We don't dethrone by imitation. The original post asked why all the apps were copies/clones/imitations of existing software, and I attempted to answer that. I never said it was my idea.
I don't think Joe OfficeUser should use Linux, anyway. All I care about - as someone using the "Dead" linux desktop at home and work - is that I can get access to the documents I need to do my job. There are precious few, because I'm a sysadmin and live my life through xterm's and vi. Still, sometimes the boss wants a document, or a diagram. I need the ability to do that, without rebooting into Windows.
>Here's the real question, tho: Why do Window-hating Linux developers clone of Windows applications and technologies ? We have >clones of Word, Visio, TWAIN -- hell, KDE and Gnome often try to clone Windows, right down to the damnable "Start" button.
Duh. Because back when Linux resembled Unix circa 1989 - that is, it ran X w/ twm or fvwm - everyone said "It's OK, but it can't run a word processor, it doesn't have a scanner interface, or an image editor beyond 'xpaint', what a P.O.S." So the community wrote them. "But windows has better ease of use". So they riffed on familiar metaphors.
Now, its a "clone" of "damnable" technolgies. Hey, don't blame the community. The people in charge of these things - so-called pundits and experts - said this was what it took to get Linux into the enterprise, to dethrone microsoft, and to make a better world. If you want things any different, set the wayback machine for 1993, and convince the pundits otherwise. The community responded to overwhelming stimuli.
IMHO, Windows is, was and will be a clone of the Macintosh GUI. Maybe W2k and XP are sufficiently different, I would grant that, but W3.1 was a clone of mwm and cde (look at the damn window controls!), and W95-WME are clones of Mac interfaces. NT was intended to compete with Unix, and therefore borrows many familiar aspects, same with W2k.
Mozilla comes with a powerful configuration tool called gcc, which combined with an editor, can be used to change every facet of the programs behavior.
Rather than continuing to compete against the likes of Sun, Compaq, and IBM, VA Linux has decided to compete against the likes of... Microsoft, Yahoo!, and other properties. WONDERFUL plan.
Actually, all saracasm aside, I think its a decent plan. Really. Microsoft is doing the services thing; IBM does the services thing; why not focus on the services thing? Shure, why not.
Today I came across a ZDNet story (yah, yah) where MS sid it will spend $1 billion US to market and promote WXP. You guys have said you'll spend the same amount on Linux.
Now: for as long as I can remember, IBM has been synonymous with "good technology, bad marketing". OS/2 stands out as a particular example.
Do you think that a cool (Dr. Evil style) 1 billion of MS's marketing dollars can match the same amount of IBM's best and brightest cranking on Linux? Do you see this as a marketing battle, a technology battle, or both (I doubt its neither, although philosophical issues factor in too)?
Shouldn't the person who wrote that do a little
:%s/CLI/CLR/g
action? Have they changed their tune mid-stream? (yes, I read the article, its just that this is the first time I've seen CLI amongst the gajillion references to CLR).
(Coming soon from Microsoft: Common Language Interface Technology. Or not.)
OK, so, you can't use Oracle, because its proprietary. Fine, use MySQL. No, wait, that's largely banked by VA (IIRC). Also rule out Postgres, and Interbase for similar reasons.
So *develop your own*? That just makes no sense. "NIH" (Not Invented Here) kills companys, it blinds their thinking from the best tool for the job.
Why can't Red Hat just partner with NuSphere/Greatbridge/etc? Is it NIH, or something about business I just don't understand?
Last point: This has (apparently) appeared out of nowhere. Some press, but that's it. No beta program. No white papers. No conspicuous hiring of RDBMS gurus - hell, check the Borders in Durham, I doubt they've even bought a textbook on databases. What gives here? Are they going to launch a product without first having running code?
the benchmark compared it to Apache, and not, say, IIS, iPlanet, or other servers.
Re:Real risks with this expirement
on
Star In A Jar
·
· Score: 2
>I suspect that this is why SETI has been so unsuccessful - most alien civilisations have performed expirements such as this and then been promptly destroyed.
Oh, please. Stop watching Star Trek.
If another civilization, one advanced enough to have advanced radio telescopes, were to start THEIR SETI program, they'd have around 50 years of our transmissions. Which means, they'd have to live in a 50 light-year area around us. The cosmos is, to quote Douglas Adams, "really big". A few thousand intelligent civilizations near the galactic core - what, 30k light years away? - would be sufficient to explain SETT's "failures". We can't hear them because their signals haven't reached us yet. The light we see today is often (said in a Sagan-esque voice) billions of years old, some of it left its star before the earth existed. A million intelligent civilizations can't overcome the speed of light and the time at which they become capable of radio astronomy.
While I'm at it, could you provide any pointers to data that says we're all going to die in this manner? Outrageous claims require outrageous evidence, after all...
The difference is simple: I own a book. You cannot take this book away from me . It is in my house; to try to get it from me is against all sorts of other laws.
I have a certain obligation, not to sit down and type it, word for word, into the computer. This is possible, but difficult. In the same category are things like building your own car (from scratch, not a kit), and so forth.
IP is an idea that floats around in your neurons. There's a concrete difference there.
We had the same problem (Fairfax, VA). What was our solution? We yelled and yelled and yelled. We bitched and moaned. We called them and complained over and over.
We got DSL very soon thereafter. Somehow the technical issues vanished, although they claimed a top speed of 780-something because of them.
Now, I titled this post YMMV, and I mean it. I don't want people to reply "But that's not possible!!!!!" over and over. It may very well not be possible; my suspicion is they (Verison) were lying when they said it wasn't possible (meaning, the lines in our area were just fine, etc). It wouldn't be the first time I'd caught them in a lie. What my point IS, is don't just wait. Make a stand, or just get a cable modem and tell them to fuck off.
Was Young's comment, not about predatory monolopolies, but instead:
"...our governmental infrastructures should be permanently open to competitive bid..."
Yes, Microsoft is the standard, and I'll even give (Linux zealot that I am) that IE is a better browser than Netscape4.x/6, and there's some good tools there on IIS (wealth of MCSE's, etc).
BUT, the truth in that statement - there should be a bid - is beyond petty squabbles about the better OS. If MS really does present the better solution, it should be given the chance to prove it, rather than being implemented because its the "default".
It makes me mad as a Linux advocate. I'd like to "lose" fair and square. If I can't write a good response to an RFP, if I can't get the people and the code running, then I deserve to lose. But I doubt anyone really put any thought into it. We need [foo], let's put it on IIS. Call MS and get a nice site license.
(I think I can get flamebait and troll all in one post)
Quote:
"There's no block to people putting features on Windows," he snaps.
Isn't that part of the problem?
1. Putting a feature into Windows means its now a target for embrasure (is that a word?), extension, or imitation. You have just decided to compete with MS. Somehow I doubt their "shared source" will help. Ask Stac how much success they had in putting features into a Microsoft product.
2. This statement is, to me, implicitly saying that innovation is dependant on Windows in the first place. Wasn't it Jackson who said (paraphrased) MS makes a barrier to innovation with this kind of thinking? They hammer the doors shut if you aren't talking Win32?
>Had to re-build perl from source because I couldn't build a module because of missing headers
Huh? Did you install perl-devel? When I first started using Mandrake it used to frustrate me to no end because 'perl -MCPAN -e shell' would never work. You have to have the perl-devel package and the appropriate kernel headers installed for it to build packages from CPAN.
>Flaky hardware detection software (call me when HardDrake actually works)
Ring, ring. I have had nothing but success on many and varied platforms, desktops, laptops, and servers. Are you using esoteric hardware?
1. Someone, please someone, make an installer that works? I've tried all of them for PPC; there was a LinuxPPC installer (IIRC) that was broken, the FORTH code for the 'blessed' system partition was just wrong. SuSE is on my PPC machines right now because it needed the least work (for me, anyway) to get it running fast.
2. Let's also see some "no MacOS, no way" things happening. I don't want MOL, I don't want to keep System around. I've never had much luck with the "official" method (the 800k Apple_Bootstrap parition trick) for having a MacOS-less PPC box. I have always used Mandrake on x86, and I hope they'll get this one right.
3. Voodoo 3! I have a Mac-ized Voodoo3 gathering dust because none of the kernels seem to work, even the latest 2.4.x. Please, there are people with PPC boxes that aren't running ATI. Let's see some cool stuff happen!
Gesture control represents something new, and to many people, interesting. I am not aware of any other OS/Desktop with gesture interfaces as a component.
Anyway, this does look like a Freshmeat thing, but I think talking about gesture entry, rather than biching about the story, is what the editors intended.
Re:What can we do to stop this from happening agai
on
Mandrake Shakeup
·
· Score: 5
I'm just another zealot, but...
How many proprietary companies went down in the past year? How many closed-source/non-[F|f]ree companies slashed their staff, killed off the management team, and "refocused"?
Does it even enter the realm of remote possiblity that perhaps many of these companies weren't focusing on a business model that generates income?
Yes, Mandrake can be had for free. I tend to buy the boxed set - because waiting to download a few ISOs is a pain in the ass, and because it is indeed the point of this whole thing.
It is probably more that they don't offer much of anything else beyond a nice distro: and that's where they're screwed. It has nothing to do with the GPL.
RH has certification, consultants, and a varied business (with Cygnus, etc). They've got partnerships. They've got industry recognition. If you were to ask Ballmer which Linux company they fear (or are concerned with), I'd bet dollars to donuts his answer would be Red Hat.
Mandrake made a great product - I'm using Mandrake 7.2 right now, and intend to buy 8 RSN - but they didn't have the varied model RH has. They aren't getting preinstalled on Dell or IBM. They aren't the 'gold standard' of compatibility.
I'll be sad to see them go, if they do. OTOH, I can always use Debian, Red Hat, or Slackware.
Re:Why i'm still not switching...
on
Mozilla 0.9 Out
·
· Score: 1
I just skanked it, before the/. effect took hold. Gotta tell you, it loaded *faster* that Netscape on my PIII/500. I had just typed mozilla & and scooted my chair back to go get a Coke, figuring it would still be loading by the time I got back, and it popped up. Note that this is a busy desktop: xmms, a gazillion xterms and gvim windows, etc etc.
Perhaps these results are far from typical, but if it keeps up, I'm going to remove Netscape once and for all.
you gotta admit, that's not a compelling argument to the average user, who can barely remember their Hotmail password and has never even used Windows Update, who clicks on every damn thing you present to them.
The problem with this is the exact opposite of your argument: the average user will think its mana from heaven. Not knowing any better, they'll vote with their dollars.
Boss: Hey, Dave just called, his PC is dead. Can you pop in a replacement?
Me: Sure, no problem. What's his machine?
Boss: uh, rack 2, #5. I think.
(walk over, yank out that Blade card)
Someone: AAGGHH!
Me: what you say?
Boss: OOps, rack 5, number 2. That was the President's machine.
Well, if a gun could only be fired once is "safe", then obviously duels should be reinstated; they traditionally used single-shot pistols. Ask Alexander Hamilton how safe one is. Oh, wait, he was killed. By a single shot.
Second, saying that single-shot firearm is somehow useful for defense shows a misunderstanding of the reality of weapons used for defense. FBI statistics show that when firearms are used legitimately (this includes police officers), the rate of accuracy is low - something on the order of 20%. So, my "safe" single-shot pistol is virtually useless for defense. Only the most highly-trained marksmen would ever stand a chance of hitting a target - and police, like the military, don't get nearly enough firearms training.
Re:Yes, but is it well written?
on
Noir
·
· Score: 4
It's not very well-written. The prose is dense, only not in a way that I would call compelling (like, say, Vinge or Wolfe). It meanders, it poorly visualizes many aspects of the world (crucial in sci-fi, since you're dealing with things that often are way outside the norm), its got long, boring gaps. Its just not... tight, I guess, for lack of a better word. Cohesive, maybe, is better. Like someone you know who's really smart and inventive, but can't explain how to make a baloney sandwitch without telling you what they did last night, that time they took a road trip to Ontairio...
OK, so if I get in a car accident, it'll call my spouse, send my medical records, and reschedule my appointments.
How do I tell it? Are we going to wire my car with Hailstorm, too? I drive a friggin 1991 Bronco II, not exactly a tremendous technology platform. OK, maybe my WinCE Pocket PC will do it for me; hope the paramedics know how. No, better yet, I'll let them spend their time keeping me out of shock.
I'm all for "changing society's infrastructure", but c'mon.
Slashdot Mirror
We don't dethrone by imitation. The original post asked why all the apps were copies/clones/imitations of existing software, and I attempted to answer that. I never said it was my idea.
I don't think Joe OfficeUser should use Linux, anyway. All I care about - as someone using the "Dead" linux desktop at home and work - is that I can get access to the documents I need to do my job. There are precious few, because I'm a sysadmin and live my life through xterm's and vi. Still, sometimes the boss wants a document, or a diagram. I need the ability to do that, without rebooting into Windows.
>Here's the real question, tho: Why do Window-hating Linux developers clone of Windows applications and technologies ? We have >clones of Word, Visio, TWAIN -- hell, KDE and Gnome often try to clone Windows, right down to the damnable "Start" button.
Duh. Because back when Linux resembled Unix circa 1989 - that is, it ran X w/ twm or fvwm - everyone said "It's OK, but it can't run a word processor, it doesn't have a scanner interface, or an image editor beyond 'xpaint', what a P.O.S." So the community wrote them. "But windows has better ease of use". So they riffed on familiar metaphors.
Now, its a "clone" of "damnable" technolgies. Hey, don't blame the community. The people in charge of these things - so-called pundits and experts - said this was what it took to get Linux into the enterprise, to dethrone microsoft, and to make a better world. If you want things any different, set the wayback machine for 1993, and convince the pundits otherwise. The community responded to overwhelming stimuli.
IMHO, Windows is, was and will be a clone of the Macintosh GUI. Maybe W2k and XP are sufficiently different, I would grant that, but W3.1 was a clone of mwm and cde (look at the damn window controls!), and W95-WME are clones of Mac interfaces. NT was intended to compete with Unix, and therefore borrows many familiar aspects, same with W2k.
Everyone riffs on everyone else. Face it.
ooops. right. I knew that. wanna hit on this?
Mozilla comes with a powerful configuration tool called gcc, which combined with an editor, can be used to change every facet of the programs behavior.
Rather than continuing to compete against the likes of Sun, Compaq, and IBM, VA Linux has decided to compete against the likes of... Microsoft, Yahoo!, and other properties. WONDERFUL plan.
Actually, all saracasm aside, I think its a decent plan. Really. Microsoft is doing the services thing; IBM does the services thing; why not focus on the services thing? Shure, why not.
Today I came across a ZDNet story (yah, yah) where MS sid it will spend $1 billion US to market and promote WXP. You guys have said you'll spend the same amount on Linux.
Now: for as long as I can remember, IBM has been synonymous with "good technology, bad marketing". OS/2 stands out as a particular example.
Do you think that a cool (Dr. Evil style) 1 billion of MS's marketing dollars can match the same amount of IBM's best and brightest cranking on Linux? Do you see this as a marketing battle, a technology battle, or both (I doubt its neither, although philosophical issues factor in too)?
Shouldn't the person who wrote that do a little
:%s/CLI/CLR/g
action? Have they changed their tune mid-stream? (yes, I read the article, its just that this is the first time I've seen CLI amongst the gajillion references to CLR).
(Coming soon from Microsoft: Common Language Interface Technology. Or not.)
I don't understand this at all.
OK, so, you can't use Oracle, because its proprietary. Fine, use MySQL. No, wait, that's largely banked by VA (IIRC). Also rule out Postgres, and Interbase for similar reasons.
So *develop your own*? That just makes no sense. "NIH" (Not Invented Here) kills companys, it blinds their thinking from the best tool for the job.
Why can't Red Hat just partner with NuSphere/Greatbridge/etc? Is it NIH, or something about business I just don't understand?
Last point: This has (apparently) appeared out of nowhere. Some press, but that's it. No beta program. No white papers. No conspicuous hiring of RDBMS gurus - hell, check the Borders in Durham, I doubt they've even bought a textbook on databases. What gives here? Are they going to launch a product without first having running code?
the benchmark compared it to Apache, and not, say, IIS, iPlanet, or other servers.
>I suspect that this is why SETI has been so unsuccessful - most alien civilisations have performed expirements such as this and then been promptly destroyed.
Oh, please. Stop watching Star Trek.
If another civilization, one advanced enough to have advanced radio telescopes, were to start THEIR SETI program, they'd have around 50 years of our transmissions. Which means, they'd have to live in a 50 light-year area around us. The cosmos is, to quote Douglas Adams, "really big". A few thousand intelligent civilizations near the galactic core - what, 30k light years away? - would be sufficient to explain SETT's "failures". We can't hear them because their signals haven't reached us yet. The light we see today is often (said in a Sagan-esque voice) billions of years old, some of it left its star before the earth existed. A million intelligent civilizations can't overcome the speed of light and the time at which they become capable of radio astronomy.
While I'm at it, could you provide any pointers to data that says we're all going to die in this manner? Outrageous claims require outrageous evidence, after all...
The difference is simple: I own a book. You cannot take this book away from me . It is in my house; to try to get it from me is against all sorts of other laws.
I have a certain obligation, not to sit down and type it, word for word, into the computer. This is possible, but difficult. In the same category are things like building your own car (from scratch, not a kit), and so forth.
IP is an idea that floats around in your neurons. There's a concrete difference there.
We had the same problem (Fairfax, VA). What was our solution? We yelled and yelled and yelled. We bitched and moaned. We called them and complained over and over.
We got DSL very soon thereafter. Somehow the technical issues vanished, although they claimed a top speed of 780-something because of them.
Now, I titled this post YMMV, and I mean it. I don't want people to reply "But that's not possible!!!!!" over and over. It may very well not be possible; my suspicion is they (Verison) were lying when they said it wasn't possible (meaning, the lines in our area were just fine, etc). It wouldn't be the first time I'd caught them in a lie. What my point IS, is don't just wait. Make a stand, or just get a cable modem and tell them to fuck off.
Was Young's comment, not about predatory monolopolies, but instead:
"...our governmental infrastructures should be permanently open to competitive bid..."
Yes, Microsoft is the standard, and I'll even give (Linux zealot that I am) that IE is a better browser than Netscape4.x/6, and there's some good tools there on IIS (wealth of MCSE's, etc).
BUT, the truth in that statement - there should be a bid - is beyond petty squabbles about the better OS. If MS really does present the better solution, it should be given the chance to prove it, rather than being implemented because its the "default".
It makes me mad as a Linux advocate. I'd like to "lose" fair and square. If I can't write a good response to an RFP, if I can't get the people and the code running, then I deserve to lose. But I doubt anyone really put any thought into it. We need [foo], let's put it on IIS. Call MS and get a nice site license.
(I think I can get flamebait and troll all in one post)
Quote:
"There's no block to people putting features on Windows," he snaps.
Isn't that part of the problem?
1. Putting a feature into Windows means its now a target for embrasure (is that a word?), extension, or imitation. You have just decided to compete with MS. Somehow I doubt their "shared source" will help. Ask Stac how much success they had in putting features into a Microsoft product.
2. This statement is, to me, implicitly saying that innovation is dependant on Windows in the first place. Wasn't it Jackson who said (paraphrased) MS makes a barrier to innovation with this kind of thinking? They hammer the doors shut if you aren't talking Win32?
>Had to re-build perl from source because I couldn't build a module because of missing headers
Huh? Did you install perl-devel? When I first started using Mandrake it used to frustrate me to no end because 'perl -MCPAN -e shell' would never work. You have to have the perl-devel package and the appropriate kernel headers installed for it to build packages from CPAN.
>Flaky hardware detection software (call me when HardDrake actually works)
Ring, ring. I have had nothing but success on many and varied platforms, desktops, laptops, and servers. Are you using esoteric hardware?
1. Someone, please someone, make an installer that works? I've tried all of them for PPC; there was a LinuxPPC installer (IIRC) that was broken, the FORTH code for the 'blessed' system partition was just wrong. SuSE is on my PPC machines right now because it needed the least work (for me, anyway) to get it running fast.
2. Let's also see some "no MacOS, no way" things happening. I don't want MOL, I don't want to keep System around. I've never had much luck with the "official" method (the 800k Apple_Bootstrap parition trick) for having a MacOS-less PPC box. I have always used Mandrake on x86, and I hope they'll get this one right.
3. Voodoo 3! I have a Mac-ized Voodoo3 gathering dust because none of the kernels seem to work, even the latest 2.4.x. Please, there are people with PPC boxes that aren't running ATI. Let's see some cool stuff happen!
Gesture control represents something new, and to many people, interesting. I am not aware of any other OS/Desktop with gesture interfaces as a component.
Anyway, this does look like a Freshmeat thing, but I think talking about gesture entry, rather than biching about the story, is what the editors intended.
I'm just another zealot, but...
How many proprietary companies went down in the past year? How many closed-source/non-[F|f]ree companies slashed their staff, killed off the management team, and "refocused"?
Does it even enter the realm of remote possiblity that perhaps many of these companies weren't focusing on a business model that generates income?
Yes, Mandrake can be had for free. I tend to buy the boxed set - because waiting to download a few ISOs is a pain in the ass, and because it is indeed the point of this whole thing.
It is probably more that they don't offer much of anything else beyond a nice distro: and that's where they're screwed. It has nothing to do with the GPL.
RH has certification, consultants, and a varied business (with Cygnus, etc). They've got partnerships. They've got industry recognition. If you were to ask Ballmer which Linux company they fear (or are concerned with), I'd bet dollars to donuts his answer would be Red Hat.
Mandrake made a great product - I'm using Mandrake 7.2 right now, and intend to buy 8 RSN - but they didn't have the varied model RH has. They aren't getting preinstalled on Dell or IBM. They aren't the 'gold standard' of compatibility.
I'll be sad to see them go, if they do. OTOH, I can always use Debian, Red Hat, or Slackware.
Or functions like
touch (my $bitch) and die;
I just skanked it, before the /. effect took hold. Gotta tell you, it loaded *faster* that Netscape on my PIII/500. I had just typed mozilla & and scooted my chair back to go get a Coke, figuring it would still be loading by the time I got back, and it popped up. Note that this is a busy desktop: xmms, a gazillion xterms and gvim windows, etc etc.
Perhaps these results are far from typical, but if it keeps up, I'm going to remove Netscape once and for all.
you gotta admit, that's not a compelling argument to the average user, who can barely remember their Hotmail password and has never even used Windows Update, who clicks on every damn thing you present to them.
The problem with this is the exact opposite of your argument: the average user will think its mana from heaven. Not knowing any better, they'll vote with their dollars.
Boss: Hey, Dave just called, his PC is dead. Can you pop in a replacement?
Me: Sure, no problem. What's his machine?
Boss: uh, rack 2, #5. I think.
(walk over, yank out that Blade card)
Someone: AAGGHH!
Me: what you say?
Boss: OOps, rack 5, number 2. That was the President's machine.
Well, if a gun could only be fired once is "safe", then obviously duels should be reinstated; they traditionally used single-shot pistols. Ask Alexander Hamilton how safe one is. Oh, wait, he was killed. By a single shot.
Second, saying that single-shot firearm is somehow useful for defense shows a misunderstanding of the reality of weapons used for defense. FBI statistics show that when firearms are used legitimately (this includes police officers), the rate of accuracy is low - something on the order of 20%. So, my "safe" single-shot pistol is virtually useless for defense. Only the most highly-trained marksmen would ever stand a chance of hitting a target - and police, like the military, don't get nearly enough firearms training.
It's not very well-written. The prose is dense, only not in a way that I would call compelling (like, say, Vinge or Wolfe). It meanders, it poorly visualizes many aspects of the world (crucial in sci-fi, since you're dealing with things that often are way outside the norm), its got long, boring gaps. Its just not... tight, I guess, for lack of a better word. Cohesive, maybe, is better. Like someone you know who's really smart and inventive, but can't explain how to make a baloney sandwitch without telling you what they did last night, that time they took a road trip to Ontairio...
OK, so if I get in a car accident, it'll call my spouse, send my medical records, and reschedule my appointments.
How do I tell it? Are we going to wire my car with Hailstorm, too? I drive a friggin 1991 Bronco II, not exactly a tremendous technology platform. OK, maybe my WinCE Pocket PC will do it for me; hope the paramedics know how. No, better yet, I'll let them spend their time keeping me out of shock.
I'm all for "changing society's infrastructure", but c'mon.