Date: Thu, 3 Jun 1999 08:17:09 -0500 (EST) From: "John S. Dyson" <dyson@iquest.net> To: wghicks@bellsouth.net (W Gerald Hicks) Cc: sfisher@twrol.com (Stephen Fisher), kalmadg@banet.net (James Kalmadge), freebsd-chat@FreeBSD.ORG, wghicks@wghicks.bellsouth.net Subject: Re: Bye-bye Windows Message-ID: <199906031317.IAA22792@dyson.iquest.net.> In-Reply-To: <199906030535.BAA01330@bellsouth.net> from W Gerald Hicks at "Jun 3, 1999 01:35:46 am"
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W Gerald Hicks said: > > The last thing FreeBSD needs (IMHO) is a marketing program aimed at > attracting every l33t d00d in the world to FreeBSD. Thankfully, I > can't imagine that -core would be doing that and instead are rightly > concerned with producing a professional system. > Be careful that users who have a clue, but have to use the inferior system due to other economic or political agendas. It is probably being elitist to say that each person choosing the obviously inferior choice is doing so out of ignorance or a twisted political agenda. Talking about VCR's, I have *both* EDBeta and VHS decks. Sure, the EDBeta looks better, but guess which one is generally more useful? Another issue is timing -- for the same price as an EDBeta deck (when they were commonly available), you can now buy a digital deck. The issue of VHS vs. Beta is uninteresting today, and the VHS product, has been *THE* success. The technical aspects of EDBeta's good luma SNR (when tweaked), and good luma resolution (which is on the order of laserdisk) can provide a very watchable picture -- but who cares? The new technology, which is soon to be common, will provide essentially BetaCam picture quality (modulo motion artifacts) as far as the consumer can normally see -- and totally blows away even EDBeta. (The major disadvantages of the digital consumer decks vs. the component decks like BetaCam are chroma resolution (makes quality chroma-keying difficult), motion artifacts, and tape area making the signal slightly more vulnerable.) The technical excellence (in a relative sense) of the past technology becomes unimportant, because new things will eventually come along to leapfrog everyone. The new distribution format (DVD) essentially blows away VHS or SVHS or EDBeta in almost every aspect, with only the (minor) issue of motion artifacts (which are probably much better than the consumer digital tape, due to the better bandwidth.) There are some die-hards who believe that laser disk is still better than DVD (and their argument isn't totally unfounded -- but I generally disagree.) Bottom line, is that the supurb technology of the past will eventually be just a footnote, if it wasn't also the commecially sucessful technology. Elitism can take you only so far, and I can agree about the need to keep quality high, but that doesn't have to be inconsistant with being ubiquitious and successful. Making the analogy with FreeBSD "being" Beta, and Linux "being" VHS is all unimportant because the technical advantages of FreeBSD will eventually be overwhelmed by general technical progress in the industry. Other aspects of product success (profit and market share) are more important. As time goes on, the major significant "technical" difference between FreeBSD and Linux will be the licenses. One can consider the license as a part of the feature set, since licenses specify the kind of freedom that one has in the use of a product, much in the same way as the feature set does. Given this, FreeBSD is licensed with a free license, and that can be a major advantage relative to software licensed with the non-free, but source-available terms of GPL. -- John | Never try to teach a pig to sing, dyson@iquest.net | it makes one look stupid jdyson@nc.com | and it irritates the pig. To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-chat" in the body of the message
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