Month: December 2000

Slashdot today was talking about this interview with Linux evangelist Eric Raymond. In the interview, Raymond’s comments come across as almost being a parody of Linux true believers. Raymond is apparently seriuos about the following claims,

I think Linux will become dominant before it is really ready technically for the end users. And the reason I believe that is because I now think that Microsoft monopoly is going to collapse for other reasons in the near future.

One of the reasons is that prices for hardware is steadily dropping. This is a problem for Microsoft because their business model depends on charging a fixed price for pre-installed Windows on a machine. As hardware prices drop, that fixed price represents a larger portion of the margins of the desktop OEMs. The desktop OEMs are going to reach the point when prices drop to a certain level where they simply can’t make any money paying the Microsoft tax.

And it is at that point, that the Microsoft monopoly will collapse, because they will then unbundle Windows from their machines, and offer something that’s inexpensive (like, say, Linux), in an effort to get some of their margin. I believe that will happen probably within five to six month from now, and that’s probably before Linux will become polished and be ready for the end user.

Ummm, no. Hardware companies selling Intel and AMD boxes won’t discard Windows or replace it with Linux for one simple reason — nobody would buy them. Okay, the Linux enthusiasts might, but general users wouldn’t touch the things with a ten foot pole.

What Windows, Mac, and Linux advocates forget is that most end users could care less what OS they’re using. What the average end user is concerned about is application support on the OS. When my wife looks at a new computer she doesn’t care about the technical aspects of the OS, she just wants to make sure she can write her thesis on it, and occasionally take a break and play “The Sims.”

Linux is a long way from having the ease of use and application support to see it migrate to desktop computers except as a niche market. The manufacturer who tried this would almost certainly end up regretting it.

The issue of school vouchers is likely headed for a Supreme Court showdown after the 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals struck down Cleveland’s school voucher program as unconstitutional. The logic of the appeals court was so inconsistent with previous Supreme Court rulings that it could once and for all settle any lingering Constitutional questions.

The appeals court’s reasoning makes little sense except as an irrational judicial reaction to the idea of school choice. Cleveland’s voucher program grants up to $2,500 in tuition vouchers for poor families with children in kindergarten through sixth grades. The public schools in Cleveland all refused to participate in the voucher program, and so most — though not all — of the 56 schools that do participate are religious schools.

Since most of the schools are religious in nature, the appeals court said, it is clear that the voucher program is nothing but a veiled attempt to provide public funding to religious institutions even though, as Ryan pointed out, the program’s selection criteria for schools is based on neutral, secular standards.

Fortunately, the appeals court is likely on very weak ground. In 1999 the Supreme Court ruled that Milwaukee’s voucher program, which also involved public funds being spent at religious schools, was Constitutional. Hopefully it will follow through on that principle and allow parents to send their children to the best possible schools rather than forcing the atrocious state-run schools urban schools on them.

Source:

Ruling against vouchers could head to high court. The Associated Press, December 12, 2000.

Slashdot has the latest in a long line of threads on the issue of why software still sucks, this time feeding of off comments made by Jaron Lanier.

To me the people who don’t understand why software will always be buggy are a lot like the people who can’t understand why a more “rational” universal language such as Esperanto has never caught on. In fact even single languages such as English are “buggy” since they are constantly (and spontaneously) revised with new, often extremely complex, rules being added ad hoc onto an already bloated grammatical structure.

To use another example, software will always be buggy for the same reason that people don’t live (yet) to be 300 years old. There doesn’t seem to be any reason at the moment that our species could not have evolved to allow for 300-year life spans, but natural selection, like software users, is more concerned with getting things to work long enough for the next version to come along rather than waiting for some mythical perfect species (okay, natural selection doesn’t really any goals or intent, but you get the idea).

While clearly some software is ridiculously bug-ridden, the more features and flexibility that users demand and the larger computer programs get, the more opportunities there are for error and the more futile efforts at non-sucking software becomes.

Personally, I think companies should focus more on error trapping and fixing bugs once the product is shipped rather than trying to ship a perfect product (Microsoft is a real villain here, in my opinion, in that it takes far too long for it to patch defective software).

Space Empires IV, the ultimate 4X space game, is out and getting very good reviews.

GamesDomain.Com’s reviewer notes that there is a pretty steep learning curve — this is definitely not a game for Civlization and Masters of Orion veterans, not 4X newbies.

For fans of the genre, however,

otherwise, there simply isn’t a deeper and more challenging space 4x game in existence. The grand epic feeling of the game is hard to miss and you really feel like you are running an empire.