physics systems such as weather simulations and high energy particle accelerators -- and perhaps some very large video image databases.
that having been said, i fix a lot of people's PCs for them, and no novice computer user i have ever encountered has ever used more than the ~8Gb space requirement for WinXP/Office + the standard handful of other apps.
People get me to upgrade their sub GHz PCs for them quite often and i usually find that the hard disc is one of the salvageble parts from their old PC (usually they have 8GBs or more).
In domestic terms, I think hard drive size vastly outstripped software size a few years ago, and it has vastly outstripped compressed audio size now (who needs more than 500GBs of mp3s? not many people)
When hard drive size outstrips the capacity for a single person to store all the losslessly compressed video and audio they want i think we may see no more domestic application for larger storage. (I havent the faintest idea how to estimate what such a capicity may be)
Mind you, as higher net bandwidth becomes available we may see a reduction in desirability of local storage. It will probably turn out that local storage will be relegated to acting as a cache for online data. (I know i for one recently thought about deleting all the tv shows i had been hoarding, on the premise that i dont watch them very frequently, and in two years i could probably download anyone of them at the same quality in about 2 minutes anyway).
We all know Capitalism and ecomonics are driven by supply and demand, but it is important to realise that neither of those factors are naturally regulated any more. Before the industrial revolution supply was dominated by the relative scarcity of pretty much everything, and demand was purely about getting what you need to survive for the vast majority of people.
Since mass production was invented the scarcity of almost everything has been potentially negligable. Anything we need, we have the resources and technology to churn it out by the ton. In order for the economy to function demand must match supply as closely as possible. The sensible thing to do would be to cut back on production so that it matches the real demand. But then individual suppliers can't out-compete each other by virtue of economies of scale, so what is the alternative? Artificially increase demand. (the exceptions are monopolies and cartels which can reduce supply and increase price since they have no competitors.)
Make everything disposable so that people buy everything over and over again, and flood the public conciousness with advertising and create a culture of mindless consumption.
The more we waste, the more profit is made by somebody. This is the inevitable culture that is fostered by capitalism and economics. Its endemic. Its not a conspiracy or evilness or whatever, it is purely the way it works.
It is not coincidence that hybrid cars only become commercially available once oil peaks. And it isnt some conspiracy by the automotive industry and the oil industry. It the mechanism by which capitalism works. If we concentrated all non essential resources on figuring out cold fusion or finding some other viable energy source we would probably have it licked very very quickly. So why don't we? No one profits.
Once it is no longer possible to profit significantly from oil then we will see the right amount of effort expended on alternative energy. By then i only hope the environment isnt totally ruined.
Capitalism is an anachronism that is destroying our planet and causing pointless suffering to thousands of starving people around the world. Unless we lift ourselves out of that rut things will never get better, and i genuinely believe the human race is capable of so much more than this.
heheheh it's very rare slashdot makes me laugh. someone mod that remark funny...
if you spent 20 hours playing an arcade game it would cost you hundreds of dollars. for $20-$40 on a domestic game you get hours and hours of game play.
All of this was done on his own whim, not as part of some obligation to the rest of the world. Just becuase thousands of people have come to rely on Linux doesnt mean he is under any obligation to support them. No one pays him a license fee to run linux.
And I'm glad it does because I agree with you that that is exactly what we need. I was put off Debian by the fact my DSL modem wasnt directly supported by Sarge; a week of research couldn't help me fix it, but then I stumbled across FAQs that told you how to set it up on Ubuntu so I gave it a go and have had nothing but joy and satisfaction using this well supported and up to date 'desktop version' of Debian.
As for stability issues, there are the odd problems (close a terminal window without typing 'exit' and it leaves a non killable 2.2mb procces, you have to patch firefox 1.5 onto the system becuase 1.0 has bad memory leaks, a few other App memory leaks, etc) but its certainly not less stable than Windows.
They have a 6 month release schedule and everything is anchored in Debian 'unstable', but with the worst bugs removed so that desktop users have an acceptably stable system to use.
I imagine implementing an MDI would be a bit of work but simply rearranging the menus must be trivial. As far as I can tell from my dabbling with GIMP, the logic of its functionality mirrors Photoshop pretty closely, but the menus are in slightly different places. (it took me ages to work out where "auto levels" was).
It's irritating that UI preferences cause so much reluctance to make a potentially beneficial switch to FOSS but it's just human nature.
Desktop GNU/Linux adoption is happening so slowly because there is little pressure on FOSS developers to address the genuine criteria by which casual computer users evaluate their experience.
For instance McDonalds don't sell millions of burgers because they are lovingly prepared and full of nutrition. They know perfectly well what motivates people to purchase and consume food, so they invest massively in these areas (make the food addictive by packing it with salt, sugar and fat, flood the public conciousness with advertising associating your food with health, sex and happiness).
Likewise Microsoft didn't sell millions of copies of windows and office by crafting lean, robust and open code. The pump it full of features to give the public a reason to keep upgrading, and sacrificed security to make it easier to use for non-techies.
While it seems fairly certain to me that you have to cater for this public stupidity(*) in order to shift volumes of product, i think that the FOSS community has the opportunity to do this without exploiting that public stupidity, or undermining the idealistic goals underpinning the FOSS movement.
(*) i dont mean this condescendingly - i'm referring to the general human capacity for stupidity that everyone has, including me ;-)
Without the financial imperative that Microsoft or McDonalds are totally dominated by, FOSS could provide the best of both worlds: stable, open, comprehensively featured, freely available software, that is also appealing on a superficial, casual level.
"Casual user" considerations can often require as much effort as the rest of the project, and as such aren't a particularly appealing expenditure of resources for a developer who is mostly concerned with producing powerful and robust software.
But as Microsoft and McDonalds have demonstrated, it is perceived value that counts in the public conciousness. In much the same way that the taste of Big Mac holds more weight than the fact it is poisonous filth, the horrific security and questionable licensing of Windows is disregarded because it takes less effort to understand how it works.
I think that commercial pressure on companies such as Red Hat, Linspire, etc will provide the pressure needed to expend sufficient resources on perceived value.
The great thing is, with the FOSS system, there doesnt need to be any trade-off. The incredible efficiency of open reusable code means the FOSS community now has the opportunity to create the software equivalent of a healthy Big Mac.