Because the assumption is that what, exactly - Microsoft and entities hurting for funding are *always* engaging in backdoor negotiations? What happens when body X that's published a report giving a fair number of substantiated reasons not to go Microsoft suddenly turns around and is all of sudden using the latest Microsoft products? Body X loses credibility for taking that which they've disparaged the second they get a good deal, and Microsoft gets pegged as not only acting completely paranoid and frightened by giving deals to the most public complainers outside of the FOSS community, but actually lends credibility to statements that they charge way more than a lot of organizations, institutions, companies, and other entities are in fact willing to pay for products of apparently completely arbitrary monetary value. You might as well say, "There's no reason to believe they're not just stupid like everyone else."
That's science. If you can't face it, mod down -1 and claim I'm a "Troll" to formalize your impotence.
No, you were likely modded down for inflammatory rhetoric about the poor being dishonest, disorganized, and foolish, which does not meaningfully correlate with people having low IQs or any subsequent innovations which may lead to a particular society's lack of success, and that is what you're talking about here. Even so, your implication that poverty is merely a result of people being stupid, rather than the result of complex combinations of numerous factors as it is in real life, is a short-sighted load of hot air completely deserving of dismissal, much the same of your borderline-eugenic spiel about great pockets of dumb people fucking themselves over in the more destitute parts of the world.
My father and his four eldest have worked their way out of the mire and muck but my uncle still doesn't see why he's still struggling to not be poor. The problem is simple. He refuses to change. When he sees a good opportunity that he would like to take advantage of and he doesn't have the funds on hand to do so, he doesn't think "What can I change so that I do have the funds next time?", he instead thinks, "Fuck my luck."
That's a reduction. On the surface? Yes, he is refusing to change. But you are not your uncle. You have not endured the same experiences he has endured throughout the course of his life. You do not have the exact same balance of chemicals he has. He may have particular convictions, be they religious or philosophical, which predispose him to particular attitudes regarding the idea of fate or similar concepts. He may have psychological problems that are undiagnosed. And so on. Factors such as these may contribute to his inability to get it together and exercise greater control of what little he has in the way of finances. Even then, financial "best practices" won't produce especially substantial results for a great long while. Does he have any metric for measuring incremental success, so that he can turn around when things seem tough and tell himself not to fret, because things are in fact working out, albeit slowly, and that it's going to be worth it? And after decades of financial hardship, what sort of fear or anxiety grips him upon seeing a bill or invoice, and is it about the cost, or is it a gut reaction that might as well be instinctual?
Really, I know it seems simple for you and for me when we sit down and break apart a problem, at least from a very general conceptual point-of-view think about a few possible solutions, and then resolve to adopt one and see it through, but think about the difficulty faced when you're going through, and then imagine having some sort of block -beyond being lazy, which is always a possibility: plenty are, well-off and poor alike- which prevents you from even getting to the hard part. You might as well pretend that an illiterate just "believes" that they can't read, or that someone who had a traumatic experience with a dog as a child is being silly for being hysterically afraid of dogs in the here-and-now, regardless of whether they're being attacked.
What afflicts the third world seems to be disorganization, corruption, dishonesty, and low intelligence. That's why they're in the fix they're in, just like some communities in the USA (trailer parks, urban ghettoes, "artist communes") are third world status because they're filled with dishonest, disorganized, foolish people.
And we all know that these characteristics are absolute, because everybody in these places is dishonest, disorganized, and foolish, and they're all there because they chose to be there. And because all success takes is somebody to decide they're going to dig themselves out. It's not about resources, it's about willpower. These people can end their struggle and saunter off to Cigarandbrandytown and make a mint whenever they like.
No, wait, it's not like that at all. People are born into poverty, it's a genuine bitch to get out of it, and most have to spend at least the first 16 to 18 years in it by default, during which they may either luck out and develop solid values and see what's so incredibly fucked about where they're coming from, or they may experience quite the opposite and have their health ravaged by subsisting on cheap convenience foods, using drugs, and placing heavy value on trivial material possessions viewed as luxury items --never mind the education issue. And then leaving home with no financial aspects whatsoever is an utterly fantastic way to get set to enter the job market, where most positions available for people with no certifiable skills provide precious little room for advancement in either position or wage; the result here is either changing jobs a ton and seeming unstable or unreliable, or sticking it out longer-term with one or two businesses and then not getting anywhere and looking like a slug who does the bare-minimum to not get fired.
I could go on, but speaking as somebody who *did* grow up poor and pull himself out to live in a decent neighborhood and ultimately land a job paying $40,000 a year -a sum many of you will figure as paltry, but it's more than I'd ever anticipated making when I was a kid watching the cops come and haul away the latest drug dealing neighbors every few months- I can tell you that the people who pull themselves out are exceptions. Most people are stuck there because their situation is utterly hopeless, many of them know no better, and there is precious little in the way of outside stimulus to encourage them to get out beyond waking up every day and knowing that the people in the nice houses thirty miles down the road consider you to be the scum of the earth, which isn't really "encouraging" in the way most people would use the word.
I am constantly amazed - wait scrub that - consistently bored at the level of Slashdot's ferocity towards an issue of which they have the tiniest morsel of information to go on. Bah this is pointless, it'll just get downmodded by iPhone hating groupthink.
You're right - suggesting that one's opinion is held by a small-but-presumably-correct minority and that it will result in dismissal by the implied incorrect majority is indeed pointless. In all seriousness: if it's pointless, why even mention it? Remember, you don't have to hit submit after formulating a statement/argument/comment. At best, you'll get someone with a similar point-of-view to yours modding you up, and then you'll have other people mod you down for both disagreeing with your statement(s) *and* to compensate for improper moderation generated by your "mod me down" spiel. You're effectively hurting the purpose of the moderation process while simultaneously complaining about improper moderation practices.
On a more on-topic note, I think you're wrong about iPhone hating group-think. People ranting on this issue probably *like* the iPhone, but dislike the ways in which Apple has restricted it. There's a long line to be said here about the question of just how much sense it makes to hand your money or time or community chatter towards something the "bad guys" are ultimately responsible for - it's paradoxical from an idealistic "vote with your dollars" perspective, but most people aren't big enough idealists. Some people will still buy the shiny toy in spite of this because they want to do cool things with, and they're well aware of what they're doing - they *like* the iPhone and *dislike* Apple's behavior. It's allowed.
Never once did I speak of people making me sick. It's more that I'd much prefer being able to bill my clients for doing worthwhile work rather than having to create hacky fixes for IE so that people who either default or insist on using a broken browser can be presented particular bits of content in the way intended.
Here's the thing about web standards that you might not understand: they're *defined*. Following them, most things can be done in a predictable manner, and so creating markup and styling it is relatively straight-forward; if you can read and you're not dumber than a rock, you can not only figure out how to put stuff together, but understand *why* it works the way it does. This is completely the opposite of the way things work in IE: because there are not documented standards, you have to blindly chip away at it until it works, and this behavior isn't even consistent between the two most recent versions, so you need fixes for both, and these fixes also have to be isolated. And this is just for (X)HTML and CSS...I won't even talk about Javascript and DOM woes.
If you can't understand why burning hours upon hours fixing this sort of stuff is a problem, let me spell it out for you: not only is it boring for me, not only does it mean that I have time taken away from other, more productive work I could be doing for my clients, but it also means the client is having to pay for these fixes. Most of my clients are health/human services oriented non-profits and the extra cash they have to spend because of this crap would be better used on things more directly impacting their constituency. Microsoft is responsible for requiring these organizations to spend money on these extra fixes.
Considering you addressed NONE of the points I've spoken of in previous posts, I'm sure it's futile, but here it is again since you seem to have missed it: Microsoft could be less of a bad guy in one of two ways. One, and my preferred way, would be following W3C standards. The other would be establishing, documenting, and adhering to their own standards so that the rendering of content in their browser is predictable and can be accounted for methodically rather than through stumbling around in the dark.
In reality, people can just code for IE and ignore the other browsers and hit most of the web.
Sure they can. Except coding for IE alone is still a bitch, and ignoring other browsers is incredibly naive as IE no longer holds 95%+ dominance as it once did. In reality, these people are stupid as far as creating web content goes.
The only instance where this is an acceptable practice in business terms is when the client specifically says, "compatibility with anything other than IE is not necessary" - either because it's for an internally-geared site where the end users are definitely only using a particular version of IE, or because they don't want want to pay for the time sunk into cross-browser QA. It still winds up costing quite a bit of money in the end, though, because as mentioned before, there *is no standard* for how markup behaves in IE, let alone between different versions of IE. Developing for IE is a case of remembering what sort of breakage there is between versions and attempting to account for each mangled take on how HTML and CSS is supposed to be written.
Furthermore, even if you want to discount other browsers to the point where you pooh-pooh the significant adoption of Firefox and the popularity of Safari on the Mac, you're totally screwed when you try to implement the design the client's in-house or third-party designer created on their Mac and they call you up to say how broken it is in Safari. Then you'll wind up engaging in the same compatibility gymnastics you would've engaged in for IE, except you'll be having to transfer the IE-compatible markup and styling to a separate stylesheet because you'll now find yourself having to write to standards to make it work. Suddenly, you'll realize you wasted an insane amount of time not writing to standards and then fixing things for IE.
It's not really Microsoft's problem - it's everyone else's. Trying to get Microsoft to see it as something they need to fix is futile. They don't need to do a thing. They have no interest in making the web interoperable. Why would they?
To compete and attempt to remain relevant! They've already lost more browser market share in the past few years than anyone had anticipated being possible. The one and only advantage that IE has at this point is being the default browser on Windows. That's it. When even laypeople are using other browsers, that's a pretty tenuous advantage.
No, the "IE won and thus reigns king" crowd needs to accept that IE doesn't even have its own set of standards and that this is the real root of the problem. Version to version, we see some bugs fixed, some bugs ignored, and wholly *new* ones appear. When you do a QA cycle on a site and find that IE6 actually renders something mostly okay while it totally breaks in IE7, you can see how ridiculous this is.
Yes, it's a tremendous pain in the ass when there's a standard everybody else either complies with or at least makes a sincere effort to comply with, but when the one player who doesn't follow it doesn't even prove itself to be consistent internally, the resulting product is worthless. They don't even provide any documentation as to what coding standards *should* be followed for their browser; this is why they outright recommend conditional comments as a fix for (qutoing them) "pages that display correctly in browsers other than Internet Explorer."
Now, you can either keep lying to yourself, or you can accept the fact that IE is crap and in need of either serious repair or published documentation of how to code for it, and will remain crap until such a time.
Are you using an insanely old version of Opera, or are you of the delusional "IE dictates the standards, screw everything else" crowd? I ask because I can't see any other reasons why you'd suggest that it makes cross-browser testing painful. The last few versions of Opera have been wonderful in terms of adhering to W3C standards. I'm not an Opera fan by a longshot -I find the name annoying, I have a fairly severe loathing for people who tout it as the second coming, and it doesn't have Firebug- but testing in it is part of my QA cycle, and generally speaking, if markup validates, things tend to render as expected in Opera.
Because actually, 100 sub-$200 PC systems running Win98SE would probably work faster and be cheaper in means of TCO, and quite likely provide all the functionality needed as well (with exception of stability and security).
Stability and security are very significant factors when determining TCO. It's probably best not to make exceptions in terms of either one.
IANAE, but I believe Rhino themselves didn't clear the rights for the Godzilla film in set ten and that's why it got pulled. Damn shame, as it's easily one of the best episodes officially released (however briefly). I only got to see it because an old neighbor of mine scooped it up when it came out, and I seem to recall there was speculation even then about it getting pulled due to whichever entity managing the distribution rights of the Godzilla movies (Toho [appropriate biz abbreviation here]?) being super-finicky about them...
Later on they rant about how all software should be free, and everyone should see the source code. Well how is anyone going to pay you for it then? Duh. SaaS or something can sort of work, we'll make the program, and you'll pay for service. But then people get bitchy when you try to bill them 600/hr for the service (not realizing there is 10hrs of programming for every hour of tech support). The company ends up getting a bad reputation, because either they are too expensive, or users try to figure it out themselves and can't, then whine when they break it.
What the hell are you talking about?
If someone objects to the fee you charge for software development, they generally don't wind up contracting with you in the first place. I find that most of my company's clients, while frequently bewildered by some of the seemingly intangible (to them, anyway) steps in the process, understand that the reason they've hired us on to do a given job is because they themselves are incapable of doing it themselves from a practical perspective - that is, they can't learn how to do it themselves quickly enough to get whatever it is they need up and running by a given a deadline.
Beyond "in principle" diatribes, it's tough to make a valid complaint about expense when you haven't actually bled the funds. Then the only point of real, valid criticism that figures in is when you *have* paid for something, and that something has been late, or incomplete, or otherwise doesn't match the specification, in which case you stand a fair chance of deserving a bad reputation because you've either done sloppy work or have done a piss-poor job of project management (or both).
But it still has such good points that have nothing to do with whether it's free or not. The idea of developing something and then making your solution known. Spread the information so the world can grow from it.
That's not *just* Woz saying he likes the idea behind sharing source code and the like, that's Woz using the word "free" in a different way than the way it's used by the "free software" people. He's suggesting that, in spite of all these cranks who want to not pay money for solutions, good solutions still get shared, wherein actuality, most of these cranks are all about sharing solutions in the first place and the $$$ issue is at best a tertiary concern.
That isn't going to attract new users to Linux! Asking them to replace expensive (but well known branded) hardware because it doesn't work. If Linux cost money I wouldn't be trying it. Needing to get new hardware that works for Linux is effectively giving the Operating System a cost.
You could legitimately argue that if the developers working on anything related to hardware compatibility issues for Linux chose to build things in a secretive, non-cooperative fashion. But the truth is that it's quite the other way around.
Here are two arguments that would be substantially more accurate than what you're suggesting:
1) Purveyors of mass-marketed products passed invisible extra costs onto consumers by intentionally limiting said products; consumers eat the cost when they become aware of the limitations and recognize the need to replace said products.
2) Consumers of mass marketed products either made uninformed purchases of limited products and were unknowingly responsible for increasing their long-term costs associated.
A much more likely scenario, however, would be as follows:
3) Consumers purchased products and then their needs changed, requiring purchase of similar-yet-different products.
Really, it's like discovering that the $35 set of SuperBassBoost headphones you bought for your portable music device are thoroughly worthless for recording purposes. Is it the fault of the audio recording setup that the headphones you already bought aren't suited to the task? Not especially. Is it the fault of the industry for making a sub-par product with features of questionable merit? Kind of. Is it the fault of the consumer that their needs changed? A bit. Can we place the blame of the extra purchase on to one party? Sure, but no matter which one you pick, it's probably a gross reduction of the truth.
OTOH, in regards to something less physically tangible things like device drivers...well, maybe we can blame the manufacturer a bit more.:)
It amazes me after all this time that people still think AAC is a proprietary format, or that iTunes somehow contaminates DRM-free files with DRM. Sometimes I think it's willful ignorance.
No, it's not. AAC *is* a proprietary, patented technology. While there is no requirement to have a license for distribution of AAC content, but a license *is* required fo anyone making hardware or developing software that encodes/decodes to/from AAC. Don't confuse "possible to be free of DRM" with "non-proprietary". They're not the same thing.
...except you lead your post off with, "If you all would switch to listening to electronic music". You're implying that by switching to listening to electronic music, we're automatically freeing ourselves of some major-label imposed shackles, and that's a pretty ridiculous statement to make. You'd have been better off stating something more general, such as "buy independent music," not hawking a genre.
If you all would switch to listening to electronic music, especially from netlabels like Thinner http://www.thinner.cc/ [thinner.cc] you wouldn't need to worry about DRM.:-)
Which is all well and good if you're willing to merely exchange cliches. Some of us judge music on artistic merits rather than how well it assumes a genre-centric posture and don't have the option. Though that's probably better: less bad pseudo-political punk choruses and less samples of bad third rate soul vocals to give otherwise white music a bit of "soul" going 'round.
I just think in order to get Linux adopted by the populous, it's going to take more than kernel enhancements to see that through.
But see, the problem is that nobody's arguing that kernel enhancements alone *are* going to result in the rise of desktop-Linux-for-the-masses. What you're doing is akin to walking into a university campus that's just expanded a bit and proclaiming how they're not doing enough to save the baby whales. Yes, some of the facilities and information dispersed therein may be getting used by people looking to save the baby whales, and some of the staff may even be interested in saving the baby whales themselves, but the university is not in fact there to save the baby whales, but instead serve as general resource that can be utilized in a number of different and often drastically divergent ways.
But graphic UI's are the future of computing and I think it's high time for a distribution to make it HARD to find the shell in an OS.
In the ideal OS, finding the shell would be *easy*, not hard. I think what you mean to say is, "...day-to-day 'regular user' tasks would not involve using the shell." Hiding any end-user application is stupid.
That's not exactly what I'd call an obscenely short or particularly difficult list to find. Maybe if one's inclined *not* to take all of about 30 seconds looking, but again, if you're concerned about specs and doing a little bit of research in the first place, I fail to see how you could miss it.
(Sorry for the lack of proper formatting and the crap use of language, I'm *really* ill at the moment. I don't mean to sound accusative at this point: I've read through what you've said and I'm genuinely curious about your choice.)
every device I have that can play digital music can play AAC files. Because I paid attention. I've never bought anything from iTunes Store and don't own an iPod. And I've recommended to all my friends and family to just buy the CDs and rip to lossless. There are fewer IP restrictions on AAC/MP4 than there are on MP3, and the owners of the IP are pretty much the same people.
So let's see...you're concerned about sound quality, you're careful about the devices and files you choose to buy, and you're concerned about IP issues - you mention all three. Why AAC/MP4 and not FLAC? It's lossless and encumbered by even fewer IP restrictions than AAC/MP4. Clearly you've got the time to go the extra mile to make sure your devices support it.
I just don't like people ranting about something that isn't true (that AAC is an Apple proprietary format [no doubt invented to lock people into being Apple customers forever]).
But no, wait, you *really* seem to love AAC/MP4. You're not just dispelling untruths here, you're flat out defending it. It seems to me that anyone who had the time and inclination and cared about the issues you mentioned would go with something that met your criteria even better. So, uh...not to sound suspicious, but really, what's going on here?
AAC is indeed a decently standardized format, but it's not as widespread as MP3. I don't know of a single device that plays AAC that doesn't also play MP3. The converse can not be said.
Ah, but it's not really about what plays it, is it? It's more about somebody being able to say something embraced almost solely by their pet company isn't in fact technically proprietary...you know, in spite of the fact that said company is among the few businesses to embrace said format almost wholesale.
It's quite a lot like whatever company makes the foam that goes into cigarette filters. Just because some contracted parties choose to use their product in the subsequent manufacture of cancer-inducing products doesn't mean they're willfully propagating cancer or the smoking habit. Really!
Slashdot Mirror
Because the assumption is that what, exactly - Microsoft and entities hurting for funding are *always* engaging in backdoor negotiations? What happens when body X that's published a report giving a fair number of substantiated reasons not to go Microsoft suddenly turns around and is all of sudden using the latest Microsoft products? Body X loses credibility for taking that which they've disparaged the second they get a good deal, and Microsoft gets pegged as not only acting completely paranoid and frightened by giving deals to the most public complainers outside of the FOSS community, but actually lends credibility to statements that they charge way more than a lot of organizations, institutions, companies, and other entities are in fact willing to pay for products of apparently completely arbitrary monetary value. You might as well say, "There's no reason to believe they're not just stupid like everyone else."
That's science. If you can't face it, mod down -1 and claim I'm a "Troll" to formalize your impotence.
No, you were likely modded down for inflammatory rhetoric about the poor being dishonest, disorganized, and foolish, which does not meaningfully correlate with people having low IQs or any subsequent innovations which may lead to a particular society's lack of success, and that is what you're talking about here. Even so, your implication that poverty is merely a result of people being stupid, rather than the result of complex combinations of numerous factors as it is in real life, is a short-sighted load of hot air completely deserving of dismissal, much the same of your borderline-eugenic spiel about great pockets of dumb people fucking themselves over in the more destitute parts of the world.
My father and his four eldest have worked their way out of the mire and muck but my uncle still doesn't see why he's still struggling to not be poor. The problem is simple. He refuses to change. When he sees a good opportunity that he would like to take advantage of and he doesn't have the funds on hand to do so, he doesn't think "What can I change so that I do have the funds next time?", he instead thinks, "Fuck my luck."
That's a reduction. On the surface? Yes, he is refusing to change. But you are not your uncle. You have not endured the same experiences he has endured throughout the course of his life. You do not have the exact same balance of chemicals he has. He may have particular convictions, be they religious or philosophical, which predispose him to particular attitudes regarding the idea of fate or similar concepts. He may have psychological problems that are undiagnosed. And so on. Factors such as these may contribute to his inability to get it together and exercise greater control of what little he has in the way of finances. Even then, financial "best practices" won't produce especially substantial results for a great long while. Does he have any metric for measuring incremental success, so that he can turn around when things seem tough and tell himself not to fret, because things are in fact working out, albeit slowly, and that it's going to be worth it? And after decades of financial hardship, what sort of fear or anxiety grips him upon seeing a bill or invoice, and is it about the cost, or is it a gut reaction that might as well be instinctual?
Really, I know it seems simple for you and for me when we sit down and break apart a problem, at least from a very general conceptual point-of-view think about a few possible solutions, and then resolve to adopt one and see it through, but think about the difficulty faced when you're going through, and then imagine having some sort of block -beyond being lazy, which is always a possibility: plenty are, well-off and poor alike- which prevents you from even getting to the hard part. You might as well pretend that an illiterate just "believes" that they can't read, or that someone who had a traumatic experience with a dog as a child is being silly for being hysterically afraid of dogs in the here-and-now, regardless of whether they're being attacked.
Obviously you didn't score one of *these* babies.
What afflicts the third world seems to be disorganization, corruption, dishonesty, and low intelligence. That's why they're in the fix they're in, just like some communities in the USA (trailer parks, urban ghettoes, "artist communes") are third world status because they're filled with dishonest, disorganized, foolish people.
And we all know that these characteristics are absolute, because everybody in these places is dishonest, disorganized, and foolish, and they're all there because they chose to be there. And because all success takes is somebody to decide they're going to dig themselves out. It's not about resources, it's about willpower. These people can end their struggle and saunter off to Cigarandbrandytown and make a mint whenever they like.
No, wait, it's not like that at all. People are born into poverty, it's a genuine bitch to get out of it, and most have to spend at least the first 16 to 18 years in it by default, during which they may either luck out and develop solid values and see what's so incredibly fucked about where they're coming from, or they may experience quite the opposite and have their health ravaged by subsisting on cheap convenience foods, using drugs, and placing heavy value on trivial material possessions viewed as luxury items --never mind the education issue. And then leaving home with no financial aspects whatsoever is an utterly fantastic way to get set to enter the job market, where most positions available for people with no certifiable skills provide precious little room for advancement in either position or wage; the result here is either changing jobs a ton and seeming unstable or unreliable, or sticking it out longer-term with one or two businesses and then not getting anywhere and looking like a slug who does the bare-minimum to not get fired.
I could go on, but speaking as somebody who *did* grow up poor and pull himself out to live in a decent neighborhood and ultimately land a job paying $40,000 a year -a sum many of you will figure as paltry, but it's more than I'd ever anticipated making when I was a kid watching the cops come and haul away the latest drug dealing neighbors every few months- I can tell you that the people who pull themselves out are exceptions. Most people are stuck there because their situation is utterly hopeless, many of them know no better, and there is precious little in the way of outside stimulus to encourage them to get out beyond waking up every day and knowing that the people in the nice houses thirty miles down the road consider you to be the scum of the earth, which isn't really "encouraging" in the way most people would use the word.
I am constantly amazed - wait scrub that - consistently bored at the level of Slashdot's ferocity towards an issue of which they have the tiniest morsel of information to go on. Bah this is pointless, it'll just get downmodded by iPhone hating groupthink.
You're right - suggesting that one's opinion is held by a small-but-presumably-correct minority and that it will result in dismissal by the implied incorrect majority is indeed pointless. In all seriousness: if it's pointless, why even mention it? Remember, you don't have to hit submit after formulating a statement/argument/comment. At best, you'll get someone with a similar point-of-view to yours modding you up, and then you'll have other people mod you down for both disagreeing with your statement(s) *and* to compensate for improper moderation generated by your "mod me down" spiel. You're effectively hurting the purpose of the moderation process while simultaneously complaining about improper moderation practices.
On a more on-topic note, I think you're wrong about iPhone hating group-think. People ranting on this issue probably *like* the iPhone, but dislike the ways in which Apple has restricted it. There's a long line to be said here about the question of just how much sense it makes to hand your money or time or community chatter towards something the "bad guys" are ultimately responsible for - it's paradoxical from an idealistic "vote with your dollars" perspective, but most people aren't big enough idealists. Some people will still buy the shiny toy in spite of this because they want to do cool things with, and they're well aware of what they're doing - they *like* the iPhone and *dislike* Apple's behavior. It's allowed.
So where do you stand? Do you believe that your meta-critical histrionics are saving the world, or are you just an asshole?
Never once did I speak of people making me sick. It's more that I'd much prefer being able to bill my clients for doing worthwhile work rather than having to create hacky fixes for IE so that people who either default or insist on using a broken browser can be presented particular bits of content in the way intended.
Here's the thing about web standards that you might not understand: they're *defined*. Following them, most things can be done in a predictable manner, and so creating markup and styling it is relatively straight-forward; if you can read and you're not dumber than a rock, you can not only figure out how to put stuff together, but understand *why* it works the way it does. This is completely the opposite of the way things work in IE: because there are not documented standards, you have to blindly chip away at it until it works, and this behavior isn't even consistent between the two most recent versions, so you need fixes for both, and these fixes also have to be isolated. And this is just for (X)HTML and CSS...I won't even talk about Javascript and DOM woes.
If you can't understand why burning hours upon hours fixing this sort of stuff is a problem, let me spell it out for you: not only is it boring for me, not only does it mean that I have time taken away from other, more productive work I could be doing for my clients, but it also means the client is having to pay for these fixes. Most of my clients are health/human services oriented non-profits and the extra cash they have to spend because of this crap would be better used on things more directly impacting their constituency. Microsoft is responsible for requiring these organizations to spend money on these extra fixes.
Considering you addressed NONE of the points I've spoken of in previous posts, I'm sure it's futile, but here it is again since you seem to have missed it: Microsoft could be less of a bad guy in one of two ways. One, and my preferred way, would be following W3C standards. The other would be establishing, documenting, and adhering to their own standards so that the rendering of content in their browser is predictable and can be accounted for methodically rather than through stumbling around in the dark.
In reality, people can just code for IE and ignore the other browsers and hit most of the web.
Sure they can. Except coding for IE alone is still a bitch, and ignoring other browsers is incredibly naive as IE no longer holds 95%+ dominance as it once did. In reality, these people are stupid as far as creating web content goes.
The only instance where this is an acceptable practice in business terms is when the client specifically says, "compatibility with anything other than IE is not necessary" - either because it's for an internally-geared site where the end users are definitely only using a particular version of IE, or because they don't want want to pay for the time sunk into cross-browser QA. It still winds up costing quite a bit of money in the end, though, because as mentioned before, there *is no standard* for how markup behaves in IE, let alone between different versions of IE. Developing for IE is a case of remembering what sort of breakage there is between versions and attempting to account for each mangled take on how HTML and CSS is supposed to be written.
Furthermore, even if you want to discount other browsers to the point where you pooh-pooh the significant adoption of Firefox and the popularity of Safari on the Mac, you're totally screwed when you try to implement the design the client's in-house or third-party designer created on their Mac and they call you up to say how broken it is in Safari. Then you'll wind up engaging in the same compatibility gymnastics you would've engaged in for IE, except you'll be having to transfer the IE-compatible markup and styling to a separate stylesheet because you'll now find yourself having to write to standards to make it work. Suddenly, you'll realize you wasted an insane amount of time not writing to standards and then fixing things for IE.
It's not really Microsoft's problem - it's everyone else's. Trying to get Microsoft to see it as something they need to fix is futile. They don't need to do a thing. They have no interest in making the web interoperable. Why would they?
To compete and attempt to remain relevant! They've already lost more browser market share in the past few years than anyone had anticipated being possible. The one and only advantage that IE has at this point is being the default browser on Windows. That's it. When even laypeople are using other browsers, that's a pretty tenuous advantage.
No, the "IE won and thus reigns king" crowd needs to accept that IE doesn't even have its own set of standards and that this is the real root of the problem. Version to version, we see some bugs fixed, some bugs ignored, and wholly *new* ones appear. When you do a QA cycle on a site and find that IE6 actually renders something mostly okay while it totally breaks in IE7, you can see how ridiculous this is.
Yes, it's a tremendous pain in the ass when there's a standard everybody else either complies with or at least makes a sincere effort to comply with, but when the one player who doesn't follow it doesn't even prove itself to be consistent internally, the resulting product is worthless. They don't even provide any documentation as to what coding standards *should* be followed for their browser; this is why they outright recommend conditional comments as a fix for (qutoing them) "pages that display correctly in browsers other than Internet Explorer."
Now, you can either keep lying to yourself, or you can accept the fact that IE is crap and in need of either serious repair or published documentation of how to code for it, and will remain crap until such a time.
Are you using an insanely old version of Opera, or are you of the delusional "IE dictates the standards, screw everything else" crowd? I ask because I can't see any other reasons why you'd suggest that it makes cross-browser testing painful. The last few versions of Opera have been wonderful in terms of adhering to W3C standards. I'm not an Opera fan by a longshot -I find the name annoying, I have a fairly severe loathing for people who tout it as the second coming, and it doesn't have Firebug- but testing in it is part of my QA cycle, and generally speaking, if markup validates, things tend to render as expected in Opera.
Because actually, 100 sub-$200 PC systems running Win98SE would probably work faster and be cheaper in means of TCO, and quite likely provide all the functionality needed as well (with exception of stability and security).
Stability and security are very significant factors when determining TCO. It's probably best not to make exceptions in terms of either one.
IANAE, but I believe Rhino themselves didn't clear the rights for the Godzilla film in set ten and that's why it got pulled. Damn shame, as it's easily one of the best episodes officially released (however briefly). I only got to see it because an old neighbor of mine scooped it up when it came out, and I seem to recall there was speculation even then about it getting pulled due to whichever entity managing the distribution rights of the Godzilla movies (Toho [appropriate biz abbreviation here]?) being super-finicky about them...
Later on they rant about how all software should be free, and everyone should see the source code. Well how is anyone going to pay you for it then? Duh. SaaS or something can sort of work, we'll make the program, and you'll pay for service. But then people get bitchy when you try to bill them 600/hr for the service (not realizing there is 10hrs of programming for every hour of tech support). The company ends up getting a bad reputation, because either they are too expensive, or users try to figure it out themselves and can't, then whine when they break it.
What the hell are you talking about? If someone objects to the fee you charge for software development, they generally don't wind up contracting with you in the first place. I find that most of my company's clients, while frequently bewildered by some of the seemingly intangible (to them, anyway) steps in the process, understand that the reason they've hired us on to do a given job is because they themselves are incapable of doing it themselves from a practical perspective - that is, they can't learn how to do it themselves quickly enough to get whatever it is they need up and running by a given a deadline. Beyond "in principle" diatribes, it's tough to make a valid complaint about expense when you haven't actually bled the funds. Then the only point of real, valid criticism that figures in is when you *have* paid for something, and that something has been late, or incomplete, or otherwise doesn't match the specification, in which case you stand a fair chance of deserving a bad reputation because you've either done sloppy work or have done a piss-poor job of project management (or both).But it still has such good points that have nothing to do with whether it's free or not. The idea of developing something and then making your solution known. Spread the information so the world can grow from it.
That's not *just* Woz saying he likes the idea behind sharing source code and the like, that's Woz using the word "free" in a different way than the way it's used by the "free software" people. He's suggesting that, in spite of all these cranks who want to not pay money for solutions, good solutions still get shared, wherein actuality, most of these cranks are all about sharing solutions in the first place and the $$$ issue is at best a tertiary concern.
That isn't going to attract new users to Linux! Asking them to replace expensive (but well known branded) hardware because it doesn't work. If Linux cost money I wouldn't be trying it. Needing to get new hardware that works for Linux is effectively giving the Operating System a cost.
You could legitimately argue that if the developers working on anything related to hardware compatibility issues for Linux chose to build things in a secretive, non-cooperative fashion. But the truth is that it's quite the other way around.
Here are two arguments that would be substantially more accurate than what you're suggesting:
1) Purveyors of mass-marketed products passed invisible extra costs onto consumers by intentionally limiting said products; consumers eat the cost when they become aware of the limitations and recognize the need to replace said products.
2) Consumers of mass marketed products either made uninformed purchases of limited products and were unknowingly responsible for increasing their long-term costs associated.
A much more likely scenario, however, would be as follows:
3) Consumers purchased products and then their needs changed, requiring purchase of similar-yet-different products.
Really, it's like discovering that the $35 set of SuperBassBoost headphones you bought for your portable music device are thoroughly worthless for recording purposes. Is it the fault of the audio recording setup that the headphones you already bought aren't suited to the task? Not especially. Is it the fault of the industry for making a sub-par product with features of questionable merit? Kind of. Is it the fault of the consumer that their needs changed? A bit. Can we place the blame of the extra purchase on to one party? Sure, but no matter which one you pick, it's probably a gross reduction of the truth.
OTOH, in regards to something less physically tangible things like device drivers...well, maybe we can blame the manufacturer a bit more. :)
It amazes me after all this time that people still think AAC is a proprietary format, or that iTunes somehow contaminates DRM-free files with DRM. Sometimes I think it's willful ignorance.
No, it's not. AAC *is* a proprietary, patented technology. While there is no requirement to have a license for distribution of AAC content, but a license *is* required fo anyone making hardware or developing software that encodes/decodes to/from AAC. Don't confuse "possible to be free of DRM" with "non-proprietary". They're not the same thing.
...except you lead your post off with, "If you all would switch to listening to electronic music". You're implying that by switching to listening to electronic music, we're automatically freeing ourselves of some major-label imposed shackles, and that's a pretty ridiculous statement to make. You'd have been better off stating something more general, such as "buy independent music," not hawking a genre.
If you all would switch to listening to electronic music, especially from netlabels like Thinner http://www.thinner.cc/ [thinner.cc] you wouldn't need to worry about DRM. :-)
Which is all well and good if you're willing to merely exchange cliches. Some of us judge music on artistic merits rather than how well it assumes a genre-centric posture and don't have the option. Though that's probably better: less bad pseudo-political punk choruses and less samples of bad third rate soul vocals to give otherwise white music a bit of "soul" going 'round.
I just think in order to get Linux adopted by the populous, it's going to take more than kernel enhancements to see that through.
But see, the problem is that nobody's arguing that kernel enhancements alone *are* going to result in the rise of desktop-Linux-for-the-masses. What you're doing is akin to walking into a university campus that's just expanded a bit and proclaiming how they're not doing enough to save the baby whales. Yes, some of the facilities and information dispersed therein may be getting used by people looking to save the baby whales, and some of the staff may even be interested in saving the baby whales themselves, but the university is not in fact there to save the baby whales, but instead serve as general resource that can be utilized in a number of different and often drastically divergent ways.
But graphic UI's are the future of computing and I think it's high time for a distribution to make it HARD to find the shell in an OS.
In the ideal OS, finding the shell would be *easy*, not hard. I think what you mean to say is, "...day-to-day 'regular user' tasks would not involve using the shell." Hiding any end-user application is stupid.
I have no idea where I would even find devices supporting FLAC.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flac#Hardware_support
That's not exactly what I'd call an obscenely short or particularly difficult list to find. Maybe if one's inclined *not* to take all of about 30 seconds looking, but again, if you're concerned about specs and doing a little bit of research in the first place, I fail to see how you could miss it.
(Sorry for the lack of proper formatting and the crap use of language, I'm *really* ill at the moment. I don't mean to sound accusative at this point: I've read through what you've said and I'm genuinely curious about your choice.)
every device I have that can play digital music can play AAC files. Because I paid attention. I've never bought anything from iTunes Store and don't own an iPod. And I've recommended to all my friends and family to just buy the CDs and rip to lossless. There are fewer IP restrictions on AAC/MP4 than there are on MP3, and the owners of the IP are pretty much the same people.
So let's see...you're concerned about sound quality, you're careful about the devices and files you choose to buy, and you're concerned about IP issues - you mention all three. Why AAC/MP4 and not FLAC? It's lossless and encumbered by even fewer IP restrictions than AAC/MP4. Clearly you've got the time to go the extra mile to make sure your devices support it.
I just don't like people ranting about something that isn't true (that AAC is an Apple proprietary format [no doubt invented to lock people into being Apple customers forever]).
But no, wait, you *really* seem to love AAC/MP4. You're not just dispelling untruths here, you're flat out defending it. It seems to me that anyone who had the time and inclination and cared about the issues you mentioned would go with something that met your criteria even better. So, uh...not to sound suspicious, but really, what's going on here?
AAC is indeed a decently standardized format, but it's not as widespread as MP3. I don't know of a single device that plays AAC that doesn't also play MP3. The converse can not be said.
Ah, but it's not really about what plays it, is it? It's more about somebody being able to say something embraced almost solely by their pet company isn't in fact technically proprietary...you know, in spite of the fact that said company is among the few businesses to embrace said format almost wholesale.
It's quite a lot like whatever company makes the foam that goes into cigarette filters. Just because some contracted parties choose to use their product in the subsequent manufacture of cancer-inducing products doesn't mean they're willfully propagating cancer or the smoking habit. Really!