Now Sabeer Bhatia (the site's co-founder) is challenging the software giant's core $20 billion office desktop business.
Way to make it sound like it's a new and original idea instead of a copy and paste of what Google Docs has done.
and from the article..
Live Documents is similar to Google Apps, launched in February and used by companies including Proctor & Gamble, General Electric and Capgemini as a cheaper alternative to Microsoft.
Don't want that cheap knockoff now do we..
However, Mr Bhatia claims that his product is superior to Google's in its range and quality, most crucially because it mimics Office 2007.
Yes it's better quality because it looks exactly like the most complained about office package due to its usability issues.
You get refunds!?! I haven't been able to get a refund in the UK since 2002! Swapping game x for game y is not a refund btw.
I don't like your analogy. In your example the DVD is fine but the physical media is broken. It would make more sense if your DVD played fine but half the content was missing and sometimes the audio would disappear because they didn't edit it in.
Game's are more complicated in that they'll release a program that they know doesn't work.
Look at the example I listed. Soldner was the worse game I ever purchased. On the back of the box it promised 13 drivable vehicles, 5 (i think) different aircraft, amazing AI, etc. What I actually got after I bought and installed the game was that you were limited to x amount of vehicles because they hadn't finished adding half of the others in. The AI was completely buggy and would headshot you from 1km away (no joke!).
So what did the community say? "Wait for the patch", "wait for the patch". You can read from the link how that went.. They released the game AGAIN and it was UNFINISHED AGAIN but this time they changed the name so they could dupe a new set of people into buying their same game, this time slightly patched.
Shouldn't it be up to the parents to control and decide whether or not their children are mature enough for alcohol, and if so, how much?
To a certain extent but you're ignoring the fact that alcohol is a poison which damages a child's liver and require them to have a transplant if they're lucky or die if they're not. We all know how stupid some people can get and it's a good idea to have laws against stuff that can kill children because of a parents ignorance.
I don't think drinking and playing violent games are in the same category. Although I guess some people argue about the long term effect no one died from playing video games, well except those weirdos in Korea but I blame the internet cafes staff. They could kick them out any time but they let them play there for three days because all they care about is making money. I bet if you kicked those kids out before they died they'd start thinking "damn I'm hungry, I'll get something to eat on the way to the other cafe", etc, etc.
I don't agree that Halo 3 is a halfass game at all, but it's time for game publishers and investors to wake up and realise you can't ship a buggy POS.
It doesn't happen with any other product that you can buy. If the car industry sold cars that had 3 out of the 4 seats missing and it only went half the speed advertised they would get legally hit so badly. Just because software is an abstract concept to grasp rather then a physical product doesn't mean you can rip the customer off on quality.
Yes you're quite right. I see what he is trying to say.
Do you know at all if steam offers refunds for its online purchases? Steam collects a huge amount of statistics from you, I would have thought it would be easy to see who has played through X amount of the game and disallow them to refund after a certain number of hours? This would be a fix to the normal brick and mortar store's problem of people playing the game and then refunding it the next week.
Their reaction to the Novell deal was not only wrong, but it was calculated maliciously in the attempt to push the GPLv3 into the hearts and minds of the people already rejecting it.
Not to say it wasn't wrong but you have to admit that it worked for some people.
I remember reading a comment on here a long time ago when it all happened it was something like "They [fsf] were right".
If someone doesn't download something on Steam, we don't lose any money. If someone sends back a box, you're throwing money away. In this new world we can do things that weren't previously possible.
I don't use steam so I don't know if they do refunds or not. I think it's against the law to not allow people to refund your product, especially in the UK. Is this the case? I interrupted this quote to mean they could get away with breaking the law since it previous wasn't possible with brick and mortar stores.
The point I was trying to make was about the FSF blowing up over the Novell deal where they used the term linux a lot in their rants.
I disagree that they timed this whole thing because they were talking about this patent trap before the Novell deal happened. After the Novell deal happened everyone jumped on the story.
I didn't say anything about the GPLv3 pushing the masses away from using linux. I said the FSF has done it or attempted to do it.
The FSF doesn't really have anything to do with Linux though. Their main goals is in advocating free software and its use. Although it's slightly related to Linux I don't think you should listen to anything they say about Linux unless it is in legal/copyright matters.
I think the whole RIAA thing is that they are providing computer experts to give evidence. I don't believe it has anything to with providing the defense with support, just an independent review. I can see how this could be turned into what you said and generate negative publicity, but I don't think it would taint Linux at all.
there would be some degree of putting people off if you required them to release their modifications, but at the same time it does ensure that no-one makes great speed improvements and keeps them to themselves.
and why would you care about that if they did? What difference does it make if someone has improved their code privately (part of freedom 3) but doesn't want to release it? It has no effect on you, the software project or the open source community.
The only way this could have an effect is if they wanted to sell/re-distribute those changes, in which case they would then have to publish those changes under the GPL license. So again what's the big deal in letting a programmer privately improve the code?
The same argument could be made for GPLing an application - any changes you make have to be distributed when you distribute the app, which might put a lot of people off using and modifying your app. People still seem happy to use GPL, though.
When you make private changes to a GPL app you aren't forced to distribute those changes, only when you re-distribute are you forced to publish your changes.
Your point is that we should force private changes to be re-distributed and just in case you mention it in your reply.. No, serving html pages to web browsers isn't redistributing the projects source code.
phpBB and the modifications are written in PHP. PHP is plain text scripting code. Could you be more specific about what you mean?
Are you talking about forcing people that customise their own phpBB board but don't release their code for distribution? You are not talking about people that release modifications on the phpBB forum at all. You want to force the phpBB user admins to release their private modifications.
So you're saying that: - Someone that put a lot of effort into making a new theme for their own forum should be forced to release that theme for everyone's use. - If someone makes a web game that incorporates a phpBB board they should be forced to give up their web game code. - If someone makes changes to anything of phpBB and is hosting it on their own website and handing out html pages to people they should give up their private modifications so that you can use it on your own phpBB forum.
That's just freeloading on other's hard work and it would destroy phpBB which is already just a platform for spammers anyway.
I hate opensouce users that contribute nothing towards a project but demand to have everyone's toys. These users kill my enthusiasm to work on the open source web projects I do have.
I know exactly what I'd say if someone showed up at my phpBB forum and demanded my code that I had put months of work into and wasn't related to any open source work.. "f*ck off". It's my code, I have a copyright over it and can do what I want with it.
If there is a mod that you want opensourced then you make it. PHP isn't exactly the hardest scripting language and you can get a lot done in a short time.
and then you see that I have done all this awesome stuff with your AGPL code and demand the changes, could I just give you..
<?php include 'mycode.php'; echo 'blah'; ?>
Since you have to redistribute changes not your own files it doesn't seem like this license would be much use, just like how GPL2 isn't much use stopping DRM'd linux kernels.
If however I am wrong and you have to redistribute mycode.php I can see this being a real nightmare for programmers who have incorporated all sorts of code into their project.
That's great but in Britan it is dark by 4pm right now so what's the point? All DST has done is made me an hour early for a lecture THATS more inconvenient then if there is more sunlight or not.
Screw DST and as a Brit I hope they get rid of it as soon as possible. I've never heard of one Brit that didn't complain about it.
Among these was Levenshulme's Tina Farrel, a 23-year-old who admitted "she had left school without a maths GCSE". She explained: "On one of my cards it said I had to find temperatures lower than -8. The numbers I uncovered were -6 and -7 so I thought I had won, and so did the woman in the shop. But when she scanned the card the machine said I hadn't.
There are two people, Tina Farrel and a sales assistant that need to be darwinised.
I way I see this is that if you make changes which are publicly viewable then you have to re-distribute those changes. If you don't make changes then no one is going to come knocking on your door.
I don't really see the need for this license. I've been writing PHP code for years and this has never been a problem. When I worked for GreedyBastardCompany I was looking for a free captcha to use. If it was licensed under the AGPL I would have looked for something else more work safe. Luck had it that it was licensed under the GPL so I took the code and incorporated it into our site. The captcha wasn't very good though so I made it better and gave the code changes back to the author. This is basically what AGPL forces you to do but when you do web work everything is so customised that it wouldn't work any better then the GPL does.
The web development community is great at giving back code changes so I do question the need for this license, especially if it gets in the way of writing a commercial site on top of an AGPL web framework (which is the point of most web frameworks, to make you write commercial websites faster in a team environment).
There are exceptions though. I think this would be a GREAT license to use when launchpad.net goes open source. Bug tracking, Time Tracking, Project Management, etc. These would be great to license under the AGPL.
Why? Well look at what happened to sourceforge.net...
My mistake, I got your post and the GGPs post mixed up..
I'm assuming that the 73.1% using directx 9 means that 26.9% were using directx 10.
Nope it's 7.14% not 26.9% GGP!
You only counted systems with a DirectX 10 GPU.
It's interesting the amount of people without a DX10 capable card that are running Vista. I wonder if these are new steam users that bought new machines and valve's orange box?
Indeed, there's no reason to switch, but for the businesses that are planning for the future you can see why some might be hesitant about going with Microsoft again.
Based on what? Your experience programming in it? Using the new shader techniques?
Or is it just looking at a new games graphics and saying "Oh wow that's all because of DX10"
The rest of the points pose similar questions, especially the one about Linux drivers... ATI or Nvidia? Which Distro? Which Driver version? I've never had any issues with the Nvidia driver myself so your comment seems very incorrect to me.
I see a reason for businesses to switch to Vista, especially if you play games at work.
Because playing games at work is top priority for most companies...
Slashdot Mirror
and from the article..Don't want that cheap knockoff now do we..Yes it's better quality because it looks exactly like the most complained about office package due to its usability issues.
You get refunds!?! I haven't been able to get a refund in the UK since 2002! Swapping game x for game y is not a refund btw.
I don't like your analogy. In your example the DVD is fine but the physical media is broken. It would make more sense if your DVD played fine but half the content was missing and sometimes the audio would disappear because they didn't edit it in.
Game's are more complicated in that they'll release a program that they know doesn't work.
Look at the example I listed. Soldner was the worse game I ever purchased. On the back of the box it promised 13 drivable vehicles, 5 (i think) different aircraft, amazing AI, etc. What I actually got after I bought and installed the game was that you were limited to x amount of vehicles because they hadn't finished adding half of the others in. The AI was completely buggy and would headshot you from 1km away (no joke!).
So what did the community say? "Wait for the patch", "wait for the patch". You can read from the link how that went.. They released the game AGAIN and it was UNFINISHED AGAIN but this time they changed the name so they could dupe a new set of people into buying their same game, this time slightly patched.
I don't think drinking and playing violent games are in the same category. Although I guess some people argue about the long term effect no one died from playing video games, well except those weirdos in Korea but I blame the internet cafes staff. They could kick them out any time but they let them play there for three days because all they care about is making money. I bet if you kicked those kids out before they died they'd start thinking "damn I'm hungry, I'll get something to eat on the way to the other cafe", etc, etc.
I don't agree that Halo 3 is a halfass game at all, but it's time for game publishers and investors to wake up and realise you can't ship a buggy POS.
It doesn't happen with any other product that you can buy. If the car industry sold cars that had 3 out of the 4 seats missing and it only went half the speed advertised they would get legally hit so badly. Just because software is an abstract concept to grasp rather then a physical product doesn't mean you can rip the customer off on quality.
Yes you're quite right. I see what he is trying to say.
Do you know at all if steam offers refunds for its online purchases? Steam collects a huge amount of statistics from you, I would have thought it would be easy to see who has played through X amount of the game and disallow them to refund after a certain number of hours? This would be a fix to the normal brick and mortar store's problem of people playing the game and then refunding it the next week.
I remember reading a comment on here a long time ago when it all happened it was something like "They [fsf] were right".
You're a brit you should know the deal by now.. English build the tech, Americans take all the glory.
Personally, I think people who take a joke seriously especially on Slashdot are the ones we could do without.
I think the whole RIAA thing is that they are providing computer experts to give evidence. I don't believe it has anything to with providing the defense with support, just an independent review. I can see how this could be turned into what you said and generate negative publicity, but I don't think it would taint Linux at all.
The only way this could have an effect is if they wanted to sell/re-distribute those changes, in which case they would then have to publish those changes under the GPL license. So again what's the big deal in letting a programmer privately improve the code?When you make private changes to a GPL app you aren't forced to distribute those changes, only when you re-distribute are you forced to publish your changes.
Your point is that we should force private changes to be re-distributed and just in case you mention it in your reply.. No, serving html pages to web browsers isn't redistributing the projects source code.
phpBB and the modifications are written in PHP. PHP is plain text scripting code. Could you be more specific about what you mean?
Are you talking about forcing people that customise their own phpBB board but don't release their code for distribution? You are not talking about people that release modifications on the phpBB forum at all. You want to force the phpBB user admins to release their private modifications.
So you're saying that:
- Someone that put a lot of effort into making a new theme for their own forum should be forced to release that theme for everyone's use.
- If someone makes a web game that incorporates a phpBB board they should be forced to give up their web game code.
- If someone makes changes to anything of phpBB and is hosting it on their own website and handing out html pages to people they should give up their private modifications so that you can use it on your own phpBB forum.
That's just freeloading on other's hard work and it would destroy phpBB which is already just a platform for spammers anyway.
I hate opensouce users that contribute nothing towards a project but demand to have everyone's toys. These users kill my enthusiasm to work on the open source web projects I do have.
I know exactly what I'd say if someone showed up at my phpBB forum and demanded my code that I had put months of work into and wasn't related to any open source work.. "f*ck off". It's my code, I have a copyright over it and can do what I want with it.
If there is a mod that you want opensourced then you make it. PHP isn't exactly the hardest scripting language and you can get a lot done in a short time.
If however I am wrong and you have to redistribute mycode.php I can see this being a real nightmare for programmers who have incorporated all sorts of code into their project.
That's great but in Britan it is dark by 4pm right now so what's the point? All DST has done is made me an hour early for a lecture THATS more inconvenient then if there is more sunlight or not.
Screw DST and as a Brit I hope they get rid of it as soon as possible. I've never heard of one Brit that didn't complain about it.
From the article..There are two people, Tina Farrel and a sales assistant that need to be darwinised.
I way I see this is that if you make changes which are publicly viewable then you have to re-distribute those changes. If you don't make changes then no one is going to come knocking on your door.
I don't really see the need for this license. I've been writing PHP code for years and this has never been a problem. When I worked for GreedyBastardCompany I was looking for a free captcha to use. If it was licensed under the AGPL I would have looked for something else more work safe. Luck had it that it was licensed under the GPL so I took the code and incorporated it into our site. The captcha wasn't very good though so I made it better and gave the code changes back to the author. This is basically what AGPL forces you to do but when you do web work everything is so customised that it wouldn't work any better then the GPL does.
The web development community is great at giving back code changes so I do question the need for this license, especially if it gets in the way of writing a commercial site on top of an AGPL web framework (which is the point of most web frameworks, to make you write commercial websites faster in a team environment).
There are exceptions though. I think this would be a GREAT license to use when launchpad.net goes open source. Bug tracking, Time Tracking, Project Management, etc. These would be great to license under the AGPL.
Why? Well look at what happened to sourceforge.net...
Ubuntu? I know I've connected to steam through wine but it probably detects me as Windows XP..
Truth doesn't matter, look at some of the outdated information people spread about Linux without using it themselves.
Indeed, there's no reason to switch, but for the businesses that are planning for the future you can see why some might be hesitant about going with Microsoft again.
Or is it just looking at a new games graphics and saying "Oh wow that's all because of DX10"
The rest of the points pose similar questions, especially the one about Linux drivers... ATI or Nvidia? Which Distro? Which Driver version? I've never had any issues with the Nvidia driver myself so your comment seems very incorrect to me.Because playing games at work is top priority for most companies...