On Sunday, June 30, 2002, at 11:13 AM, Larry Price wrote: > On Sun, 30 Jun 2002, Dennis Eberl wrote: > >> twisting and FUD (both tue). Obviously Microsoft responds to a need >> purchasers have. If the Linux community could define and address that need >> (which for reasons not worth belaboring it cannot, for it is built on the >> wrong "economic model"), it would be in a position to offer real >> competition to Microsoft. IMHO, it never will. > > And that need is for a prepackaged "user experience" that "just works".
Right. Just one corner (albeit a large one) of the "market" if you will. > You are correct in pointing out that the open source model won't work very > well in any attempt to optimize for a seamless UI where everything visible > to the user works predictably ( the problem for most us is that what's > hidden away is important to us ). Exactly! That's precisely what I love about Linux. The stuff that's hidden, not easy, powerful, often from the command line, very cool, very fast, slicker than [nevermind]... > Disneyland has a great User Interface, everything works the way that it's > supposed to and lot's of thought has gone into making the inevitable > difficulties psychologically unnoticeable. However it would be a truly > sucky place to get work done, particularly creative work where there were > lots of possible ways of accomplishing a given objective. Well, we may agree to disagree here. The word "creative" covers a lot of territory and I think comparing the Mac environment (both the GUI and it's command line version of Unix) to Disneyland is a straw man. I find MAC OSX to be my favorite "creative" playground for the following activities: serious writing and publishing, graphic design and layout, and web programming using HTML, PHP, and MySQL. I love BBEdit as an editor and I have never had anything go flakey on me as I have in KDE. It's a personal choice ultimately, but to be honest with you I am just thrilled by Mac OS X. I love being able, for example, to be able to pop back and forth from BBEdit or IE under the Mac GUI to a command line interface to MySQL. I know you can do that in KDE and Gnome, I just find the reliability and readability to be superior. IMHO and all that. I really apologize for sounding so preachy in all this. As usual, Larry, your comments are intelligent and appreciated. >> As it is, and this is certainly wonderful and from my perspective an >> outstanding and no doubt long lived step forward, BSD, Linux et alia will >> remain the favorites of programmers and web site administrators, but will >> not even ever succeed as the favorite operating system of the poor, for >> the >> poor are for the most part people who want what those who are not poor >> have, >> which is -- you guessed it! -- Windoze. >> > Which is the domain of the bourgeois, the rich use Macs, or Bloomberg > workstations or high-end propietary unix workstations. > <snip/> Well, we don't agree politically. As a social movement, I find Linux to be a joke. Sorry. Don't mean to be offensive, but that's my honest opinion. I do agree that Linux is a wonderful alternative to "high-end propietary unix workstations," which were what kept me locked out of learning unix for so long. And though (some) of "the rich use Macs" (where did you get your data incidentally?), I hasten to point out that a super machine like the new eMac is priced at $1099, darned competitive with a lot of Windoze junk from Dell and Gateway and Moo Cow et alia. An eMac would do anything I can see myself needing to do for the next three years and if I need to do more, well, let my employeer pay for it. I think to politicize the argument rather than to argue on technical and practical merits is plain silly. >> I hope you take this as the non-maliscious observation, possibly wrong, of >> someone succumbing to the temptation to play devil's advocate. It is not >> meant to demean or attack Linux, BSD, open source, or any of the more >> ardent members of EUG-LUG. The open source movement is an intelligent, >> needed alternative to purely commercial software that has, I believe, a >> _permanent_ place in the future of worldwide computing. I just don't think >> it is the path to universal brotherhood, world peace, or the everlasting >> Holy Grail. > > My take is that real democracies and actual free markets are untidy > contentious affairs where problems are resolved through vicious > unrelenting competition (friendly vicious unrelenting competition). > Much of the criticism the free software community levels at Microsoft and > the rest of the media industry is that they are attempting to make it > illegal to compete. I am in far less fear of Microsoft making it illegal to compete than I am of leftwing Linux zealots trying (a la Argentina was it?) making it illegal to compete. > It's as if the Disney Corporation were taking over most of the media and > simultaneously trying to get legislation passed that would require > everyone to live by disneyland's rules (oh wait... bad example Disney is > trying to do just that) What is the referrant of "It's," the first word in the first sentence of your paragraph above, please? Is this a conspiracy theory? Oh, come on now, Larry, come out from under your bed. Dennis
