Re: [tlug] playing real video with an open source player

["Stephen J. Turnbull" <stephen@example.com>]

>>>>> "Godwin" == Godwin Stewart <gstewart@example.com> writes:

    Godwin> Yeah, well my name being Stewart I should be able to trace
    Godwin> my ancestry back to the Scottish royal family, or does
    Godwin> that *really* sound like I'm scraping the barrel?

*scritch*  *scritch*

>>>>> Speaking of robber barony, JB speaketh thusly:

    >> I dunno.  A lot of people seem to not like [Microsoft] much,
    >> even as they keep on buying it.  The fact that they believe
    >> they have no alternative seems to make at least some of them
    >> resent it more.

I have to agree; 75% of the Microsoft user population I know are
bovines a la Lessig.  The ones who think about choice want an
alternative, about 4 to 1, but the network externalities have them
locked in.  Even among the *programmers*, they'd be happy to *follow*
somebody competent away from Microsoft (assuming all their friends
did, too), but they are not ready (psychologically or technically) to
*lead*.

I got called a "bigot" on c.e.x a couple of days ago because I said
that improving reliability of the XEmacs installer for Windows was not
"profitable" in the sense of being likely to attract potential
developers to XEmacs.  The guy said that "fix it yourself" when
addressed to Windows users was "bigotry" because it doesn't address
their needs.  While I think the guy is an aho (add sibilants and
liquids to taste if you don't speak Kansai-ben), he does have a point.

There are lots of Windows users who probably would appreciate the
power of Emacs if it installed seamlessly and worked out of the box
and didn't break for no apparent reason.  But it often fails one or
more of those tests, at least on Windows XP.  So they throw it away.
Now these are not your ordinary wapuro users; if they've heard of
Emacs, they are programmers (or related to one).  The point then is
that even for people that we would like to think "should know better",
"fix it yourself" doesn't make sense.  Of course this shows that I'm
right---they're not going to turn around and become Emacs developers.
But it also shows that we really cannot depend on the ability to fix
things and/or experiment (that we hold so dear) to matter *at all* to
most users, even technically proficient ones.

    Godwin> Also, many have /heard/ of Linux but hesitate to use it
    Godwin> because they think they need a degree in computer science
    Godwin> to be able to. "Oh yeah, Linux, I've heard of that. It's
    Godwin> that funny thing for geeks, right?" A message about
    Godwin> usability really needs to be sent out,

Don't even think about it.  If the OS's name needs to be known to the
user, by definition it's not usable.

Look, Microsoft's goal is Windows CE running your 4-slot popup
toaster, and that's what *most* people want.  They don't want a
computer they can fix when it breaks; they want a computer that they
can blame the breakage on somebody else when it breaks.  In fact, they
don't want a computer at all.  They want some job done without them
ever thinking about it, and the afternoon off when that necessary job
stops getting done for some reason.

Even many programmers think that way.

We can't beat Microsoft on "usability" until we can match their
network externalities, and that's not going to happen any time soon.
There's a half-witting conspiracy out there.  I bought a Sharp Zaurus
... all the Sharp upgrades come as .exes.  It turns out that they're
vanilla lharc SFEs, so "lha zaurus_rom_1.50.exe" and bingo!---but this
defeated at least one reasonably quick guy I know.  Does Sharp tell
you that?  No, file(1) does.  I bought a Corega wireless access point;
the doc tells you you need IE 5.0 or higher to configure it.  A
half-lie: IE 4.x would blow chunks, of course, but Safari works fine,
and I bet Mozilla or Galeon would too.  But if you're not a die-hard
FLOSS advocate, why risk it?  There's always a box with IE on it
around somewhere....

We can't beat Microsoft on "power", either.  Microsoft is going to get
the apps first (or very soon after Apple), because their users will
cough up money.  Not much, the cheap bastards, but enough that the
proprietary app-writers will flow in that direction.  The open-source
apps will too, because they're open source and generally written to be
easy to port, even to b0rked OSes---so people who are tied to the
b0rked OS will do the port.  We can't win that game.  (Don't tell me
about "server power", we've already won that technically, and we
should be able to win it in the marketing arena too, because there are
plenty of big players who don't really care whether the OS is Windows,
Linux, Mac OS X, Solaris, HP/UX, NetBSD, or even the God-forsaken
HURD, as long as it doesn't add to Microsoft's power.  But that's not
the big win we want for our playtime selves.)

The only thing left is reliability and security.  We win that
hands-down.  The problem is selling that to the bovines, who may be
very responsible in their day jobs and as parents, but when it comes
to computers they just want to have somebody to blame.

    >> Sadly true.  Basically, they've come to think that computers
    >> are basically supposed to suck, and there isn't much they can
    >> do.  They don't even know about the Mac. This is indeed a sad
    >> state of affairs.

    Godwin> I gave up on the Mac around the days of MacOS 8.1. Up
    Godwin> until that point at least they were slow, buggy and
    Godwin> unstable in my experience. Easy to use, yes, no arguments
    Godwin> there (you don't even have to think which mouse button to
    Godwin> press),

Yah, but you know what?  When I'm using Mac apps, I don't miss the
other buttons.  That's impressive.

    Godwin> but still slow, buggy and unstable.

Sure.  Good UI is always buggy, or rather good UI immediately exposes
bugs in the users.  The instability was due to the underlying OS, a
problem that has been fixed well in Mac OS X.  There's still app
instability, but except for Safari, which is quite new, it's known
buggy software (Acrobat Reader _still_ crashes on some conforming PDFs
because Acrobat doesn't use those facilities---but Ghostscript and
pdflatex do) or sabotage (at least I suspect Microsoft of sabotaging
the Mac versions of their software---Excel is the single most unstable
app I use on the Mac, except XEmacs after I've changed something, and
we know where that problem lies (^-;;;; ).

The Mac is probably not a good server platform yet; I imagine that the
Mach kernel is still slow under heavy load, at least compared to a
native FreeBSD kernel running on a comparably expensive Intel box.

    Godwin> Also, Mac hardware is comparatively expensive,

Not really.  It's expensive, but not really directly comparable.  The
ergonomics of the whole Mac experience are quite different, and some
of it is in the hardware.  I think it's worth it (especially since
it's paid for by the Japanese taxpayer ;-).

    Godwin> Nobody in the mainstream media seems to point out that M$
    Godwin> knew about the LSASS vulnerability 5 months ago, and that
    Godwin> the patch released a few weeks ago to plug it basically
    Godwin> hosed the computers on which it was installed (lockups
    Godwin> with the system process using 100% CPU time repeatedly
    Godwin> trying to load drivers).

I guess you don't "get" "mass media" then.  *Of course* they don't.
The exploit is NEWS, the fix is news, the details are only of interest
to geeks.  This is really the point about the bovinity of 4-slot popup
toasters in sheep's clothing.  Of course an arrest would be NEWS (cf
the Mitsubishi Fuso kid-killing truck hubs fiasco), but even that
doesn't hold interest very long (anybody heard anything about the
kid-killing doors at Roppongi Hills recently?)

I think the popularity of OSS OSes among the geeky faction is shaping
up very well.  There is an impressive amount of idle curiosity about
FLOSS, especially Linux, even among my decidedly non-geeky students.
But to actually gain market share is going to require a strategy based
on doing something significantly better than Windows does.

I don't know what that is yet, but I think it's worth thinking about.

-- 
Institute of Policy and Planning Sciences     http://turnbull.sk.tsukuba.ac.jp
University of Tsukuba                    Tennodai 1-1-1 Tsukuba 305-8573 JAPAN
               Ask not how you can "do" free software business;
              ask what your business can "do for" free software.