Collaborative being a key word, I didn't get the impression that Open365 allows google docs style concurrent collaborative editing. EtherCalc should work, but is of course limited in features: https://ethercalc.net/
Ethercalc may fit the bill...but dear Lord is it ugly! Form over function is one thing, but were they explicitly attempting to evoke 80's nostalgia?
Have you tried Zoho Docs? It's like a native application, both in features and performance
No self-hosted option that I saw, though I do seem to remember that a self-hosted version was available at one point. If it's not self-hosted, it offers little benefit to simply using O365.
Q: Are the spreadheets for actual financial data, or just for lists of things?
If they are for lists of things, then maybe the nonprofit could host a wiki that has good support for tables.
I've been looking at a few possibilities. The challenge with a Wiki is that the folks who need to edit it are not exactly the kind of folk who will take kindly to having to add HTML markup to what they're making. Also, a few of the documents we're eyeballing will end up being helped out a lot by formulas, so a Wiki would only be 'partially helpful' here.
No. I'll just start a rickshaw company that will use as labour all the people in these car firms who are found to have colluded with the false results. Choice: 10 years in prison or 2 years rickshaw duty.
Your ideas are intriguing and I wish to subscribe to your newsletter.
I do some tech work for a nonprofit. We're Office365, but there are a few documents better kept in-house. I've been looking for a self-hosted collaborative spreadsheet, preferably browser based, but nothing I've tried has materialized correctly...
FengOffice - doesn't support spreadsheets natively. The hackneyed workaround that does, only supports it in a particular, dated version of FengOffice, and after creating the document, the web app prompts to download the spreadsheet rather than edit it. OnlyOffice - eight cores and 8GB of RAM for this VM, and it takes over a minute to load any document. ZKSpreadsheet Server - From the hand of Johnny Ives himself comes the most beautiful spreadsheet software ever written. It's fast, it's easy to use, it's effective, it's simple to install, it's resource efficient...and it's $4,000.
So, if Open365 gets its self-hosted option off the ground, I would love nothing more than for this to solve my problem.
In retrospect, I think the fastest cable boxes I ever had were there Scientific Atlanta boxes from the late 80s/early 90s... Literally instant channel-changes. You could hold the channel up or down button, and let it rip through at least 2 or 3 channels per second. Sigh... Two steps forward, 1.97 steps back...
Well, yes - those were an entirely different ballgame. In the 80's, we were still dealing with analog cable, meaning that all the box had to wait for was a vertical sync pulse, of which it got 60/sec. Now that we've gone digital, and we're running MPEG-2 or MPEG-4 streams everywhere, the boxes need to wait for a complete I-frame before they can display...which may involve some form of decryption and a number of other factors.
The old boxes were much better, because they were much simpler.
Well, one might argue that concern about the privacy of one's data requires a certain level of understanding regarding what's going on. Furthermore, one might argue that VPNing to your home connection will keep the bloke at Starbucks running Wireshark from attaining anything useful, but data going out your network's front door won't help keep Uncle Sam from getting what he wants.
That being said, Asus routers are very simple to set up for PPTP VPNs...no, not the most secure thing ever, but functional enough to get you Netflix in China. Literally, it's a matter of clicking 'enable vpn server', then adding a few usernames and passwords. While using Untangle is a bit more involved (you need a desktop with two NICs, and to install the software, etc)...but the software is free, and the OpenVPN module will give you a downloadable executable preconfigured to connect to your router.
It's not the kind of thing that everyone will want, but it's possible for a moderately intelligent person to go from "i want it" to "i have it" in a Saturday afternoon.
Yes...but now you need multiple accounts, and it's wholly dependent on which studio releases the film, and if the studio only releases on iTunes then you'll never get an ultraviolet copy, and you have to stream the movies rather than keeping local copies.
These are all problem that self-ripping solves, and doesn't cost anyone anything, but is illegal because DMCA, yet we do the same thing with music because CDs are perfectly legal to do that with.
I completely agree and share your preference. However, the fiefdom method unfortunately has its benefits, too.
First, let's address the fact that XMPP, while a good IM standard protocol, is not the simplest thing to manually configure - you have to know what you're doing, and the core demographic for many of these folks consist of people who can't tell a search bar from an address bar in a web browser. You also need a server...somewhere...that someone owns. If Viber makes an XMPP client that can talk to Whatsapp's servers to send messages to Kik users, it's just a money pit for anyone to run the server, unless they're actively capturing and monetizing that traffic. To make it an analog to the Usenet days, the telcos would run the XMPP servers in the same way that ISPs ran the Usenet servers - somewhat-viable, but it would have to be 'out of the goodness of their heart' at this point, since they already run the servers for SMS and MMS; XMPP would be redundant. Then there's the classic "it's the server...it's the client..." finger pointing game if a messenger isn't configured properly.
Next, let's deal with extensions and encryption. All the listed messengers give sent/delivered/read notifications, which XMPP doesn't (I don't believe). So, each client would have to come up with some way of replicating that functionality, so we end up once again with the fiefdom of 'use whatsapp so you'll know if I read your message', to which we then say, "so let's add it to the XMPP standard". Makes sense, but then you need cooperation from everyone at once to implement it and abandon their proprietary extensions.
For such an open standard, you'll once again need to deal with the spam problem. As much as I love e-mail and usenet, both of them had a massive amount of spam, It's somewhat-tolerated on e-mail because spam filtering has gotten quite good, and it's somewhat-tolerated on usenet because there's much less of it than there used to be...but Viber and Whatsapp have been pretty good about keeping the spam levels down (Kik, less so). No one is going to be happy with a system that allows spam on their cell phone, especially with push notifications involved.
Finally, the fiefdoms are a bit better suited toward monetization. Viber makes money through sticker purchases. BBM has sponsored groups and promotional notifications. Whatsapp used to sell their service, but now sugar daddy Facebook has deprecated that, so they're a bit messier to point to a monetization system. One could possibly sell the client directly; Outlook, Eudora, and eM Client have done well on the e-mail side of this, with Agent and Newsman Pro both having sold their clients as well. Doing that in the mobile world is a bit more challenging, and one can argue that selling stickers works well-enough to keep Viber afloat and can apply to XMPP as well, but then we're back to the compatibility problem, as GroupMe has a vested interest in ensuring that Viber stickers don't display right. Selling the client for $5 a pop in the App Store is the most direct method, but when the client abstracts away the gimmick, you'll need to have an amazing UI and perfect support to get money for something that LibreChat will do for free next month....And this, good sir/madam, is why we can't have nice things.
The argument here seems to be that piracy is okay because the movie studios are making plenty of money anyway. It's like saying that if I steal a couple million dollars from a billionaire, they're making plenty of money anyway so it's not really theft. Theft is theft is theft. And it's wrong.
Agreed. Here are the bigger questions involved with the current setup:
1.) Copyright infringement is wrong, and should be punished. However, the present system is such that a conviction of copyright infringement can be a life-ruining event. As TFA shows, the MPAA is not making a compelling case that ruining the life of an infringer is reasonable. If the MPAA wants to make the case that downloading a movie from The Pirate Bay is akin to stealing the Blu-Ray from Best Buy, then make the punishment for downloading the same as stealing the Blu-Ray. Instead, the fines and criminal charges are seen as akin the professional counterfeiting and piracy rings in court.
2.) There has always been the concept of the public domain - where art goes after a certain amount of time, and can be used by anyone. Copyright first started with a reasonable length of time for authors to make money off their work as an incentive to continue creating. However, it's been extended to the point of absurdity - no video game released, or pop song I grew up with, will enter the public domain until my grandchildren are dead. Now, there are different ideas as to how long copyright *should* last (my personal belief is ten years, with the option to renew at the cost of 10% of the owner's gross income annually), but "two lifetimes" is generally agreed upon to be patently unreasonable.
3.) There's very little 'reasonable ground' to be had. Stealing $100 from a billionaire is wrong, but 'finding a $100 bill on the ground that is later determined to have belonged to a billionaire' is a different matter entirely. In the US, making backup copies of one's own DVDs and Blu-Rays for noncommercial use that are never otherwise shared is, legally speaking, subject to the same penalties as operating a for-profit piracy ring. The whole "digital copy" situation with movies is such that whether the digital copy applies to the customer or not is dependent upon which services are being used. It's impossible to legally view a movie on an Android device if it comes in a DVD/Blu-Ray/iTunes combo pack, and nobody wants to standardize.
The MPAA's issue here is how royally fixed the game is in their favor, and a seeming unwillingness to come up with reasonable terms for things.
Hillary had her own private e-mail server. Hillary used that private e-mail server for government communication. Some of that communication was classified, and wasn't handled as such. Hillary did not turn over the server at the end of her tenure as Secretary of State (a condition of the rules allowing the use of a non-government server). When prompted about the server because of Benghazi, Hillary denied access to the server until quite some time later. When she did, she printed the e-mails out on paper, instead of delivering digital copies. There is at least one documented case of intentionally having safeguards of classified data circumvented.
Questions circling: What, exactly, was Hillary truly aware of at the time, from a technical standpoint? What, exactly, was Hillary truly aware of at the time, from a political standpoint? Exactly what documents were classified, and when (one of the arguments is that some documents were retroactively marked classified)?
You're correct in that the ruling in TFA wouldn't apply to Hillary's case, because Hillary's case involves warrants and subpoenas and other fun documents of that nature, and apply to official government communication. Thus, the ruling in TFA would be superseded by those things anyway.
I'm glad that tools like this exist. There have been a handful of ransomware viruses that have had decryption tools released. Amongst the issues I've had in the past is that it's quite difficult to tell which ransomware a particular computer has been hit with. Is there a way for end users to determine which ransomware application they've been hit with, ideally linking to known decryption tools?
I have never understood why macros need access to the Internet or to run an external program. Personally, I would rather be prompted if a macros needs to connect outside of the document. It would make more sense to me than telling me that a document is scary simply because I emailed it to my self via gmail,
I'll give you two examples of how macros are used in ways that involve external programs.
The first is a program called Worldox. It's used heavily by law firms, and it allows users to "save to Worldox", to which you're saying, "so...they reinvented the file system?" Not exactly. Saving to Worldox allows a document to be assigned to a particular case, with a bunch of metadata pulled from the document, to allow it to be filed along with other documents relevant to the case. It also allows e-mail correspondence to be filed in the same way, and permissions applied to users on (literally) a case-by-case basis.
The second program is called ProSystemFX Engagement. It's used by accounting firms in a way somewhat-similar to git (check document out, modify document, a second user will get told the document is unavailable so there are no save collisions, etc.), but also will provide real-time updates to Excel sheets based on other data that's available to it in the system.
Are Macros the "right" task for the job? Well, maybe not...but in practice, if you're trying to extend the capabilities of Office, it's either macros or add-ins, and one of them is easier to port between versions of office, and both are equally capable of wreaking havoc.
It wouldn't behoove Apple - or anyone else - to reinstate the conditions that made the iPhone a good place for the indie developers. Before Apple had an App Store, there was Installer.app and Cydia. This was back in the 1.x firmware days, when the innovations that Apple brought to the table were "kinetic scrolling", "threaded SMS", and "the marriage of the iPod and the cell phone". Labyrinth, Tap Tap Revolution (later Tap Tap Revenge), and a few others got their start there. Before Apple supported MMS, someone wrote SwirlyMMS that allowed picture messages to be sent and received on the iPhone. Summerboard (later Winterboard) allowed for theming and icon customizations. For those who prefer the shadier side of the internet and to use the phrase 'because I can' to justify their patience, cTorrent allowed for torrent downloads using a command line.
The reason why there was all this innovation before the App Store formalized was because it required jailbreaking to install *any* app. There were no formally documented APIs or anything; all programs were reverse engineered. While Apple never (to my knowledge) sent a lawyer-drawn nastygram to anyone who developed for the jailbroken iPhone platform, if King started making the hand-over-fist money they're getting from Candy Crush as a result of a release in Cydia, I think it definitely would have drawn the eye of Apple to intervene in some form.
Once the App Store was 'legitimized' and regulated by Apple, sea level started rising. Now, everyone is competing with ten million other apps for the same few-dozen spots on everyone's phone, and trying to come up with an original, marketable idea that somehow manages to rise to the top of the congested top-50 charts against apps that have TV commercials starring Arnold Schwarzenegger is the kind of thing that requires nothing short of a miracle.
tl;dr: When "getting too big" in Cydia had the implicit concern that Apple would come and rain on your parade, indie development was relatively possible. Apple making an App Store that they controlled and thus enabling "sky is the limit" development, marketing budgets, and 'too many choices' made it nearly impossible to an indie to compete with traditional means.
SQL Server is still used a lot in line-of-business applications. They're not necessarily used for the 'regular' database stuff, but things like BackupExec and Veeam use SQL Server as their backend to manage things like volume sets and backup jobs and their success/fail status. A company I used to work for used a piece of software called eFreedom that prepared their annual financial statements. A company who's a client at my present company uses SQL server for the back end of their point of sale system. The CRM software Goldmine runs on SQL Server.
There's lots of applications that use SQL Server for their backend data storage. Yes, it's frequently a part of a "bigger whole", and usually integrated into locally installed applications than stuff that runs through a web browser, but it has indeed carved out a bit of a niche for itself.
Oh god... please end it now. As someone that has had to deal with end user generated 'applications' spreading Access is both a crime against humanity and nature.
"Spreading Access"...yeah, you're right. However, you've missed the essence of what the GP was getting at. Access allows for information to be grouped and displayed easily, without having to write any code, and some minimal code will goes a long way to automation. "Yet Another Centralized Database That Requires An HTML/CSS/JS Frontend To Be Useful" isn't going to stand out nearly as well as something that does what Access does, better than how Access does it.
I agree with what you said, my point is that "set up a personal Exchange server for me, a multimillionaire for whom an Exchange server is pocket to purchase, who just so happens to be Secretary of State" is not, in itself, an inaccurate statement to the point where Pagliano should have dug deeper or outright refused to set up the mail server for her. The fact that Clinton misused her mail account and didn't follow the established protocols (thus violating compliance, then trying to hand wave it away and generally making it a political mess) isn't his fault.
I am curious, would you be against video surveillance on these busses?
Yes, because without the surveillance, you do what you can to get everyone off the bus if a disgruntled former civil servant rigs a bomb whose detonator is set to go off if the bus goes slower than 50mph. With video surveillance, you'll need to get a news van to loop a short clip of people sitting still long enough for everyone to get out safely.
The guy who pushed the buttons was clearly just following orders, which was "set up a mail server", a relatively common task. Moreover, her statement of "it was above board when I did it" was correct, in that it was contingent upon those e-mails being turned over upon her exit from the position, so the initial setup wouldn't have had reasons to raise suspicions of wrongdoing at that time.
I see no reason not to grant immunity in this context.
Apparently I've been buying the wrong computers. Tell me more about these nice little machines.
Well, it's generally illegal (and socially frowned upon) to outright purchase them. However, you can request one. Random expenditures (patterned fabric, very small bits of precision forged metal, and colorful plants) and dialog are usually requirements, and their firmware is generally considered to be difficult to understand and changes frequently with minimal documentation. If you manage to acquire one in exclusivity, upgrading is incredibly expensive.
Do they still write software for Windows? [...] I think if you have 3 pages of anti-virus software and 1 page of education titles, that's a dead OS! There's still quite a few games for Windows, but nothing like the choice on Steam.
Yes, plenty. It's just not sold on Newegg.
Every law firm I do work for uses a program called Worldox to keep case documents together, and most use TimeMatters to keep track of their billable hours.
While Electronic Medical Records are usually done via a website of some kind, the software that runs the X-Ray machines and 101 other medical diagnostic devices all run on Windows. So do Dentrix and Dexis, the software that probably runs your dentist's office.
The applications used by auto mechanics to diagnose issues with cars, like Mitchell, is almost all Windows-only.
While browser-based CRM applications like SugarCRM are making definite inroads, a number of companies are still locked into Act.
Quickbooks runs on Windows, and if you think Microsoft has a lock-in with Office, you have yet to see the death stares that you'll get at the mention of the possibility of moving away from Quickbooks...and the browser based alternatives are not drop-in replacements just yet.
Some very new, low-volume startup restaurants can use iPads as point-of-sale machines, but the vast majority of PoS systems are Windows specific, especially if they need to integrate with other software.
While there was an article last week about doing audio engineering on Linux, Windows and OSX are the places where you'll find formal support from the hardware developers and plug-in creators, and the story repeats itself for video creation.
Most reasonably-sized offices have had their furniture layout rendered in something like 20/20 Giza, which conveniently segues me to the whole cottage industry around AutoCAD.
The LED marquee signs in storefront windows and the scoreboards at sporting events have their content designed and uploaded with something like Venus 1500, and the intelligent lights at those ballgames may well be controlled with Lightjockey or Compushow - even many of the dedicated hardware lighting boards run on an embedded version of Windows.
Your local moderate-sized accounting firm probably uses something like ProsystemFX Engagement, which is kinda like Git for accounting ledgers. Circling back to Office, much of the value-add for the heavy users is not necessarily that LibreOffice isn't as good as Excel, but that there are many Excel-specific plug-ins that pull data from other places and streamline layouts.
The list of niche industry-vertical software that's Windows only is about as large as your most recent Yellow Pages - virtually every industry has a handful of software vendors specializing in that niche. If you're a software developer, sure, Eclipse, notepad and a web browser are interchangeable on basically everything, so writing C++ code on one OS is basically the same experience as writing C++ on another. Even server-side, Samba shares on Windows Server and Samba shares on FreeNAS are functionally identical to end users. The long tail, on Windows, is a very powerful thing - and you won't see that software for sale on Newegg.
Slashdot Mirror
You heard about it on 60 Minutes last week: http://www.cbsnews.com/news/60....
Collaborative being a key word, I didn't get the impression that Open365 allows google docs style concurrent collaborative editing. EtherCalc should work, but is of course limited in features: https://ethercalc.net/
Ethercalc may fit the bill...but dear Lord is it ugly! Form over function is one thing, but were they explicitly attempting to evoke 80's nostalgia?
Have you tried Zoho Docs? It's like a native application, both in features and performance
No self-hosted option that I saw, though I do seem to remember that a self-hosted version was available at one point. If it's not self-hosted, it offers little benefit to simply using O365.
Q: Are the spreadheets for actual financial data, or just for lists of things?
If they are for lists of things, then maybe the nonprofit could host a wiki that has good support for tables.
I've been looking at a few possibilities. The challenge with a Wiki is that the folks who need to edit it are not exactly the kind of folk who will take kindly to having to add HTML markup to what they're making. Also, a few of the documents we're eyeballing will end up being helped out a lot by formulas, so a Wiki would only be 'partially helpful' here.
No. I'll just start a rickshaw company that will use as labour all the people in these car firms who are found to have colluded with the false results. Choice: 10 years in prison or 2 years rickshaw duty.
Your ideas are intriguing and I wish to subscribe to your newsletter.
I do some tech work for a nonprofit. We're Office365, but there are a few documents better kept in-house. I've been looking for a self-hosted collaborative spreadsheet, preferably browser based, but nothing I've tried has materialized correctly...
FengOffice - doesn't support spreadsheets natively. The hackneyed workaround that does, only supports it in a particular, dated version of FengOffice, and after creating the document, the web app prompts to download the spreadsheet rather than edit it.
OnlyOffice - eight cores and 8GB of RAM for this VM, and it takes over a minute to load any document.
ZKSpreadsheet Server - From the hand of Johnny Ives himself comes the most beautiful spreadsheet software ever written. It's fast, it's easy to use, it's effective, it's simple to install, it's resource efficient...and it's $4,000.
So, if Open365 gets its self-hosted option off the ground, I would love nothing more than for this to solve my problem.
In retrospect, I think the fastest cable boxes I ever had were there Scientific Atlanta boxes from the late 80s/early 90s... Literally instant channel-changes. You could hold the channel up or down button, and let it rip through at least 2 or 3 channels per second. Sigh... Two steps forward, 1.97 steps back...
Well, yes - those were an entirely different ballgame. In the 80's, we were still dealing with analog cable, meaning that all the box had to wait for was a vertical sync pulse, of which it got 60/sec. Now that we've gone digital, and we're running MPEG-2 or MPEG-4 streams everywhere, the boxes need to wait for a complete I-frame before they can display...which may involve some form of decryption and a number of other factors.
The old boxes were much better, because they were much simpler.
For the average Joe, not so much.
Well, one might argue that concern about the privacy of one's data requires a certain level of understanding regarding what's going on. Furthermore, one might argue that VPNing to your home connection will keep the bloke at Starbucks running Wireshark from attaining anything useful, but data going out your network's front door won't help keep Uncle Sam from getting what he wants.
That being said, Asus routers are very simple to set up for PPTP VPNs...no, not the most secure thing ever, but functional enough to get you Netflix in China. Literally, it's a matter of clicking 'enable vpn server', then adding a few usernames and passwords. While using Untangle is a bit more involved (you need a desktop with two NICs, and to install the software, etc)...but the software is free, and the OpenVPN module will give you a downloadable executable preconfigured to connect to your router.
It's not the kind of thing that everyone will want, but it's possible for a moderately intelligent person to go from "i want it" to "i have it" in a Saturday afternoon.
Yes...but now you need multiple accounts, and it's wholly dependent on which studio releases the film, and if the studio only releases on iTunes then you'll never get an ultraviolet copy, and you have to stream the movies rather than keeping local copies.
These are all problem that self-ripping solves, and doesn't cost anyone anything, but is illegal because DMCA, yet we do the same thing with music because CDs are perfectly legal to do that with.
I completely agree and share your preference. However, the fiefdom method unfortunately has its benefits, too.
First, let's address the fact that XMPP, while a good IM standard protocol, is not the simplest thing to manually configure - you have to know what you're doing, and the core demographic for many of these folks consist of people who can't tell a search bar from an address bar in a web browser. You also need a server...somewhere...that someone owns. If Viber makes an XMPP client that can talk to Whatsapp's servers to send messages to Kik users, it's just a money pit for anyone to run the server, unless they're actively capturing and monetizing that traffic. To make it an analog to the Usenet days, the telcos would run the XMPP servers in the same way that ISPs ran the Usenet servers - somewhat-viable, but it would have to be 'out of the goodness of their heart' at this point, since they already run the servers for SMS and MMS; XMPP would be redundant. Then there's the classic "it's the server...it's the client..." finger pointing game if a messenger isn't configured properly.
Next, let's deal with extensions and encryption. All the listed messengers give sent/delivered/read notifications, which XMPP doesn't (I don't believe). So, each client would have to come up with some way of replicating that functionality, so we end up once again with the fiefdom of 'use whatsapp so you'll know if I read your message', to which we then say, "so let's add it to the XMPP standard". Makes sense, but then you need cooperation from everyone at once to implement it and abandon their proprietary extensions.
For such an open standard, you'll once again need to deal with the spam problem. As much as I love e-mail and usenet, both of them had a massive amount of spam, It's somewhat-tolerated on e-mail because spam filtering has gotten quite good, and it's somewhat-tolerated on usenet because there's much less of it than there used to be...but Viber and Whatsapp have been pretty good about keeping the spam levels down (Kik, less so). No one is going to be happy with a system that allows spam on their cell phone, especially with push notifications involved.
Finally, the fiefdoms are a bit better suited toward monetization. Viber makes money through sticker purchases. BBM has sponsored groups and promotional notifications. Whatsapp used to sell their service, but now sugar daddy Facebook has deprecated that, so they're a bit messier to point to a monetization system. One could possibly sell the client directly; Outlook, Eudora, and eM Client have done well on the e-mail side of this, with Agent and Newsman Pro both having sold their clients as well. Doing that in the mobile world is a bit more challenging, and one can argue that selling stickers works well-enough to keep Viber afloat and can apply to XMPP as well, but then we're back to the compatibility problem, as GroupMe has a vested interest in ensuring that Viber stickers don't display right. Selling the client for $5 a pop in the App Store is the most direct method, but when the client abstracts away the gimmick, you'll need to have an amazing UI and perfect support to get money for something that LibreChat will do for free next month. ...And this, good sir/madam, is why we can't have nice things.
The argument here seems to be that piracy is okay because the movie studios are making plenty of money anyway. It's like saying that if I steal a couple million dollars from a billionaire, they're making plenty of money anyway so it's not really theft. Theft is theft is theft. And it's wrong.
Agreed. Here are the bigger questions involved with the current setup:
1.) Copyright infringement is wrong, and should be punished. However, the present system is such that a conviction of copyright infringement can be a life-ruining event. As TFA shows, the MPAA is not making a compelling case that ruining the life of an infringer is reasonable. If the MPAA wants to make the case that downloading a movie from The Pirate Bay is akin to stealing the Blu-Ray from Best Buy, then make the punishment for downloading the same as stealing the Blu-Ray. Instead, the fines and criminal charges are seen as akin the professional counterfeiting and piracy rings in court.
2.) There has always been the concept of the public domain - where art goes after a certain amount of time, and can be used by anyone. Copyright first started with a reasonable length of time for authors to make money off their work as an incentive to continue creating. However, it's been extended to the point of absurdity - no video game released, or pop song I grew up with, will enter the public domain until my grandchildren are dead. Now, there are different ideas as to how long copyright *should* last (my personal belief is ten years, with the option to renew at the cost of 10% of the owner's gross income annually), but "two lifetimes" is generally agreed upon to be patently unreasonable.
3.) There's very little 'reasonable ground' to be had. Stealing $100 from a billionaire is wrong, but 'finding a $100 bill on the ground that is later determined to have belonged to a billionaire' is a different matter entirely. In the US, making backup copies of one's own DVDs and Blu-Rays for noncommercial use that are never otherwise shared is, legally speaking, subject to the same penalties as operating a for-profit piracy ring. The whole "digital copy" situation with movies is such that whether the digital copy applies to the customer or not is dependent upon which services are being used. It's impossible to legally view a movie on an Android device if it comes in a DVD/Blu-Ray/iTunes combo pack, and nobody wants to standardize.
The MPAA's issue here is how royally fixed the game is in their favor, and a seeming unwillingness to come up with reasonable terms for things.
Hillary had her own private e-mail server.
Hillary used that private e-mail server for government communication.
Some of that communication was classified, and wasn't handled as such.
Hillary did not turn over the server at the end of her tenure as Secretary of State (a condition of the rules allowing the use of a non-government server).
When prompted about the server because of Benghazi, Hillary denied access to the server until quite some time later.
When she did, she printed the e-mails out on paper, instead of delivering digital copies.
There is at least one documented case of intentionally having safeguards of classified data circumvented.
Questions circling:
What, exactly, was Hillary truly aware of at the time, from a technical standpoint?
What, exactly, was Hillary truly aware of at the time, from a political standpoint?
Exactly what documents were classified, and when (one of the arguments is that some documents were retroactively marked classified)?
You're correct in that the ruling in TFA wouldn't apply to Hillary's case, because Hillary's case involves warrants and subpoenas and other fun documents of that nature, and apply to official government communication. Thus, the ruling in TFA would be superseded by those things anyway.
I'm glad that tools like this exist. There have been a handful of ransomware viruses that have had decryption tools released. Amongst the issues I've had in the past is that it's quite difficult to tell which ransomware a particular computer has been hit with. Is there a way for end users to determine which ransomware application they've been hit with, ideally linking to known decryption tools?
They should have located it at some high security base, so that people with too much time on their hands would no longer be a public nuisance
Here's the dilemma: Do we send them to Area 51, or Guantanamo Bay?
Look, I know it's been almost ten years now, but just checking - are we still waiting for a card that can run Crysis?
I have never understood why macros need access to the Internet or to run an external program. Personally, I would rather be prompted if a macros needs to connect outside of the document. It would make more sense to me than telling me that a document is scary simply because I emailed it to my self via gmail,
I'll give you two examples of how macros are used in ways that involve external programs.
The first is a program called Worldox. It's used heavily by law firms, and it allows users to "save to Worldox", to which you're saying, "so...they reinvented the file system?" Not exactly. Saving to Worldox allows a document to be assigned to a particular case, with a bunch of metadata pulled from the document, to allow it to be filed along with other documents relevant to the case. It also allows e-mail correspondence to be filed in the same way, and permissions applied to users on (literally) a case-by-case basis.
The second program is called ProSystemFX Engagement. It's used by accounting firms in a way somewhat-similar to git (check document out, modify document, a second user will get told the document is unavailable so there are no save collisions, etc.), but also will provide real-time updates to Excel sheets based on other data that's available to it in the system.
Are Macros the "right" task for the job? Well, maybe not...but in practice, if you're trying to extend the capabilities of Office, it's either macros or add-ins, and one of them is easier to port between versions of office, and both are equally capable of wreaking havoc.
It wouldn't behoove Apple - or anyone else - to reinstate the conditions that made the iPhone a good place for the indie developers. Before Apple had an App Store, there was Installer.app and Cydia. This was back in the 1.x firmware days, when the innovations that Apple brought to the table were "kinetic scrolling", "threaded SMS", and "the marriage of the iPod and the cell phone". Labyrinth, Tap Tap Revolution (later Tap Tap Revenge), and a few others got their start there. Before Apple supported MMS, someone wrote SwirlyMMS that allowed picture messages to be sent and received on the iPhone. Summerboard (later Winterboard) allowed for theming and icon customizations. For those who prefer the shadier side of the internet and to use the phrase 'because I can' to justify their patience, cTorrent allowed for torrent downloads using a command line.
The reason why there was all this innovation before the App Store formalized was because it required jailbreaking to install *any* app. There were no formally documented APIs or anything; all programs were reverse engineered. While Apple never (to my knowledge) sent a lawyer-drawn nastygram to anyone who developed for the jailbroken iPhone platform, if King started making the hand-over-fist money they're getting from Candy Crush as a result of a release in Cydia, I think it definitely would have drawn the eye of Apple to intervene in some form.
Once the App Store was 'legitimized' and regulated by Apple, sea level started rising. Now, everyone is competing with ten million other apps for the same few-dozen spots on everyone's phone, and trying to come up with an original, marketable idea that somehow manages to rise to the top of the congested top-50 charts against apps that have TV commercials starring Arnold Schwarzenegger is the kind of thing that requires nothing short of a miracle.
tl;dr: When "getting too big" in Cydia had the implicit concern that Apple would come and rain on your parade, indie development was relatively possible. Apple making an App Store that they controlled and thus enabling "sky is the limit" development, marketing budgets, and 'too many choices' made it nearly impossible to an indie to compete with traditional means.
SQL Server is still used a lot in line-of-business applications. They're not necessarily used for the 'regular' database stuff, but things like BackupExec and Veeam use SQL Server as their backend to manage things like volume sets and backup jobs and their success/fail status. A company I used to work for used a piece of software called eFreedom that prepared their annual financial statements. A company who's a client at my present company uses SQL server for the back end of their point of sale system. The CRM software Goldmine runs on SQL Server.
There's lots of applications that use SQL Server for their backend data storage. Yes, it's frequently a part of a "bigger whole", and usually integrated into locally installed applications than stuff that runs through a web browser, but it has indeed carved out a bit of a niche for itself.
Oh god... please end it now. As someone that has had to deal with end user generated 'applications' spreading Access is both a crime against humanity and nature.
"Spreading Access"...yeah, you're right. However, you've missed the essence of what the GP was getting at. Access allows for information to be grouped and displayed easily, without having to write any code, and some minimal code will goes a long way to automation. "Yet Another Centralized Database That Requires An HTML/CSS/JS Frontend To Be Useful" isn't going to stand out nearly as well as something that does what Access does, better than how Access does it.
I agree with what you said, my point is that "set up a personal Exchange server for me, a multimillionaire for whom an Exchange server is pocket to purchase, who just so happens to be Secretary of State" is not, in itself, an inaccurate statement to the point where Pagliano should have dug deeper or outright refused to set up the mail server for her. The fact that Clinton misused her mail account and didn't follow the established protocols (thus violating compliance, then trying to hand wave it away and generally making it a political mess) isn't his fault.
I am curious, would you be against video surveillance on these busses?
Yes, because without the surveillance, you do what you can to get everyone off the bus if a disgruntled former civil servant rigs a bomb whose detonator is set to go off if the bus goes slower than 50mph. With video surveillance, you'll need to get a news van to loop a short clip of people sitting still long enough for everyone to get out safely.
The guy who pushed the buttons was clearly just following orders, which was "set up a mail server", a relatively common task. Moreover, her statement of "it was above board when I did it" was correct, in that it was contingent upon those e-mails being turned over upon her exit from the position, so the initial setup wouldn't have had reasons to raise suspicions of wrongdoing at that time.
I see no reason not to grant immunity in this context.
You want a nice little machine to fellate you?
Apparently I've been buying the wrong computers. Tell me more about these nice little machines.
Well, it's generally illegal (and socially frowned upon) to outright purchase them. However, you can request one. Random expenditures (patterned fabric, very small bits of precision forged metal, and colorful plants) and dialog are usually requirements, and their firmware is generally considered to be difficult to understand and changes frequently with minimal documentation. If you manage to acquire one in exclusivity, upgrading is incredibly expensive.
Do they still write software for Windows? [...] I think if you have 3 pages of anti-virus software and 1 page of education titles, that's a dead OS! There's still quite a few games for Windows, but nothing like the choice on Steam.
Yes, plenty. It's just not sold on Newegg.
Every law firm I do work for uses a program called Worldox to keep case documents together, and most use TimeMatters to keep track of their billable hours.
While Electronic Medical Records are usually done via a website of some kind, the software that runs the X-Ray machines and 101 other medical diagnostic devices all run on Windows. So do Dentrix and Dexis, the software that probably runs your dentist's office.
The applications used by auto mechanics to diagnose issues with cars, like Mitchell, is almost all Windows-only.
While browser-based CRM applications like SugarCRM are making definite inroads, a number of companies are still locked into Act.
Quickbooks runs on Windows, and if you think Microsoft has a lock-in with Office, you have yet to see the death stares that you'll get at the mention of the possibility of moving away from Quickbooks...and the browser based alternatives are not drop-in replacements just yet.
Some very new, low-volume startup restaurants can use iPads as point-of-sale machines, but the vast majority of PoS systems are Windows specific, especially if they need to integrate with other software.
While there was an article last week about doing audio engineering on Linux, Windows and OSX are the places where you'll find formal support from the hardware developers and plug-in creators, and the story repeats itself for video creation.
Most reasonably-sized offices have had their furniture layout rendered in something like 20/20 Giza, which conveniently segues me to the whole cottage industry around AutoCAD.
The LED marquee signs in storefront windows and the scoreboards at sporting events have their content designed and uploaded with something like Venus 1500, and the intelligent lights at those ballgames may well be controlled with Lightjockey or Compushow - even many of the dedicated hardware lighting boards run on an embedded version of Windows.
Your local moderate-sized accounting firm probably uses something like ProsystemFX Engagement, which is kinda like Git for accounting ledgers. Circling back to Office, much of the value-add for the heavy users is not necessarily that LibreOffice isn't as good as Excel, but that there are many Excel-specific plug-ins that pull data from other places and streamline layouts.
The list of niche industry-vertical software that's Windows only is about as large as your most recent Yellow Pages - virtually every industry has a handful of software vendors specializing in that niche. If you're a software developer, sure, Eclipse, notepad and a web browser are interchangeable on basically everything, so writing C++ code on one OS is basically the same experience as writing C++ on another. Even server-side, Samba shares on Windows Server and Samba shares on FreeNAS are functionally identical to end users. The long tail, on Windows, is a very powerful thing - and you won't see that software for sale on Newegg.
It sounds like the perfect thing to find the missing socks from the dryer.