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Cringely on StarOffice, W2k, Alpha & more
Shturmovik[KGB] gave us the
hook-up for the latest piece by Cringely. Bob does what columnists are supposed to do-ties together all the disparate news that's been happening and makes a convincing argument about a certain-company being off the tracks.
Can't we somehow convince Sun that for this particular project even something like Mozilla's NPL would be more productive? The same licensing page referenced above shows that Sun doesn't seem to like the bazaar model much, so perhaps not.
JimYup, it is from "boot"n us_torvalds_interview.htm
http://www.dcs.napier.ac.uk/~st7003/trap/linux/li
oh well i forgot there is actually a 32 bit digital unix and a 64 bit one... they have about the same functionality...
but in response to cringley's thinking compaq will drop it in favor of linux... that is a LLLLooooong shot! there is no way they will drop there installed user base like that... big mistake.
Remember when Novell owned the server market, or Netscape owned the browser market? Or what a disaster Windows was until 3.0?
I share your feelings about Microsoft's technology, but what keeps them in the game - apart from money - is their tenacity when they have a target in their sights, and the surprising nimbleness of such a large company to turn around when they need to. Of course the money is a huge factor, since it allows them to fight these loss-leader wars of attrition and win.
The landscape may be changing, but I wouldn't discount Microsoft's ability to evolve [just] fast enough to keep up...
"This means, for starters: a uniform GUI across all applications, ease of (secure) maintenance, ease of installation, great USB/plug-n-play support, etc. To me, the UI is Linux's biggest detractor, followed by ease of installation/maintenance." The same thing could once have been said about DOS. Before the dominance of Windows, there were several GUIs for DOS. One clearly won. Give Linux a little time. There will be all these things you want... and soon.
What I would like to see is D|I|G|I|T|A|L, err Compaq, pay some of their grey-of-beard wizards to study Linux.
MS could give Windows away for free. Before you laugh your ass off, think about this scenario for a moment: the situation is such that MS will have to lose something, the OS suddenly becoming a free product. Linux, *BSD, (which recently got more mindshare beause of Linux), BeOS (free for PC vendors, if bundled with the PC), FreeDOS (there are many apps that run on DOS, and FD is free) etc. Here the champ is Linux, but let's not forget the others. MS could decide to give Windows away for free, effectively killing of Linux for the masses. MS would keep the source for itself, of course. This way, it could sell apps (Office etc.) that will run best on the free OS. Making Windows free will allow MS to have even greater marketshare, and it would hurt Linux and the others. Probably the server versions of Windows (NT and W2K) would still be a per-money stuff. When I thought about this scenario, I felt quite bad. Someone tell me this won't happen! Haggar the Horrible, you know...
Yes, he is exagerrating. Much closer to 0%
Amen! These would be the best guys to incorporate features from Digital UNIX into Linux.
Compaq/Alpha would benefit from having Linux as strong as possible! (and the community would be grateful)
Don't 'cha know its happenin' now PDQ? BeOS has BeWINE, ECGS, and GNU. OS/2 has XFree, EMX GCC, and WINE/Win32-OS2. Solaris and SCO have linuxrun. They all have TCP/IP and POSIX to one degree or another. And everyone does Linux, either directly, through ports, or emulation. It's a happenin' thang, MS wouldn't understand!
It may be that folk are just too impatient, also. I expect that Mozilla will come crawling out of the woodwork any week (month?) now (M11 is said to be the first target end-user release -- M9 is the current version, and was not expected to be useable). At that point thing may start to move a bit faster (parallel debugging).
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
But perhaps if they release the source, someone else will get it to work for them. They probably won't GPL it, but their "Community License" seems to have created some features which were offered back to Java (it didn't take many of them, but they were certainly studied with interest -- check-out the Pizza compiler and Kiev). This without any attempt on their part to solicit contributions.
It's too bad that they wouldn't use the GPL, I don't like the "Community License" very much, but it's obviously better than the average one (which I typify as): "What ever bad happens, it's your fault, we get the credit for anything good. If we decide we don't like your looks, we get to take the software back. And if you complain, then win or loose you pay all legal expenses, and any resulting fine or other penalty."
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
There is no way I would be reading this flame war if "SoftwareJanitor" weren't magically privileged.
I didn't ask to be 'magically privileged'. I'm not even sure what the mechanism is for getting auto-moderated up or down. Maybe there needs to be a facility that you can specifically exclude an account if you don't want to read them (maybe there already is -- I don't remember, as I haven't looked recently). Maybe there needs to be a way for those of us who are 'magically blessed' to choose to post at a lower level if we want, or maybe instead of 'auto-blessing' every post, we should get a pool of self-moderating points we can spend on posts to make us decide which ones we think are most important.
However, if you really don't want to read 'flame wars' (and this really doesn't qualify as such in the scheme of things), then you can always excercise your browser's scroll bar or your down arrow key. Nobody forces you to read on once you get to the first message in a 'flame war' thread.
Also, Sun will be launching their next-gen "JavaStation" in about 5-6 days, I believe.
You can download StarOffice 5.1 for free here - support for Solaris SPARC/Intel, Linux, OS/2, Windows 95/98/NT, and several languages. Unfortunately, you do have to register, but if you've already got a username/password for say the Java (or Solaris) Developers Connection then you can use that.
And finally, Sun will be making available Solaris 8 early access - ie open beta to the public, for the first time for a new version of Solaris. You'll probably see the source code available later...
Huh? I know of a Robert S. McNamara who fought a land war in Asia, but I don't know much about this George character . . .
To make things worse for Redmond, Sun plans a Web-based version of Star Office that will allow the cheesiest little Java Web browser to run a sophisticated office application, even without local storage. Spreadsheets on your TV set top box are only months away.
That sound you hear is Cringely suckin' on a whipped-cream can. That other sound you hear is me not holding my breath. Yeah, sure, I'd love to see it, but realistically . . . If it ever happens, it's not going to be within "months" for any reasonable value of "months". People have tried to write high-profile shrink-wrapped end-user programs in Java, e.g. Corel and Netscape, and nothing has ever been shipped. Now, we all know (or should know) that the failure of two software projects is about as significant as two baby turtles being eaten by seagulls right after they hatch: So what? That's what the odds have always been, and we haven't run out of turtles yet. A lot of things other than Java may have been wrong with those projects -- it's well known that a lot of things other than Java were certainly wrong with those companies. Nevertheless, it looks bad and people get discouraged by these things. And there really are genuine, honest-to-God technical reasons why Java isn't ideally suited to that sort of thing, like for example the eternal speed and VM-compatibilty problems.
I have to agree...I don't think that anyone will assert that the computer/OS/tech field in general has been static for the past 20 years, and yet Microsoft has been able to advance and remain on top. They are able to adapt, but I think it's natural to try to control as much as possible so you don't have to adapt. But they are going to rest on the laurels...their free ISP service is going to be the first of I am sure many attempts to stake a dominant claim to the internet. Now I am not saying that this is a good thing mind you, but they are a corporation after all and Sun, the Open Source Community etc have the same right but maybe not the same warchest.........
Hasn't microsoft been been buying up great
art like Michaelangelo's or Leanardo DiVinci's
stuff?
Plus Encarta scares me. Orwellian control of
history. See this month's "Archaeology" for
a review of the Encarta Black History
Encyclopedia. Not too bad, but definately
biased.
-- cary
Meeja, Meeja, Meeja. It is so utterly
different from desktop bloatware as to be no
more than a mere joke - if it weren't for the
fact that it may be true...
WinCE on my telly?? My mother wouldn't approve
of that, when the blue screen appears - or what
of the couch potatoes watching a blue screening:
will they care about the 'my computer' icon
top-left? I don't think so.
--------------------------------------------
--------------------------------------------
There's a storm a-comin'....
I agree hopefully the Open Sourcing of Star Office will allow it to be re-done quicker and have less overhead.
:-(
>Where'd we ever lose the UNIX mantra of, "Do One >Thing and Do It Well"?
As opposed to Microsoft's "Do everything, or at least crash trying to."
So MS should stick to their core business, desktops and should not wander into distributed computing? Besides, Sun's core busniness is Unix systems, networking just comes with that turf as a natural sidekick. They haven't wandered an inch. -M
They've been trying ever since the browser wars, with no success. Remember MSN? Neither do I. Then there's Hotmail, (what security hole?) and Ebay (sinusoidal behavior makes its debut on the Internet). The big players to be taken seriously on the Internet do not include Microsoft. They've failed miserably because the rules of the game have changed, and they're stuck with what made them what they are.
As Cringley's well-written article points out, the MS strategy no longer applies. Close standards which take advantage of market forces (PCs becoming the dominant hardware standard) is one thing when the technology is a stand-alone box. When the technology hinges upon the Internet, ie communication between many people, closed standards will always be ignored for open ones. It's simply the nature of the environment.
For MS to reinvent itself enough to survive in the Internet Age, they must inevitably abandon all that has made them profitable. Money is the only thing keeping the company in the game, it certainly isn't technological or innovative prowess. Their current dominance in office productivity software will not save them, Star Office being offered free will do to them what they did to Netscape (what sweet irony it is). Even better yet, a coordinated triumverate between StarOffice, WordPerfect Suite, and Applixware will but speed up the process. It is simply a matter of time before the Darwinian nature of the industry makes Microsoft the dinosaur of the PC industry.
One thing I'd like to see is someone port StarOffice to the Mac. With the Sun Community Source License in place I don't see any motivation for third parties to do so.
On an unrelated front, the Hotmail fiasco is turning out to be a black eye for them, as well. Mistakes happen, but they clearly left the servers running well after everyone and his dog was raiding other peoples' accounts. (There's an article in Salon by someone who read about it in CNN, found the URL on /. and read the mail of a woman who took her boyfriend. How many other incidents like that were there? Hundreds? Thousands?)
And then their PR campaign erred too far on the side of understatement. Reading stories in the mainstream press, it sounds like that business about "required an advanced knowledge of web development language" came across as condescending and blatantly untrue.
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
That's unfortunately true. OTOH, it's a lot cheaper. The question for me is going to be "How does it stack up against ApplixWare, KOffice, WordPerfect?"
I'm not too pleased with the way that it does tables of contents or indicies, but then I'm not too happy with the current version of word either. I rather liked the way that Mac Word 5.1 did it, although it sure would have been nice to have multiple versions the way WordPerfect used to let you (the last version that I tried didn't seem to have this still available.. that was unfortunate).
...
<rest of ramble deleted>
I do have high standards for word processors. Unfortunately, MSWord has been going backwards with respect to them recently. The only recent addition that I liked was the interactive speller. OTOH, the interactive grammarian was... <Snarl>It sure would be nice if it had some clue as to what it was doing!! </Snarl>
We need a word processor that developes in the direction of peoples needs rather than in the direction of what can be marketed!
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
That would give the end user an option of either using the fat or thin client. With no additional costs to the developer.
Has anybody ever tried it?
I was referring specifically to standards for word processing, spreadsheets, presentation software, etc. I'm already 100% behind existing standards.
Behold! The new Web-based StarOffice written entirely in Java!
Now with the UltraSlow[tm] technology that makes it even more difficult to use.
New additions include InstantCore[tm] for faster and better coredumps..
Let's face it; web-based StarOffice is a bad idea, but the idea of running applications remotely is good.
.. but wait.. where have I seen that before? Hmmm..
isn't fully MSOffice compliant == unusable
That depends on your needs. I don't really have a need to be 'fully MSOffice compliant'. I find StarOffice to be usable for my needs, other than being a little bit hungry on the resource requirements side (which is a fully MSOffice compliant feature). For that matter, between different versions of MSOffice, they are often only one directionally compliant.
So you take the existing StarOffice GUI interface, make a java applet "display server" paired to an interface library for StarOffice, and voila, you're in business.
And on top of that, you get a chunk of software usable for other things...
- "History shows again and again how nature points out the folly of men" -- Blue Oyster Cult, 'Godzilla'
I personally can't wait for it to be opened up. Star Office seams like a much superior product then microsoft office. Just needs some rough edges cleaned up. But being able to run cross platform, and system independant is a true "Office" Application.
Have they released the sources to this beast yet?
Factoring the product of two large primes is the difficult problem.
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | my blog
You cannot wash away blood with blood
I think Linux has had plenty of time already. As I said, the UI is the biggest problem, but there are others, and most are inherent in the design of Linux. It is geek-friendly, not user-friendly.
That is both good and bad.
I will be surprised and impressed if Linux can deliver on the UI front. I'm not just talking about how it draws fonts and that sort of thing. I mean things like how it handles keyboard shortcuts across applications, and all the little things that make a UI complete, and above all else, *intuitive.*
Then it has to tackle the ease-of-use problems.
-WW
--
Why are there so many Unix-using Star Trek fans?
When was the last time Picard said, "Computer, bring
Or maybe Compaq will save the best parts of True64 and put them on Linux, which is similar to the survival strategy being embraced right now by SGI.
Heh heh heh.... This would be a great trend.
Can anyone enumerate any benefits that True64 could bring to Linux? I mean, with SGI giving a journaled file system to Linux, they are making Linux much more attractive to buisnesses who want to use Linux in enterprise servers. What benefits would True64 be able to share?
---------The early bird gets the worm, but the second mouse gets the cheese.
Well, if it weren't such a bloat, it would be a great suite. I've used it, and is a very good replacement, but the problem is the bloat
Called "Nerds 2.0.1". It blew chunks.
StarOffice rules, i love it.
I definately don't agree that just because it's not M$Office compliant that it's unusable, in fact i think that's what makes it so great - it's by time we started a new standard for word processing. No more storage of massive binary data, use something editable by an ASCII editer, like LaTeX, sure it takes up more space, but that isn't as much an issue as it once was.
Don't know if StarOffice uses binary data that bad or not, but i know that M$Office uses it like it's going out of style.
I read an interview in Boot i think, last issue before they went to MaximumPC or whatever, where they interviewed Linus, and i distinctly remember a remark he made on people sending him docs in word format, he said something simple to the effect of "i send it back". don't have a link, don't know if it's archived somewhere, if someone knows, please post it.
well that's my $.02
Sun (or Company X) cannot compete with MS on the basis of having a better product. Lord knows, there are a million better offerings in terms of OS's, applications, etc... If people really cared about what was better, MS would be nothing today. But instead, people are like sheep -- they just follow the herd and will easily settle for mediocrity -- as long as they don't actually have to *learn* something...
If you were say, a gov't office, you could buy a ton of thin clients and contract out the operations. If a thin client breaks, buy a new one.
There are lots of issues about security and the appropriateness of the architecture model to
the organization, but on the whole it's the way to go.
HotOffice
Chuck
try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
>Think a year or so ahead, where cable modems are more ubiquitous, and Microsoft has continued to build up influential inventment positions in a large
>number of cable companies.
But you still come back to quality of content.
And the folks who choose this sort of stuff for a living right now screw it up *way* more often than they get it right. Or get screwed over by change in fashion, change in fads, or change in advertisers.
MS will wish for the days when all they had to worry about was buggy code.
Geoff
I think I see a trend here. Maybe for them it really would be easier to muzzle the entire internet than to produce p
Compaq engineers quietly admit that Linux on Alpha runs better than Compaq's own Unix.
Well.. maybe, but AFAIK the compilers available for Linux still lacks good optimization for the Alpha.
(Doesn't the standard libraries need to be optimized too?)
Please don't hesitate to correct me if I'm wrong.. my statements are based on somthing I think I read somewhere a while ago..
Bull. There is only 64-bit Digital UNIX, there never has been a 32-bit one.
That's what SGI is betting on!
Hmmm, I think you have hit the nail right on the head, at least in McNealy's view.
Sun would love nothing more than to have fat servers and thin clients as the new computing model, especially if it's _their_ fat servers running the show. In that world, who cares what the client OS is? Sun has given up on the desktop and if Linux helps to clear MS away from the pesky PC market so much the better. It's easier for Linux to communicate with cousin Solaris on the big fat servers than it is for MS-anything and Sun knows it.
If Linux helps clear the PCs of MS and allows Sun to concentrate on the big fat servers the Sun gods will be as happy as swines in excrement.
Onto the next monopoly. This one's getting old.
-M
DEC (err ... Compaq) has C and Fortran compiler technology that is better than GCC, for the Alpha that is. I'd love to see the optimizations available in those compilers move into the GNU tools.
LaTex surly uses its own formatting codes in its ASCII text. The problem with ASCII is that you will have a nice big format if you want ASCII text to be able to hold pictures, and all the cool formatting stuff that people (especially WordPerfect users) have become accostomed to using.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't XML (already) supported as a standard file format in Office 2000?
Wouldn't MS be pissed if some big-name manufacturers start installing Star Office instead of the MS Office Suite? I'm not sure that any would do that, because it would piss off MS, but smaller companies and white box manufacturers could install it at no cost and make their customers happy also.
-- Error: Cannot find file REALITY.SYS - Universe halted, please reboot!
As I remember on the Slashdot post about 64 bit NT (It runs now!!!) GCC produces pretty unoptimized output for the Alpha. From that end I find it very hard to belive that Linxu outperforms Tru64. Besides, this guys a columnist, you think he knows what he is talking about? Get rid of Tru64 and you have basically killed the Alpha as a decent platform.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
Microsoft owns WebTV.
Tell that to HP, they make everything from processors, to printers to stethescopes. I doubt they started making all those products, they expanded. And if you think HP is unsuccessfull, I'll be glade to take any stock you may have off your hands.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
I'd like to point out that, MS is not the first one to play the online media company role, unlike what they did in X86 desktops. Don't you see AOL is AIM'ing microsofe pretty good, AOL has the leverage to force people to upgrade to an entirely different AIM if it want. Not to mention that AOL runs promotion and FUD as good as M$.
And the free ISP thing is a joke, everybody offers it now, there's another ISP offering the exact 3 years deal with eMachine (damn if I remember who) aol is keep sending you "another 2 free months" CD after you quick, And none of them is that much better that netzero, with free pop3. If I want to pay for the ISP, I want cable connection.
M$ still hasn't put anything intelligent into the home electronic device, I guess Billg doesn't like sushi.
CY
Their current dominance in office productivity
software will not save them, Star Office being offered free will do to them what they did to
Netscape (what sweet irony it is)
Don't forget when IE was being offer free, it was inferior to Netscape, but SUN doesn't has a OS to push it to people's mouth though. I guess they will have to "intergrade" it to the applidviewer hehe.
CY
I think Cringely's right, here. The difference in speed is mostly in user space and due to gcc producing slower code than Digital/Compaq's compiler. And DU has some hand-optimized libraries (esp. math libraries) that are much faster on the alpha than the vanilla GNU versions.
That's assuming, of course, that someone doesn't already know the language or the facts before they click the little Office icon. For MS Office to presume to correct MY grammar (or correct anything else, for that matter), is the height of absurdity. I didn't earn a degree in English to then have to sit through His Billness' "verb conjugation wizard."
Shows how difficult it is to get it right. Even though his numbers don't seem believable. Do you think Sun will be able to get it right if MS can't? Even with the "full on power" and "superiority" of the Open Source movement?
If real email clients are so cheap, why have Web-based email? Access from anywhere and ease of entry for the beginning user.
After you've spent an hour or two helping a writer friend get Office installed and patched and running and help him to navigate past the paper clip doing its "Welcome to Word" routine you (and him) really wish he could dial-in to somewhere and have a fully-functional up-to-date office app to run that's administered remotely. There are lots of people right now acting as their own sysadmins because they have to. They'd love an alternative where they get to just use the system.
Plus, even in America, something like half the adult population doesn't even use a computer yet. These people are not going to be screwing around with a Windows PC just to run Office, no matter how cheap the PC is. If they can boot up a terminal that always works and get a word processor that always works, they'll do some word processing. That's a big, untapped market.
Amen! I LOVE Linux, BUT...Until it gets the productivity apps (StarOffice has a LONG way to go to top off97 in terms of Programmability, User Interface (if I don't like ActiveDesktop why the would I like an office suite taking over my desktop like Staroffice wants to?), IMNSHO, Linux needs: Consistent GUI GREAT IDE (unless you can convince newbie programmers that it's easier to program on a Linux boxen than say VB 5.0, your not going to attract the new programmers and Ideas Linux needs) Decent MTA, I single this out because there simply doesn't seem to be an "Outlook" or "Lotus Notes" killer MTA for Linux. On average most Home users spend a significant portion of their time in email. They want a friendly, stable, MTA that can read the HTML mail that looks so "keen". Super Webbrowser. Your home user lives in email and their Webbrowser when they aren't playing games. Netscape/Mozilla are still VERY buggy (if I get one more prompt bitching about multiple sessions I'm gonna scream) OPERA is a good competitor, but can it compete with IE? As bloated and convoluted as IE is, it's still got the majority of the market, so any competitor will have to plan not breaking support for it if they expect Home users to go for it. Better Hardware support. USB, Better P-n-P (much as I hate it, it's the defacto standard for new hardware). Better Printer Support. While looking for a Printer for my Linux box I was dismayed at the lack of choice (due to Manufacturer's not providing Linux Drivers). This will most likely have to come from the Printer manufacturer's as companies like Lexmark aren't going to release their API's anytime soon I'd love to see Linux Desktops rule the market, but until some very intensive effort is devoted to the core issues with using Linux as a desktop machine I don't look for it.
Bugs Bunny was right.
Check out OpenVMS Galaxies. An integration of clustering and SMP that allows you to take advantage of the best of both!
OpenVMS also has the same superior language compilers as Tru64.
I work for Compaq (formerly Digital) in the ZKO facility, which does a large portion of the operating system work. We also recently had a visit from our CEO. I think it's safe to say that Tru64 (not "True64") Unix will be here to stay for quite a while. There are a bunch of people here who work with Linux for Compaq or just at home (like me). Linux will not replace Tru64 Unix (as far as Compaq is concerned) anytime in the near future. Both products will be in use: Tru64 Unix is being targeted at much higher end areas with capibilities such as TruCluster (what I work on) and Linux is for "normal" size servers or desktops. Most of the work going on is to make sure Linux and Tru64 Unix play well together, not to drop one or the other. In fact, we'll even be keeping OpenVMS around for quite some time.
Our new CEO is big on "enterprise level computing", which to him/Compaq means high-end Alphas running Tru64 Unix, possibly in large, highly-available clusters. Ask maddog sometime about Tru64 Unix; he'll probably agree that in many areas it is better than Linux from a "computer science" point of view.
(Flame gear on)
Nice try astroturfer. Sun is giving away an Office Suite that competes with 50% of M$'s business. They are doing to M$ what M$ did to Netscape. What goes around comes around.
rm -rf microsoft*
The point you are missing here is user level and root level. At least thats my take...the worst it could do is take down that specific user. Maybe rm -rf his home dir or something along those lines. Windows (nt et all) have never had the concept of user level and root level security implemented very well. Another reason that it wouldnt be as effective is userspace and kernel space. Programs from Microsoft are so integrated into kernelspace (for "ease of use") that its scary. Of course I could be talking out of my ass but then again I dont use staroffice to read my mail. Emacs works just fine ;)
"Fighting the underpants gnomes since 1998!" "Bruce Schneier knows the state of schroedinger's cat"
I've just done a 2 day intro course on these products and based on what I've learned I'd have
/etc/binlog.conf shows:
../cluster/members/{memb}/etc/binlog.conf
:-)
to say that chucking out the Tru64 kernel and replacing it with Linux is IMO not yet an option.
This is the biggest leap in technology that Tru64 has made during it's life so far, and the jewel in the crown for V5 has got to be the new filesystem, CFS (Cluster File System).
With CFS, not only can every system in the cluster see all the devices on the shared SCSI bus, but also all the devices on all the private SCSI buses too. When one system mounts a device, this appears in the mount table for all the cluster members.
The thing is that CFS is bound so closely to UNIX V5 and the kernel, that even on a standalone V5 system with no clustering there are tell tale signs that dormant cluster software is waiting with hooks at the ready. You can see this in the file system. For example an ls -l of
binlog.conf ->
Btw, {memb} is something new too. It's called a CDSL (context dependant symbolic link) and in this case resolves to "member0", changing the number where the cluster member number is different.
While I'm at this I can't resist telling you how clusters are installed, cos this was really neat too.
When installing a cluster you start off with one disk, which can be either local or shared, and install Tru64 UNIX on that. Then install the TruCluster software and select two disks on the shared SCSI, one for the Cluster disk and one for the system (member0) boot disk. When you run "clu_create" Tru64 UNIX is copyied from your current disk to the cluster disk and the boot disk containing the root f/s for member0. You then shutdown and boot of the boot disk. Hey presto, you're a 1 system cluster. The first disk you used can be junked now and reused for something else.
Want to add more members? No problem. You need to assign boot disks for each one, then run clu_add_member for each system. A system specific root is added to each, and member specific directories are setup on the common Cluster Disk. At this point you could take all your new systems out of their boxes, cable them up (though in practice you'd have done this first) power them on and then boot them straight off their new boot disks. No installation needed
The whole process is so quick we reckoned we could install and cluster of 4 x DS20's from scratch in about 1.5 hours.
I could ramble on now about the new System Management Station, that can be driven from a curses front end, a CDE GUI front end, or even a Java version of the CDE GUI from a Web browser. I could wax lyrical about the dynamicly updated pictorial system maps of the systems, their devices, buses, cluster members, etc, the new Event Manager, and lots of other things. But I reckon I've taken up enough of your time.
To wrap up I'd like to say that I think it would be very cool (and cost effective in the long term) if the Linux kernel could replace Tru64's. But I don't see that happening just yet, not for the next couple of years anyway.
Macka
Even if the virus would be limited to rm -rf on my home directory, that is still too much risk.
Just because theres no Windoze support
doesnt mean thateveryone will put Linux on it, Sales will undoubtadly be
poor as a result of M$'s announcement. I wouldnt see it as a victory for linux just yet.
Maybe the small few new users alpha can now expect to get will run Linux....
I couldn't agree more. Look at Novell PerfectOffice for a recent example of this. Sun can't even get client-side Java working to a run anything more than trivial bouncing head programs. This is true even on their own platform!!! Sun is up in the night if they think they can compete with M$ in this area. Sun's obesession with M$ is going to be their undoing.
Not if they saw an supermarket ad that sells the box 40% cheaper because they private windows --yea, a lot of little shop here in ny don't pay windows license and don't give you a windows CD, more than ebay anyway.
CY
Here in my collect, a lot of people download the whole fscking (20meg?) aol trail just to read their email -just to read their email, despite the fact that AOL does provide a webbase email software. You think people are smart?
I don't understand why the admins don't junkbuster it though.
"Word process over a 56K modem line (or even a DSL/cable modem)? I don't think so." I do think so.. The actual application may take a couple of minutes to download, but word processing takes very little effort to do. A plain old Pentium 100 does nothing 90% of the time when someone's word processing, which is why thin clients work. Words a big app, but most people use less than 10% of it's capabilities. Bit slow on a 56k, but very possible on a DSL/Cable modem...
I think Cringley meant webTVs in the generic sence, not the propietry M$ WebTV. After all there are other companies that make webTVs, they just have different names.
User-friendliness has nothing to do with it. Windows is extraordinarily user-hostile, overly complex and appallingly obscure, but it benefits from one key fact: it comes preloaded on PCs, as a result of which prospective users don't have to go through the utterly user-unfriendly Windows installation procedure. If you put Windows and Linux head-to-head in front of a computer-unaware beginner with the goal of installing exactly the same feature set, Windows would be so far behind that it wouldn't even figure on the user-friendly map.
Don't flatter Microsoft with a "user-friendly" label. It's not. Their horrid product is just preloaded, and Linux isn't.
"The question of whether machines can think is no more interesting than [] whether submarines can swim" - Dijkstra
You mean 32bit NT with a few 64bit extensions? :)
What is the market share breakdown of "webTV"
companies? I do believe WebTV has the biggest
market.
-WW
--
Why are there so many Unix-using Star Trek fans?
When was the last time Picard said, "Computer, bring
There are two approaches to writing, say, an office app in Java: just rewrite the whole thing and have all of that run in the JVM on the client machine (which may be unplugged from the net at that point), or write it such that most of the crunching takes place on the server and the client side is just a smart user interface (something like the X Windows model but at a higher level).
Corel (AFAIK) tried the former, and at a stage when the Java language and JVM technology was in its infancy (no JIT, etc). It bombed. I don't know that Sun is taking the latter approach, but if they want to sell servers that's the way I'd bet. That could be very workable indeed. (I've done apps like this, where the core logic, data storage, etc took place on a Unix server but the GUI ran on an NT workstation. It's a very workable model.)
Since Sun is talking about having this stuff run in e.g. Java-enable cell phones, the later is almost certainly the model they're using.
-- Alastair
Now that Star Office is free and psuedo Open Sourced how can the Office Suite Applixware hope to compete?
What Linux user in their right mind is going to buy Applixware now?
I plan on downloading and using Star Office on my Linux box and I want to thank Sun for their generosity.
Now what scares me is how Open Source is being used as a weapon, thats not what it's about, or is it? The target was Microsoft but I'm afraid a lot of the little commercial developers are going to be taken out first.
IMO Linux needs more commercial developers and tactics like the Star Office move will only scare them away, it's like poisoning the water hole. Some of the extremists may argue that this is a good thing, I don't believe it is.
Really smartass? In that case explain:
ULTRIX on MIPS3 processors (32 bit)
OSF/1(32 Bit variant)
Both of these are Digital UNIX an are/were 32 bit. Never seen a 64 bit VAX.
Seems to me that open sourcing the Netscape browser didn't do to much to revive it. (MSIE now has over 50% of the market)
I can't see how open sourcing Star Office is going to bring it to the top.
He made some good points, but others weren't so good.
For instance, he talks about WebTV:
"This puts Microsoft at both a price and platform disadvantage and virtually guarantees we'll soon see server-based office applications on WebTV."
Microsoft owns WebTV.
Doesn't he realize this is the exact reason MS bought WebTV in the first place? Right now, they don't even offer Java on that platform... so why on earth would they want to buy WebTV -- a company that could potentially a huge distributor of an alternate platform (Java)? So they can control it!
It was a fight just to get RealAudio (another MS foe) on WebTV. If MS ever finally decides to let Java onto WebTV, you can bet your sweet bippy that they will have their own java-enabled Office software ready and waiting. Or maybe their version of Java will lack a few things needed to run StarOffice applets...
The second problem I had with Cringely's article is that he makes the same assumption many Linux zealots make: If the software is free, everyone will use it! His last paragraph was almost a joke.
Linux is NOT a threat to Microsoft (or any user-friendly OS maker) at the *consumer level* until it is re-designed from the ground up to be USER-FRIENDLY.
Otherwise, you'll be limited to the sysadmins, networking dudes, geeks, academics, and programmers market. Not that there's anything wrong with that... but I'm sick of hearing about how Linux is going to take over the world. If you believe that, you're not living in the real world. I consider myself OS agnostic... I've used and liked quite a few (Windows, MacOS, Irix, BeOS, etc). This gives me the power to look around without tinting my view with a personal OS bias. I just do not see Linux invading the consumer market until it has a MAJOR overhaul.
This means, for starters: a uniform GUI across all applications, ease of (secure) maintenance, ease of installation, great USB/plug-n-play support, etc. To me, the UI is Linux's biggest detractor, followed by ease of installation/maintenance.
-WW
--
Why are there so many Unix-using Star Trek fans?
When was the last time Picard said, "Computer, bring
StarOffice has lots of nice features, and is great at reading/writing MS Office formats. But on my PPro200, it's so sluggish that I thought it was already written in Java.
Office isn't 100% compatible with Office, or even 50% compatible, especially not among the various versions, or even among the subreleases of an individual version.
I deliver database files to mailing houses for CASS certification, always in DbaseIII format because anybody can read them. It's the gold standard among formats. The dolts always send them back in XLS files (which version? who knows), I reject the work, and then they click on the .dbf button (duh), and I get my data.
This is not a valid criticism of any program, let alone Applix or SO.
Indeed this could be the new strategy, although I think it took the increasing visibilty of Linux and OSS for the corporate jocks to clue in.
Since MS has been known to undermine competition by underpricing and even giving away software, a tactic that is subsidised by the Windows monopoly cash cow, this strategy is basically poetic justice.
But how do you make money from poetic justice? Professional Services and subscriptions to online services. Open software is a low-to-no cost development item so giving away (not selling) something that costs nothing is not going to cause much of a loss. Selling services, all sorts of services, is where the cash comes in.
Make them come to your portal by giving the software away. They then know the site is there and may (hopefully will) come back for services and/or other goodies.
It's a service economy, remember? (I keep hearing this anyway). Services and other value adds is also the standard answer to "How do we make $$$ from OSS?"
-M
I definately don't agree that just because it's not M$Office compliant that it's unusable, in fact i think that's what makes it so great - it's by time we started a new standard for word processing. No more storage of massive binary data, use something editable by an ASCII editer, like LaTeX, sure it takes up more space, but that isn't as much an issue as it once was.
It's not unusable at all - it's just not as good (not a crime or a putdown) as MS Office yet. My real fear is that Sun will drop the ball on continuing to improve it.
Ever since I installed it my Win98 box has suddenly become unstable (used to be 2-3 days between reboots, now I'm getting BAD crashes at least once a day. The only thing I've changed is adding Star Office and Agent 1.6. I'm hoping it's a coincidence. Star Office doesn't seem to handle the page formatting stuff as well as MS Office, and the one-master-app thing is a little different.
I'm having a few beta tester type people test it out, and no complaints yet - they like it but it's an adjustment. When I get back in I'm going to have my department as a whole try it out. I wish the various apps were individually runable without loading the star desktop thing. That is one thing I find truly annoying.
Is there someplace we can email them with suggestions/requests?
http://www.bullnet.com
I like the sig - Bill Gates is obviously a brilliant mathemetician.
http://www.bombcar.com It's where it is at.
Fellowship 9/11
Which is more valuable to you, the operating system files or your own data?
... pity I can't do that for my personal stuff. True, I have a backup, but I'm still going to lose the current day's work.
I don't know about you, but I can always re-install the OS from CD
In short, the original poster had an excellent point. Best way to solve it? A few thoughts:
- Don't allow macros in document files - require that the macros be in program code files linked to documents. When the virus-laden document is emailed, the program code won't go with it. If program code is needed, send both files.
- Don't allow autoexec macros, or have a screen that pops up asking if you want to execute the auto-exec macro. Don't allow the user to switch off this protection.
I think those two changes would go a long way towards killing off macro viruses.
D
----
So naturally the Office Suite that will appear on WebTV will be a Microsoft offering, like maybe a huge CaptiveX monster.
Think? Indeed.
-M
Thank you for getting me to smile!
Well, I am glad that someone enjoyed that comment, obviously some moderator didn't, as that post got marked down a point... Ah well.
I sounds like you believe that most of the Alpha business came from NT and that the loss of NT means the loss of most Alpha business. Where I work we do hundreds of millions of dollars in Alpha business every year. Less than 10% of that business was NT based, the rest is Tru64 Unix, OpenVMS and Linux. NT has been a marketing and financial boat-anchor for The alpha platform. Many customers believed that the long term migration path was from Unix/VMS to NT and they avoided Alhpa because they didn't want to be caught up in that migration. Compaq was losing money on NT, they make great profits on VMS, Tru64 Unix and Linux.
I browse with my threshold at 2 so I can't read my own comments :-)
Excuse me. You must have missed the part where I
::shudder:: configuring the
named all the different OS's I've used, so I'll do
it again: Windows, BeOS, MacOS, Irix, and Linux.
Currently I rank user-friendliness of those
systems as such:
1. MacOS
2. Windows
3. BeOS (still young, but can beat Windows
in this category very soon with some changes)
4. Irix
5. Linux
That's just my opinion, but I would challenge
anyone to show how Linux is any easier to use
than BeOS, Windows, or MacOS for the *average
user*.
"If you put Windows and Linux head-to-head in front of a computer-unaware beginner with the goal of installing exactly the same feature set, Windows would be so far behind that it wouldn't even figure on the user-friendly map."
Hahaha! I cannot describe how absurd this statement truly is. Sadly, it is very clear
that you are blinded by your Linux faith.
Instead, why not open your eyes and try to
realize where Linux's failings really are?
It can't hurt.
First of all, your argument hinges on Windows
only. My statement was that Linux is well behind
Windows, MacOS, and BeOS. Apparantly you agree
that Linux doesn't compare to MacOS or BeOS in
the user-friendliness category.
Secondly, you only speak of the installation
process. I am more concerned about the ease of
use of the operating system after installation.
However, installation is a key for seconday OS's
like BeOS and Linux.
I am a competent computer user (been using them
for 12+ years). I have been programming for the
past 3-4 years, and I am a CS major. In short, the
first time I installed Windows 3.1, Windows 95,
Windows NT, etc. I found them annoying, and
occasionally impossible due to hardware problems.
However, compared to the 5 different times I tried
or completed a Linux installation (all in the past
year or two), I felt like I had gone through HELL.
Reading HOWTO's out the wazoo for every different
piece of hardware, securing the system, navigating
the system, and
windowing systems. None of the entire process was
the least bit intuitive. Worst of all, most of the
installs I tried were downright UGLY. Not just in
what I had to do, but what I had to look at
on-screen. These things go a long way towards
user-friendliness.
Not that I like to defend the likes of Microsoft,
but they have spent millions on testing the window
system on people to see what makes things easier
to use. This has led to advancements in things
like access for the handicapped and sight-
impaired. I would rather inflict Chinese water
torture then turn over a Linux-based computer to a
handicapped friend or relative!
Instead of comparing Linux installs to Windows --
which as you said is not fair because Windows
comes pre-installed on most computers -- why not
compare it to BeOS?
BeOS installation takes roughly 10-15 minutes, and
is almost completely GUI based. Granted, it will
likely become a longer process once there is more
supported hardware and networking/multi-user
capabilities. However, don't expect it to ever
sink to the level of a current Linux install.
It's sort of a paradox that Linux's biggest plus
is also it's largest minus: it's development is
driven largely by computer geeks. I mean, the
reason Linux has come so far is because it has had
great people working on it. But it has now reached
a point where it needs the influence of designers
and GUI gurus if it wants to approach the consumer
level. I wish Linux the best of luck, but I'm not
betting on it at the consumer level.
-WW
--
Why are there so many Unix-using Star Trek fans?
When was the last time Picard said, "Computer, bring
Yes. You will not have to eat your own head.
Star Division required registration prior to Sun's purchasing them. Many web-downloadable programs require some kind of questions to be answered. This can be avoided by using FTP sites, but it is considered correct internet etiquite to use your e-mail address as a password. What are you afraid of? Some Sun employee coming to your house? Get real. If you don't want to give all the personal info just buy the CD for $10.
Actually, Cringely has one thing wrong, which I find rather humorous for someone who tends to claim he has an inside track. The StarOffice purchase goes hand-in-hand with Corona, which is not a JavaStation. [Perhaps he is lacking the technical specs on the Corona and is just assuming it is another JS?] ....watch for a product announcement either this week or next.
Since we're the IT department, we inflict everything except the engineering apps on us for beta testing prior to rolling ANYTHING out to an end-user.
I'd worry more about companies that don't do a little inhouse testing before rolling something out.
As a result our user's office workstations are VERY stable
http://www.bullnet.com
Well, if StarOffice becomes about 10X faster, and if it loses its (IMHO) awful Windows MDI interface, then Applix will be in big trouble. Until then, I still think it's worth $80 for a set of office apps. that come up in 1 second instead of 60.
Since StarOffice has a programming script, I don't see why it also won't be vulnerable to macro viruses.
Its not just having a scripting language in the product that causes the problem. It is allowing the scripts to automatically run on opening the document for one. It is also how much outside the "sandbox" of the application the scripting language is allowed to do. Scripting languages in applications are nothing new (for example JavaScript in browsers), however VBA in Microsoft Office basically has total access to the entire Windows machine, which is a problem in a highly networked world.
Even in a Linux environment such a virus could cause a lot of damage.
Perhaps, but only likely if someone runs their office suite as root, or some other similar user-related security hole. In general, it is users that are the biggest weakness in security.
They even had a 16 bit version of Digital UNIX for the PDP-11.
>. . . look for Gates to
;-)
>reinvent Microsoft as an on-line media company.
And that will be the end of Microsoft.
Think MS is having fits over Open Source software like Linux, *BSD, Apache & Samba? Publishing is a high-risk, high-cost business. Take the book industry: the traditional rule of thumb is that of ten books published every year, 7 loose money, 2 break even, & the tenth one pays for the other nine.
Television is about the same -- only where the cost of publishing the average book is in the tens of thousands, the average tv show is in the hundreds of thousands, if not the millions.
And movie-making is even more risky: does anyone else out there remember how the movie _Heaven's Gate_ drove a major studio into bankrupcy?
Of course, if the folks in Redmond were truly imaginative, innovative people, who relied on their skills & not on their hands around the throat of the computer industry, they might be able to pull this off.
Geoff
I think I see a trend here. Maybe for them it really would be easier to muzzle the entire internet than to produce p
As soon as the stock takes a dive. 5-10% might do it. When you pay all your employees in stock, as soon as it dives, they will begin to cash out...and that will start the implosion. Those who don't get to cash in will leave. I am reminded of rats leaving the Titanic. Besides, I read somewhere, that M$ doesn't have enough in assets to cover the stock. Here it is: http://www.hex.net/~cbbrowne/mscrash.html jmr
I think he is right about one thing, as the cost of hardware keeps spiraling down, MS is either going to have to give their OS away for free or lose out to the free alternatives. I think most people would have a problem paying more for their OS than for their hardware.
Actually, bloat is a get-stuff-done-without-playing-around feature. Star Office has it. Microsoft Office has it. ApplixWare has it. Everything that comes from Corel has it.
About the only thing that doesn't have it is a glass teletype operating system.
Oh, and probably Wordstar 3.3.
The rationale behind web based applications is so that users need not shell out $$$ for a full blown PC, only a cheaper "WebTV-like" gizmo. With PCs becoming so cheap, why should anyone put up with the hassle of working with a distributed application, especially for word processing and spreadsheets.
Even if PCs don't get much cheaper, most people will be willing to spend the extra $200-400 to get a real PC and avoid the hassle of running their office suite over an internet connection. Word process over a 56K modem line (or even a DSL/cable modem)? I don't think so.
Where'd we ever lose the UNIX mantra of, "Do One Thing and Do It Well"? :-(
That happened when somebody figured out it isn't efficient to just do one thing at a time.
That Unix mantra went away in about 1985. It's easy to be nostalgic, particularly as bad memories fade and good memories expand to fill in the gaps.
-----
Free P2P Backup, Windows & Linux
Give them a dumb terminal and a nine pin dot matrix printer and tell them to deal with it.
We didn't come all this way to spurn leading edge 1983 technology.
you're going to inflict Star Office on your whole department?
What company? Time to short some stock.
History shows that companies that stray from their core business don't do so well. MicroSoft's golden egg is its Office Application Suite. Sun shouldn't compete in this area.
I haven't had much respect for BC since the business about his degree (or lack thereof) came out, but it's good to see him posting a positive view of OSS, because that means the view is likely to start showing up in the spots he does for PBS (or that use his name, at any rate), and perhaps as a sequel to his well-known documentary. This could be a good way of introducing a big segment of the public to what's going on in the OSS world, and what some of the issues are that the public should (IMO) be concerned with. Black Parrot /nologin
Compaq engineers quietly admit that Linux on Alpha runs better than Compaq's own Unix
Are they talking about DEC unix here?
And if so, would it be more practical for Compaq to open source it so that parts of it can be incorporated into Linux?
Most users don't use anywhere near all of the features of an office suite. Some users need (or want) it all, at least for some of the suite applications. "Bloat" can be reduced by letting people customize their application to their needs.
In a lot of ways, this favors a Java-based intranet approach, as features used will only be loaded as needed. (A mixed method might have the basic features in a client executable and only load specialty modules from the network.) Of course, this approach requires a network with high throughput and low latency.
Compaq engineers quietly admit that Linux on Alpha runs better than Compaq's own Unix
Are they talking about DEC unix here?
And if so, would it be more practical for Compaq to open source it so that parts of it can be incorporated into Linux?
> The early bird gets the worm, but the second mouse gets the cheese. I had to think about that one for a few seconds, but when I caught on, I L'dMAO. Black Parrot /nologin
Could it be easily be redone to use either GTK or Qt? (so that we don't have to have so many different GUI libraries on our systems)
Seeing as the source code is going to be available. You can always disable them completly. Not that this would be an easy task.
IIRC, Microsoft refused to release a seperate version with macros disabled completely. The easier Sun makes it to get rid of macros, completely, the better; for Sun.
Hmmm I really should have a look at the SCSL.
--- "If a man speaks in a forest, and no woman hears him, is he still wrong?"
Could it be that all of the anti-MS forces are trying a new strategy? Instead of the old strategy of, "compete with MS by trying to sell more competing products," the new strategy might be, "compete with MS by giving products away that are equivalents to MS's most profitable products."
The question now becomes, "if the strategy is to merely damage MS's sales and profits by giving stuff away (similiar to what MS did to Netscape), does that allow its competitors (Sun, AOL, Linux) to win?" To win=to make big profits. How will they make big profits if the market becomes used to getting stuff for free?
I don't know the answers, but I'd like to hear opinions.
Ultrix is NOT Digital Unix. Digital Unix is/was DEC's brand name for its 64bit Unix on the Alpha Platform. Ultrix was DEC's 32bit Unix for Vax and MIPS systems. Ultrix was a Unix made by digital but it is definitely not Digital Unix(tm).
Digital Unix was originally named OSF/1 prior to around version 3.2 Even at that point it was fully 64bit. There was an Open Software Foundation reference standard called OSF/1 which Digital used to develop Digital Unix and from which they licensed the name OSF/1, but Digital's implementation was always 64bit.
I browse with my threshold at 2 so I can't read my own comments :-)
Its been known for some time (few months?) that MS was going to allow Office to be run off servers. It's just their ASP strategy reworded. Notice Ballmer didn't say it was going to be free. It'll be "rented".
Heck, I doubt it'd take much work to make Office2000 work on internet servers. The question is how to entice users to do that and to work out a reliable method of securing payment and preventing piracy. Although why anybody would want to run any word processing software over a dialup (or even broadband) connection is unclear to me.
Does anyone know if StarOffice is available for Linux on Alpha? I use/like Applixware for Alpha/Linux, but I like to try new things.
Thanks!
LONG LIVE ALPHA!
Now I gotta clean coffee off of the Trinitron! Yes, bloat is a fully Microsoft-compliant feature, smartass. Thank you for getting me to smile!
If you call that supported.
Try to run it under afterstep or some other more advanced window manager.
Star Office has been getting worse and worse since the day they decided to try doing their own desktop. The fact that they do not know how to do it and it does not obide to any window manager conventions makes the matter even worse.
Anyway - it will die, unless someone takes it back to separate applications running within the normal X context like in the old days of version 3.1
Baker's Law: Misery no longer loves company. Nowadays it insists on it
http://www.sigsegv.cx/
"but it's not open source"
There, that's the only answer needed.
heh
This is one of the scariest things about the pervasive use of MS software.
Basically all entry-level business worker bees are now required to know and use Office, so nearly everybody that's using a computer at work is relying on MS's dictionary, thesaurus and grammar tools.
How much more Philip K. Dick can this get?
The skills that we use to communicate in business (which, in America at least, equals life and culture) are being taught and reinforced by the editorial department at one company!
And now encyclopedias and so on. Regardless of MS's actual intentions, the balance of power in cultural indoctrination just can't be so lopsided!
Good work, Bob X.
Please, anyone reading this, if you are, or are considering becoming a Star Office developer, see if you can work it so that I can launch star office in segments. Like, just the word processor, or I can hit a toolbar button and launch the spreadsheet program if I need it, later.
It's a great program, and a perfectly usable office suite, but I wish it was a suite, as in several apps, not one big huge-ass app. I mean, even M$ users aren't forced to always launch Word and Excel and Access and a drawing app at the same time if they want to use any one of those things.
Ok, that's my rant. I know a lot of others feel the same, I just hope some of them have to coding talent I don't have, and dig in on this problem!
There is no K5 cabal.
I am not the real rusty.
A few months ago one of my friends was joking about Star Office by saying it was optimised for Java (i.e.: it is really slow), if they rewrite it in Java they will have a lot of optimisation to do before it becomes useable on my K6 233Mhz.
"The obvious mathematical breakthrough would be development of an easy way to factor large prime numbers." Bill Gates,
Over the next couple of years Microsoft's earnings growth and margins are sure to decline for the reasons Cringley outlined, but look for Gates to reinvent Microsoft as an on-line media company.
Even if Microsoft loses the Internet server and home user markets (although they'll eventually drop personal use Windows license prices - to zero if necessary), they'll have the business and office application markets for a long time as a cash cow. They also have a *huge* warchest.
If you look at all of Microsoft's cable aquisitions (some 20-30 investments - incl. the recent $600M or so in Rogers), the battle they appear to be starting to get in with AOL, and Gate's long standing desire to get into the "razorblade" business, you can see pretty clearly where they are headed...
Where'd we ever lose the UNIX mantra of, "Do One Thing and Do It Well"? :-(
Your Servant, B. Baggins
at least IIRC...
This sig left unintentionally blank.
If Sun (a company with no history of producing successful end user applications) manages to use Java (a language with no history of producing successful end user applications) and a browser (a "platform" with no history of producing successful end user applications) to produce successful end user applications, I'll eat my own head.
Cringely made at least one good point even tho' it has been made before (ESR comes to mind). That is that M$ is afraid of open standards.
So, instead of getting on the StarOffice/Applixware/AbiSource/whatever soapbox, the Linux/Open Source community should be screaming and shouting about open standards. TCP/IP and HTML have proven what benefit there is to open standards. So, why not open standards for all software?
Word processors have been around for a long time, so why isn't there a WP standard? You basically need formatting (indentation, justification, margins, etc.), fonts, chaptering, indexing, etc. If that were standardized, then all WPs could import and export docs that all others could read.
The same can be said about spreadsheets and presentation packages. DBs already have SQL which is somewhat standardized. And there are probably applications that I never use that could be included.
Let's climb on the standards bandwagon, and ask the other OS backers to join us. If all the BSDers, BEOSers, UN*Xers, Hurders, OS/2ers, and any otherers could define standards and write all Open Source software to them, then a lot of the commercial companies that have come to Linux in hopes of saving themselves from the M$ juggernaut would pretty much have to play along. And thanks to the success of the Internet, open standards carries a lot of weight with business AND end users.
Would just like to make a comment on the Staroffice Web application.. it's a move in the right direction. Thin clients/fat server model is the ideal one for most home applications. The whole idea of spending $2000 or even $1000, to get a piece of equipment that is going to be used for a little bit of publishing and small-time number crunching, and which is going to be obsolete in a matter of years.. is ludicrous. Computers arent worth that much to many people. The javastation idea would have been really great if it was implemented correctly. A native java chip running remote apps? Expensive servers.. but far cheaper client machines? This sounds like the PERFECT model for a lot of businesses deploying computers to employees. It takes care of a lot of issues like consistency (everyone would run the same versions of apps, and everyone could have their customized preferences stored on the server), upgrading (upgrade 1ce), the path to obsolecence (the clients will not grow obsolete as fast. Perhaps the server.. but then, 1 server purchase v. 20/30/100/1000 client purchases is still a good deal). -Laxative
Since StarOffice has a programming script, I don't see why it also won't be vulnerable to macro viruses. Even in a Linux environment such a virus could cause a lot of damage.
I'm not keen on using programs that require anti-virus tools as std. equipment.
Besides SO51 is somewhat simplistic, and this simplicity of use is what makes it attractive.
Psssst: it's supported on more platforms than MSOffice!!!
Today's English Lesson: Oxymorons
Sanity.html - Error 404 not found
If StarOffice can pull off converting their internal data format to an open standard like XML (almost as much buzzword value as Linux and OSS), then other providers, be they Corel or Microsoft, will suddenly find themselves playing catch-up, just as they did when the Internet first exploded on the scene.
Your Servant, B. Baggins
"True Cluster" is a High-avaliability clustering available with TrueUnix. In my opinion this and the Fortran-compiler are by far the best pieces of software Digital ever produced.