Is it using one of those coin sized hard drives that was mentioned here some time back?
It seems to have the dial on the side...is this doing things kind of like the phone key input, where you press the letter for the key (one..two..or three taps)..then wait a second, then work on the next letter...with this one using the dial to indicate the letter desired. Maybe a shift/shift lock key?
That's one reason this is all out of hand--just bring up the analogy of a video rental store or a library and the RIAA and MPAA's brains would melt because they'd instantly realize the craziness of their arguments.
They are trying to protect their investment.
Don't the video stores still provide some money back to the corporations? If so, they make some money back. So it's not as big of an issue.
And any VCR duplicates would not be as good as the originals..so they may not be as threatened. But the DVD have means to prevent unauthorized viewing (and duplication) with unauthorized viewers.
With library, unless someone photo copies a book and sells it, or scans in the contents of the book and sells it...it doesn't become an issue. Which is a lot harder than putting a CD and pressing duplicate. The idea of encryption on DVD is trying to make it harder to duplicate to cause them to buy a new one vs copying.
Once someone else starts making money..then it becomes an issue to them.
in a discussion about information wanting to be free? For years, we've paid taxes for the Government to develop all kinds of nifty technologies, just for big corporations to turn around with this freebie information and make huge profits (does RSA ring a bell?).
Corporations and the people that run it pay taxes too...they are entitled to that info also..and what they choose to do with is how they make money...As much as we hate M$...they take a technology and run with it to make you have to have it and/or want it.
Information DOES want to be free - what you do with the information is totally your business.
If it's your information. When you purchase a CD or movie...the CD becomes yours...I don't know if I would necessarily say the content becomes yours.
I don't see how analyzing and re-engineering a process should be illegal - how anyone figured that DeCSS, which basically manipulates DVDs which are in YOUR POSSESSION, is illegal.
You own the DVD yes, but not the content, you can play it on recognized DVD players that lawfully decrypt things and play it. The issue, is that DeCSS "unlawfully" (right or wrong) circumvents legal encryption which is there to avoid unauthorized playing and (as the corporations love to say) "duplication" of the content. The breaking of the DVD encryption scheme is the issue. I think it is a protection through obuscation thing. Although an argument could be made, that to make better protections, you have to be able to identify the weaknesses.
I wonder - does this joker think that VCR's should be illegal because you can copy tapes from Blockbuster? How about cassette decks and the radio?
It is not an issue, because the (1) the duplicates degrade and are not as good as the original (2) there is nothing preventing playing (or duplication) on unauthorized viewers and so does not fall under the current laws in question. DVD duplicates would be almost identical to the originals, which is seen as a threat to the Movie makers.
This is a TERRIBLE thing to be coming from someone who's supposedly a computer person. This is lawyer reasoning.
Guess what...we unfortunately have to think the way the lawyers do, because if we don't they will run all over you. Adapt, think it through, and thrive.
I think one of the issues is no one wants to pay the high prices of certain things and so they find another way of doing it. I wish the same could be said about lawyers and the fees they charge.
Napster should be the world's pre-eminate collaboration tool for musicians.
Your right as a tool for distribution its good...but the musicians still don't make any money off of it. How do they put food on their table if no money is made for them.
People who can't afford to distribute their music any other way.
The authors of the music can't afford to distrubute their music any other way.
So instead, people pirate music with it.
The listeners pirate music instead.
That's not the fault of Napster - what people choose to do with the technologies they're presented is their own business.
We're setting very dangerous precedent -
I agree, it does set a bad precedent.
next, we'll have to toss our VCR's, cassette decks, you'll need a special license to own a port scanner, etc.
See the argument above on the VCRs and etc.
Public ports are necessary, otherwise, you would have no way of know you can connect.
Network traffic is another issue, but hopefully encrypted traffic would make network traffic privacy issue a moot issue...
I don't see how this country is all NRA happy, but we're having our information rights stripped from us by the second, and nobody says anything.
Your right...our rights are slowly being stripped away. But the issues of the problem have to be identified. And some of the issues are changing over time.
I think the NRA doesn't want what happened in Germany prior to WWII to occur. I know we probably won't have that happen here as apparent, but if something should occur...we have to be able to overcome a repressive government. And if the government has big guns...its kind of hard to overcome it, if you don't have as good of a gun.
What we choose to do with those rights (be they pop some gang banger or kill a robber) is up to us.
And what is a right and what is a privledge have to also be recognized.
I agree that some information should not be open to the public...
However..could you not, in turn, consider the music as a musicians private information and as such what he or she chooses to do with it is also a consideration?
If he choose to not want people to freely distrubute it, does his/her right to privacy apply here?
From this point of view, then the two issues are not so different.
But also from another stand point, celebraties and well not people, tend to be less able to have rights to privacy as us normal average every day Joes.
Have you noticed that few, if any, Napster advocates are arguing that it should be legal to purchase a copy of Windows 2000 and share it with a community of Windows fans on the Internet via a peer-to-peer networking system? Why not? Is it because there are no fans or potential fans of Windows 2000?
This is an apples and oranges argument. "Why not?" Because if you are already an owner of Windows 2000, then you already have a copy in data format. When I download an MP3 from Napster, it's because I don't want to take the time to rip and encode the tracks of my CDs--I have them in audio format, but not data format. Napster saves me the time. That's why, Mr. Petreley.
There is a flaw in this argument...your argument is based on the assumption that you own the music and software. With Napster, there is no way to guarantee that the MP3 you are getting you own (or for the sake of this argument software). For lack of any proof, they assume you are guilty of theft of the music/software.
But then again, aren't we suppose to be "concider innocent until proven guilty"? I know I read that somewhere.
I think the ideas expressed and pushed by the advocates of Napster, is the exact reason that so many dot.com companies are failing.
They fail to remember, to run a business, you have to make money to support the costs of the business.
This mentaility is similar to the way communism is. One of the reasons that communism did not work so well is there was no incentive (money) in doing certain things and no concideration for how to fund it or get people to do it. But let's not change this into a politcal debate either.
There are obviously several issues in the IP fight:
(1) The rights of a user to listen to content he buys and where he listens to it (mp3.com)
(2) The rights of the user do with it after he purchases it (distributing it outside of the normal distributors - napster).
(3) The rights of the writer of the music (to make money from what he writes)
(4) The rights of the corporate funding the writer to insure they can pay for the costs - if they can't earn enough, then they don't resign the artist and the artist goes into obscurity and they sign another artist that gives the people (the consumer) what they want.
(5) The price placed on the music by the corporating is deemed too high. Price to produce, distribute, market vs money made from sales of all products (CDs, tapes, concert tickets, posters, buttons, etc). Because of the high return for the corporations, the consumer trade with no insentive to buy. Although prior to napster, mp3.com,etc...no one ever seem to make such a big deal on this before.
Sorry to say...humans are greedy. They need incentives to do things they wouldn't necessarily do, like give away something for free. Why do you think Heaven and Hell exist. And no let's not get into the "Existance of God" debate either. (And before anyone asks, I actually do believe in God and Heaven and Hell.)
Might try checking out the news groups related to the subject. Maybe with enough comments there some additional improvements can be made to the whole environment.
I have worked with it in the past and must agree, it is more a hinderance then a help.
DII COE uses segmentation to package things up, which allows easy installation, removing, documentation, source (for development). A lot of these segments just package things up and install using tar or any other appropriate install tool with an install script. This can be a way to allow for overcoming some of the shortfalls of this.
I saw another article similar to this one over at infoworld .
The thing about the infoworld article was a little bit of details about the US case at the end of the article. More specifically, the part about the API, communication interface, and technical info being available to third party vendors and the "secure facility".
Does this mean, that the linux developers should be able to get all the gory details about the file systems and such? Although I would imagine some of that proprietary stuff would still have to sign those NDAs.
This may have been addressed in one of the trial brief somewhere, but when the brief is some 100 page brief...there is only so much M$ B$ that I can stand.
I am not an ISP or have experience in any of these ways, but is it possible to perhaps have a hostname alias that the ISP attaches when you connect on that will allow for better tracking of dialup accounts? Say something like:
john_doe.dialup.isp.com
which can/and would only be assigned by the ISP.
For that matter, can't they tell who is dialed in at any particular time, presuming they are logging all the appropriate information?
Well...if the M$ Split goes through...do you think DirectX would be part of the OS group or the App group.
If it's part of the App group, then I could see DirectX for Linux (in addition to a whole line of M$ products "MS Office for Linux" - don't hurt me for saying that, it's just a fact that people in the work environment {not just development} like using M$ Office")
If DirectX becomes part of the OS, then it still seems that M$ could greatly influence the developers, but only if they force them to use DirectX API.
I prefer the cross platform capabilities of OpenGL, but I've heard that the development of OpenGL is slower to improve. I am sure OpenGL is more thought out, but I still wonder.
I don't know specifically what the person I was talking to was referring to about DirectX excelling in certain areas.
It may be he was referring to how DirectX includes a lot of things that OpenGL requires add ons (GLUT,etc) to do some basic stuff, like menuing systems, sound, support for alternative multimedia formats,etc
Could it perhaps be that they don't want to publize the fact that with region encoding, they can make multiple versions of the same movie & players and have the benefit of having not one product to sell (at outrageous prices) but many products to sell (at outrageous prices).
And of course those other versions cost more because they have to be made special for whatever region/language in the area (which probably is all of about one or two bytes of code somewhere preventing viewing these region encoded disks.
I can see where this is an issue of not wanting to put 100 different languages/translations on one disk, which wouldn't be realistic (unless you want 3 or 4 DVD with only 1 DVD having the language/translation you want).
Staroffice is not an attempt to make Linux more cozy to Windows users. Windows remains and has been the primary market for StarOffice, albeit in Europe. In the US, the Windows Office bundle has always been invincible--maybe European laws have something to do with the different market situations...
And this isn't a reason to see this as an opportunity? If there is a customer need that isn't fullfilled, then that is an area to develope and make money. There are a lot of Linux users that need an office suite...SO provides that.
I do believe S.O. is "decent"--that is the reason I care enough about the subject to get very angry about its muffed opportunities.
It is good too be passionate about things...but remember, there is more to consider in any issue then one or two things...don't get a knee jerk reaction without additional consideration.
It seems to me...that if you take 5.2 to be based on the 5.x line..then there is not likely to be major changes in the interface any time soon.
Sun is promoting a lot of new bells and whistle (like Java 2 support) in their "Star Portal" version. Whether 5.2 is suppose to be Star Portal I have no idea...but I would think that would be the time that such a major user interface change would take place.
Kind of like the difference in the 4.x netscape updates and the 6 mozilla/netscape update. Re-engineering something like that can take a lot of time...
The piled-on junk in the interface is a terrible mistake and doesn't make Linux users, neither the new converts nor the cli veterans happy. Neither does it make the StarOffice-on-Windows users happy. It makes them all equally confused about how all this crap is supposed to work.
There is, of course, one justifying case for the False desktop/Window manager crap of S.O. (versions 4.0 and later), but only one: deployment in a thin client situation where S.O. is really the only application that runs on that station. (One has to wonder tho' how thin such a thin client could realistically be. If S.O. ran on a monster server and only displayed on the client,a la X-windows, that would make sense--but GORR! that would have to be some kind of mainframe sized server to handle many concurrent sessions). This is just not a viable model for gaining share for the S.O. product though. The Office suite market is emphatically desktop oriented, has been so for many years--and, as everyone keeps telling Sun, whether we're on MS or Unix, we already have a desktop.
But then again...you have to remember, that they are targeting it for more then just power Linux users who could care less about the desktop.
And rather than have to make a version for Motif, KDE, Gnome, Generic X, Windows, Mac, Be, etc (you would think Sun would us Java a little more in this instance:-)...it might be easier for portability purposes (I know using some of the QT/GTK stuff might make some of that easier but that's another thread) to have their own desktop that looks the same on as many platforms as possible. If I use it on Windows and then want to move to Linux...it's kind of nice to not have to learn new shortcuts and stuff.
I have never used it on Windows, so if it has a desktop in a desktop...I agree that doesn't make sense.
If you want MS users to feel at home in Linux and you hope StarOffice will help in that aim, you should help Sun rewrite the interface to be less onerous, clumsy and confusing (or realize you're out of your depth && shut the *bleep* up, heh) MS Office based companies will not be converting to S.O., no matter how much money they blow on Office licenses so long as the S.O. interface is cumbersome and layered with redundancy the way it is. It changes the proposition from a switch to using a free product on your desktop oriented network, to a switch that requires some expensive retraining+downtime at best, and in the extreme case, a conversion to E10K servers and thin clients.
Sun is dreaming the impossible dream here: unless S.O. can be obtained in a form that allows an efficient, drop-in replacement of MS Office, and I mean soon,well before MS starts releasing Office for Linux as result of the Antitrust suit, all that money they paid for StarOffice is just swirling around the bowl, soon to disappear forever. That's 500,000,000 dollars. Don't you think that kind of investment warrants the protection of an interface recode--at least making available an optional version that MS Office users and home Linux users say they want?
And it is partially because of this investment that they aren't likely to throw away everything they invested in (SO desktop). It is a starting point...but give them a little time it's hard to re-engineer something as massive as this in a month or two.
Hey...maybe we can get them to open up the source for Star Office and do a Mozilla version....naaaah...this is Sun we are talking about with their wonderful Licensing scheme..
And before anyone comments about me changing any of the last post...name calling isn't needed...neither is cursing... Have a nice day:-)
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Is it using one of those coin sized hard drives that was mentioned here some time back?
It seems to have the dial on the side...is this doing things kind of like the phone key input, where you press the letter for the key (one..two..or three taps)..then wait a second, then work on the next letter...with this one using the dial to indicate the letter desired. Maybe a shift/shift lock key?
Voice recognization?
BreezyGuy
They are trying to protect their investment.
Don't the video stores still provide some money back to the corporations? If so, they make some money back. So it's not as big of an issue.
And any VCR duplicates would not be as good as the originals..so they may not be as threatened. But the DVD have means to prevent unauthorized viewing (and duplication) with unauthorized viewers.
With library, unless someone photo copies a book and sells it, or scans in the contents of the book and sells it...it doesn't become an issue. Which is a lot harder than putting a CD and pressing duplicate. The idea of encryption on DVD is trying to make it harder to duplicate to cause them to buy a new one vs copying.
Once someone else starts making money..then it becomes an issue to them.
BreezyGuy
Corporations and the people that run it pay taxes too...they are entitled to that info also..and what they choose to do with is how they make money...As much as we hate M$...they take a technology and run with it to make you have to have it and/or want it.
Information DOES want to be free - what you do with the information is totally your business.
If it's your information. When you purchase a CD or movie...the CD becomes yours...I don't know if I would necessarily say the content becomes yours.
I don't see how analyzing and re-engineering a process should be illegal - how anyone figured that DeCSS, which basically manipulates DVDs which are in YOUR POSSESSION, is illegal.
You own the DVD yes, but not the content, you can play it on recognized DVD players that lawfully decrypt things and play it. The issue, is that DeCSS "unlawfully" (right or wrong) circumvents legal encryption which is there to avoid unauthorized playing and (as the corporations love to say) "duplication" of the content. The breaking of the DVD encryption scheme is the issue. I think it is a protection through obuscation thing. Although an argument could be made, that to make better protections, you have to be able to identify the weaknesses.
I wonder - does this joker think that VCR's should be illegal because you can copy tapes from Blockbuster? How about cassette decks and the radio?
It is not an issue, because the (1) the duplicates degrade and are not as good as the original (2) there is nothing preventing playing (or duplication) on unauthorized viewers and so does not fall under the current laws in question. DVD duplicates would be almost identical to the originals, which is seen as a threat to the Movie makers.
This is a TERRIBLE thing to be coming from someone who's supposedly a computer person. This is lawyer reasoning.
Guess what...we unfortunately have to think the way the lawyers do, because if we don't they will run all over you. Adapt, think it through, and thrive.
I think one of the issues is no one wants to pay the high prices of certain things and so they find another way of doing it. I wish the same could be said about lawyers and the fees they charge.
Napster should be the world's pre-eminate collaboration tool for musicians.
Your right as a tool for distribution its good...but the musicians still don't make any money off of it. How do they put food on their table if no money is made for them.
People who can't afford to distribute their music any other way.
The authors of the music can't afford to distrubute their music any other way.
So instead, people pirate music with it.
The listeners pirate music instead.
That's not the fault of Napster - what people choose to do with the technologies they're presented is their own business.
We're setting very dangerous precedent -
I agree, it does set a bad precedent.
next, we'll have to toss our VCR's, cassette decks, you'll need a special license to own a port scanner, etc.
See the argument above on the VCRs and etc.
Public ports are necessary, otherwise, you would have no way of know you can connect.
Network traffic is another issue, but hopefully encrypted traffic would make network traffic privacy issue a moot issue...
I don't see how this country is all NRA happy, but we're having our information rights stripped from us by the second, and nobody says anything.
Your right...our rights are slowly being stripped away. But the issues of the problem have to be identified. And some of the issues are changing over time.
I think the NRA doesn't want what happened in Germany prior to WWII to occur. I know we probably won't have that happen here as apparent, but if something should occur...we have to be able to overcome a repressive government. And if the government has big guns...its kind of hard to overcome it, if you don't have as good of a gun.
What we choose to do with those rights (be they pop some gang banger or kill a robber) is up to us.
And what is a right and what is a privledge have to also be recognized.
BreezyGuy
However..could you not, in turn, consider the music as a musicians private information and as such what he or she chooses to do with it is also a consideration?
If he choose to not want people to freely distrubute it, does his/her right to privacy apply here?
From this point of view, then the two issues are not so different.
But also from another stand point, celebraties and well not people, tend to be less able to have rights to privacy as us normal average every day Joes.
BreezyGuy
- Have you noticed that few, if any, Napster advocates are arguing that it should be legal to purchase a copy of Windows 2000 and share it with a community of Windows fans on the Internet via a peer-to-peer networking system? Why not? Is it because there are no fans or potential fans of Windows 2000?
There is a flaw in this argument...your argument is based on the assumption that you own the music and software. With Napster, there is no way to guarantee that the MP3 you are getting you own (or for the sake of this argument software). For lack of any proof, they assume you are guilty of theft of the music/software.This is an apples and oranges argument. "Why not?" Because if you are already an owner of Windows 2000, then you already have a copy in data format. When I download an MP3 from Napster, it's because I don't want to take the time to rip and encode the tracks of my CDs--I have them in audio format, but not data format. Napster saves me the time. That's why, Mr. Petreley.
But then again, aren't we suppose to be "concider innocent until proven guilty"? I know I read that somewhere.
BreezyGuy
They fail to remember, to run a business, you have to make money to support the costs of the business.
This mentaility is similar to the way communism is. One of the reasons that communism did not work so well is there was no incentive (money) in doing certain things and no concideration for how to fund it or get people to do it. But let's not change this into a politcal debate either.
There are obviously several issues in the IP fight:
(1) The rights of a user to listen to content he buys and where he listens to it (mp3.com) (2) The rights of the user do with it after he purchases it (distributing it outside of the normal distributors - napster).
(3) The rights of the writer of the music (to make money from what he writes)
(4) The rights of the corporate funding the writer to insure they can pay for the costs - if they can't earn enough, then they don't resign the artist and the artist goes into obscurity and they sign another artist that gives the people (the consumer) what they want.
(5) The price placed on the music by the corporating is deemed too high. Price to produce, distribute, market vs money made from sales of all products (CDs, tapes, concert tickets, posters, buttons, etc). Because of the high return for the corporations, the consumer trade with no insentive to buy. Although prior to napster, mp3.com,etc...no one ever seem to make such a big deal on this before.
Sorry to say...humans are greedy. They need incentives to do things they wouldn't necessarily do, like give away something for free. Why do you think Heaven and Hell exist. And no let's not get into the "Existance of God" debate either. (And before anyone asks, I actually do believe in God and Heaven and Hell.)
BreezyGuy
I have worked with it in the past and must agree, it is more a hinderance then a help.
DII COE uses segmentation to package things up, which allows easy installation, removing, documentation, source (for development). A lot of these segments just package things up and install using tar or any other appropriate install tool with an install script. This can be a way to allow for overcoming some of the shortfalls of this.
BreezyGuy
The thing about the infoworld article was a little bit of details about the US case at the end of the article. More specifically, the part about the API, communication interface, and technical info being available to third party vendors and the "secure facility".
Does this mean, that the linux developers should be able to get all the gory details about the file systems and such? Although I would imagine some of that proprietary stuff would still have to sign those NDAs.
This may have been addressed in one of the trial brief somewhere, but when the brief is some 100 page brief...there is only so much M$ B$ that I can stand.
BreezyGuy
john_doe.dialup.isp.com
which can/and would only be assigned by the ISP.
For that matter, can't they tell who is dialed in at any particular time, presuming they are logging all the appropriate information?
BreezyGuy
If it's part of the App group, then I could see DirectX for Linux (in addition to a whole line of M$ products "MS Office for Linux" - don't hurt me for saying that, it's just a fact that people in the work environment {not just development} like using M$ Office")
If DirectX becomes part of the OS, then it still seems that M$ could greatly influence the developers, but only if they force them to use DirectX API.
I prefer the cross platform capabilities of OpenGL, but I've heard that the development of OpenGL is slower to improve. I am sure OpenGL is more thought out, but I still wonder.
I don't know specifically what the person I was talking to was referring to about DirectX excelling in certain areas.
It may be he was referring to how DirectX includes a lot of things that OpenGL requires add ons (GLUT,etc) to do some basic stuff, like menuing systems, sound, support for alternative multimedia formats,etc
Oh Well...
And of course those other versions cost more because they have to be made special for whatever region/language in the area (which probably is all of about one or two bytes of code somewhere preventing viewing these region encoded disks.
I can see where this is an issue of not wanting to put 100 different languages/translations on one disk, which wouldn't be realistic (unless you want 3 or 4 DVD with only 1 DVD having the language/translation you want).
And this isn't a reason to see this as an opportunity? If there is a customer need that isn't fullfilled, then that is an area to develope and make money. There are a lot of Linux users that need an office suite...SO provides that.
I do believe S.O. is "decent"--that is the reason I care enough about the subject to get very angry about its muffed opportunities.
It is good too be passionate about things...but remember, there is more to consider in any issue then one or two things...don't get a knee jerk reaction without additional consideration.
It seems to me...that if you take 5.2 to be based on the 5.x line..then there is not likely to be major changes in the interface any time soon.
Sun is promoting a lot of new bells and whistle (like Java 2 support) in their "Star Portal" version. Whether 5.2 is suppose to be Star Portal I have no idea...but I would think that would be the time that such a major user interface change would take place.
Kind of like the difference in the 4.x netscape updates and the 6 mozilla/netscape update. Re-engineering something like that can take a lot of time...
The piled-on junk in the interface is a terrible mistake and doesn't make Linux users, neither the new converts nor the cli veterans happy. Neither does it make the StarOffice-on-Windows users happy. It makes them all equally confused about how all this crap is supposed to work.
There is, of course, one justifying case for the False desktop/Window manager crap of S.O. (versions 4.0 and later), but only one: deployment in a thin client situation where S.O. is really the only application that runs on that station. (One has to wonder tho' how thin such a thin client could realistically be. If S.O. ran on a monster server and only displayed on the client,a la X-windows, that would make sense--but GORR! that would have to be some kind of mainframe sized server to handle many concurrent sessions). This is just not a viable model for gaining share for the S.O. product though. The Office suite market is emphatically desktop oriented, has been so for many years--and, as everyone keeps telling Sun, whether we're on MS or Unix, we already have a desktop.
But then again...you have to remember, that they are targeting it for more then just power Linux users who could care less about the desktop.
And rather than have to make a version for Motif, KDE, Gnome, Generic X, Windows, Mac, Be, etc (you would think Sun would us Java a little more in this instance :-)...it might be easier for portability purposes (I know using some of the QT/GTK stuff might make some of that easier but that's another thread) to have their own desktop that looks the same on as many platforms as possible. If I use it on Windows and then want to move to Linux...it's kind of nice to not have to learn new shortcuts and stuff.
I have never used it on Windows, so if it has a desktop in a desktop...I agree that doesn't make sense.
If you want MS users to feel at home in Linux and you hope StarOffice will help in that aim, you should help Sun rewrite the interface to be less onerous, clumsy and confusing (or realize you're out of your depth && shut the *bleep* up, heh) MS Office based companies will not be converting to S.O., no matter how much money they blow on Office licenses so long as the S.O. interface is cumbersome and layered with redundancy the way it is. It changes the proposition from a switch to using a free product on your desktop oriented network, to a switch that requires some expensive retraining+downtime at best, and in the extreme case, a conversion to E10K servers and thin clients.
Sun is dreaming the impossible dream here: unless S.O. can be obtained in a form that allows an efficient, drop-in replacement of MS Office, and I mean soon,well before MS starts releasing Office for Linux as result of the Antitrust suit, all that money they paid for StarOffice is just swirling around the bowl, soon to disappear forever. That's 500,000,000 dollars. Don't you think that kind of investment warrants the protection of an interface recode--at least making available an optional version that MS Office users and home Linux users say they want?
And it is partially because of this investment that they aren't likely to throw away everything they invested in (SO desktop). It is a starting point...but give them a little time it's hard to re-engineer something as massive as this in a month or two.
Hey...maybe we can get them to open up the source for Star Office and do a Mozilla version....naaaah...this is Sun we are talking about with their wonderful Licensing scheme..
And before anyone comments about me changing any of the last post...name calling isn't needed...neither is cursing... Have a nice day :-)