It needs apps that don't suck, and it needs a killer app for the desktop instead of the windows ripoffs.
Is there ever likely to be a killer app that is unique to Linux though? Linux's open source nature means that any Linux software which is worth its salt will be ported to Windows anyway.
As an example, look at "Tuxracer" - that is the sweetest looking non-commercial game I've ever seen, and it plays pretty well too. It even stars Tux, mascot of Linux. Yet the quality of this game shines through and it's been ported to both Windows and Mac. Other great examples of open source working well, Apache and the GNU C compiler, both started their life out on *nix yet got ported over to Windows.
Like it or not, the vast majority of the world's computers run Windows and Windows users are demanding that quality free (as in speech) software is ported to their OS. It might be nice if they ran the free software under Linux, or even BSD, but this isn't going to happen overnight. Personally, I think it's great that quality free software is available to everyone, regardless of their OS. But it also means that Linux will probably never have a killer app to call its own - unless Linux itself becomes the killer app (and in some people's opinion, mine included, it already is)
I very much doubt it would work. Hard disks are encased in a metal case, which is an alloy of iron. This has a high magnetic permeability (which behaves like a "good conductor" of magnetism with a low "resistance" to magnetic flux, to use analogies from electric circuits). Hence, any applied magnetic field will tend to be confined within the low "resistance" of the case material and the magnetic flux will not go near the magnetic media. In my experience, hard drives stand up to magnetism pretty well - I use a standard laptop computer as part of an instrumentation setup within a large magnetic field on a daily basis, and have yet to suffer any form of data loss.
Besides, even if you were to realign magnetic domains sufficiently to make the data unreadable to the drive itself, a determined "bad guy" could use magnetoresistive microscopy (Slashdot story here) to piece the data back together again. Magnetoresistive microscopy would even be able to recover your data if you did an "rm -rf/*" when the bad guys appeared. Maybe you could run "shred" to erase your drives thoroughly when the bad guys knock on your door, and then try to stall them for an hour or so while your data is safely erased?
That looks suspiciously like the URL for the world renowned journal known as Science! Why's that fake?
It claims nonsence clear to enyone knows that light frequency's 1E12 times greater than one of sound
I suspect the laws of physics are different in your part of the world (as well as the rules of English spelling and grammar).
Where I live, the speed of sound in air is of the order of 3e2 m/s, and the speed of EM radiation (light!) is 3e8 m/s. That's a factor of 1e6, not 1e12!
I don't know whether or not the original post is a hoax or not. But your logic is certainly spurious.
Corporations that do things we find entertaining, like publishing games, creating episodes of The Simpsons, making big budget movies, and distributing carbonated beverages..they're all right
Hate to correct you, but we hate those corporations too!
Game publishing - Microsoft publish games and are even bringing out a console, but we still don't like Microsoft.
Creating episodes of the Simpsons - That would be Fox, wouldn't it? We hated Fox here because they wouldn't allow Linux users to connect to their website.
Making big budget movies - Sounds like the MPAA to me. Where have you been? WereallytheMPAA.
Distributing carbonated beverages - We complained about Pepsi too!
This all goes to show that Slashdot readers and editors are a fickle bunch of people.
The aesthetics and appeal of a website (or any form of computer program) are due to the fundamental design of the program, rather than the way in which it is implemented.
There's nothing wrong with a visually appealing website, but too many people (usually corporate types) think that in order to be visually appealing, a website must have Flash, javascript and frames. Good, pretty, functional, web design can be done without any of these evils (look at Slashdot for proof of this!).
The best looking designs needn't be the most technically impressive - Melon Dezign's Amiga demos in the early 1990s proved that the prettiest things are not necessarily the most technically advanced. Someone with good design skills can make something useable and visually impressive, without the need for much complexity. Complexity is often added in order to hide a fundamentally poor design.
The only thing that scares me more then a Microsoft mononpoly is a Nvidia / Intel / M$ Dulopoly.
There's no need to worry about this. A few years ago, 3Dfx ruled the roost for graphics cards. Before that Matrox (the company many people here are writing off) made the graphics cards of choice. Similarly, Intel's dominance in the PC processor market is now being challenged - Intel are feeling the heat from AMD and if they don't start shipping large numbers of 1GHz PIIIs soon, AMD could end up winning this battle. Who knows, maybe M$'s dominance may face a serious challenge sometime soon. I can remember a time when M$ Word was playing second fiddle to WordPerfect, but where is WordPerfect these days?
Things change, and in the high-tech business things change quickly. It just takes one company to come up with a great bit of innovation, and the whole status quo is disturbed very rapidly. Don't write off Matrox just yet.
But what does "Tarantella" mean? Or "Agilent", for that matter?
Agilent doesn't mean anything! This was discussed on Slashdot a while ago, as a result of this lengthy Salon article. In a world where the snake-oil salesmen have rebranded themselves as "management consultants", these expensive corporate rebrandings are the corporate equivalent of the Emperor's new clothes. And as long as the senior management of these companies continue to listen to the nonsense spouted by the management consultants, we're going to see a lot more of these name changes. I wonder who long it will take until sanity and common sense prevail?
I don't see how it can be said that poor licenses cause people to develop an equivalent open source version of the software. The majority of open source developers write software in order to scratch an itch - they have a need for a piece of software, so they go and write it. If they decide to make an open source version of some proprietary closed source software, then it is because they need the functionality of this software, not because they are striking to strike a blow against the evils of proprietary software.
The only way it could be argued that closed source software is good for open source software is when the open source software tries to emulate important aspects of the closed source software (e.g. AbiWord is intended to have a very similar look and feel to the market leader, Microsoft Word, so that AbiWord is intuitive to use for Word users). The larger financial resources of the software companies can be used to conduct research into what users require of the software and to design other aspects such as the user interface, and these fundamental features can be incorporated into the open source software. Therefore, the commercial software companies can lay the foundations for the open source programmers to build upon, therefore saving some development effort for the open source programmers.
So maybe closed source software can benefit open source software, but not in the way suggested by the article.
How will we ever preserve things for future generations with our current technologies?
Every few months someone posts a scare story to Slashdot, concerned that current magnetic and optical media has a shorter lifespan than the more traditional 'pen and ink' methods of archiving information. Although there may be some truth to this, I believe that the fact that data in a digital format can be so easily duplicated and distributed actually gives the data a better chance of survival. For example, consider a hypothetical work of literature which is distributed both in the traditional dead-tree format and in a (free to copy) electronic format. The fact that the printed version of this information has a physical presence in meatspace will reduce the chance that it can be widely distributed - books take time to print, cost money to print, and are bulky and expensive to transport around the world. However, the electronic format of the information can be quickly, cheaply and easily shared between people and international boundaries provide no obstacle to the transfer of the information. This more widespread distribution of the digital information gives it a very good chance of survival.
People have also wondered what will happen if the medium onto which the data is archived becomes obsolete. Again, I wonder if this is really an issue. Although my Sinclair Spectrum computer and its Microdrive (a 4cm x 3cm x 0.5cm tape cartidge, which was actually pretty fast, in case you're interested) no longer work and my original Spectrum games cassettes have long since rotted away, emulators allow me to relive the glorious golden age of Spectrum computing. With emulators and tape images of software, the spirit of the hardware and software lives on by making use of today's superior technology.
Provided the data is wothwhile, I am sure that people will make the effort to ensure that it survives in some form and is readable on whatever technology is widespread at the time.
Yep, I've done this. I got a second hand Dell P133 that was thrown out by a company (with no monitor, mouse or keyboard). The nice thing about this Dell case is that it has no cooling fans so it doesn't make any noise which would detract from the music. I put a $5 secondhand sound card it, and was given an old 10 MBit/s ethernet card and coax. Red Hat was installed on the machine, and the sound card was connected to my stereo.
I control this MP3 server remotely across my network from an Xterm window on my main machine (which is too slow to play MP3 and do anything useful simultaneously). So for an outlay of only $5, I have a very good MP3 separate system.
No, Stallman releasing his version of Happy Birthday would be a very Bad Thing. Listen to his Free Software Song, available from http://www.gnu.org/music/free-soft ware-song.html and you will agree that the world is not yet ready for his unique vocal talents. And the less said about his lyrics, the better...
RMS does indeed have an opinion on copyrighted music and literature (does this surprise anyone?)...
You can find his exact words in this interview. He obviously thinks that music should be free (as in beer) because that way the musicians would make more money, and he suggests that copyright on literature is unecessary.
Although Sun are giving StarOffice away without charging for it, don't be under the illusion that Sun are throwing their money away for the good of humanity. Sun's purchase of Stardivision (the original creators of StarOffice) was intended to try to prevent Microsoft's Office from increasing its strangehold on office software. Sun have also stated their long-term intention is to turn StarOffice into "StarPortal", which will use thin clients running StarOffice on central servers - this can be interpreted as a statement of intent to try to phase out PCs and get everyone to run their applications remotely on huge Sun servers. (Isn't this setting technology back by 20 or so years?)
Sun are not generously giving us free (as in beer) software out of the goodness of their hearts. It is a carefully calculated loss-leader which ties in with their long-term business strategy.
I think the Canadian governement has good grounds for granting Microsoft political asylum in Canada. The recent DoJ crusade against Microsoft demonstrates that Microsoft is being persecuted by the US government for its political views (or monopolistic practices as the DoJ prefer to call them). Therefore Canada has a moral obligation to grant MS political asylum, just like they would to any individual who was being persecuted by their government.
Microsoft are a persecuted minority who are being forced out of their own country. You've got to feel sorry for them haven't you?:-)
I agree that it is not necessarily true that someone who learns how to code will not use their skills for 'evil' purposes. But it has been said that the reason that *nix doesn't have a virus problem is partly due to the fact that the people who have the sort of expertise required to write an effective *nix virus have realised that they can use their skills for more constructive things. Of course, *nix's security model is another factor in the lack of viruses.
Maybe the reason that dumb people can write devastating viruses is because they are dumb. Although I'm not suggesting that the writer of the infamous Internet Worm is dumb, his virus/worm was meant to be harmless and its devastating consequences happened by accident rather than by design.
Actually, I think your idea for a virus/daemon is pretty dumb. While it may be intellectually stimulating for you, have you thought about the consequences it would have on the people who you infected? Submitting tasks a la distributed.net is theft of people's processor resources and passing MP3s etc is theft of bandwidth. I am sure that the courts would not agree that it is just a harmless prank.
Don't take this personally, but I'm glad your coding skills are insufficient to do this. Maybe by the time you learn how to do this (and not get caught) you'll realise the consequences of this sort of thing and will decide to apply your skills to something more worthwhile.
I really have to wonder what Real's motives for this are. Now that this news has emerged, that Real have yet again tried to poke their noses into people's privacy, their reputation is going to take another hammering.
But I can't see where the payoff is for Real. I imagine that if everyone in the world was to use Download Demon for every download they ever made, then the resulting sending of information back to Real would cost them a small fortune in bandwidth. I can't see that they're going to make much money selling the information on either - if companies are particularly interested in finding out who's downloading their products then they usually make the user register or fill in a form before downloading.
Real's main software product, Real Player, is losing market share to Windows Media Player so it seems that Real needs all the goodwill it can get in order to survive. Although the majority of computer/internet users are not overly worried by the issue of privacy (certainly not to the same extent as the average Slashdot reader), more and more of their potential customers are going to become disillusioned every time Real pull a stunt like this.
It's not just space shuttle code that needs extreme reliabilty. The embedded systems in civilian aircraft are not interrupt-driven because of the reliabilty issues associated with interrupt-driven code - interrupts make the software to hard to debug thoroughly (becuase there are so many combiniations and timings of input signals to test), make faults difficult to replicate and have the potential to go wrong on a spurious set of input signals. This sort of problem doesn't really matter too much in a home or corporate computing environment, but it would be a major disaster if a plane carrying a few hundred people were to crash into a city with a population of a few million, just because of a software error. These things need 100.00 per cent reliability, so obviously software hacks are frowned upon.
Please think before you post such obvious "flamebait" in the future. If you look carefully at the moderator guidelines, you will see that all moderators are required to moderate down comments which do not treat Transmeta with the appropriate level of reverence. By having a post such as yours at Score:1, you are forcing other people to read your blasphemy and you may corrupt the minds of the innocent. Moderation to Score:0 or Score:-1 is undeniably the correct punishment for your post. Similarly, it is a capital offence to post anything to Slashdot which discusses Transmeta rationally.
You should be ashamed of yourself for posting such heresy, and trying to excuse it by saying that this is your own opinion. Remember, this is Slashdot - you are entitled to your own opinion, providing it is the same as everyone else's. Please proceed immediately to the nearest correctional facility for a new course of brainwashing. Beware, any similar offences will result in your account being bitchslapped.:-)
Repeat after me, RedHat is not Mandrake. Mandrake is based on RedHat, but is very different. The Mandrake distro has several different packages to the RedHat distro it is based on, and Mandrake compile everything for Pentium optimisation. I really cannot see Mandrake branching into such radically new territory - they are far happy serving the (Pentium owning) mass market.
The Exodus facility sounds cool, but does the Playboy.com web server really need all that security?:-)
But seriously, your description of Exodus reminds me of The Bunker in the UK (I think this was featured on Slashdot a few months back), which is housed in a decommisioned nuclear bunker. Sadly, The Bunker has no kevlar walls (as far as I know), though it does have "blast proof" doors, a "high security" electric fence and HERF protection. The fact that there's a demand for this type of facility shows how important web servers are to some corporations.
On a point of pedantry, I don't see how SuSE and TurboLinux porting their distros to S/390 constitutes "Main Linux distributions port their Linux..". This is only two distributions. Similarly, I would argue with the statement "The only major distributor that is missing here is Redhat" - what about Debian, Mandrake, Caldera and Corel?
I'm only playing Devil's advocate, but this sort of logic is only a small step away from that of people who think RedHat==Linux.
Just wondering, the story says that Itania (?) can't be bought by Jes Folks. Who is this Jes Folks guy/gal, and why are Intel discriminating against him/her?
Slashdot Mirror
Is there ever likely to be a killer app that is unique to Linux though? Linux's open source nature means that any Linux software which is worth its salt will be ported to Windows anyway.
As an example, look at "Tuxracer" - that is the sweetest looking non-commercial game I've ever seen, and it plays pretty well too. It even stars Tux, mascot of Linux. Yet the quality of this game shines through and it's been ported to both Windows and Mac. Other great examples of open source working well, Apache and the GNU C compiler, both started their life out on *nix yet got ported over to Windows.
Like it or not, the vast majority of the world's computers run Windows and Windows users are demanding that quality free (as in speech) software is ported to their OS. It might be nice if they ran the free software under Linux, or even BSD, but this isn't going to happen overnight. Personally, I think it's great that quality free software is available to everyone, regardless of their OS. But it also means that Linux will probably never have a killer app to call its own - unless Linux itself becomes the killer app (and in some people's opinion, mine included, it already is)
Besides, even if you were to realign magnetic domains sufficiently to make the data unreadable to the drive itself, a determined "bad guy" could use magnetoresistive microscopy (Slashdot story here) to piece the data back together again. Magnetoresistive microscopy would even be able to recover your data if you did an "rm -rf /*" when the bad guys appeared. Maybe you could run "shred" to erase your drives thoroughly when the bad guys knock on your door, and then try to stall them for an hour or so while your data is safely erased?
That looks suspiciously like the URL for the world renowned journal known as Science! Why's that fake?
It claims nonsence clear to enyone knows that light frequency's 1E12 times greater than one of sound
I suspect the laws of physics are different in your part of the world (as well as the rules of English spelling and grammar).
Where I live, the speed of sound in air is of the order of 3e2 m/s, and the speed of EM radiation (light!) is 3e8 m/s. That's a factor of 1e6, not 1e12!
I don't know whether or not the original post is a hoax or not. But your logic is certainly spurious.
Hate to correct you, but we hate those corporations too!
Game publishing - Microsoft publish games and are even bringing out a console, but we still don't like Microsoft.
Creating episodes of the Simpsons - That would be Fox, wouldn't it? We hated Fox here because they wouldn't allow Linux users to connect to their website.
Making big budget movies - Sounds like the MPAA to me. Where have you been? We really the MPAA.
Distributing carbonated beverages - We complained about Pepsi too!
This all goes to show that Slashdot readers and editors are a fickle bunch of people.
There's nothing wrong with a visually appealing website, but too many people (usually corporate types) think that in order to be visually appealing, a website must have Flash, javascript and frames. Good, pretty, functional, web design can be done without any of these evils (look at Slashdot for proof of this!).
The best looking designs needn't be the most technically impressive - Melon Dezign's Amiga demos in the early 1990s proved that the prettiest things are not necessarily the most technically advanced. Someone with good design skills can make something useable and visually impressive, without the need for much complexity. Complexity is often added in order to hide a fundamentally poor design.
There's no need to worry about this. A few years ago, 3Dfx ruled the roost for graphics cards. Before that Matrox (the company many people here are writing off) made the graphics cards of choice. Similarly, Intel's dominance in the PC processor market is now being challenged - Intel are feeling the heat from AMD and if they don't start shipping large numbers of 1GHz PIIIs soon, AMD could end up winning this battle. Who knows, maybe M$'s dominance may face a serious challenge sometime soon. I can remember a time when M$ Word was playing second fiddle to WordPerfect, but where is WordPerfect these days?
Things change, and in the high-tech business things change quickly. It just takes one company to come up with a great bit of innovation, and the whole status quo is disturbed very rapidly. Don't write off Matrox just yet.
Look at this photo and judge for yourself.
Agilent doesn't mean anything! This was discussed on Slashdot a while ago, as a result of this lengthy Salon article. In a world where the snake-oil salesmen have rebranded themselves as "management consultants", these expensive corporate rebrandings are the corporate equivalent of the Emperor's new clothes. And as long as the senior management of these companies continue to listen to the nonsense spouted by the management consultants, we're going to see a lot more of these name changes. I wonder who long it will take until sanity and common sense prevail?
The only way it could be argued that closed source software is good for open source software is when the open source software tries to emulate important aspects of the closed source software (e.g. AbiWord is intended to have a very similar look and feel to the market leader, Microsoft Word, so that AbiWord is intuitive to use for Word users). The larger financial resources of the software companies can be used to conduct research into what users require of the software and to design other aspects such as the user interface, and these fundamental features can be incorporated into the open source software. Therefore, the commercial software companies can lay the foundations for the open source programmers to build upon, therefore saving some development effort for the open source programmers.
So maybe closed source software can benefit open source software, but not in the way suggested by the article.
Every few months someone posts a scare story to Slashdot, concerned that current magnetic and optical media has a shorter lifespan than the more traditional 'pen and ink' methods of archiving information. Although there may be some truth to this, I believe that the fact that data in a digital format can be so easily duplicated and distributed actually gives the data a better chance of survival. For example, consider a hypothetical work of literature which is distributed both in the traditional dead-tree format and in a (free to copy) electronic format. The fact that the printed version of this information has a physical presence in meatspace will reduce the chance that it can be widely distributed - books take time to print, cost money to print, and are bulky and expensive to transport around the world. However, the electronic format of the information can be quickly, cheaply and easily shared between people and international boundaries provide no obstacle to the transfer of the information. This more widespread distribution of the digital information gives it a very good chance of survival.
People have also wondered what will happen if the medium onto which the data is archived becomes obsolete. Again, I wonder if this is really an issue. Although my Sinclair Spectrum computer and its Microdrive (a 4cm x 3cm x 0.5cm tape cartidge, which was actually pretty fast, in case you're interested) no longer work and my original Spectrum games cassettes have long since rotted away, emulators allow me to relive the glorious golden age of Spectrum computing. With emulators and tape images of software, the spirit of the hardware and software lives on by making use of today's superior technology.
Provided the data is wothwhile, I am sure that people will make the effort to ensure that it survives in some form and is readable on whatever technology is widespread at the time.
I control this MP3 server remotely across my network from an Xterm window on my main machine (which is too slow to play MP3 and do anything useful simultaneously). So for an outlay of only $5, I have a very good MP3 separate system.
No, Stallman releasing his version of Happy Birthday would be a very Bad Thing. Listen to his Free Software Song, available from http://www.gnu.org/music/free-soft ware-song.html and you will agree that the world is not yet ready for his unique vocal talents. And the less said about his lyrics, the better...
You can find his exact words in this interview. He obviously thinks that music should be free (as in beer) because that way the musicians would make more money, and he suggests that copyright on literature is unecessary.
Sun are not generously giving us free (as in beer) software out of the goodness of their hearts. It is a carefully calculated loss-leader which ties in with their long-term business strategy.
Microsoft are a persecuted minority who are being forced out of their own country. You've got to feel sorry for them haven't you? :-)
Maybe the reason that dumb people can write devastating viruses is because they are dumb. Although I'm not suggesting that the writer of the infamous Internet Worm is dumb, his virus/worm was meant to be harmless and its devastating consequences happened by accident rather than by design.
Don't take this personally, but I'm glad your coding skills are insufficient to do this. Maybe by the time you learn how to do this (and not get caught) you'll realise the consequences of this sort of thing and will decide to apply your skills to something more worthwhile.
But I can't see where the payoff is for Real. I imagine that if everyone in the world was to use Download Demon for every download they ever made, then the resulting sending of information back to Real would cost them a small fortune in bandwidth. I can't see that they're going to make much money selling the information on either - if companies are particularly interested in finding out who's downloading their products then they usually make the user register or fill in a form before downloading.
Real's main software product, Real Player, is losing market share to Windows Media Player so it seems that Real needs all the goodwill it can get in order to survive. Although the majority of computer/internet users are not overly worried by the issue of privacy (certainly not to the same extent as the average Slashdot reader), more and more of their potential customers are going to become disillusioned every time Real pull a stunt like this.
So the way that Microsoft Flight Simulator keeps crashing is actually a feature?
It's not just space shuttle code that needs extreme reliabilty. The embedded systems in civilian aircraft are not interrupt-driven because of the reliabilty issues associated with interrupt-driven code - interrupts make the software to hard to debug thoroughly (becuase there are so many combiniations and timings of input signals to test), make faults difficult to replicate and have the potential to go wrong on a spurious set of input signals. This sort of problem doesn't really matter too much in a home or corporate computing environment, but it would be a major disaster if a plane carrying a few hundred people were to crash into a city with a population of a few million, just because of a software error. These things need 100.00 per cent reliability, so obviously software hacks are frowned upon.
You should be ashamed of yourself for posting such heresy, and trying to excuse it by saying that this is your own opinion. Remember, this is Slashdot - you are entitled to your own opinion, providing it is the same as everyone else's. Please proceed immediately to the nearest correctional facility for a new course of brainwashing. Beware, any similar offences will result in your account being bitchslapped. :-)
Repeat after me, RedHat is not Mandrake. Mandrake is based on RedHat, but is very different. The Mandrake distro has several different packages to the RedHat distro it is based on, and Mandrake compile everything for Pentium optimisation. I really cannot see Mandrake branching into such radically new territory - they are far happy serving the (Pentium owning) mass market.
But seriously, your description of Exodus reminds me of The Bunker in the UK (I think this was featured on Slashdot a few months back), which is housed in a decommisioned nuclear bunker. Sadly, The Bunker has no kevlar walls (as far as I know), though it does have "blast proof" doors, a "high security" electric fence and HERF protection. The fact that there's a demand for this type of facility shows how important web servers are to some corporations.
I'm only playing Devil's advocate, but this sort of logic is only a small step away from that of people who think RedHat==Linux.
Just wondering, the story says that Itania (?) can't be bought by Jes Folks. Who is this Jes Folks guy/gal, and why are Intel discriminating against him/her?