Showing headlines posted by theBeez

DRM infested content will never be as easy to share and manage as unprotected content, no matter what. This is one of the most fundamental flaws of DRM: unprotected content has better value than protected content. Where there is a margin, there is profit; where there is profit there is a market; where there's a market there are suppliers. DVD Jon is not the problem, he is the inevitable consequence.

IMHO speed is overrated. Benchmarks execute hundreds of millions of the same instructions, taking ages to finish. In real life that is almost never the case, except for some pretty processor intensive jobs you'd never dream to write in a scripting language. Telling an interpreter it is slow makes just as much sense as telling a bicycle it is slow. Although that is true, millions of Dutchmen find good reasons to use them every day. If you need to go a long way, you simply won't use a bicycle. If an interpreter is too slow for a job, you grab a compiler. It is as simple as that.

On thing that the recent KDE-Gnome war has learned me is that the smartest people of all are the "civilians", our users. They just use a mixture of what is there and don't understand what the fuss is all about. They happily shop in the giant bazaar for whatever they need.

"Three reasons to use Gnome" shocked me. Sal Cangeloso is free to use what ever he wants and list his reasons for using it. But he is not free to spread FUD and use some very questionable arguments. I've used KDE from the first moment I installed Linux and I've never been disappointed.

Windows security was primarily designed for a single user, stand alone Operating System. Instead of fixing the fundamental problems, Microsoft has continued to add kludges, which in essence don't solve anything. And don't think Vista will do much better. Apart from being nagged by UAC popups, it will only get worse since Microsoft has decided security cannot be left to third parties. Well, that feels good, being totally dependent on Microsoft for your digital security..

A lot of managers are afraid to use Open Source Software, because it doesn't come with any support. Of course that isn't true. It is a classical piece of FUD. And then again, how much is support worth?

In my most conservative estimate, it will infect about sixty million PC's in Europe over the next three months. That is twice as much as Vista in a quarter of the time. That will generate $80 billion in the EC due to "cascading economic benefits" from increased employment and taxes, creating a stronger economic base. That's not bad for one night work, isn't it, Mr. Beez?

I don't have to argue here that the FOSS community has been the victim of FUD tactics a number of times. To name a few myths: no support, open to attack, unprofessional, viral licenses and so on. Each and every time the community has answered in a appropriate, accurate and responsible way. But how effective has that been? Well, not. We're fighting it every day.

[I could not agree more. - Scott]

Corruption of computer magazines? Far-fetched? I don't think so. Correction. I know it is not far-fetched. If you happen to live in Europe, you may have seen many computer magazines this summer that included the Microsoft Office 2007 test suite on CD. You may have bought such a magazine and wondered why they were so friendly to Microsoft.

In the last part of this series, I mentioned how Jim Allchin came in, saved the day and everything was hunky dory again. Wrong. The story that "Windows was broken" came out in September, 2005. The same month a blog was published about the up and coming reorganization of Microsoft, stating that is was "just just shuffling the chairs on the deck of the Titanic".

Microsoft tolerates the bugs riddling the software, since problems can always be patched over. However, with each patch and enhancement, it becomes harder to strap new features onto the software, since new code can affect everything else in unpredictable ways. In short, the software becomes unmaintainable. And Vista reached that point.

Jim Morrison once said "You can't petition the Lord with prayer". To paraphrase that it I'd like to say "You can't address the OSS community", because it is much too varied to be addressed. What do you expect when you address the community like it is a company? That there will be a board meeting? That we will issue a press statement? That all of a sudden the community will change its corporate strategy? We have none of those things!