On 03/16/11 10:43, Chad Perrin wrote:
On Tue, Mar 15, 2011 at 08:37:53PM -0400, Jerry wrote:
The nice thing about standards is that there are so many of them to
choose from.
. . . and most of them are supported on any given platform that isn't
pathologically closed.
Microsoft has approximately 90% of the desktop market share with
everyone else dividing up the remainder. If you are on a Microsoft
platform you use their products. The same applies to other platforms
and their utilities.
Corporate media, giants or otherwise, are in business to make money.
They obviously are going to focus on the largest possible paying
audience. Simple business 101.
The largest possible paying audience is generally everybody capable of
using an open standard. Thinking that MS Windows users who browse the
Web with IE constitute the largest possible paying audience is a classic
mistake of not thinking things through. Modern versions (post-6.0) of IE
support a nontrivial percentage of open standards; so do Firefox, Opera,
Safari, Chromium, and others. If you select standards supported by all
of them, you get better than 98% of the user base, and if you select
Microsoft technologies, you may get 100% of IE users (post-6.0), but you
only get something like 70% of your potential paying audience.
People don't target a given proprietary platform that appears to hold the
majority of the market because they're targeting the largest possible
user base. They do so because they're lazy thinkers.
If you hadn't have pointed this out I would have... :)
Having studied in some of the best business schools (this means you,
Monash, for one) I can vouch for the exceedingly narrow view of the
world by the so called captains of industry.
Now, as far as HAL goes, the fragmented open-source community cannot
even begin to agree on its replacement. Every distro is busy trying to
reinvent the wheel. Here you want the majority of users to be dictated
to by a minority of users who cannot even agree on a common platform
that is uniformly used throughout all the non-Microsoft community. That
reasoning is totally irrational.
I haven't really been following the goings-on with HAL, so I'm not sure
exactly what all is going on there. All I know for sure is that HAL
never lived up to its own promises. Clearly, it needed to be either
overhauled in a major way or replaced. Just as clearly, there's some
kind of confusion over how the solution will look when the dust settles.
Beyond that, I'm not sure what's going on.
I'm just as mystified. Why do we need a hotplug system on an OS which
does it already?
It is a system I've never been bothered enough to actually try to
understand, its done its job as regards the latest in Xorg (else it
wouldn't be needed all), but as for the rest of the features it
supposedly does... why? It's easier to read the man pages and
research/activate the native functionality in FBSD.
I do know, however, that the state of the disunion over HAL is no more or
less annoying than the disconnect between API versions in one poorly
implemented, incompletely specified, secretly propagated MS Windows
version's software framework and another.
The real tragedy, I think, is that the majority opinion in any major
development space (Apple, Microsoft, Linux, et cetera) is unlikely to be
anything clean, elegant, and sane, except in rare cases.
Again, my apologies for reviving the dead horse... :)
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