I guess SCO thinks that calling in the lawyers beats actually trying to compete on the merits of its products and services. Well if you had their assets you might think that too.
What a lame-o way of looking at things. THEY HAVE A WHOLE FREAKING COMPANY! They can do anything they want with the talent they have.
Here's one small example. Remember Caldera Linux + Word Perfect? With the stupid license tricks Microsoft has been playing, that has fantastic potential. There are hoards of Word Perfect faithful out there suffering under M$. It would be so easy to sell them an OS "approved" by the folks at Word Perfect.
The revolt is on, and they could be riding it. Instead, they are contend with a few licensing fee scraps from M$ and what little they will gain off sales of their personal shares. All their people will suffer as the company fails. It's a criminal waste of resources.
This was supposed to happen back in October, but Microsoft missed their deadline again. The ultimatum was supposed to be, "You have until the 31st or all your Unix are belong to US."
IBM to McBitch: You and me go out back. You sell your stocks, give us all money, we kick you in the balls and call it even, OK? That way we don't waste a lot of time and you save youself a lot more embarassment.
What does Mr. Boiles have to say about any of this stupid stuff? All I've seen is moronic comments from McBitch and friends. They are paying Boils for advice, no?
I've used Star Office for my resume for about a year now. I send people a.doc and a.pdf version and both work just fine. What version of Word, exactly, has given your problems? Every version of Word I've ever used has had problems taking Word documents from other computers.
I remember the shock and horror a fellow office worker once had when they got a new computer and all of their Word docs renderd wrong. They had spent the better part of a year translating them from Word Perfect, which had no such problems, into Word. They were furious because they had to reformat every one of those docs again. Imagine my surprise that year when I got a version of Word Perfect up and running on Linux and opened Word Perfect 4.2 stuff without a problem. Oh well, that's how it goes.
The Excel replacement I don't think is nearly as mature. I generally use it to open other peoples Excel docuemnts on my Linux box and for this it works very well. However, when it comes to usability features for display, such as ease of splitting into panes, adding autosort or even easily hiding rows or columns it doesn't compare. All the advanced features, such as pivot tables, work much better in Excel.
Have you tried gnumeric lately? It works better than the Star Office thingy. Star Office is still a better M$ translator, but gnumeric has good auto-fill, sort and even simple graphs that rival or beat M$ Excel.
On fonts, you will find the same problems moving from one M$ box to the other, especiall when they use different Office versions or M$ O$. Sometimes the same programs from a different vendor will create problems. It's just another one of those M$ pains that should have you moving further away rather than further toward them. Place the blame where it belongs. Star Office, on it's own, produces better looking stuff with much less effort.
As for Power Point, Star Office has never had a problem reading those things for me. It works just fine, though I might lose some cheezy effects. Once again, I have to say that Star Presenter, on it's own is vastly superior to Microsoft's offering. It is easier to use, does more usefull stuff and writes out to more formats: html, pdf, and others that can be opened by anyone.
The faster you get away from the Microsoft lock in, the better off you are.
I am aware that MS Access stinks, although as a student I take what I can get and have made some decent money programming Access applications.
Yeah, the last company I worked for considered Access work, "student worker" dispoable cruft that might be used to teach students a few useful things about the business but never for anything real.
If you want to do databases that don't suck, learn to set up discarded office computers as postressql or mysql servers on your choice of free software, and have it generate web pages. Viola! That's an insturment that everyone likes and has nothing to do with the M$ vendor lock in. Because it won't break in one or two years, the company might keep using it and it will be much easier to maintain than that awful Access VB nightmare.
What exactly are they asking for? I did not see anything about hacking into boxes, but that sounds about right. What "extra powers" are they really asking for?
I'm suspicious about any additional powers being granted. The same arguments can be made for any crime in the public eye, "We must violate your rights in order to combat this_daterdly_deed" All criminals hide their assets. That does not make me want my tax money paying government clerks to read my email.
I'm waiting for the big sting that shows that most spam is comming from MSNBC, AOL, Earthlink and others who advertise "spam fighting email service". I doubt I have to give up any more for this than I gave up when "Steven Barkto" got nailed. Spam, not everloving, astroturfing Microsoft!
No, that's just the way you would portray anyone who considers software freedom a valid criteria for software selection. This is why you have accused me of making a political statement instead of considering technical matters. Software freedom is a technical matter much more than it is a political statement.
They used to be run by doctors, at least the good ones were. Other forces, not present in the software world, are at work there. I'm sorry to hear things have gotten bad. It's one thing when a doctor willingly throws themselves into administration and active practice so that they work 60 hour weeks, and another thing entirely when a nurse is forced to do so for "budget" reasons.
A: Things got rough, they treated us like dirt, I left.
BZZZZZT, wrong answer.
A: We did not like the way our management was handeling our product so we formed a partnership. You may be familiar with OUR_NAME and OUR_PRODUCTS and OUR_CLIENTS.
Of course, the question only has to be answered if the partnership fails. As such partnerships are the way of free software and free software is the future, I would not project a failure. If you end up with an interviewer that wants to work you to death and dispose of you, you might be better off somewhere else.
Perhaps you ought to think about how lucky you are to even HAVE a job right now.
No, the company is lucky to have them and should behave. If the company is really on the way out and these folks can do without them, they should as soon do it as soon as possible. Why sit around and eat shit until the company fails, FOR NO FAULT OF THEIRS? Someone at that company is screwing up or does not belong there. It's not the programmers. A partnership will be tough, but they will be there eventually and might as well start rectruiting useful people before they all make other plans.
A few months of pure missery and 8 months of unemployment. If the company is fucked and you and your friends can make a go of it withouth them, do it. There's no point in taking grief from a bunch of do nothings. Reasonable companies are run by the professionals who make them work: law partnerships, hospitals, engineering consultancies, you name it. Your masters have tried to tell you where you stand in the world. Good luck.
Alow me to quote my favorite still, from his good CD explosion. It's an amazing and frightening image, in which we can clearly see the trajectory of a large chunk many frames before the author had time to flinch. I'd like to see a pciture of his ceiling where much of the energy may have been deposited.
I'd also like to share a sad story of a lab death due to flying glass. Somewhere around 1989, a student at Tulane died when a piece of glassware exploded in his hand and a fragment severed his jugular vein. His death was partly due to the difficulty the EMS team had finding him in the building.
If the author feels this display of his image constitues a "removal" and untolerable infringment, he may send me a cease and desist letter by replying here, the public place of advertisement of publication. In that case, I'll consider him a weenie.
The decision of which software to use should not be made by legislators, it should be made by people experienced with the technology.
The technocrats are the ones pushing the bills, legislators are the ones with doubts.
Mandating the use of open source only limits choice.
No, it does not. Software companies are free to open their code at any time.
Bills that mandate that open source be considered are less damaging, but pointless, since if an open solution exists that is viable, a smart engineer will consider it.
That does not mean that he can use it. Vendors must be aproved in order for state employees to purchase things. The process of aproval is Byzantine at best and one that does not work well for free software that may not have a vendor at all. Bills that free state employees to use software they want to use would be a Godsend.
I work with government clients all the time, and as much as I like open source software, some of it just doesn't meet the needs of my client.
That's hollow. Name one thing that propriatory software does that free software does not besides interoperate with propriatory software. In those rare instances, a purchasing agency can claim "sole source vendor" and make the purchase and those are looked on with susupecion.
It's about finding the best tool for the job, not the one that best fits my political views.
This IS about finding the best tool for the job . Free software is almost always better than it's closed source counterparts. Free software, in part, helps to avoid vendor lock in, a very real goal of state purchasing laws. Legislators have already decided they don't like getting raped by vendors. Vendor lock in always results in a lack of legitimate competition and inferior goods in the end.
The only political view that you need to have is a belief in full disclosure in state afairs. From honest discource, function and trust flow. Indeed, it's the closed source view of the world that requires the most radical assumptions. It requires you to believe that you don't own your computers, that you should be so very greatful that your computer does a few things and you agree to limitations on your use of that computer, that you pay absorbedent fees instead of developing your own solution, even that you will never even attempt to understand how the program works. That kind of nonsense is not accepted in most government purchasing, where complete honesty and accountability through inspection is required. The closed source software companies, which have only existed in their current form since the early 1980s, has a lot of nerve to try to impose these conditions on the public and call it IP rights.
The Chinese have the source code to Windows. Their having the source code to our most popular OS is a national security risk. In response to this we should move everything to open-source... Hey....are you working for the Chinese?!
First, Microsoft said it believed this was a national secruity risk. Their sale is therefore willful treason, regardless of the facts.
Second, the fact that our enemies have access to information our own government does not have compete access to really is detrimental to US security. China can and will give that code to all the people they think they have to in order to find weaknesses to exploit. The NSA can only go so far in protecting against those attacks because Microscrew continues with their "fork" and new sofware is being deployed on government desks all day long with windoze updater. It's doubtuf that the NSA or anyone besides Microsoft can keep up with all the different versions of software that gets put on those computers, so any weakenss the Chinese find will have a high probability of sucess. Windoze is fragile enough without help from professionals representing one of the world's most repressive regiems having the source code to understand exactly how random expoits found work.
It should be obvious that free software levels the playing field and alows everyone to help fix the problems. The results are already in because we know that IIS gets broken all the time, but free software is not.
I believe the opponents to the open-source bills were mostly afraid to favor open-source; they weren't against it.
Yes, that's what they say and that's why they are wrong. They ARE afraid of bills that favor open source solutions because they would then be out of sales. The problem they are trying to avoid is that open source is a legitimate criteria of selection. Trying to say that it's not is dishonest. The government, like anyone else, should take advantage of free software and all the benifits it brings.
Of course, these groups are lying about all those benifits too. They claim their software is superior and cheaper than free software. Those using free software know better. That's why these bills are floating up from the technocrats and why the opposition uses lobiests, adverts and lies. They are trying to use ignorant opinion to prop up their sales that much longer while they despiratly look for ways to kill off free software.
They are doomed to fail. Though the technocrats may not be as well organized, they are armed with the truth and can back it up with test cases and numbers. So long as Paladium is not made manditory, the number of cases proving the viability of free software will only continue to become more numerous and obvious. The disparity between free software and propriatory code continues to grow.
AVI is a container format. It does not actually define a compression method for audio or video (except perhaps raw PCM). Various companies make various codecs. What makes you expect Microsoft to make every existing codec available on the Windows installation disc?
Xanim seems to do it, and I doubt what you say is true. If it is true, it's so Microsoft! It's kind of like their registry. They created the damn thing, but did not specify what vendors put into it, yet they require it to be perfect for their goofey OS to boot your computer. Looked at that way, I don't expect Microsoft to provide anything, even if it's their own file format and others can make full decoders for it and others in less than 100k of binary. Nope, it don't fit on the disk, especially when you have that disk filled with 10,000 "drivers" for 5 chipsets.
So, if a fork occurs in a feature which nobody uses, does it make a sound?
It does when the company in question starts dumping product and people start using it. Just let them promote the useless feature and wait for the ass pains to set in. If they are dumping a "client" ala Adobe PDF, people can say, "Don't complain, the client is free." Ugh, at least Adobe released file specs.
If a company decides to go 20 years retro and create a new non free file format, that's just one more dumb format to get in the way. You would hope that people knew better by now, but they don't. Witness the growing popularity of M$.DOC, the dumbest way to exchange text ever.
maybe it's the tar.gz format that's lame. If you there's a gzipped tarball of 1,000 files, and you want to extract only the last one, you have to wait for the entire file to decompress.
No, gzip is very nice thank you. It's a tool that does what it says it will, compress files. The way you use it might be at fault. Don't make giant archives of unrelated work.
That may be the unix way, but it's not the efficient way.
Who made you SCO this week?;-)
The unix way is to break your work up into reasonable chunks. Try making tarballs of related work, then a tarball of tarballs, then compress the biggie to get it from your place to someone elses. That way you get your data to the other side in a usable form. If you need to compress the smaller archives for storage, go ahead. To keep the other side up to date, just send the files you modify. Tar can append and replace files in archives.
You can probably extend the same methods to a graphical client like winzip. Make zips of zips and all that.
The big story here is that PKware is not sharing information. That means that people who don't have pkware eventually won't be able to work with archives sent by pk users. It's obnoxious, the same way WORD.DOC is. Free software might be able to keep up, but Winzip won't want to. Oh, the wonders of closed source develpment. Make it stop.
This means only that you have a decoder for the audio but not for the video. Install a decoder for your digicam's video format and everything will work fine.
Yerbie, you would think that would come with M$'s own Windows Media Player. What's the point of using your market share to create a "standard" if all you do is shit on it later?
If the heat is less than I think, why did they have to water cool the coper tube wall? Oh yeah, it's kind of like arc welding equipment. Me thinks there might be heat involved, though they have made it so it won't melt that coper.
14 psig one side, vocuum the other, I'd say it was exerting a force. Sure, there's plasma in the middle that actually exerts the force and that plasma is held in place by a powerful magnet. What did you expect, someone to magnitise the air for you?
Slashdot Mirror
What a lame-o way of looking at things. THEY HAVE A WHOLE FREAKING COMPANY! They can do anything they want with the talent they have.
Here's one small example. Remember Caldera Linux + Word Perfect? With the stupid license tricks Microsoft has been playing, that has fantastic potential. There are hoards of Word Perfect faithful out there suffering under M$. It would be so easy to sell them an OS "approved" by the folks at Word Perfect.
The revolt is on, and they could be riding it. Instead, they are contend with a few licensing fee scraps from M$ and what little they will gain off sales of their personal shares. All their people will suffer as the company fails. It's a criminal waste of resources.
This was supposed to happen back in October, but Microsoft missed their deadline again. The ultimatum was supposed to be, "You have until the 31st or all your Unix are belong to US."
McBitch: Gulp.
What does Mr. Boiles have to say about any of this stupid stuff? All I've seen is moronic comments from McBitch and friends. They are paying Boils for advice, no?
I remember the shock and horror a fellow office worker once had when they got a new computer and all of their Word docs renderd wrong. They had spent the better part of a year translating them from Word Perfect, which had no such problems, into Word. They were furious because they had to reformat every one of those docs again. Imagine my surprise that year when I got a version of Word Perfect up and running on Linux and opened Word Perfect 4.2 stuff without a problem. Oh well, that's how it goes.
Have you tried gnumeric lately? It works better than the Star Office thingy. Star Office is still a better M$ translator, but gnumeric has good auto-fill, sort and even simple graphs that rival or beat M$ Excel.
On fonts, you will find the same problems moving from one M$ box to the other, especiall when they use different Office versions or M$ O$. Sometimes the same programs from a different vendor will create problems. It's just another one of those M$ pains that should have you moving further away rather than further toward them. Place the blame where it belongs. Star Office, on it's own, produces better looking stuff with much less effort.
As for Power Point, Star Office has never had a problem reading those things for me. It works just fine, though I might lose some cheezy effects. Once again, I have to say that Star Presenter, on it's own is vastly superior to Microsoft's offering. It is easier to use, does more usefull stuff and writes out to more formats: html, pdf, and others that can be opened by anyone.
The faster you get away from the Microsoft lock in, the better off you are.
Yeah, the last company I worked for considered Access work, "student worker" dispoable cruft that might be used to teach students a few useful things about the business but never for anything real.
If you want to do databases that don't suck, learn to set up discarded office computers as postressql or mysql servers on your choice of free software, and have it generate web pages. Viola! That's an insturment that everyone likes and has nothing to do with the M$ vendor lock in. Because it won't break in one or two years, the company might keep using it and it will be much easier to maintain than that awful Access VB nightmare.
I'm suspicious about any additional powers being granted. The same arguments can be made for any crime in the public eye, "We must violate your rights in order to combat this_daterdly_deed" All criminals hide their assets. That does not make me want my tax money paying government clerks to read my email.
I'm waiting for the big sting that shows that most spam is comming from MSNBC, AOL, Earthlink and others who advertise "spam fighting email service". I doubt I have to give up any more for this than I gave up when "Steven Barkto" got nailed. Spam, not everloving, astroturfing Microsoft!
No, that's just the way you would portray anyone who considers software freedom a valid criteria for software selection. This is why you have accused me of making a political statement instead of considering technical matters. Software freedom is a technical matter much more than it is a political statement.
They used to be run by doctors, at least the good ones were. Other forces, not present in the software world, are at work there. I'm sorry to hear things have gotten bad. It's one thing when a doctor willingly throws themselves into administration and active practice so that they work 60 hour weeks, and another thing entirely when a nurse is forced to do so for "budget" reasons.
A: Things got rough, they treated us like dirt, I left.
BZZZZZT, wrong answer.
A: We did not like the way our management was handeling our product so we formed a partnership. You may be familiar with OUR_NAME and OUR_PRODUCTS and OUR_CLIENTS.
Of course, the question only has to be answered if the partnership fails. As such partnerships are the way of free software and free software is the future, I would not project a failure. If you end up with an interviewer that wants to work you to death and dispose of you, you might be better off somewhere else.
No, the company is lucky to have them and should behave. If the company is really on the way out and these folks can do without them, they should as soon do it as soon as possible. Why sit around and eat shit until the company fails, FOR NO FAULT OF THEIRS? Someone at that company is screwing up or does not belong there. It's not the programmers. A partnership will be tough, but they will be there eventually and might as well start rectruiting useful people before they all make other plans.
A few months of pure missery and 8 months of unemployment. If the company is fucked and you and your friends can make a go of it withouth them, do it. There's no point in taking grief from a bunch of do nothings. Reasonable companies are run by the professionals who make them work: law partnerships, hospitals, engineering consultancies, you name it. Your masters have tried to tell you where you stand in the world. Good luck.
I'd also like to share a sad story of a lab death due to flying glass. Somewhere around 1989, a student at Tulane died when a piece of glassware exploded in his hand and a fragment severed his jugular vein. His death was partly due to the difficulty the EMS team had finding him in the building.
If the author feels this display of his image constitues a "removal" and untolerable infringment, he may send me a cease and desist letter by replying here, the public place of advertisement of publication. In that case, I'll consider him a weenie.
My dad is a cardiologist, so I'll have to ask IBM about mainframes. Oops! Want to tell me IBM is making a political statement?
The technocrats are the ones pushing the bills, legislators are the ones with doubts.
Mandating the use of open source only limits choice.
No, it does not. Software companies are free to open their code at any time.
Bills that mandate that open source be considered are less damaging, but pointless, since if an open solution exists that is viable, a smart engineer will consider it.
That does not mean that he can use it. Vendors must be aproved in order for state employees to purchase things. The process of aproval is Byzantine at best and one that does not work well for free software that may not have a vendor at all. Bills that free state employees to use software they want to use would be a Godsend.
I work with government clients all the time, and as much as I like open source software, some of it just doesn't meet the needs of my client.
That's hollow. Name one thing that propriatory software does that free software does not besides interoperate with propriatory software. In those rare instances, a purchasing agency can claim "sole source vendor" and make the purchase and those are looked on with susupecion.
It's about finding the best tool for the job, not the one that best fits my political views.
This IS about finding the best tool for the job . Free software is almost always better than it's closed source counterparts. Free software, in part, helps to avoid vendor lock in, a very real goal of state purchasing laws. Legislators have already decided they don't like getting raped by vendors. Vendor lock in always results in a lack of legitimate competition and inferior goods in the end.
The only political view that you need to have is a belief in full disclosure in state afairs. From honest discource, function and trust flow. Indeed, it's the closed source view of the world that requires the most radical assumptions. It requires you to believe that you don't own your computers, that you should be so very greatful that your computer does a few things and you agree to limitations on your use of that computer, that you pay absorbedent fees instead of developing your own solution, even that you will never even attempt to understand how the program works. That kind of nonsense is not accepted in most government purchasing, where complete honesty and accountability through inspection is required. The closed source software companies, which have only existed in their current form since the early 1980s, has a lot of nerve to try to impose these conditions on the public and call it IP rights.
First, Microsoft said it believed this was a national secruity risk. Their sale is therefore willful treason, regardless of the facts.
Second, the fact that our enemies have access to information our own government does not have compete access to really is detrimental to US security. China can and will give that code to all the people they think they have to in order to find weaknesses to exploit. The NSA can only go so far in protecting against those attacks because Microscrew continues with their "fork" and new sofware is being deployed on government desks all day long with windoze updater. It's doubtuf that the NSA or anyone besides Microsoft can keep up with all the different versions of software that gets put on those computers, so any weakenss the Chinese find will have a high probability of sucess. Windoze is fragile enough without help from professionals representing one of the world's most repressive regiems having the source code to understand exactly how random expoits found work.
It should be obvious that free software levels the playing field and alows everyone to help fix the problems. The results are already in because we know that IIS gets broken all the time, but free software is not.
Yes, that's what they say and that's why they are wrong. They ARE afraid of bills that favor open source solutions because they would then be out of sales. The problem they are trying to avoid is that open source is a legitimate criteria of selection. Trying to say that it's not is dishonest. The government, like anyone else, should take advantage of free software and all the benifits it brings.
Of course, these groups are lying about all those benifits too. They claim their software is superior and cheaper than free software. Those using free software know better. That's why these bills are floating up from the technocrats and why the opposition uses lobiests, adverts and lies. They are trying to use ignorant opinion to prop up their sales that much longer while they despiratly look for ways to kill off free software.
They are doomed to fail. Though the technocrats may not be as well organized, they are armed with the truth and can back it up with test cases and numbers. So long as Paladium is not made manditory, the number of cases proving the viability of free software will only continue to become more numerous and obvious. The disparity between free software and propriatory code continues to grow.
Xanim seems to do it, and I doubt what you say is true. If it is true, it's so Microsoft! It's kind of like their registry. They created the damn thing, but did not specify what vendors put into it, yet they require it to be perfect for their goofey OS to boot your computer. Looked at that way, I don't expect Microsoft to provide anything, even if it's their own file format and others can make full decoders for it and others in less than 100k of binary. Nope, it don't fit on the disk, especially when you have that disk filled with 10,000 "drivers" for 5 chipsets.
AVI is a M$ format. Why M$ would shit on it is beyond me.
It does when the company in question starts dumping product and people start using it. Just let them promote the useless feature and wait for the ass pains to set in. If they are dumping a "client" ala Adobe PDF, people can say, "Don't complain, the client is free." Ugh, at least Adobe released file specs.
If a company decides to go 20 years retro and create a new non free file format, that's just one more dumb format to get in the way. You would hope that people knew better by now, but they don't. Witness the growing popularity of M$.DOC, the dumbest way to exchange text ever.
No, gzip is very nice thank you. It's a tool that does what it says it will, compress files. The way you use it might be at fault. Don't make giant archives of unrelated work. That may be the unix way, but it's not the efficient way.
Who made you SCO this week? ;-)
The unix way is to break your work up into reasonable chunks. Try making tarballs of related work, then a tarball of tarballs, then compress the biggie to get it from your place to someone elses. That way you get your data to the other side in a usable form. If you need to compress the smaller archives for storage, go ahead. To keep the other side up to date, just send the files you modify. Tar can append and replace files in archives.
You can probably extend the same methods to a graphical client like winzip. Make zips of zips and all that.
The big story here is that PKware is not sharing information. That means that people who don't have pkware eventually won't be able to work with archives sent by pk users. It's obnoxious, the same way WORD.DOC is. Free software might be able to keep up, but Winzip won't want to. Oh, the wonders of closed source develpment. Make it stop.
Yerbie, you would think that would come with M$'s own Windows Media Player. What's the point of using your market share to create a "standard" if all you do is shit on it later?
If the heat is less than I think, why did they have to water cool the coper tube wall? Oh yeah, it's kind of like arc welding equipment. Me thinks there might be heat involved, though they have made it so it won't melt that coper.
14 psig one side, vocuum the other, I'd say it was exerting a force. Sure, there's plasma in the middle that actually exerts the force and that plasma is held in place by a powerful magnet. What did you expect, someone to magnitise the air for you?