It probably won't cost him. Charlie Pride is a country has-been whose fan-base is a hick version of Pat Boone's. Country music has an even shorter memory than "Mainstream"--every FM station plays hits from the "70s, 80s, and today", or something like that, but about the farthest back any country radio station will go is Early Garth Brooks. I'm not criticizing the man--he was truly revolutionary (a black man in country music?), and I've seen him in concert, but Charlie's fans mainly own LPs and (8-track) tape decks--most of them don't own CD players, and even fewer own computers. So, he isn't going to be hurt by this. If anything, he will be helped, because he doesn't get played on the radio anymore, and this is giving him some publicity.
It is so ironic that MS is embracing XML as the state-of-the-art cutting edge technology (evidence of their innovation?). Why? Well, what is XML? some super-encrypted file format? some highly compressed communication system? Some super-efficient binary code transfer protocol? No--its text-based markup, designed specifically to avoid the inter-operability problems associated with a long tradition of proprietary binary document formats.
When you read the IBM people talking about the billion dollar number, it is always something like "Invest a billion dollars throughout the organization in linux". My impression is not that they are necessarily spending the money as people have been suggesting around these parts. For instance, they aren't going to be giving FSF 100 million, or buy out Loki. They aren't going to spend a billion dollars painting buses with peace signs and Penguins. They're probably not even hiring more than a handful of programmers to hack on existing 'open source' projects. But, across their entire organization, infrastructure is shifting. People who used to work on AIX are now devoting some of their efforts to Linux. Some people are helping out with Mozilla (which they are probably counting too, even though its also a Windows platform). Others are making their "Enterprise Software" usable on Linux, or vice versa. They are even starting some projects in China too. Added all up, its a billion, but its not like they are spending a billion more than they would have otherwise--its a shift of their normal operating expenses, and probably much of it isn't on flashy high-profile activities.
No need to post any of the following comments, as I will take care of them for you:
"Big deal. KDE has had AA since..."
"So what? OS X has had AA since..."
"This is news? Windows has had AA since..."
Unfortunately, I still don't have AA fonts, because I'm running debian and the alianized.deb I created didn't appear to do anything.
Document format isn't everything.
on
Linux Office Suites
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
Many people here are saying that Star Office is doomed if it doesn't have good import/export filters. Although this would be a good feature to convince hesitant managers, I think that this feature is overrated somewhat, at least compared to some other considerations. "We must be able to read external documents" is the usual defense, but this probably comes up less frequently than one might think, and star office handles most of those situations fairly well already. I've even used it to import--nearly flawlessly--powerpoint with Equation editor inserts.
What I mean is, if format was so important, Microsoft word would have never caught on, because its wordperfect->word filters were terrible. Even its word 5-> word 95 -> word 97 -> word on mac filters were terrible. Everytime I would look at a document in a new version, things would move around. Same goes for Lotus/Quattro->Excel. They even changed fundamental syntax for the spreadsheet! (in quattro, functions begin with an @ sign, whereas in excel, an =; a number of the function names are different as well, I believe.)
My point is that compatability isn't everything. Platform can be even more important. One of the major reason's MS Office is a 'standard' is because Microsoft moved the industry to Windows with 3.1, and the industry leaders (WP, Lotus, etc.) on the dos-based platform understood only too late that slow adaption to Windows meant their death.
So, StarOffice might stand a chance, even if they are not 100% compatable, because other considerations can be more powerful. For instance, with Microsoft pushing increasingly restrictive licensing, and the emminent maturing of many linux desktop and business apps, this may give enough of a toehold for real market penetration. By the same logic, even if the conversion filters are flawless, they might not capture the attention of the business world, many of whom won't likely even consider Star Office as an alternative.
I don't want to get in a flame war, but I think you are misinformed. QT is licensed under the GPL and QPL, which allows one to use it to produce software that is also GPLed. This is the QT "Fre Edition". According to trolltech,the "Professional Edition" must be used to write proprietary software. Here is an excerpt from their page:
Included below is version 1.0 of the license used for version 2.0 of the Qt Free Edition. The license is called the Q Public License (or "QPL"), and qualifies as an Open Source license. It is thus appropriate for people wishing to write software under the Open Source model where all source code to the software is made available to all users and can be freely modified and redistributed.
The QPL prohibits development of proprietary software. For Qt our Qt Professional Edition product is available for this.
(emphasis is mine).
If you did not interpret "Proprietary" as "Non-GPLed", then we are arguing over semantics, and you really didn't need to YELL AT ME LIKE THAT.. Anyway, what I originally said is true, and does present problems for both Sun and other vendors who don't wish to be beholding to trolltech if they want to produce and sell proprietary software. I don't think it is necessarily good that Gnome makes it easier to produce closed-source software, but it is true.
The licensing issue is still partly valid: 3rd party developers of proprietary software would have to license QT, whereas they could use the lgpled GTK+ for 'free'.
This organizational paradox is so common it should have a book written about it. If you have two (or more) independent indexes of information, but only one dimension to organize it in (e.g. linearly--like in written prose, or tree-like, as most file systems are), how do you do it? Generally, there are two solutions: a1b1c1, a2b2c2, a3b3c3 -or- a1a2a3, b1b2b3, c1c2c3.
This is especially difficult for modern file systems because there are probably four or five logical organizational indices-- application, user, computer, file 'type', etc.
DOS chose to have the main hierarchy essentially be 'applications', with the secondary hierarchy 'files'. Thus, there may be a lot of structure mimicked inside many application subdirectories. This second dimension is kept usually kept track of with file extensions. Of course, this makes certain things difficult to manage, like how (in the dos days) you had to be in the appropriate subdirectory to execute an application, unless you wanted to put everything in your path, which would probably be really slow. Also, traditionally, all user-produced data files were kept right near their application, which made it a pain to do backups.
In contrast, unix segregates files by type, which traditionally eliminated much of the need for semanticly-identifying file extensions. It made it easy for many users on a single machine, because each user's data is segregated, the path is small but allows access to all the programs, it makes backup easier too. But, it makes installation/removal more difficult, and only really works if every application follows the same standard. But, unix does do a little bit with 'user' and 'group' that allows representing the 'user' index.
Of course, newer oses blur this distinction a little--Windows has the registry, and Linux is very often used as a single-user OS. So their file organization metaphors have become a bit corrupted, depending upon your task.
What I would like to see is MDFS--multi-dimensional file system. In this system, you could navigate the system according to various indices: application, file purpose, user, computer, etc. The tree-like organization is limited, no matter how you slice it, so it would be interesting to do a truly new organization. There are interesting interface issues concerning MDFS--I'm not sure what it would take to make it usable by people. Anyway, That's what I think.
You may know this already, but Galeon has tabs too. Plus, its based on Mozilla's gecko. It has a very plain interface, but I find myself using it more and more. I switch between it and Mozilla frequently, and I only wish I could use the same history for both, so my followed links will stay the same color.
NOOOOOOO! As a young, stupid college freshman in 1992, I discovered usenet and made a fool out of myself several times. I have been resting peacefully at night for the last decade, thinking that my past was safely hidden from the present, believing that nobody would be able to hold me responsible for the misdeeds of my youth. I guess I'm going to have to change my name now.
....is to use the dvorak keyboard. Or another alternative configuration. Or probably hunt-and-peck typing would be ok too. Or don't type in english (japanese?). Or use speech recognition. I did not read the research report, but herbivore apparently works by constructing a detailed model of an individual's typing patterns. They can probably get pretty good at cracking an individual's password, if they have a really good model of that individual's own typing. It would probably generalize OK from one touch-typist to another, if they were typing in the same language, keyboard, etc. But, anything that mixes up the transition probabilities, and/or Herbivore's mapping of keys onto letters, will probably increase its cracking times to be greater than brute-force search, because you are providing it with 'misleading' information. And by entertaining more than one model, (e.g., QWERTY/ DVORAK, ENGLISH/FRENCH/JAPANESE/GERMAN, TOUCH-TYPING/HUNT-AND-PECK, ETC),its efficiency would be reduced, maybe to the level of brute-force search if the attacker knew nothing about his target.
Probably, a lot of the gain in cracking efficiency is due to simply the character transition probabilities (e.g., 'q' is almost always followed by 'u'), independent of their timing. In that case, simply obfuscating the timing might not help all that much.
I have never seen a post with this sort of comment get modded down.
It obvious why. It's because you never see the ones that get modded down.
But, you're right. People use the "This will probably get me modded down" as a shield against negative moderation, and it probably works. It actually probably adds points, even. This will probably get me modded down, but I admit that sometimes I mod down comments with that kind of line in them (even good ones) just out of spite.
It would be really, really bad news if our schools were unable to make use of these things.
What do you mean by this? I would think that schools who cannot use your content will just go to a publisher who will publish in a format they can use. So, it would only really be bad for you. As a college instructor, I'm not going to be influenced by the bells and whistles that publishers add if they cannot be viewed on the student's platform of choice.
It looks like you have two options: choose a more open format, or convince the producers of your content engine to support more platforms. The second will be difficult if you are providing CD-ROMS full of Quicktime videos, though.
Come on! Slashcode is available. Domain names are cheap. You can even steal all the links from slashdot, editing out the ones about linux, and have your own news about nerds. Its the beauty of Open Source. If you let me know, I might even register so I can 'get in early' with a low ID number. Just stop whining.
The only thing I really want is a free replacement for Maple and Mathematica.
amen. I could really go for a Mathematica replacement. FYI, Octave, an OS clone of Matlab, is available, and apparently its pretty good. But its not mathematica. Also, R, a Free version is S-plus, is now probably more popular than its predecessor. It does a lot of math, but is really a statistics package. However, it has the lisp-like (functional/interpretive) environment that Mathematica has. The similarities are so great that it probably wouldn't be too difficult to write an Mathematica interpreter that translates into Splus/R.
...but I just finished hunting down and killing all of the errant ximian packages on my debian testing install. My system has never run more smoothly--even Nautilus is zippy since I moved to a consistent distribution. I'm not going to let that happen again, and I just tried dpkging the available.deb but it wanted to overwrite libcamel0. I guess I'll wait for it to magically appear as an official.deb.
I don't know about your claim about free beer. I'll bet your average Linux users spends considerably more on hardware annually than your average windows user. A lot of them fall into the "early adopters" category, and have disposable income to buy toys with. The funny thing is that with the current size of the linux market, a hardware company can probably only get ROI for writing a driver if they are one of the only companies that support linux in their class of products (capturing a large chunk of a small market--this is what Apple has done well for 15 years.) If there is already a ton of supported devices, it may not pay to support linux. So, we get what we have--spotty support. There are a few webcams, a few scanners, a few 3D video cards(ok, I'm just bitter because I haven't been able to get my Voodoo3 to play Tuxracer), and a few laptops that linux can use. Because there are already a few alternatives in each of these markets, their is less of an incentive for new entrants to support linux.
They are already doing this here,
here, and here, using macs and pcs and unix boxes (UNclustered) to run "Cognitive Architectures"--simulated virtual agents that (to one extent or another) behave as real people do in simple and complex virtual environments. The problems that are being addressed out there do not require as much computing power as you might think, and the research is studying complex tasks (flying airplanes, air-traffic control, learning, memory, etc.) There is little brute-force search required in the search for 'consciousness', which is what these distributed client systems (ala SETI@home and the gene folding project) do best. The largest leaps forward have been made looking at small manageable problems that don't generally require a supercomputer. If you were able to create a giant distributed model of the brain, it very likely would be equally as difficult to understand as our own brain is; and in order to build one (for spectacle's sake or something), you would need to know a lot about the details, like local connectivity patterns.
That being said, I don't think there's any theoretical reason someone couldn't build a fairly realistic highly-complex "brain" using, say, 100,000,000 simplified neural units (I've heard of a guy in Japan who is doing such a thing), but I don't really know what it would do, or if it would teach us anything that is interesting.
...that the only way for the upcoming LOTR movie to get a good response from./ posters is if Katz doesn't like it. Seriously, I have never before seen a scifi/fantasy movie reviewed here that people claimed to like, but as soon as Katz says its crap, everyone and his brother is singing the praises of the movie in a unified voice.
Does anyone else find it amusingly coincidental, perhaps even ironic, that this Microsoft-inspired license is debuting in version 3.1?
(Depending upon how you look at it, Windows 3.1 was either the end of DOS or the beginning of universal GUI for intel-platform computers. Either way, it was a true milestone in computer history.)
From what I understand, one of the primary reasons for having two or three levels of distribution is to avoid this dependency hell. In debian, e.g., everything in Stable (should) play nice together, but the newer stuff is more likely to break other stuff. This means that a lot of the stable stuff is a year or more old, and because of Linux's nascent status, this means that if you want to get something that is usable, you have to deal with conflicts.
I think this is one of the primary hurdles facing Linux's wider adoption. Nobody wants to mess with upgrading/downgrading libraries, and you rarely have to do that stuff in Windows. For example, I have never been able to get the newest versions of galeon, mozilla, and nautilus installed and working at the same time. And, perhaps unrelated, gnumeric and netscape 4.7 no longer work. Of course, its not impossible to fix, and I'm not trying to sound like I'm whining, but I don't know to many of my friends who are Windows power users & programmers who would put up this stuff.
Hopefully things will improve when libraries become more stable, and apps move into versions 1, 2, 3, and higher. Then, release cycles should get longer and less drastic, and everything should be easier to use together.
Slashdot Mirror
It probably won't cost him. Charlie Pride is a country has-been whose fan-base is a hick version of Pat Boone's. Country music has an even shorter memory than "Mainstream"--every FM station plays hits from the "70s, 80s, and today", or something like that, but about the farthest back any country radio station will go is Early Garth Brooks. I'm not criticizing the man--he was truly revolutionary (a black man in country music?), and I've seen him in concert, but Charlie's fans mainly own LPs and (8-track) tape decks--most of them don't own CD players, and even fewer own computers. So, he isn't going to be hurt by this. If anything, he will be helped, because he doesn't get played on the radio anymore, and this is giving him some publicity.
It is so ironic that MS is embracing XML as the state-of-the-art cutting edge technology (evidence of their innovation?). Why? Well, what is XML? some super-encrypted file format? some highly compressed communication system? Some super-efficient binary code transfer protocol? No--its text-based markup, designed specifically to avoid the inter-operability problems associated with a long tradition of proprietary binary document formats.
When you read the IBM people talking about the billion dollar number, it is always something like "Invest a billion dollars throughout the organization in linux". My impression is not that they are necessarily spending the money as people have been suggesting around these parts. For instance, they aren't going to be giving FSF 100 million, or buy out Loki. They aren't going to spend a billion dollars painting buses with peace signs and Penguins. They're probably not even hiring more than a handful of programmers to hack on existing 'open source' projects. But, across their entire organization, infrastructure is shifting. People who used to work on AIX are now devoting some of their efforts to Linux. Some people are helping out with Mozilla (which they are probably counting too, even though its also a Windows platform). Others are making their "Enterprise Software" usable on Linux, or vice versa. They are even starting some projects in China too. Added all up, its a billion, but its not like they are spending a billion more than they would have otherwise--its a shift of their normal operating expenses, and probably much of it isn't on flashy high-profile activities.
"Big deal. KDE has had AA since
"So what? OS X has had AA since
"This is news? Windows has had AA since
Unfortunately, I still don't have AA fonts, because I'm running debian and the alianized .deb I created didn't appear to do anything.
What I mean is, if format was so important, Microsoft word would have never caught on, because its wordperfect->word filters were terrible. Even its word 5-> word 95 -> word 97 -> word on mac filters were terrible. Everytime I would look at a document in a new version, things would move around. Same goes for Lotus/Quattro->Excel. They even changed fundamental syntax for the spreadsheet! (in quattro, functions begin with an @ sign, whereas in excel, an =; a number of the function names are different as well, I believe.)
My point is that compatability isn't everything. Platform can be even more important. One of the major reason's MS Office is a 'standard' is because Microsoft moved the industry to Windows with 3.1, and the industry leaders (WP, Lotus, etc.) on the dos-based platform understood only too late that slow adaption to Windows meant their death.
So, StarOffice might stand a chance, even if they are not 100% compatable, because other considerations can be more powerful. For instance, with Microsoft pushing increasingly restrictive licensing, and the emminent maturing of many linux desktop and business apps, this may give enough of a toehold for real market penetration. By the same logic, even if the conversion filters are flawless, they might not capture the attention of the business world, many of whom won't likely even consider Star Office as an alternative.
trolltech,the "Professional Edition" must be used to write proprietary software. Here is an excerpt from their page:
Included below is version 1.0 of the license used for version 2.0 of the Qt Free Edition. The license is called the Q Public License (or "QPL"), and qualifies as an Open Source license. It is thus appropriate for people wishing to write software under the Open Source model where all source code to the software is made available to all users and can be freely modified and redistributed.
The QPL prohibits development of proprietary software. For Qt our Qt Professional Edition product is available for this.
(emphasis is mine).
If you did not interpret "Proprietary" as "Non-GPLed", then we are arguing over semantics, and you really didn't need to YELL AT ME LIKE THAT.. Anyway, what I originally said is true, and does present problems for both Sun and other vendors who don't wish to be beholding to trolltech if they want to produce and sell proprietary software. I don't think it is necessarily good that Gnome makes it easier to produce closed-source software, but it is true.
The licensing issue is still partly valid: 3rd party developers of proprietary software would have to license QT, whereas they could use the lgpled GTK+ for 'free'.
This is especially difficult for modern file systems because there are probably four or five logical organizational indices-- application, user, computer, file 'type', etc.
DOS chose to have the main hierarchy essentially be 'applications', with the secondary hierarchy 'files'. Thus, there may be a lot of structure mimicked inside many application subdirectories. This second dimension is kept usually kept track of with file extensions. Of course, this makes certain things difficult to manage, like how (in the dos days) you had to be in the appropriate subdirectory to execute an application, unless you wanted to put everything in your path, which would probably be really slow. Also, traditionally, all user-produced data files were kept right near their application, which made it a pain to do backups.
In contrast, unix segregates files by type, which traditionally eliminated much of the need for semanticly-identifying file extensions. It made it easy for many users on a single machine, because each user's data is segregated, the path is small but allows access to all the programs, it makes backup easier too. But, it makes installation/removal more difficult, and only really works if every application follows the same standard. But, unix does do a little bit with 'user' and 'group' that allows representing the 'user' index.
Of course, newer oses blur this distinction a little--Windows has the registry, and Linux is very often used as a single-user OS. So their file organization metaphors have become a bit corrupted, depending upon your task.
What I would like to see is MDFS--multi-dimensional file system. In this system, you could navigate the system according to various indices: application, file purpose, user, computer, etc. The tree-like organization is limited, no matter how you slice it, so it would be interesting to do a truly new organization. There are interesting interface issues concerning MDFS--I'm not sure what it would take to make it usable by people. Anyway, That's what I think.
You said:
Bird 1 - undercutting Sun high-end
Stone 2 - Microsoft's cost of Open Source argument
No Comment.
You may know this already, but Galeon has tabs too. Plus, its based on Mozilla's gecko. It has a very plain interface, but I find myself using it more and more. I switch between it and Mozilla frequently, and I only wish I could use the same history for both, so my followed links will stay the same color.
NOOOOOOO! As a young, stupid college freshman in 1992, I discovered usenet and made a fool out of myself several times. I have been resting peacefully at night for the last decade, thinking that my past was safely hidden from the present, believing that nobody would be able to hold me responsible for the misdeeds of my youth. I guess I'm going to have to change my name now.
Probably, a lot of the gain in cracking efficiency is due to simply the character transition probabilities (e.g., 'q' is almost always followed by 'u'), independent of their timing. In that case, simply obfuscating the timing might not help all that much.
Okay moderators, down we go.....
I have never seen a post with this sort of comment get modded down.
It obvious why. It's because you never see the ones that get modded down.
But, you're right. People use the "This will probably get me modded down" as a shield against negative moderation, and it probably works. It actually probably adds points, even. This will probably get me modded down, but I admit that sometimes I mod down comments with that kind of line in them (even good ones) just out of spite.
What do you mean by this? I would think that schools who cannot use your content will just go to a publisher who will publish in a format they can use. So, it would only really be bad for you. As a college instructor, I'm not going to be influenced by the bells and whistles that publishers add if they cannot be viewed on the student's platform of choice.
It looks like you have two options: choose a more open format, or convince the producers of your content engine to support more platforms. The second will be difficult if you are providing CD-ROMS full of Quicktime videos, though.
Come on! Slashcode is available. Domain names are cheap. You can even steal all the links from slashdot, editing out the ones about linux, and have your own news about nerds. Its the beauty of Open Source. If you let me know, I might even register so I can 'get in early' with a low ID number. Just stop whining.
amen. I could really go for a Mathematica replacement. FYI, Octave, an OS clone of Matlab, is available, and apparently its pretty good. But its not mathematica. Also, R, a Free version is S-plus, is now probably more popular than its predecessor. It does a lot of math, but is really a statistics package. However, it has the lisp-like (functional/interpretive) environment that Mathematica has. The similarities are so great that it probably wouldn't be too difficult to write an Mathematica interpreter that translates into Splus/R.
But.... wasn't this topic about games?
See subject. ps. This is not off-topic--its an "inside" joke that you will understand if you have played Zork.
...but I just finished hunting down and killing all of the errant ximian packages on my debian testing install. My system has never run more smoothly--even Nautilus is zippy since I moved to a consistent distribution. I'm not going to let that happen again, and I just tried dpkging the available .deb but it wanted to overwrite libcamel0. I guess I'll wait for it to magically appear as an official .deb.
I don't know about your claim about free beer. I'll bet your average Linux users spends considerably more on hardware annually than your average windows user. A lot of them fall into the "early adopters" category, and have disposable income to buy toys with. The funny thing is that with the current size of the linux market, a hardware company can probably only get ROI for writing a driver if they are one of the only companies that support linux in their class of products (capturing a large chunk of a small market--this is what Apple has done well for 15 years.) If there is already a ton of supported devices, it may not pay to support linux. So, we get what we have--spotty support. There are a few webcams, a few scanners, a few 3D video cards(ok, I'm just bitter because I haven't been able to get my Voodoo3 to play Tuxracer), and a few laptops that linux can use. Because there are already a few alternatives in each of these markets, their is less of an incentive for new entrants to support linux.
That being said, I don't think there's any theoretical reason someone couldn't build a fairly realistic highly-complex "brain" using, say, 100,000,000 simplified neural units (I've heard of a guy in Japan who is doing such a thing), but I don't really know what it would do, or if it would teach us anything that is interesting.
...that the only way for the upcoming LOTR movie to get a good response from ./ posters is if Katz doesn't like it. Seriously, I have never before seen a scifi/fantasy movie reviewed here that people claimed to like, but as soon as Katz says its crap, everyone and his brother is singing the praises of the movie in a unified voice.
Did you mean Luke or Anniken?
(Depending upon how you look at it, Windows 3.1 was either the end of DOS or the beginning of universal GUI for intel-platform computers. Either way, it was a true milestone in computer history.)
Are you CLUELESS? Its Xerox PARC (Palo Alto Research Center.)
I think this is one of the primary hurdles facing Linux's wider adoption. Nobody wants to mess with upgrading/downgrading libraries, and you rarely have to do that stuff in Windows. For example, I have never been able to get the newest versions of galeon, mozilla, and nautilus installed and working at the same time. And, perhaps unrelated, gnumeric and netscape 4.7 no longer work. Of course, its not impossible to fix, and I'm not trying to sound like I'm whining, but I don't know to many of my friends who are Windows power users & programmers who would put up this stuff.
Hopefully things will improve when libraries become more stable, and apps move into versions 1, 2, 3, and higher. Then, release cycles should get longer and less drastic, and everything should be easier to use together.