Why must we force people of lower income to either pay what is beyond their reach for our tools or by forced to use inferior versions? In the financial situation of most of us, if we choose to pay Microsoft $400 for the usage of their software, we may complain, but it is really not that much relative to our other costs. For those that have lower income, because this is so much beyond what they could ever afford, M$ is rolling out programs like this. But is it being a "responsible global citizen"? http://www.microsoft.com/about/corporatecitizenshi p/citizenship/default.mspx
Why not adjust the prices according to the relative financial burden on the average person in an area? With Microsoft's activation system, they could prevent having their products imported to other countries.
It is unfair and unkind to either force the less blessed on the earth to use stripped-down versions of software, such as Windows XP Starter Edition, or to gouge out their money through plans like this.
As the Wikipedia dev said in the linked e-mail, anyone that wants to help Wikipedia reward good, informative sites without the risk of abuse of Wikipedia with linkspam is quite welcome to help. If somebody wanted to help them out by writing "better heuristic and manual flagging tools", they would appreciate that and this issue would be resolved in the best way.
The state of the Openoffice.org project reminds me of how the Mozilla Project was about four or five years ago. It has all the features imaginable (e.g. database connectivity, vector graphic support, full-featured spreadsheet), and is compatible with everything under the sun. However, non o matter how modern or fast a system, it runs like a sloth. I would suggest that it is time for a new Openoffice, much more like what Mozilla has done with Firefox and Thunderbird; spinning one huge piece of bloat into several smaller tools that do their job effectively.
Nobody used Mozilla, because it was big and slow and looked a lot like something from five years before (Netscape Communicator 4.7); people running GNU/Linux systems used it because it was all they generally had (not trying to throw flamebait). If Openoffice and its developers (mostly Sun) learned from Mozilla, we could see a great, useful, usable, and popular product come out of what Openoffice is today.
The debate about ads on Wikipedia has gone on for quite such time. (The first major dispute involved a deal with answers.com) As a result of this, many Wikipedia contributers have formed a Wikiproject (a semi-organized group of Wikipedia editors) against them. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikiproject _no_ads To summarize this page, these editors think:
1. Wikipedia's philosophy is non-commercial
2. Ads put at risk Wikipedia's principle of Neutral Point of View (NPOV)
3. The information that constitutes Wikipedia is wealth for the community
Although banning proprietary modules is probably not the best idea, something needs to be in place to ensure that all drivers do not become proprietary (like in other popular operating systems). I can't find the link, but about a year ago, somebody wrote an article outlining how such a thing would be very detrimental to everything - the ABI would need freezing, security holes would never get fixed.... Perhaps more liberal use of EXPORT_SYMBOL_GPL (permitting only GPL-licensed modules to use a certain ABI feature) would have a place in doing this. Few other nonideological benefits otherwise are there to make a driver or feature free.
OO.o has run well compiled for amd64 since the 2.0.3 release, and builds have been available at ftp://ftp.openoffice.cz/ for quite a while. Will OO.o release an *official* 64-bit build for this release? (I could not find one on the main download page) If not, what has changed to make amd64 supported?
With the widespread adoption of 802.11(pre-)n devices, as consumers are likely to bend eventually to the marketing of all the retailers, even more interference will be caused on 2.4Ghz bands (especially since there are only 3 non-overlapping channels for 802.11{b,g} devices. In the times ahead, 802.11a will become more popular as there is less interference and more channels, even though the range is shorter and has "only" 54mbps bandwidth.
Wikipedia is a great resource for issues that are not controversial. For instance, once can assume an article about http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kit_Fisto some obscure Star Wars character very correct. However, anything there is not a solid source from can range from being semiprotected to biased to being an absolute disaster http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Religious_Pluralism.
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Why must we force people of lower income to either pay what is beyond their reach for our tools or by forced to use inferior versions? In the financial situation of most of us, if we choose to pay Microsoft $400 for the usage of their software, we may complain, but it is really not that much relative to our other costs. For those that have lower income, because this is so much beyond what they could ever afford, M$ is rolling out programs like this. But is it being a "responsible global citizen"? http://www.microsoft.com/about/corporatecitizenshi p/citizenship/default.mspx
Why not adjust the prices according to the relative financial burden on the average person in an area? With Microsoft's activation system, they could prevent having their products imported to other countries.
It is unfair and unkind to either force the less blessed on the earth to use stripped-down versions of software, such as Windows XP Starter Edition, or to gouge out their money through plans like this.
(I'm not trying to be a Microsoft-bashing troll.)
As the Wikipedia dev said in the linked e-mail, anyone that wants to help Wikipedia reward good, informative sites without the risk of abuse of Wikipedia with linkspam is quite welcome to help. If somebody wanted to help them out by writing "better heuristic and manual flagging tools", they would appreciate that and this issue would be resolved in the best way.
Bit off topic, but can AbiWord render Hebrew with vowel points yet, and can Hebrew be pasted into it?
The state of the Openoffice.org project reminds me of how the Mozilla Project was about four or five years ago. It has all the features imaginable (e.g. database connectivity, vector graphic support, full-featured spreadsheet), and is compatible with everything under the sun. However, non o matter how modern or fast a system, it runs like a sloth. I would suggest that it is time for a new Openoffice, much more like what Mozilla has done with Firefox and Thunderbird; spinning one huge piece of bloat into several smaller tools that do their job effectively.
Nobody used Mozilla, because it was big and slow and looked a lot like something from five years before (Netscape Communicator 4.7); people running GNU/Linux systems used it because it was all they generally had (not trying to throw flamebait). If Openoffice and its developers (mostly Sun) learned from Mozilla, we could see a great, useful, usable, and popular product come out of what Openoffice is today.
The debate about ads on Wikipedia has gone on for quite such time. (The first major dispute involved a deal with answers.com) As a result of this, many Wikipedia contributers have formed a Wikiproject (a semi-organized group of Wikipedia editors) against them. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikiproject _no_ads To summarize this page, these editors think:
_ who_think_that_the_Wikimedia_Foundation_should_use _advertising
1. Wikipedia's philosophy is non-commercial
2. Ads put at risk Wikipedia's principle of Neutral Point of View (NPOV)
3. The information that constitutes Wikipedia is wealth for the community
There are fully three Wikipedians that state their support for advertising. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Wikipedians
And Openoffice can export to LaTeX for prettier formatting.
Although banning proprietary modules is probably not the best idea, something needs to be in place to ensure that all drivers do not become proprietary (like in other popular operating systems). I can't find the link, but about a year ago, somebody wrote an article outlining how such a thing would be very detrimental to everything - the ABI would need freezing, security holes would never get fixed....
Perhaps more liberal use of EXPORT_SYMBOL_GPL (permitting only GPL-licensed modules to use a certain ABI feature) would have a place in doing this. Few other nonideological benefits otherwise are there to make a driver or feature free.
OO.o has run well compiled for amd64 since the 2.0.3 release, and builds have been available at ftp://ftp.openoffice.cz/ for quite a while. Will OO.o release an *official* 64-bit build for this release? (I could not find one on the main download page) If not, what has changed to make amd64 supported?
With the widespread adoption of 802.11(pre-)n devices, as consumers are likely to bend eventually to the marketing of all the retailers, even more interference will be caused on 2.4Ghz bands (especially since there are only 3 non-overlapping channels for 802.11{b,g} devices. In the times ahead, 802.11a will become more popular as there is less interference and more channels, even though the range is shorter and has "only" 54mbps bandwidth.
Wikipedia is a great resource for issues that are not controversial. For instance, once can assume an article about http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kit_Fisto some obscure Star Wars character very correct. However, anything there is not a solid source from can range from being semiprotected to biased to being an absolute disaster http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Religious_Pluralism.