Check out NeoOffice. They seem to be doing just fine. Help/funds from Apple would certainly not hurt, but I'd say the "native-looking" OS X oo.o version is here to stay.
Looking at the documentation, I'd say this is a step in the right direction for Linux to be appropriate for home users. For the typical user, it is important that they can find an "application link" somewhere on the internet and just click it to use it. Package management systems like apt/urpm/emerge work well and are still necessary for Linux, but klik-style installation will enable average users to be comfortable using software that hasn't already been installed by someone else. As a result, they will probably feel a lot more "at ease and in control" during their Linux experience.
As a bonus, the linked application only runs with the user's privilege level. That means if it's a malicious app, it won't hose the whole system, and security/recovery becomes much easier.
It almost makes me want to try out desktop Linux again (using OS X right now).
NeoOffice is OpenOffice on OS X. It's been out for quite a while, and works fine most of the time. It is built on top of Java. Building it on top of Java was apparently much easier than building on Cocoa.
I guess I'm abnormal then. I've been married 5 years, have two kids, and consider myself much happier than I was before I was married (and I'm not rich). I find the companionship and stability that my wife provides me improve my life quite a bit. I suppose a live-in girlfriend could provide the same thing, but I figured I didn't see a need to break with the tradition of marriage, so why not?
Sorry you have such a bleak view of it. I've been quite happy so far.
"I'm sorry, but you're wrong". Heh... no, *you're* wrong. Now that that's out of the way...
There is plenty of evidence that kids *do* learn new subjects without coercion. For one example, they learn to speak without being forced to do so. They learn games from their peers. They learn social behavior by imitation. They learn how to ride bikes, make sandwiches, etc etc. All it takes is for them to have interest, be it due to immediate practical necessity, or due to intellectual curiosity. On a personal level, I have learned *far* more after school, been a lot more interested in what I've learned, and thus retained it for a lot longer, than I did when I was in school and subjected to batteries of tests and coercion.
Besides, my argument is that if learning these subject has to be coerced, it is not worth teaching them to our kids. To use an example: do we really care if kids know what date the French revolution started? No! It would be nice if they had a general idea about history. But some kids don't care *at all* about history, and our attempts to force them to learn about it will be futile. Other kids who *are* interested will obviously not need to be coerced to learn about it. If we can't spend more than 5-10 minutes on a subject with some kids, why should we force the issue? When a toddler refuses to eat, you can't force the food down his mouth; you have to let him have his way, then eat when he's actually hungry. Let's treat our kids as human beings; eg treat them the way we would want to be treated.
I think the whole "we need to teach this stuff even though it's boring" idea is silly. If the learning doesn't seem relevant and/or fun, what's the point? If I personally don't see the point in something I'm learning, I'll just forget it all. So why bother trying to force-feed it to me in the first place?
What we need to do is let kids (and adults? who says schooling has to stop when we turn 18?) learn what they want, whenever they want. Even if it means they're learning nothing for 5 years. We need to have some faith in human nature: the human desire to learn is preprogrammed into us as a result of our intelligence. Trust that we will learn what we need to when the time comes for it to be necessary.
The whole school system needs to be re-worked from the ground up. The forced warehousing and detention of kids is stifling and degrading to all involved, and needs to be abolished. Can't we come up with a better environment for our kids to be in for the first 18 years of their lives? Let them do interesting, useful things. If we did this, I think we'd be amazed at how intelligent kids can be, and how much of a benefit they can be to their society.
So as with every "Linux marketshare" article on Slashdot, I'm seeing several replies along the lines of "who cares? I use Linux, I don't care what the rest of the world uses". The whole "market share" question is not about who has "the best tools for the job". It is about who controls the software chokepoints.
The "who" in this case is the majority software provider, aka Microsoft. Want to play the latest whiz-bang games? Better get Windows. Want to use proprietary small business apps? Better get Windows. Want to run large corporate integrated apps? Better get Windows. Want to install a computer for your Mom, but "it has to have Quicken"? Better get Windows. (Because I'm lazy, let's leave Mac OS out of this for now)
See the common theme here? For the past 5-10 years, Windows has controlled these "chokepoints". Not because it is the "best tool for the job", but because its unique combination of features, price, etc were what the market favored at that time.
So, why should this matter to you, who already uses Linux and already have your "best tools for the job"? The answer: maybe sometimes you want to play some of those new whiz-bang games that are coming out, or you want to interact with another small business who uses Windows-only apps, or you work for a megacorp whose executives insist they need MS-BigProject 5.2. See? You are forced to use Windows; it doesn't matter what you would like to use.
This is why market share questions are important. This is really about computer users who want the freedom not to choose Microsoft products. It is also why the place for "I use the best tool for the job" responses are in other, more technical discussions.
A lot of the comments by the police department and "authorities" in TFA make absolutely no sense (like that's a big surprise, considering that we're talking about network security here). They say things like "a wardriver could sit on business premises and hack your website". This concern is bogus. If I were a cracker and wanted to crack some company's website, I sure as hell wouldn't sit in their parking lot to do it. I would find a nice safe anonymous internet proxy to connect from and launch my exploits from there.
Unsecured wireless network connections should be seen as a kind of "open internet connection" with a smaller audience. If you wouldn't attach an unfiltered internet connection to a certain network resource, you shouldn't connect an open wireless connection to it either. If you're really paranoid, you can consider secured and unsecured wireless equivalent in that regard.
I heartily agree. I submitted a bug report to OO.o a while ago requesting they stick a bug reporting feature directly into OO.o. Although many would still not use it, I'm certain it would encourage more bug reports and improve the product. My original request is here. As you can see if you look at it, it's dated January 2004. The problem with bug reports/feature requests in OO.o is obviously that they sometimes take a *long* time to be addressed. I guess if people really want to see this feature they can register with OO.o and vote to support this request.
I'm not sure whether this would increase responsiveness to bug reports in general, since this is a volunteer project. That's the Achilles heel of F/OSS, as most here are already aware.
Did you submit the bugs to the OO.o bug tracker? If enough people start submitting these bugs, they'll eventually get fixed and OO.o really will become a killer office productivity app. If you're interested, the OO.o bug tracker is here.
First off, Taiwan is a rich, developed country already. Outsourcing labor to Taiwan to save money on labor would be unwise, as the people who live their have high salary expectations. Would a software haus outsource to S Korea to reduce labor costs? If not, than they probably wouldn't consider Taiwan either.
That, and the native language of Taiwan is Chinese (although quite a few Taiwanese speak passably good English). Good luck trying to get Joe User from Anytown, USA to try to do receive technical support in Chinese.
I think watermarking would work to identify piraters
for a few days, at least. Someone would figure out how to "smudge" the watermarks, making the original mark unidentifiable. The smudged version would then be traded around in the traditional way.
Probably this would initiate yet another tech arms race. The watermarkers would develop more advanced and smudge-proof watermarks. The smudgers would develop more advanced smudging methods. Ad infinitum.
If we really want to roll out universal broadband coverage, we need it to be sub-15$/month. Think about it: 40$/month is almost 500$/year. Is your standard low income family even going to consider it when they can get dial-up for maybe 10$/month?
Oh well, I'm sure someone will figure out how to provide really cheap broadband/wireless service sooner or later. Taking the monopolistic local copper providers out of the loop will certainly improve things. I'm guessing we will see "economy/low margin" wireless broadband service at 5$-10$/month in maybe 5 or 6 years since competition in the wireless broadband service provider market seems to finally be heating up. Maybe a commercial provider like netzero will even do it for free by encapsulating wireless service in ads.
Another advantage of living in space habitats is that we can eventually push them away from the sun. Long-term, the sun is probably very dangerous as a source of power. It is relatively unstable and prone to violent, lethal events. There is a cool sci-fi story here that mentions this. The story also theorizes that space is too lethal for humanity to survive, which I don't happen to agree with; a few meters of lead between humans and space ought to handle most radiation from space quite nicely.
Uhh... hate to break this to you, but there is insufficient pressure at the Earth's core to cause fusion. If everything else remained the same, in the future the only change of elements within the Earth would be due to radioactive decay, which is in a way "reverse fusion".
I'm also not sure what 64 codon triplets have to do with 64 bit computing.
We may be made obsolete and become extinct. Or we may evolve and continue to exist at a different level. There is no way to be certain, since we are notoriously bad at prognostication.
I would say the "privilege" vs "right" argument is not framed correctly. Instead it is more of a "private" vs "public" rights argument. I wouldn't care about people's machines getting infected, etc if they were not continuously acting as spam-bots, zombies, etc. Once the user who owns the machine allows it to start generating "internet pollution" like this, I think a little bit of personal responsibility is in order.
Thus, instead of looking at it as "LARTing clewless n00bs", we should look at it as "policing internet pollution". I imagine most people would support fines and/or restrictions for people who drive damaged and dangerous cars on the highway, putting everyone else at risk. IMHO, this situation is analagous to restricting internet access for those people who ignore repeated warnings about securing their online machines.
Heh... OK, call it a kernel update or upgrade then. Since I used precompiled kernel packages that came with my Linux distribution, I honestly didn't do any traditional patching nor kernel recompiling. It was all apt-get update, apt-get upgrade, etc; pretty simple actually. The reboot was of course still disruptive though.
This is partially redundant to a few of the other posts here saying that this vulnerability was already disclosed several weeks ago. However, I thought I'd add that if you already patched, check the vulnerability ID; in this case it's CAN-2004-0077. Your patch should have specifically mentioned this ID. If not, you need to patch again.
Thank $DEITY I don't need to patch/reboot again. I was starting to get a bit annoyed at having to patch the kernel twice in two months. Scheduling reboots of machines in use by many people is no fun.
Turn off Bayesian filtering and add more memory. The majority of SpamAssassin's work load comes from its regular expression checks and the Bayesian filter. You can turn off the Bayesian filter to halve the work load. The reg ex stuff will go much faster if you add memory. Any alternate heuristics-based anti-spam solution is going to have the same trouble, so spring for the memory first and see if it helps.
On Apple X "just works" also. I'm currently using Panther with Apple-supplied X. Start up X and you have a terminal window. Most of the commands you are used to from Linux will work from this terminal window. For example "ssh -X somehost run_gui_app" launches XWindows apps from a remote host on my Mac.
When my Linux box's video died, I decided to just give up on it. Now I either ssh into it from my Mac for CLI sessions or use ssh-tunnelled X forwarding to launch GUI apps. No problem!
BTW, OS 10.3 has X built in; you don't have to download and install it separately any more.
Actually, internal combustion engines in general are horribly inefficient at using the energy stored in gasoline (about 12% efficient is what I last heard). It's a bunch of rapid explosions, which dissipate a lot of energy into heat, audible noise, and mechanical wear in the transmission mechanisms. To get better efficiency out of gas or anything with hydrogen in it, look at internal combustion engines (30-40% efficient last I heard).
This is only partially relevant to your comment, but:
Why does everyone assume all our hydrocarbons come from dead, compacted plants? There are hydrocarbons all over the solar system. Should we assume that all those hydrocarbons on Titan, the moon of Saturn, came from dead, compacted plants?
Slashdot Mirror
Check out NeoOffice. They seem to be doing just fine. Help/funds from Apple would certainly not hurt, but I'd say the "native-looking" OS X oo.o version is here to stay.
Looking at the documentation, I'd say this is a step in the right direction for Linux to be appropriate for home users. For the typical user, it is important that they can find an "application link" somewhere on the internet and just click it to use it. Package management systems like apt/urpm/emerge work well and are still necessary for Linux, but klik-style installation will enable average users to be comfortable using software that hasn't already been installed by someone else. As a result, they will probably feel a lot more "at ease and in control" during their Linux experience.
As a bonus, the linked application only runs with the user's privilege level. That means if it's a malicious app, it won't hose the whole system, and security/recovery becomes much easier.
It almost makes me want to try out desktop Linux again (using OS X right now).
NeoOffice is OpenOffice on OS X. It's been out for quite a while, and works fine most of the time. It is built on top of Java. Building it on top of Java was apparently much easier than building on Cocoa.
Ruin his life, eh?
I guess I'm abnormal then. I've been married 5 years, have two kids, and consider myself much happier than I was before I was married (and I'm not rich). I find the companionship and stability that my wife provides me improve my life quite a bit. I suppose a live-in girlfriend could provide the same thing, but I figured I didn't see a need to break with the tradition of marriage, so why not?
Sorry you have such a bleak view of it. I've been quite happy so far.
I will see you one diatribe and raise you a rant.
1: Telling people they're wrong does not make for a productive discussion.
2: Brandishing credentials is similarly non-productive.
3: Condescension also does not help.
4: You are a Nazi! OK, you may or may not be a Nazi, but I've now satisfied Godwin's law and can say my part in this thread is concluded.
"I'm sorry, but you're wrong". Heh... no, *you're* wrong. Now that that's out of the way...
There is plenty of evidence that kids *do* learn new subjects without coercion. For one example, they learn to speak without being forced to do so. They learn games from their peers. They learn social behavior by imitation. They learn how to ride bikes, make sandwiches, etc etc. All it takes is for them to have interest, be it due to immediate practical necessity, or due to intellectual curiosity. On a personal level, I have learned *far* more after school, been a lot more interested in what I've learned, and thus retained it for a lot longer, than I did when I was in school and subjected to batteries of tests and coercion.
Besides, my argument is that if learning these subject has to be coerced, it is not worth teaching them to our kids. To use an example: do we really care if kids know what date the French revolution started? No! It would be nice if they had a general idea about history. But some kids don't care *at all* about history, and our attempts to force them to learn about it will be futile. Other kids who *are* interested will obviously not need to be coerced to learn about it. If we can't spend more than 5-10 minutes on a subject with some kids, why should we force the issue? When a toddler refuses to eat, you can't force the food down his mouth; you have to let him have his way, then eat when he's actually hungry. Let's treat our kids as human beings; eg treat them the way we would want to be treated.
I think the whole "we need to teach this stuff even though it's boring" idea is silly. If the learning doesn't seem relevant and/or fun, what's the point? If I personally don't see the point in something I'm learning, I'll just forget it all. So why bother trying to force-feed it to me in the first place?
What we need to do is let kids (and adults? who says schooling has to stop when we turn 18?) learn what they want, whenever they want. Even if it means they're learning nothing for 5 years. We need to have some faith in human nature: the human desire to learn is preprogrammed into us as a result of our intelligence. Trust that we will learn what we need to when the time comes for it to be necessary.
The whole school system needs to be re-worked from the ground up. The forced warehousing and detention of kids is stifling and degrading to all involved, and needs to be abolished. Can't we come up with a better environment for our kids to be in for the first 18 years of their lives? Let them do interesting, useful things. If we did this, I think we'd be amazed at how intelligent kids can be, and how much of a benefit they can be to their society.
So as with every "Linux marketshare" article on Slashdot, I'm seeing several replies along the lines of "who cares? I use Linux, I don't care what the rest of the world uses". The whole "market share" question is not about who has "the best tools for the job". It is about who controls the software chokepoints.
The "who" in this case is the majority software provider, aka Microsoft. Want to play the latest whiz-bang games? Better get Windows. Want to use proprietary small business apps? Better get Windows. Want to run large corporate integrated apps? Better get Windows. Want to install a computer for your Mom, but "it has to have Quicken"? Better get Windows. (Because I'm lazy, let's leave Mac OS out of this for now)
See the common theme here? For the past 5-10 years, Windows has controlled these "chokepoints". Not because it is the "best tool for the job", but because its unique combination of features, price, etc were what the market favored at that time.
So, why should this matter to you, who already uses Linux and already have your "best tools for the job"? The answer: maybe sometimes you want to play some of those new whiz-bang games that are coming out, or you want to interact with another small business who uses Windows-only apps, or you work for a megacorp whose executives insist they need MS-BigProject 5.2. See? You are forced to use Windows; it doesn't matter what you would like to use.
This is why market share questions are important. This is really about computer users who want the freedom not to choose Microsoft products. It is also why the place for "I use the best tool for the job" responses are in other, more technical discussions.
A lot of the comments by the police department and "authorities" in TFA make absolutely no sense (like that's a big surprise, considering that we're talking about network security here). They say things like "a wardriver could sit on business premises and hack your website". This concern is bogus. If I were a cracker and wanted to crack some company's website, I sure as hell wouldn't sit in their parking lot to do it. I would find a nice safe anonymous internet proxy to connect from and launch my exploits from there.
Unsecured wireless network connections should be seen as a kind of "open internet connection" with a smaller audience. If you wouldn't attach an unfiltered internet connection to a certain network resource, you shouldn't connect an open wireless connection to it either. If you're really paranoid, you can consider secured and unsecured wireless equivalent in that regard.
I heartily agree. I submitted a bug report to OO.o a while ago requesting they stick a bug reporting feature directly into OO.o. Although many would still not use it, I'm certain it would encourage more bug reports and improve the product. My original request is here. As you can see if you look at it, it's dated January 2004. The problem with bug reports/feature requests in OO.o is obviously that they sometimes take a *long* time to be addressed. I guess if people really want to see this feature they can register with OO.o and vote to support this request.
I'm not sure whether this would increase responsiveness to bug reports in general, since this is a volunteer project. That's the Achilles heel of F/OSS, as most here are already aware.
Did you submit the bugs to the OO.o bug tracker? If enough people start submitting these bugs, they'll eventually get fixed and OO.o really will become a killer office productivity app. If you're interested, the OO.o bug tracker is here.
Umm... Taiwan?!
First off, Taiwan is a rich, developed country already. Outsourcing labor to Taiwan to save money on labor would be unwise, as the people who live their have high salary expectations. Would a software haus outsource to S Korea to reduce labor costs? If not, than they probably wouldn't consider Taiwan either.
That, and the native language of Taiwan is Chinese (although quite a few Taiwanese speak passably good English). Good luck trying to get Joe User from Anytown, USA to try to do receive technical support in Chinese.
I think watermarking would work to identify piraters
for a few days, at least. Someone would figure out how to "smudge" the watermarks, making the original mark unidentifiable. The smudged version would then be traded around in the traditional way.
Probably this would initiate yet another tech arms race. The watermarkers would develop more advanced and smudge-proof watermarks. The smudgers would develop more advanced smudging methods. Ad infinitum.
If we really want to roll out universal broadband coverage, we need it to be sub-15$/month. Think about it: 40$/month is almost 500$/year. Is your standard low income family even going to consider it when they can get dial-up for maybe 10$/month?
Oh well, I'm sure someone will figure out how to provide really cheap broadband/wireless service sooner or later. Taking the monopolistic local copper providers out of the loop will certainly improve things. I'm guessing we will see "economy/low margin" wireless broadband service at 5$-10$/month in maybe 5 or 6 years since competition in the wireless broadband service provider market seems to finally be heating up. Maybe a commercial provider like netzero will even do it for free by encapsulating wireless service in ads.
Another advantage of living in space habitats is that we can eventually push them away from the sun. Long-term, the sun is probably very dangerous as a source of power. It is relatively unstable and prone to violent, lethal events. There is a cool sci-fi story here that mentions this. The story also theorizes that space is too lethal for humanity to survive, which I don't happen to agree with; a few meters of lead between humans and space ought to handle most radiation from space quite nicely.
Uhh... hate to break this to you, but there is insufficient pressure at the Earth's core to cause fusion. If everything else remained the same, in the future the only change of elements within the Earth would be due to radioactive decay, which is in a way "reverse fusion".
I'm also not sure what 64 codon triplets have to do with 64 bit computing.
We may be made obsolete and become extinct. Or we may evolve and continue to exist at a different level. There is no way to be certain, since we are notoriously bad at prognostication.
I would say the "privilege" vs "right" argument is not framed correctly. Instead it is more of a "private" vs "public" rights argument. I wouldn't care about people's machines getting infected, etc if they were not continuously acting as spam-bots, zombies, etc. Once the user who owns the machine allows it to start generating "internet pollution" like this, I think a little bit of personal responsibility is in order.
Thus, instead of looking at it as "LARTing clewless n00bs", we should look at it as "policing internet pollution". I imagine most people would support fines and/or restrictions for people who drive damaged and dangerous cars on the highway, putting everyone else at risk. IMHO, this situation is analagous to restricting internet access for those people who ignore repeated warnings about securing their online machines.
When you say "we here on Slashdot" you cannot possibly expect to represent every last Slashdot reader's views. You don't speak for me. So don't try.
Heh... OK, call it a kernel update or upgrade then. Since I used precompiled kernel packages that came with my Linux distribution, I honestly didn't do any traditional patching nor kernel recompiling. It was all apt-get update, apt-get upgrade, etc; pretty simple actually. The reboot was of course still disruptive though.
This is partially redundant to a few of the other posts here saying that this vulnerability was already disclosed several weeks ago. However, I thought I'd add that if you already patched, check the vulnerability ID; in this case it's CAN-2004-0077. Your patch should have specifically mentioned this ID. If not, you need to patch again.
Thank $DEITY I don't need to patch/reboot again. I was starting to get a bit annoyed at having to patch the kernel twice in two months. Scheduling reboots of machines in use by many people is no fun.
Turn off Bayesian filtering and add more memory. The majority of SpamAssassin's work load comes from its regular expression checks and the Bayesian filter. You can turn off the Bayesian filter to halve the work load. The reg ex stuff will go much faster if you add memory. Any alternate heuristics-based anti-spam solution is going to have the same trouble, so spring for the memory first and see if it helps.
On Apple X "just works" also. I'm currently using Panther with Apple-supplied X. Start up X and you have a terminal window. Most of the commands you are used to from Linux will work from this terminal window. For example "ssh -X somehost run_gui_app" launches XWindows apps from a remote host on my Mac.
When my Linux box's video died, I decided to just give up on it. Now I either ssh into it from my Mac for CLI sessions or use ssh-tunnelled X forwarding to launch GUI apps. No problem!
BTW, OS 10.3 has X built in; you don't have to download and install it separately any more.
Or I am just an idiot... a definite possibility...
I meant "fuel cells"... oops...
Actually, internal combustion engines in general are horribly inefficient at using the energy stored in gasoline (about 12% efficient is what I last heard). It's a bunch of rapid explosions, which dissipate a lot of energy into heat, audible noise, and mechanical wear in the transmission mechanisms. To get better efficiency out of gas or anything with hydrogen in it, look at internal combustion engines (30-40% efficient last I heard).
This is only partially relevant to your comment, but:
Why does everyone assume all our hydrocarbons come from dead, compacted plants? There are hydrocarbons all over the solar system. Should we assume that all those hydrocarbons on Titan, the moon of Saturn, came from dead, compacted plants?