Hmm. Mozilla is a ground-breaking project using cutting-edge technology (or it was cutting-edge when it was started). I think that there will be a lot of software engineering papers on the Mozilla processs in the future. It is a bold project, and I believe it has succeeded because of persistence and eye-ball-count rather than good planning and solid methodology.
Then again, a lot of developers had a lot of fun and AOL Time Warner footed the bill, so who are we to complain (except that IE got a monopoly during the years of development)?
Well - they are giving it away under the restriction that your derived work must comply with the shared source license (an anti-GPL license). So, it is not given away freely (as in speech).
But, this is Microsoft after all. It's certainly an improvement.:)
Corporations routinely kill customers whenever it is profitable. Car manufacturers were not at all taking safety into consideration when they were building cars - until the 60s/70s sometime. Why? People did not realize car safetey could be done better - since the poeple had insufficient technical knowledge to improve safety belts, invent airbags and crumble zones.
Corporations started the Gulf War - amongst others. Please do not listen to what the leaders say in war matters - neither political or corporate leaders. Look at the facts - where do the money go? Who gains power? And what would the consequences of inaction have been?
Corporations have also tortured and executed many people through inadequate quality assurance. Quality assurance is expensive and unproductive, so it is not necessarily profitable. They would rather hire statisticians to figure out how to get acceptable safety, than spending extra time making sure the safety is really good.
Corporations only care about money. It is the duty of the Government to make sure money results from ethical behavoir.
And I will not listen to your counter-arguments until you've taken a few classes in Social Psychology and advertising. PR is much cheaper than correcting the actual flaws. There is an entire industry built around covering the corporate ass. Doesn't that make you worry, you've got a real problem.
What really worries me is how corporations and goverment appear to conspire against the poeple (like copyright extensions, patriot act, non-transparent policy-making in the EU and so forth). We the people are led to think on a national level, while the national level is rapidly becoming irrelevant.
Whenever someone has done a poor choice and implemented part or all business logic somewhere proprietary, migrating becomes hell. One example would be databases where you rely heavily on the procedural language that comes with your particular RDBMS. Another example would be use of macros in MS Office products.
Sure, if you have all your systems implemented in a Java-based GUI or as a webapp, then you're in luck. Otherwise, tough luck.
I'll find my new job in a governmnent position where I can use technology I care about and will be allowed to contribute to for not-so-great pay when I get fired for using Linux.
<sidetrack>All platforms have limitations. It's just all about identifying and correcting those. That also goes for the current economic platform.</sidetrack>
I was mostly referring to the "sell" portion. They should be forced to keep selling older versions of their software for those with normal requirements. We use Office97 at work (finally, slowly upgrading to Office 2000), and it words nicely for our needs. All the business logic stuff is (wisely) in separate systems, with just enough glue to avoid a print and ocr solution.
In fact, if Office97 was usd 100 and Office XP was usd 200, most people would buy Office 97. I want people to decide when to upgrade themselves, not allow themselves to be dictated by corporate boardrooms. Whatever happened to customer rights?
I think it is quite OK for Microsoft to require a more advanced OS with their new Office package. After all, sometimes you need to drop the backwards compatibility in order to move forwards.
However, if they break the backwards compatibility, they should (be forced to) maintain and sell the old office and keep patching those security holes in the previous version. After all, they are declared a monopoly by US judges, and forcing users to upgrade their entire system in order to install Office software would be outrageous.
So - if they continue to support and sell Office 2000, I will not have a big, ethical problem with this. I'll just keep on using openoffice and/or Abiword/Gnumeric no matter.
In fact, I would not be surprised at all if the guy that hacked the account is Israeli. Iraq and Israel have never gotten along well, and those Scuds during Desert Storm did not improve matters at all.
Sorry to say this - but the internet is much larger than national boundaries. Freenet in fact enforces the borderless nature of the internet, since it distributes content across the globe, making it really hard for anyone to retract information from it.
Think China, Russia, North Korea, Saudi Arabia and Singapore. Think the Scientiology. These are nations that aggressively pursue "subversive" information. Freenet attempts to make harder for goverments to stop their citizens from exhanging information freely.
This issue is indeed much, much larger than copyright infringement.
I am quite shocked to see someone downmodded my suggestion we experimentally test the conclusion of the paper. They have created a theory that can be tested. Let's test it, folks.
The knowledge we have today comes from a careful interplay between theory and experiment. They have set forth theories that can be tested and verified. What appears to be solid logic may also have loopholes in it - maybe even hidden deep into the assumptions. Experimentation can at least sometimes expose incorrect theories.
So - get a grip, and lose the awe of what appears to be definite proof for the NP-completeness of the game you've struggeled with for so long.
Openoffice is XML-based, and extended into suit-compability by StarOffice. It is to my best knowledge rather xml-based, easily parseable and well documented.
That alone is a unique feature that adds a lot of value to openoffice in the medium to long perspective. Microsoft would certainly not risk one of their big cash cows by clinging too tightly to their paradigms. They are many things, but not they are not complete idiots.
So, opening up the format would remove some of the reasons why customers might want to migrate to other systems.
It's a defensive move, really. A rather good one for all parties, too, especially if they refrain from their anti-open-source licensing. If they allow open source projects to process their documents, we will add value to their product. I certainly hope they will see it this way, though I'm not convinced.
It's relatively desolate - there are no real cities.
It's pretty hot in the summer - 90s most of July and August.
It's really cold in the winter - -40 windchill in january is not unheard of at all. -60 and below are relatively rare events, though. Blizzards galore!
It's extremely franchised. There is little room for people who wish to build their own concept - people would rather go to the Olive Garden in Fargo than their home-grown, superior Lola's.
People are kinda nice, though. Kinda funny looking in a general sort of way.
We rule that out, then. I don't want my computer to short out if I lose power. How about the oil the other guy mentioned? Do we have oil with the right viscosity? Alcohol boils at 60-70C. That's too low, in my estimation.
I have been thinking about this for a while now.. If you can download the mind - will we be able to upload it as well at some point in the future? I'm thinking along the lines of falling asleep in a body that's in its 70s, and then waking up in a body in its teens. It would certainly be interesting to relive my teens. A few things that could be done differently..
No wonder this world is falling to pieces. It's all about integrity. We are at the bottom, and only those that learn from their past mistakes get to climb back up.
She misrepresented the integrity of the information. It was meant to convey the opinions of a satisfied, independent Microsoft user. It did not do that at all - it was the opinions of a satifisied Microsoft user who got at least part of her paycheck by Microsoft. That may very well mean that she didn't pay a dime for the Microsoft software either.
The fact that the integrity of the message author is so poor, makes the validity of the message irrelevant. It may or may not be true, but you will have to double-check since the person obviously has motivation to deceive you. Then, it is worthless information.
What was supposed to look editorial was indeed anything but editorial. The very least she could have done was to say that "I am hired by a PR relations company that does business with Microsoft".
Not really, since it is a separate product. It does not have the brand recognition. It should have been called "Microsoft Basic Office" or something like that.
I want to be able to buy components from Office that I need on demand - new fonts, more powerful table component, interface to scripting engine, database access components. All that crap comes with it for free, most people don't use it, and they end up paying for it for the few people who do use it. The real costs of the sophisticated yet underused components is simply hidden from us.
I would not call it a web application in the common interpretation of the word. The Mozilla framework would be used to create a client/server application. It would be more similar to creating a new alternative to (X)HTML.
Besides, Mozilla technology is available on most important platforms by now.
Word processing applications have not changed substantially enough to make people need the new versions. We use Word97 at work, and it does what we need. I could use Open Office if I wanted to.
It's like a vacuum cleaner. We all pretty much know what it is, how to use one, and several competitors sell similar products with the result of small, incremental improvements in pricing and functionality. No revolutions in that business.
This is Microsoft's biggest nightmare come true. More and more people are realizing that the the latest and greatest will not offer then enough extra stuff to make the upgrade worthwhile.
If Microsoft wants to compete, they will need to modularize Office to the extent where the user buy a simple version that does the famous 90% for a low amount of cash. Then, they will offer to sell new modules at a relatively low price.
If they cannot make something like this, Microsoft Office is doomed as an office suite product.
Slashdot Mirror
Hmm. Mozilla is a ground-breaking project using cutting-edge technology (or it was cutting-edge when it was started). I think that there will be a lot of software engineering papers on the Mozilla processs in the future. It is a bold project, and I believe it has succeeded because of persistence and eye-ball-count rather than good planning and solid methodology.
Then again, a lot of developers had a lot of fun and AOL Time Warner footed the bill, so who are we to complain (except that IE got a monopoly during the years of development)?
Well - they are giving it away under the restriction that your derived work must comply with the shared source license (an anti-GPL license). So, it is not given away freely (as in speech).
:)
But, this is Microsoft after all. It's certainly an improvement.
They are pretty vocal about all their code audits, but the buffer overflow in OpenSSL should have been detected using grep.
Corporations routinely kill customers whenever it is profitable. Car manufacturers were not at all taking safety into consideration when they were building cars - until the 60s/70s sometime. Why? People did not realize car safetey could be done better - since the poeple had insufficient technical knowledge to improve safety belts, invent airbags and crumble zones.
Corporations started the Gulf War - amongst others. Please do not listen to what the leaders say in war matters - neither political or corporate leaders. Look at the facts - where do the money go? Who gains power? And what would the consequences of inaction have been?
Corporations have also tortured and executed many people through inadequate quality assurance. Quality assurance is expensive and unproductive, so it is not necessarily profitable. They would rather hire statisticians to figure out how to get acceptable safety, than spending extra time making sure the safety is really good.
Corporations only care about money. It is the duty of the Government to make sure money results from ethical behavoir.
And I will not listen to your counter-arguments until you've taken a few classes in Social Psychology and advertising. PR is much cheaper than correcting the actual flaws. There is an entire industry built around covering the corporate ass. Doesn't that make you worry, you've got a real problem.
What really worries me is how corporations and goverment appear to conspire against the poeple (like copyright extensions, patriot act, non-transparent policy-making in the EU and so forth). We the people are led to think on a national level, while the national level is rapidly becoming irrelevant.
Whenever someone has done a poor choice and implemented part or all business logic somewhere proprietary, migrating becomes hell. One example would be databases where you rely heavily on the procedural language that comes with your particular RDBMS. Another example would be use of macros in MS Office products.
Sure, if you have all your systems implemented in a Java-based GUI or as a webapp, then you're in luck. Otherwise, tough luck.
I'll find my new job in a governmnent position where I can use technology I care about and will be allowed to contribute to for not-so-great pay when I get fired for using Linux.
<sidetrack>All platforms have limitations. It's just all about identifying and correcting those. That also goes for the current economic platform.</sidetrack>
I was mostly referring to the "sell" portion. They should be forced to keep selling older versions of their software for those with normal requirements. We use Office97 at work (finally, slowly upgrading to Office 2000), and it words nicely for our needs. All the business logic stuff is (wisely) in separate systems, with just enough glue to avoid a print and ocr solution.
In fact, if Office97 was usd 100 and Office XP was usd 200, most people would buy Office 97. I want people to decide when to upgrade themselves, not allow themselves to be dictated by corporate boardrooms. Whatever happened to customer rights?
I think it is quite OK for Microsoft to require a more advanced OS with their new Office package. After all, sometimes you need to drop the backwards compatibility in order to move forwards.
However, if they break the backwards compatibility, they should (be forced to) maintain and sell the old office and keep patching those security holes in the previous version. After all, they are declared a monopoly by US judges, and forcing users to upgrade their entire system in order to install Office software would be outrageous.
So - if they continue to support and sell Office 2000, I will not have a big, ethical problem with this. I'll just keep on using openoffice and/or Abiword/Gnumeric no matter.
When you write PERL, most knowledgeable Perl people tune you out.
In fact, I would not be surprised at all if the guy that hacked the account is Israeli. Iraq and Israel have never gotten along well, and those Scuds during Desert Storm did not improve matters at all.
Sorry to say this - but the internet is much larger than national boundaries. Freenet in fact enforces the borderless nature of the internet, since it distributes content across the globe, making it really hard for anyone to retract information from it.
Think China, Russia, North Korea, Saudi Arabia and Singapore. Think the Scientiology. These are nations that aggressively pursue "subversive" information. Freenet attempts to make harder for goverments to stop their citizens from exhanging information freely.
This issue is indeed much, much larger than copyright infringement.
I am quite shocked to see someone downmodded my suggestion we experimentally test the conclusion of the paper. They have created a theory that can be tested. Let's test it, folks.
The knowledge we have today comes from a careful interplay between theory and experiment. They have set forth theories that can be tested and verified. What appears to be solid logic may also have loopholes in it - maybe even hidden deep into the assumptions. Experimentation can at least sometimes expose incorrect theories.
So - get a grip, and lose the awe of what appears to be definite proof for the NP-completeness of the game you've struggeled with for so long.
If losing a phase in a three phase systems burns electical motors - why the heck do people use three phase systems for powering motors?
I am really green on electrical stuff, but isn't it possible to convert three phase into one phase?
If we created a tetris that moves really slowly, with no speed increase and full look-ahead, I bet you could keep that game going for days.
I am extremely skeptical to their final result, and suspect they simply have not understood the game and algorithms required well enough.
Openoffice is XML-based, and extended into suit-compability by StarOffice. It is to my best knowledge rather xml-based, easily parseable and well documented.
That alone is a unique feature that adds a lot of value to openoffice in the medium to long perspective. Microsoft would certainly not risk one of their big cash cows by clinging too tightly to their paradigms. They are many things, but not they are not complete idiots.
So, opening up the format would remove some of the reasons why customers might want to migrate to other systems.
It's a defensive move, really. A rather good one for all parties, too, especially if they refrain from their anti-open-source licensing. If they allow open source projects to process their documents, we will add value to their product. I certainly hope they will see it this way, though I'm not convinced.
Great. This is another way to get rid of those pesky, honest players and my enemies.
I'll just assume their MAC address, misbehave like hell. Their MAC gets banned, and I get rid of the losers.
Alone, I shall reign through spite and malice.
I went to college there (UND in Grand Forks).
It's relatively desolate - there are no real cities.
It's pretty hot in the summer - 90s most of July and August.
It's really cold in the winter - -40 windchill in january is not unheard of at all. -60 and below are relatively rare events, though. Blizzards galore!
It's extremely franchised. There is little room for people who wish to build their own concept - people would rather go to the Olive Garden in Fargo than their home-grown, superior Lola's.
People are kinda nice, though. Kinda funny looking in a general sort of way.
We rule that out, then. I don't want my computer to short out if I lose power. How about the oil the other guy mentioned? Do we have oil with the right viscosity? Alcohol boils at 60-70C. That's too low, in my estimation.
I have been thinking about this for a while now.. If you can download the mind - will we be able to upload it as well at some point in the future? I'm thinking along the lines of falling asleep in a body that's in its 70s, and then waking up in a body in its teens. It would certainly be interesting to relive my teens. A few things that could be done differently..
I have to wonder whether there are any liquids around that will cool a system without short-circuiting it if it spills out?
No wonder this world is falling to pieces. It's all about integrity. We are at the bottom, and only those that learn from their past mistakes get to climb back up.
She misrepresented the integrity of the information. It was meant to convey the opinions of a satisfied, independent Microsoft user. It did not do that at all - it was the opinions of a satifisied Microsoft user who got at least part of her paycheck by Microsoft. That may very well mean that she didn't pay a dime for the Microsoft software either.
The fact that the integrity of the message author is so poor, makes the validity of the message irrelevant. It may or may not be true, but you will have to double-check since the person obviously has motivation to deceive you. Then, it is worthless information.
What was supposed to look editorial was indeed anything but editorial. The very least she could have done was to say that "I am hired by a PR relations company that does business with Microsoft".
Not really, since it is a separate product. It does not have the brand recognition. It should have been called "Microsoft Basic Office" or something like that.
I want to be able to buy components from Office that I need on demand - new fonts, more powerful table component, interface to scripting engine, database access components. All that crap comes with it for free, most people don't use it, and they end up paying for it for the few people who do use it. The real costs of the sophisticated yet underused components is simply hidden from us.
I would not call it a web application in the common interpretation of the word. The Mozilla framework would be used to create a client/server application. It would be more similar to creating a new alternative to (X)HTML.
Besides, Mozilla technology is available on most important platforms by now.
Word processing applications have not changed substantially enough to make people need the new versions. We use Word97 at work, and it does what we need. I could use Open Office if I wanted to.
It's like a vacuum cleaner. We all pretty much know what it is, how to use one, and several competitors sell similar products with the result of small, incremental improvements in pricing and functionality. No revolutions in that business.
This is Microsoft's biggest nightmare come true. More and more people are realizing that the the latest and greatest will not offer then enough extra stuff to make the upgrade worthwhile.
If Microsoft wants to compete, they will need to modularize Office to the extent where the user buy a simple version that does the famous 90% for a low amount of cash. Then, they will offer to sell new modules at a relatively low price.
If they cannot make something like this, Microsoft Office is doomed as an office suite product.