When I was working for my college newspaper, we used College Publisher, and I was NOT impressed. It was a relatively small college, so there wasn't really a source of free labor in the CS department, and the powers that be thought the best choice was to pay for hosting at College Publisher so they could slather our site with their ads for credit cards, etc. and offer us "valuable syndicated content" that nobody read.
I would have loved something built from the ground-up for our purposes, particularly if it offered similar features (article submission/review/revision process, for example) without all the nonsense College Publisher gave us.
It's not quite as good as a single hotkey, but Opera 6.x (for Windows, at least) has a popup menu associated with the F12 key that allows you to enable/disable popups, change your reported user agent, enable/disable javascript/plugins/cookies/animated gifs/etc.
I'm all for the changes you mentioned to the popup window blocking though.
Can't remember who it is, but I've seen a car dealership commercial (looks local) using the pets.com puppet as their mascot. They come right out and admit it too, without mentioning pets.com specifically - the idea of the commercial is that they're giving the puppet a second chance, and that everybody deserves a second chance (on their bad credit).
Because, um, saying that 90% of the GNU/Linux people are a bunch of 1337 bastards sounded like a bit of a generalization. I see your point, it's just that the contrast of those two statements that close together was interesting.
A good point, and all the more reason why this theoretically completed OpenWindows would make more sense for companies than solutions like WINE. People have gotten used to the changeover necessary when a new major version of Windows comes out, so it's not a big deal. Meanwhile, changing your entire company from NT to Linux would be traumatic to say the least, even if you hide it behind a GUI and WINE.
Whether or not anyone can actually accomplish this wacky feat is a much stickier topic. I choose to cling to my optimism on this unless/until the developers prove they're not up to the task. Not that long ago, most people would have doubted the feasibility of creating a workable opensource Unix-style OS from scratch.
>how long do you think it would take for Microsoft to sue?
But sue for what? Seriously, I'm asking. Most of the reasons that I can think of have been at least partially shot down already.
Look and Feel - MS already came out on the winning side when Apple sued them for stealing their L&F.
API's - As long as the API's are reproduced without looking at MS source, isn't this the same case that Sony isn't having much luck with against Connectix for reproducing the PSX API's?
General binary compatibility (I can't think of a better term here) - If I'm not mistaken, courts tend to frown on selective enforcement of intellectual property rights. If MS lets WINE exist and then decides to sue the OpenWindows people, they've got a long case ahead of them.
I figure there's something I'm missing here, but maybe there would be enough holes in the case that they wouldn't sue.
This would theoretically be better than VMWare/Wine for commercial users because it could both save money (like Linux/Wine) and provide a migration path that is much easier to swallow (not like Linux/Wine).
I'm currently interning at a company that is almost exclusively WinNT based. Between commercial apps and in-house tools, each workstation has several dozen Win apps installed.
To move to Linux/Wine, hundreds of workstations will need a Linux install, which will mean repartitioning, installing the new OS, and maybe reinstalling some apps depending on how smoothly everything moves over. Hundreds of times. As for VMWare, you could install with NT as the host, but you still need the NT license and now you've paid for VMWare too, so there's no convincing financial reason for them to switch over.
Assuming OpenWindows were to ever reach the point of being a drop-in replacement for MSWindows (a long shot at best, I realize), the migration path could simply be an installation. No more buying NT licenses. Poof, you're saving money with no impact on productivity.
This would certainly be nice. I don't see it happening, but if it ever reaches the point of code that I could work on (not really an OS writer personally) I would help them out.
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I would have loved something built from the ground-up for our purposes, particularly if it offered similar features (article submission/review/revision process, for example) without all the nonsense College Publisher gave us.
It's not quite as good as a single hotkey, but Opera 6.x (for Windows, at least) has a popup menu associated with the F12 key that allows you to enable/disable popups, change your reported user agent, enable/disable javascript/plugins/cookies/animated gifs/etc.
I'm all for the changes you mentioned to the popup window blocking though.
Can't remember who it is, but I've seen a car dealership commercial (looks local) using the pets.com puppet as their mascot. They come right out and admit it too, without mentioning pets.com specifically - the idea of the commercial is that they're giving the puppet a second chance, and that everybody deserves a second chance (on their bad credit).
Because, um, saying that 90% of the GNU/Linux people are a bunch of 1337 bastards sounded like a bit of a generalization. I see your point, it's just that the contrast of those two statements that close together was interesting.
> My biggest problem I have with GNU/Linux culture is that 90% of its devotees...
> Get a clue, you l337 bastards.
In the sig:
> All generalizations are false.
Just had to point that out. No offense intended, old-school Solaris user; that just struck me as funny.
xyzzy
Whether or not anyone can actually accomplish this wacky feat is a much stickier topic. I choose to cling to my optimism on this unless/until the developers prove they're not up to the task. Not that long ago, most people would have doubted the feasibility of creating a workable opensource Unix-style OS from scratch.
xyzzy
But sue for what? Seriously, I'm asking. Most of the reasons that I can think of have been at least partially shot down already.
- Look and Feel - MS already came out on the winning side when Apple sued them for stealing their L&F.
- API's - As long as the API's are reproduced without looking at MS source, isn't this the same case that Sony isn't having much luck with against Connectix for reproducing the PSX API's?
- General binary compatibility (I can't think of a better term here) - If I'm not mistaken, courts tend to frown on selective enforcement of intellectual property rights. If MS lets WINE exist and then decides to sue the OpenWindows people, they've got a long case ahead of them.
I figure there's something I'm missing here, but maybe there would be enough holes in the case that they wouldn't sue.Sure.
xyzzy
I'm currently interning at a company that is almost exclusively WinNT based. Between commercial apps and in-house tools, each workstation has several dozen Win apps installed.
To move to Linux/Wine, hundreds of workstations will need a Linux install, which will mean repartitioning, installing the new OS, and maybe reinstalling some apps depending on how smoothly everything moves over. Hundreds of times. As for VMWare, you could install with NT as the host, but you still need the NT license and now you've paid for VMWare too, so there's no convincing financial reason for them to switch over.
Assuming OpenWindows were to ever reach the point of being a drop-in replacement for MSWindows (a long shot at best, I realize), the migration path could simply be an installation. No more buying NT licenses. Poof, you're saving money with no impact on productivity.
This would certainly be nice. I don't see it happening, but if it ever reaches the point of code that I could work on (not really an OS writer personally) I would help them out.
xyzzy