Won't comment on the merits or lack thereof of putting development tools on a firewall machine, but I'm not sure I understand why you're having trouble installing your choice of software. Every package-based distribution I've used provides an option to select and install only individual packages.
Depending on your tastes, give Slackware a look. The install is fast and simple, and its avoidance of rpm/apt mean you can install code from source without worrying about screwing the packaging database.
I wouldn't agree or disagree that the patent office sometimes grant patents that ought not to be granted. I certainly do agree that people and organizations with lots of money -- like Microsoft -- can more easily afford to hire lawyers than people with less money. That's a fact of life.
But, every time/. posts something about patents, it serves its purpose by prompting a few hundred posts from the braindead among us who decide that the concept of patents is evil just because the open source demigods tell them to hate software patents.
Meanwhile, I have an idea for a faster-than-light spaceship. No plans or implementation, just an idea. By your logic, I can get a patent.
An implentation is not a subset of an idea. An idea is somethig bouncing around in your head. An implementation is a manifestation of that idea in physical reality.
Software patents make perfect sense, but you're arguing too broadly and with imprecision. You can't patent an entire broad and pre-existing "thing", but you can patent a different implementation of that "thing". For example, the Wright Brothers didn't patent the "airplane", they patented a specific way of controlling the flight of an aircraft.
No one patents something as broad as "one-click internet shopping". They patent a specific method of implementing one-click internet shopping. When someone comes along with another implemention of one-click internet shopping, the lawyers get busy.
>> You seem to be implying that patent schemes are the only way that people can have a prospect of financial reward and benefit from their inventions.
Not the only way, just the way with the most appeal to the most people. Besides, gving it all away RMS-style just results in stagnation since only RMS-style oddballs will have an incentive to invent. (Even that's dubious: Open source software is mired in swamp of conservative me-tooism primarily because there's little real incentive to make something that's better than the "good enough" tools that someone made years ago. E.g., vi and emacs. Both are decades old, and both would be panned if they were tossed today to unsuspecting computer users. Meanwhile, other people kept/keep imitating WordStar/Office.
And...worries about govenmental instrusion in a "free market" always seem to be premised on the notion that a free market can exist without governance. That's wrong. Absent a role for government, a market will be organized and governed by the most powerful economic agents in the market. While these agents will act only to further their own interests, at least a government can, in theory, work to the benefit of all, especially those excluded from the market.
>> And patents effectively give the holder a monopoly on the idea. "The right conferred by the patent grant is, in the language of the statute and of the grant itself, "the right to exclude others from making, using, offering for sale, or selling"
That's what patents are supposed to do. Only oddballs like RMS think people will continue to invent things without any prospect of reward and benefit.
By the way, a patent does not give the holder a monopoly on an idea. As you say, it excludes others from making, using, offering to sell, or selling the invention. None of those is an "idea". It's clearly impossible for anyone to have a monopoly on an idea, but patents concern themselves with specific implementations of ideas. E.g., did Edison acquire a monopoly on the idea of the light bulb? No, just a particular implementation.
....'cause at $199 it was a few dollars cheaper than at the local independent computer shops (they existed back then, folks). It was also about $2000 cheaper than the competition from Apple.
Of course, I spent more buying a 1541 drive and a Commodore monitor (all the better to see those cute little sprites),
Eventually, I wrote a Commodore Basic program of, maybe, 2000 lines to collect, "analyze" and report on results from a local newspaper survey. Iirc, the paper loved the results, but I had no way of knowing if the program could be trusted.
If a non-PC (PC architecture == boring) machine was on the market today for $199 and had a fraction of the fun-potential of the C64, I'd jump on it.
Well...the first hurdle in this quest would be to get your employer's permission to use a Mac on their network in the first place, wouldn't it? Since this guy didn't get fired, he must've dealt with that little detail.
ANd it's a tad unfair to dump on the IT staff for being "ignorant" of the Mac. They were hired to support all those Windows machines the boss paid for. Whining about an MSCE not being able to support a Mac laptop is a bit like complaining that the kid at your local Big Mac doesn't know how to make your favorite Caramel Macchiato.
The mere fact that the startup feedback in KDE is not identical to what's used in Windows is enough to throw many users into fits of discomfort.
Remember, if you know enough about computers to read and post here on Slashdot, you're a couple of orders of magnitude beyond the computer skills of most users. That isn't to cast aspersions on their capabilities. I drive a car every day and if it starts doing something unexpected I'll take it to a mechanic, because my level of interest in what makes cars work is pretty low. Similarly, most people who use a computer every day in a corporate environment will pick up the phone and call tech support when their machine misbehaves. Why? Because they find computers to be about as interesting as typewriters. For them, computers are just tools they have to use to get their jobs done. Any changes are as unwelcome as someone rearranging the keys on a typewriter keyboard.
It's this kind of inertia that plays to Microsoft's advantage and plays against any OS that wants to play the alternative game. People don't necessarily want to change.
LInux or any other alternative OS needs to do something other than simply mimicing Windows. No one is going to be interested in going through the hassle of learning new software only to find out that it is pretty much the same as the Windows stuff it replaced.
Success in the corporate desktop environment requires adding capability that Windows lacks. Make them more productive on Linux than on Windows at the same time you make their jobs easier and, just maybe, their employers might make the switch.
By continuing to use the MS software they already own.
Remember, I don't expect people to stay with MS forever, regardless of anything MS does. I am saying that now, and for the forseeable future, there's no reason other than ideology to convert from.doc to an open format. Open standards currently don't offer enough incentives. The returns on the conversion costs just aren't there. (This, of course, is a different matter for a new company that has yet to acquire any software.) But, if and when MS does something that increases the return from converson, then companies will pay to move to an alternative. The key point is thay they most perceive that the converson will cost them less than staying with MS.
Even then it will be a very slow process, because people will not want to generate data that can't be read by the recipients, or vice versa. The cost of being unintelligible is rather high.
The cost of most everything is determined by what the market will bear. Why should a business care what MS's progit margin is, so long as their own is satisfactory? If the cost of buying MS increases too much in the future, that's when businesses will switch, not before.
People who use.doc format are "screwed" only if MS kills it, which seems unlikely. If they foolishly price it out of the market, people will still use it, but without MS tools.
Kach and all the other Kahane groups have been on the list for years. The Israelis consider them terrorists, too. They outlawed them in 1994. In 1994, a Brooklyn-born Kach supporter armed with a machine gun massacred 29 people in a mosque in the city of Hebron in the West Bank.
...can be bothered to read the ref'd article and learn that placing these sites on the terrorist list -- the organizations that sponsor the sites have been on the list for some time -- prohibits fundings or supporting the sites. not reading them.
If you're paranoid about the USG perhaps knowing about your visits to the site, bear in mind that the site's sponsors have probably been tracking you all along.
Sure, as an individual I am not prepared to buy MS 2003 just to read Word files. But, I'm a Linux user and I don't use or even need a word processor.
However, if I was a corporation with a substantial IT budget and important data retained in MS format, the cost of buying that server would be a lot less that adopting an open standard, retraining my employees and support staff, and converting all my legacy data.
I'm not arguing in favor of closed standards or MS formats; I'm just describing reality. Lecturing about the virtues of open standards in a corporate board room will simply cause eyes to glaze over. They'll find it as important to company goals as telling people to obey the speed limit.
To break the MS stranglehold, proponents of open standards must demonstrate that the new standards will help businsses make money, will not require throwing away their investment in MS programs and infrastructure, and will allow them to continue to transparently (without conversion) read and use both their own legacy data and new incoming data from other sources that is still in the MS format.
If a new standard, and its supporting technology, doesn't allow that, it won't be adopted.
>> If you have two different implementations, one which follows a documented, well thought out standard, and another a non-documented closed implementation, which one would you choose?
I'm not a business person, I use Linux, and I don't use Word, so, personally, I'd opt for the open standard. But, if I ran a business, I'd opt for whatever was going to make me the most money, regardless of whether or not it was well-documented, open or closed.
Don't confuse my statements about how I see people actually behaving with my own sentiments about what they ought to do. The vast majority of people use the.doc format, and have no interest in moving elsewhere. We may not like the reasons behind that, but we can't deny that it's real. In my book, that makes.doc a standard, whether or not the specs are locked away in Redmond or posted on a W3C site.
(I don't accept the notion that, somehow freed of the MS monopoly, people would flock to some other standard simply because it is open. I suspect that they'd want to keep on using the.doc format until there was clear financial reason to move way from it. After all, people have a lot of money invested in using that stuff and lot of legacy data sitting around in.doc format that will never be converted to something else. People are not going to blind themselves to their own data just to support an open standard,)
As far as I'm concerned, ebooks have no future unless they look and feel like a real book and cost less.
Give me an ebook with a flexible reading surface that's at least 5x8 inches, that allows me to put my own notes in the margins, features crisp black-on-white text, and the ability to function without a power source and independently of some sort of reader hardware, and I might change my mind.
Right now, though, reading an ebook is just too unpleasant to be worth it.
I'm not taking an ethical stand here, or declaring my own position on standards. I'm simply stating what I believe is the truth: The vast majority of computer users do not know that standards bodies exits, and, in addition, have no reason to know.
Standards that are not used aren't standards, they're just futile academic exercises. I agree that it would be better in the long run for the majority of word processors to adopt a single open standard, rather than use the MS format. But, the reality is different. The present-day cost of moving away from the.doc format outweighs the long-term possibility of getting screwed by Microsoft.
If I ran a business, I'd have no business reason to move away from the.doc format until the majority of other users had already moved. Unless you're doing it for ideological reasons, it makes no sense to generate correspondence and other communications in a format that can't be read by the recipients.
Middle clicking, etc. are not exactly what I'd call important things I do on my computer. BTW, virtual desktops are available for XP, gratis, via a Microsoft download. Ditto focus-on-mouseover, I believe. Yeah, their addons, but that's a cheap shot, since X is a rather large addon.
Hoe is Joe User supposed to know if the software is stable? A developer gives something a name with "1.0" in it and users are stuck trusting the guy. That's no improvement over commercial code.
And being compelled to stick with software compiled for one distro is a weakness, not a strengt, of Linux. It's the same bloody code; it ought to run everywhere.
I was referring to the marketplace of use, not the marketplace of ideas.
The typical computer user isn't interested in development models, or even has a reason to know they exist. He expects his software to work. If it doesn't, he will throw it away and find something else.
THe "choice" that's important to developers is not that important to users, and often proves a detriment.
Committee-generated standards are useless unless people decide to adhere to them, regardless of technical reasonableness. E.g., TCP/IP is universally used not because it is a formal standard, but because it works and people would rather use it than something else. That's the standard that really counts: acceptance and use.
So, of course, the.doc format is a standard. Yes, it is a proprietary standard, but one that's readily accepted by hundreds of millions of users who just want to get some work done and wouldn't know a standards body if they were stuck in an elevator with it.
I'm not advocating the widespread acceptance of proprietary standards. I certainly didn't state that open standards represent "a flaw". (To the contrary, ASCII is good enough for me.) But, it is delusional to imagine that people will stop using a product and migrate to one they consider inferior simply because the former doesn't follow a standard created by some group they've never heard of, while the latter does.
MS has a free download that provides multiple virtual desktops.
Most folks don't care about LSB and such. When they think of standards, they think about getting some application to run on their machine. If it works, it's standard, if it doesn't, it isn't. In other words, the standard they want complicance with is the standard established by the hardware and software they already own.
Using a distribution's in-house update scheme is great, but even RPM's aren't reliably exchangable between RPM-based distributions. It's hard for a non-geek to see standards in Linux when they also see umpteen distributions.
And, I guess you missed the part where I said I'm a Linux user (since the SLS days.)
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Won't comment on the merits or lack thereof of putting development tools on a firewall machine, but I'm not sure I understand why you're having trouble installing your choice of software. Every package-based distribution I've used provides an option to select and install only individual packages.
Depending on your tastes, give Slackware a look. The install is fast and simple, and its avoidance of rpm/apt mean you can install code from source without worrying about screwing the packaging database.
I wouldn't agree or disagree that the patent office sometimes grant patents that ought not to be granted. I certainly do agree that people and organizations with lots of money -- like Microsoft -- can more easily afford to hire lawyers than people with less money. That's a fact of life.
/. posts something about patents, it serves its purpose by prompting a few hundred posts from the braindead among us who decide that the concept of patents is evil just because the open source demigods tell them to hate software patents.
But, every time
OK, RMS plus Berners-Lee equals two.
Meanwhile, I have an idea for a faster-than-light spaceship. No plans or implementation, just an idea. By your logic, I can get a patent.
An implentation is not a subset of an idea. An idea is somethig bouncing around in your head. An implementation is a manifestation of that idea in physical reality.
>> ... patent one-click internet shopping?
Software patents make perfect sense, but you're arguing too broadly and with imprecision. You can't patent an entire broad and pre-existing "thing", but you can patent a different implementation of that "thing". For example, the Wright Brothers didn't patent the "airplane", they patented a specific way of controlling the flight of an aircraft.
No one patents something as broad as "one-click internet shopping". They patent a specific method of implementing one-click internet shopping. When someone comes along with another implemention of one-click internet shopping, the lawyers get busy.
>> You seem to be implying that patent schemes are the only way that people can have a prospect of financial reward and benefit from their inventions.
Not the only way, just the way with the most appeal to the most people. Besides, gving it all away RMS-style just results in stagnation since only RMS-style oddballs will have an incentive to invent. (Even that's dubious: Open source software is mired in swamp of conservative me-tooism primarily because there's little real incentive to make something that's better than the "good enough" tools that someone made years ago. E.g., vi and emacs. Both are decades old, and both would be panned if they were tossed today to unsuspecting computer users. Meanwhile, other people kept/keep imitating WordStar/Office.
And...worries about govenmental instrusion in a "free market" always seem to be premised on the notion that a free market can exist without governance. That's wrong. Absent a role for government, a market will be organized and governed by the most powerful economic agents in the market. While these agents will act only to further their own interests, at least a government can, in theory, work to the benefit of all, especially those excluded from the market.
>> And patents effectively give the holder a monopoly on the idea. "The right conferred by the patent grant is, in the language of the statute and of the grant itself, "the right to exclude others from making, using, offering for sale, or selling"
That's what patents are supposed to do. Only oddballs like RMS think people will continue to invent things without any prospect of reward and benefit.
By the way, a patent does not give the holder a monopoly on an idea. As you say, it excludes others from making, using, offering to sell, or selling the invention. None of those is an "idea". It's clearly impossible for anyone to have a monopoly on an idea, but patents concern themselves with specific implementations of ideas. E.g., did Edison acquire a monopoly on the idea of the light bulb? No, just a particular implementation.
....'cause at $199 it was a few dollars cheaper than at the local independent computer shops (they existed back then, folks). It was also about $2000 cheaper than the competition from Apple.
Of course, I spent more buying a 1541 drive and a Commodore monitor (all the better to see those cute little sprites),
Eventually, I wrote a Commodore Basic program of, maybe, 2000 lines to collect, "analyze" and report on results from a local newspaper survey. Iirc, the paper loved the results, but I had no way of knowing if the program could be trusted.
If a non-PC (PC architecture == boring) machine was on the market today for $199 and had a fraction of the fun-potential of the C64, I'd jump on it.
Well...the first hurdle in this quest would be to get your employer's permission to use a Mac on their network in the first place, wouldn't it? Since this guy didn't get fired, he must've dealt with that little detail.
ANd it's a tad unfair to dump on the IT staff for being "ignorant" of the Mac. They were hired to support all those Windows machines the boss paid for. Whining about an MSCE not being able to support a Mac laptop is a bit like complaining that the kid at your local Big Mac doesn't know how to make your favorite Caramel Macchiato.
The mere fact that the startup feedback in KDE is not identical to what's used in Windows is enough to throw many users into fits of discomfort.
Remember, if you know enough about computers to read and post here on Slashdot, you're a couple of orders of magnitude beyond the computer skills of most users. That isn't to cast aspersions on their capabilities. I drive a car every day and if it starts doing something unexpected I'll take it to a mechanic, because my level of interest in what makes cars work is pretty low. Similarly, most people who use a computer every day in a corporate environment will pick up the phone and call tech support when their machine misbehaves. Why? Because they find computers to be about as interesting as typewriters. For them, computers are just tools they have to use to get their jobs done. Any changes are as unwelcome as someone rearranging the keys on a typewriter keyboard.
It's this kind of inertia that plays to Microsoft's advantage and plays against any OS that wants to play the alternative game. People don't necessarily want to change.
LInux or any other alternative OS needs to do something other than simply mimicing Windows. No one is going to be interested in going through the hassle of learning new software only to find out that it is pretty much the same as the Windows stuff it replaced.
Success in the corporate desktop environment requires adding capability that Windows lacks. Make them more productive on Linux than on Windows at the same time you make their jobs easier and, just maybe, their employers might make the switch.
>> How will they use .doc without MS?
.doc to an open format. Open standards currently don't offer enough incentives. The returns on the conversion costs just aren't there. (This, of course, is a different matter for a new company that has yet to acquire any software.) But, if and when MS does something that increases the return from converson, then companies will pay to move to an alternative. The key point is thay they most perceive that the converson will cost them less than staying with MS.
By continuing to use the MS software they already own.
Remember, I don't expect people to stay with MS forever, regardless of anything MS does. I am saying that now, and for the forseeable future, there's no reason other than ideology to convert from
Even then it will be a very slow process, because people will not want to generate data that can't be read by the recipients, or vice versa. The cost of being unintelligible is rather high.
The cost of most everything is determined by what the market will bear. Why should a business care what MS's progit margin is, so long as their own is satisfactory? If the cost of buying MS increases too much in the future, that's when businesses will switch, not before.
.doc format are "screwed" only if MS kills it, which seems unlikely. If they foolishly price it out of the market, people will still use it, but without MS tools.
People who use
Didn't say anything about a conspiracy or a conviction. Just said that the guy who killed 29 people was a sympathizer.
Kach and all the other Kahane groups have been on the list for years. The Israelis consider them terrorists, too. They outlawed them in 1994. In 1994, a Brooklyn-born Kach supporter armed with a machine gun massacred 29 people in a mosque in the city of Hebron in the West Bank.
I'd guess you didn't know that.
Ii've always thought it was so nice of Michael Moore to write an autobiography.
The group that sponsors this site has been on the list for years and are essentially an American group. The Israelis consider them terrorists, too.
A website can't kill people, but these guys can, and have.
How do you know that your support for the site really does go to paying for bandwidth?
How do you know if your support for one of these sites doesn't free up funds to allow them to murder another American or another Palestinian?
Check these groups out, nd then think before you post.
...can be bothered to read the ref'd article and learn that placing these sites on the terrorist list -- the organizations that sponsor the sites have been on the list for some time -- prohibits fundings or supporting the sites. not reading them.
If you're paranoid about the USG perhaps knowing about your visits to the site, bear in mind that the site's sponsors have probably been tracking you all along.
Sure, as an individual I am not prepared to buy MS 2003 just to read Word files. But, I'm a Linux user and I don't use or even need a word processor.
However, if I was a corporation with a substantial IT budget and important data retained in MS format, the cost of buying that server would be a lot less that adopting an open standard, retraining my employees and support staff, and converting all my legacy data.
I'm not arguing in favor of closed standards or MS formats; I'm just describing reality. Lecturing about the virtues of open standards in a corporate board room will simply cause eyes to glaze over. They'll find it as important to company goals as telling people to obey the speed limit.
To break the MS stranglehold, proponents of open standards must demonstrate that the new standards will help businsses make money, will not require throwing away their investment in MS programs and infrastructure, and will allow them to continue to transparently (without conversion) read and use both their own legacy data and new incoming data from other sources that is still in the MS format.
If a new standard, and its supporting technology, doesn't allow that, it won't be adopted.
>> If you have two different implementations, one which follows a documented, well thought out standard, and another a non-documented closed implementation, which one would you choose?
.doc format, and have no interest in moving elsewhere. We may not like the reasons behind that, but we can't deny that it's real. In my book, that makes .doc a standard, whether or not the specs are locked away in Redmond or posted on a W3C site.
.doc format until there was clear financial reason to move way from it. After all, people have a lot of money invested in using that stuff and lot of legacy data sitting around in .doc format that will never be converted to something else. People are not going to blind themselves to their own data just to support an open standard,)
I'm not a business person, I use Linux, and I don't use Word, so, personally, I'd opt for the open standard. But, if I ran a business, I'd opt for whatever was going to make me the most money, regardless of whether or not it was well-documented, open or closed.
Don't confuse my statements about how I see people actually behaving with my own sentiments about what they ought to do. The vast majority of people use the
(I don't accept the notion that, somehow freed of the MS monopoly, people would flock to some other standard simply because it is open. I suspect that they'd want to keep on using the
As far as I'm concerned, ebooks have no future unless they look and feel like a real book and cost less.
Give me an ebook with a flexible reading surface that's at least 5x8 inches, that allows me to put my own notes in the margins, features crisp black-on-white text, and the ability to function without a power source and independently of some sort of reader hardware, and I might change my mind.
Right now, though, reading an ebook is just too unpleasant to be worth it.
I'm not taking an ethical stand here, or declaring my own position on standards. I'm simply stating what I believe is the truth: The vast majority of computer users do not know that standards bodies exits, and, in addition, have no reason to know.
.doc format outweighs the long-term possibility of getting screwed by Microsoft.
.doc format until the majority of other users had already moved. Unless you're doing it for ideological reasons, it makes no sense to generate correspondence and other communications in a format that can't be read by the recipients.
Standards that are not used aren't standards, they're just futile academic exercises. I agree that it would be better in the long run for the majority of word processors to adopt a single open standard, rather than use the MS format. But, the reality is different. The present-day cost of moving away from the
If I ran a business, I'd have no business reason to move away from the
Middle clicking, etc. are not exactly what I'd call important things I do on my computer. BTW, virtual desktops are available for XP, gratis, via a Microsoft download. Ditto focus-on-mouseover, I believe. Yeah, their addons, but that's a cheap shot, since X is a rather large addon.
Hoe is Joe User supposed to know if the software is stable? A developer gives something a name with "1.0" in it and users are stuck trusting the guy. That's no improvement over commercial code.
And being compelled to stick with software compiled for one distro is a weakness, not a strengt, of Linux. It's the same bloody code; it ought to run everywhere.
I was referring to the marketplace of use, not the marketplace of ideas.
The typical computer user isn't interested in development models, or even has a reason to know they exist. He expects his software to work. If it doesn't, he will throw it away and find something else.
THe "choice" that's important to developers is not that important to users, and often proves a detriment.
Committee-generated standards are useless unless people decide to adhere to them, regardless of technical reasonableness. E.g., TCP/IP is universally used not because it is a formal standard, but because it works and people would rather use it than something else. That's the standard that really counts: acceptance and use.
.doc format is a standard. Yes, it is a proprietary standard, but one that's readily accepted by hundreds of millions of users who just want to get some work done and wouldn't know a standards body if they were stuck in an elevator with it.
So, of course, the
I'm not advocating the widespread acceptance of proprietary standards. I certainly didn't state that open standards represent "a flaw". (To the contrary, ASCII is good enough for me.) But, it is delusional to imagine that people will stop using a product and migrate to one they consider inferior simply because the former doesn't follow a standard created by some group they've never heard of, while the latter does.
MS has a free download that provides multiple virtual desktops.
Most folks don't care about LSB and such. When they think of standards, they think about getting some application to run on their machine. If it works, it's standard, if it doesn't, it isn't. In other words, the standard they want complicance with is the standard established by the hardware and software they already own.
Using a distribution's in-house update scheme is great, but even RPM's aren't reliably exchangable between RPM-based distributions. It's hard for a non-geek to see standards in Linux when they also see umpteen distributions.
And, I guess you missed the part where I said I'm a Linux user (since the SLS days.)