Y'know, statistically, entering somebody's home is one of the most dangerous things a law enforcement officer can do. (I forget which is first and which is second, but the other is stopping a car.) And when you figure that a lot of hackers -- crackers, even more so -- are also gun enthusiasts, you're damn right I'd want a bullet proof vest and something heavier than a Glock.
Would you want to bust, say, Eric Raymond without some serious firepower?
Why should M$ open their code? If you want open code, make a similiar product, create your own interface, and then market it.... Why should M$ give away its trade secrets? That's not a monopolistic practice...
That's not the point. The point is that the AMD/Intel example, in which AMD not only had access to Intel's instruction set, but (through some clever acquisitions), a license to use it in competing products, cannot be extended to the Microsoft situation, in which competitors do not have access to the complete API and most certainly do not have a license to use it in competing products.
The point is that while the AMD/Intel example is a good case of market forces working to prevent the maintenance of a monopoly, it is not, in and of itself, sufficient evidence that market forces will always succeed in preventing the maintenance of a monopoly, because it includes a number of special features that aren't present in other cases that might, on the surface, be considered similar.
In other words, this isn't proof that "all 'big businesses' can be affected by smaller ones", it's just anecdotal evidence.
(P.S. Will somebody tell me why I'm bothering to respond to this troll? I must not have enough work to do.)
I love it when people can't tell the difference between "I hate it" and "It sucks."
These statements are equivelant. Implicit in the phrase, "It sucks." is the phrase, "In my opinion." since there is no objective measure of "suckiness".
Okay, then let me rephrase:
I love it when people present their opinions as facts.
For instance, "That font smoothing stuff is *really* hard on the
eyes" would appear to be a fact, but actually it's an opinion. So
is "With a sharp 17" it's not an improvement".
Whoopee.... blurry text, just what I needed....That font smoothing stuff is *really* hard on the eyes....it kinda worked [back in the day] because they were crappy monitors anyway. With a sharp 17" it's not an improvement.
I love it when people can't tell the difference
between "I hate it" and "It sucks."
I'd settle for answering these arguments from the sci.skeptics FAQ. This sounds like a classic case of item 8.1: "If they can provide so much energy, why do they need the battery to keep going?"
Easy enough -- they could just allow connections only from sites with formal "Web Link Agreements". Probably cost less in sysadmin time than it's costing them in lawyer time to send out the letters. Go nuts, guys.
Bruce Schneier has
an informative story about this in the November 15 CRYPTO-GRAM, including some of the pros and cons. Basically, he says it would be better than what they have now, but still not all that great (he points out that the government already has several separate, secure internets, for various purposes, and they were still infected by Melissa and LoveLetter). And that this is one of the few cases where security and convenience might really be inversely proportional.
Usually the purpose of an RFP is to get vendors
to bid on a job you want done. They have incentive
to do this because you're paying them to do the
job. Free software programmers might be willing to give you advice, but they probably aren't going to go to the trouble of writing you a "proposal" just in the hope that you'll adopt free software rather than some commercial solution. (Though plenty of them will probably write you long email tirades, I doubt those will compete seriously with the professional proposals you get.)
Are you planning to pay someone to set up a system for you? If
so, you want to talk to a consulting services /
support company, not to the free software
community (unless you want to try, say, just posting your RFP on a semi-appropriate mailing list or newsgroup, and then trying to sort through all the junk responses and/or complaints you get).
Basically, open source / non-open-source doesn't make a difference here. A professional services company is a professional services company. If you're interested in having someone customize a free software product for you, find a consulting company that knows that product, and send them an RFP, just like you would if you were interested in a custom non-free-software solution.
Maybe, one of the reasons is that, as long as they keep adding more complicated stuff to web sites, it's never viable to produce a cheap (ie, all in hardware) web browsing device... Does anyone else want to join a Keep Websites Simple/Kill All Graphic Designers movement?
Think a site has too much "crap"? Then don't browse it. Nobody's forcing you to. Sheesh.
Yeah, lots of sites have stuff they don't need, stuff that doesn't work, stuff that's overdesigned, stuff that's pointless. All-Flash sites, for instance -- sometimes I think if I see one more "Default Plugin | This page contains information of a type (application/x-shockwave-flash) that can only be viewed with the appropriate Plug-in." dialog box I'm going to kill someone.
But get real. Tables were annoying pointless crap in 1995. Images were annoying pointless crap in 1993. The Web is an evolving technology. If you want something simple and stable, stick to Gopher.
(Says a guy who's been using ucbmail since 1990 and isn't switching.)
How can you look your boss in the face and tell them that they do not have to replace Outlook and the platform it runs on? I would rather resign than misslead my company that way. My advice may be ignored, but it will always be honest.
I have told them that. Doesn't mean they're going to do it. And it's not 1999 any more; I don't have the luxury of saying I'm only going to work in Microsoft-free companies.
The suits at my (relatively small) company insist on using Outlook (yeah, yeah, I know) and aren't likely to change that in the foreseeable future, particularly as it's what all the new suits coming in as the company grows are used to. They're now insisting on installing Exchange, because it's the only -- or appears to be the only -- server solution that gives them a calendaring system that's integrated with their email address books.
Does anyone know of a good open-source / free software equivalent? I haven't been able to find anything. For that matter, I haven't been able to find an open-source calendaring client that works with Exchange -- Ximian Evolution and some of the KDE software can apparently handle peer-to-peer vCalendar messages, but they can't do the conflict checking and whatnot you get with the centralized system.
I'm dreading the day when they come around and say "okay, we're tired of not being able to schedule developers for meetings; you all need to switch over to Windows and Outlook." Anyone have any useful ideas?
The reason @Home is refusing to sign up new residential cable-modem subscribers is that the cable companies are way behind in passing along money for existing customers. The moratorium on new subscriptions is just a way to get the cable companies to cough up the money they already owe. It doesn't, in itself, mean they're going out of business. (Though it does look like they are going out of business, at least in their current form.)
This from a friend of mine who's a sales support engineer in their business-customer division.
(Also, while Cringely sometimes has interesting things to say, where Excite@Home's concerned, he's off his gourd. Remember his article a little while back about how unprofitable @Home absorbed poor profitable Excite and bled it to death? Never mind that the collapse in Web ad revenue is killing portals all over the place, that's got nothing to do with it -- just @Home's poor management, right?)
From the article: "What Apple objected to was not Aquafying Mozilla, but rather the way I was doing it via emulation, thus not giving Mozilla users a pure Aqua experience. Apple is willing to provide information for creating real Aqua experience for Mozilla."
Does Apple mean they insist that Mozilla use native OS X widgets if it wants to look like an Aqua application? From my (admittedly limited) understanding of the Mozilla architecture, this is impossible. Mozilla's appearance is all defined at run-time, and everything including its own buttons, menus, scroll bars, is a Mozilla custom component, not part of the OS standard UI toolkit.
Am I wrong? Please correct me. But it seems like the only thing you could do would be to write your own browser using native widgets, and embed the Gecko rendering engine, ala Galeon. Mozilla's not going to give you a "pure Aqua experience" unless you rewrite it from scratch.
But what action implies agreement with the GPL? Where do I "sign" before I implement the GPL'ed code in my project?
You don't. Look, it's pretty simple. Say you have a developer named Fred who writes a program, FredWare. FredWare is automatically copyrighted under U.S. law. If you come across a copy of FredWare's source -- maybe Fred publishes it in a book -- and include it in your own program without explicit permission from Fred, you're violating Fred's copyright.
All without reading or signing a license of any kind. Fred didn't tell you that you could use his code, so you can't. That simple. It's the law.
Now, say Fred releases FredWare under the GPL. What you now have is that explicit permission that you were missing before -- with certain limitations. It's now legal for you to copy Fred's code and include it in your own program -- with certain limitations. The only permission Fred has given you to use it is the permission described in the GPL. Nothing in releasing the code under the GPL limits Fred's original copyright. If you're using his code in any other way (blindfolded so you can't read the license, singing la-la-la with your fingers in your ears, whatever), it doesn't matter that you haven't "signed" anything. You're violating his copyright and breaking the law.
The problem here is with the word "license". What the GPL means by "license" is really something pretty different from what your typical EULA means by "license".
What bothers me is you want a word processor to do an outline in an outline mode. Well I don't want cat to have a file list mode anymore then ls to look inside a file. I want a suite of programs that do each of their things well. TV/VCR combo? That I leave on the shelf.
No, no, you're missing the point. I don't want to make outlines. I want to make documents. What MS calls "Outline Mode" is, to me, a tool for arranging and rearranging the high-level structure of my document. Which is vital, as far as I'm concerned, for all but the shortest documents. I don't think either the ls/cat or TV/VCR analogy holds up. This is an interactive process we're talking about here; you can't just set up a piped filter stream (or a chain of stereo components) and sit back and watch the output.
Hell, even just having the paragraph drag handles and the hide-all-but-first-line-of-each-paragraph feature would be nice.
OK, you're on: try the Amaya [w3.org] (it's open source, IIRC) and then come back to this forum to tell me why its Structure View facility "doesn't cut it".
Amaya's undoubtedly an outstanding HTML editor, but I don't need an HTML editor, I need a word processor.
"Structure view" gives you a great tree represenation of the HTML markup, but it doesn't give you a tree representation of the logical structure of the document. Trivial example: I can use <h1> tags for my section headers and <h2> tags for my subsection headers, but there's no concept in HTML of the subsections being "contained" in the sections. Structure Mode can show my that my <body> tag contains some <h1> and <h2> tags, but it doesn't tell me one is "below" the other, nor does it let me promote a subsection to a section or demote a section to a subsection.
Have a look at the buttons on Word's Outline toolbar and tell me how Structure Mode implements each of those capabilities -- and once you've done that (which I'll be really surprised if you can do), tell me how it's at least as easy to use.
(By the way, this is also more or less why KWord's Document Structure tool doesn't do what I want. It probably does something a lot more interesting and powerful from a certain perspective, and I can see how being able to see all your tables, pictures, and whatnot at a glance would be useful, but it doesn't solve my immediate problem.)
When it comes to word processing, I'm looking for something that makes my life easier.:). Emacs outline mode is okay, but it's too intrusive -- I don't like the way it works by screwing around with the content of the text in the buffer. LaTeX, as far as I'm concerned, is one of those "Gee, this is really powerful -- maybe some day I'll learn it properly and then write a front end that I can actually use" projects.
Oh well you can forget about that excuse after 6.0, pal.
I sure hope so. My first thought when I heard about 6.0 -- after "bet they still don't have a decent outline mode":) -- was, "Gee, I wonder if the font handling is any better?"
I'd love it if they'd actually improve that to the point it became usable. Does anyone actually know where there are some screenshots of SO 6.0? I haven't been able to find any.
To me, the outline function in Word Perfect is much more intuitive and functional than that in Word.
Funny, I had exactly the opposite response:). The outline mode in WordPerfect (as I recall it) is a lot more like the way we were taught to make outlines in school -- you know:
I. Introduction
1. Blah
2. Blah blah
3. Blah blah blah
II. Blah, at greater length
...etc.
But it doesn't lend itself as well to treating your whole document as an outline, as opposed to creating outlines as prep work for creating "real" documents. Has it improved a lot in 6.1 vs. what it was in 5.x?
That said, I used to like WordPerfect a lot back in the DOS days. If I could run console-mode WordPerfect under Linux I'd probably do it -- what really gives me hives with WP for Linux is looking at the horrible X fonts in WYSIWYG mode. (I heard that the "server" version of WordPerfect for UNIX/Linux comes with console mode, but I was never able to get any information out of Corel about it, and they don't seem to offer it any more. Does anyone out there have any experience with this?)
Ok so name one feature that Microsoft Word has that StarOffice doesn't that is preventing you to do your work. Not that easy to come up with something is it?
Outline mode!
And it was pretty damn easy to come up with that. In fact every time the discussion of Office alternatives come up, it's like ripping the bandages off the wound. Even before you asked the question the bleeding had already started again. "Outline mode! Why the hell isn't there a word processor out there besides MS Word that has a decent outline mode?"
I'd pay for a Linux word processor with a decent outline mode. I don't know why no other word processing vendor (up to and including whoever the hell owns WordPerfect these days) has been able to match a feature that MS Word has had for a good ten years.
If you know a program that has one, let me know. And I'll tell you why it doesn't cut it.
I hate being addicted to MS Word, but I can't write anything more than about six pages long without outline mode.
It sounds very nice, and I'm sure their intentions are good, but it doesn't look like it's contractually binding on AOL Time Warner in any way.
What happens when they have a change of management and the new management decides -- pardon the expression -- all your DMOZ are belong to us?
Seriously, why? It's not like I need convincing to go see the movie......And this fucking thing better be of higher quality than TPM.
Don't see the trailer. Continue to expect LOTR to be roughly on a par with Phantom Menace. Get blown out of your chair in December.
Re:CYAN DIDN'T DEVELOP THIS GAME - AMEND/DELETE TH
on
Myst III: Exile Review
·
· Score: 1
The Millers have a reputation for being a couple of
extremely ethical boys. I think they're more interested in making cooler stuff than in getting richer, from the interviews I've read. (On the other hand, these days you need money to make cool stuff... I'm sure Myst III sales are helping to fund Mudpie.)
One could also point out that it's in their financial interest for UbiSoft to produce a high-quality game that sells better and gets them more royalties.:)
Cool. I'm looking forward to it. I think their
stuff rocks. I'd try to get a job there myself if
I could stand the idea of moving to Spokane.:)
Hell, I expect the actual content in Myst III is pretty good, even if it maybe isn't as good as what the Millers would have done if they'd put their mind to it. It's a shame the publisher it ended up with is so screwed up, that's all.
(What's particularly sad about it is you just know Myst III is going to sell a quingigillion copies anyway, looking at Myst and Riven sales figures. It's just stupid, shortsighted greed on the behalf of the publishers that led them to this idiotic protection scheme. I'll bet they lose more sales due to the installation problems than they ever would have lost from piracy.)
Slashdot Mirror
Thanks for that articulate summary. Good point about the "pros" vs. the suburban loudmouths.
Would you want to bust, say, Eric Raymond without some serious firepower?
(P.S.: Eric, that's meant to be a compliment. :) )
The point is that while the AMD/Intel example is a good case of market forces working to prevent the maintenance of a monopoly, it is not, in and of itself, sufficient evidence that market forces will always succeed in preventing the maintenance of a monopoly, because it includes a number of special features that aren't present in other cases that might, on the surface, be considered similar.
In other words, this isn't proof that "all 'big businesses' can be affected by smaller ones", it's just anecdotal evidence.
(P.S. Will somebody tell me why I'm bothering to respond to this troll? I must not have enough work to do.)
P.S. Either your spelling or your typing sucks.
I'd settle for answering these arguments from the sci.skeptics FAQ. This sounds like a classic case of item 8.1: "If they can provide so much energy, why do they need the battery to keep going?"
Easy enough -- they could just allow connections only from sites with formal "Web Link Agreements". Probably cost less in sysadmin time than it's costing them in lawyer time to send out the letters. Go nuts, guys.
Bruce Schneier has an informative story about this in the November 15 CRYPTO-GRAM, including some of the pros and cons. Basically, he says it would be better than what they have now, but still not all that great (he points out that the government already has several separate, secure internets, for various purposes, and they were still infected by Melissa and LoveLetter). And that this is one of the few cases where security and convenience might really be inversely proportional.
Are you planning to pay someone to set up a system for you? If so, you want to talk to a consulting services / support company, not to the free software community (unless you want to try, say, just posting your RFP on a semi-appropriate mailing list or newsgroup, and then trying to sort through all the junk responses and/or complaints you get).
Basically, open source / non-open-source doesn't make a difference here. A professional services company is a professional services company. If you're interested in having someone customize a free software product for you, find a consulting company that knows that product, and send them an RFP, just like you would if you were interested in a custom non-free-software solution.
Yeah, lots of sites have stuff they don't need, stuff that doesn't work, stuff that's overdesigned, stuff that's pointless. All-Flash sites, for instance -- sometimes I think if I see one more "Default Plugin | This page contains information of a type (application/x-shockwave-flash) that can only be viewed with the appropriate Plug-in." dialog box I'm going to kill someone.
But get real. Tables were annoying pointless crap in 1995. Images were annoying pointless crap in 1993. The Web is an evolving technology. If you want something simple and stable, stick to Gopher.
(Says a guy who's been using ucbmail since 1990 and isn't switching.)
Does anyone know of a good open-source / free software equivalent? I haven't been able to find anything. For that matter, I haven't been able to find an open-source calendaring client that works with Exchange -- Ximian Evolution and some of the KDE software can apparently handle peer-to-peer vCalendar messages, but they can't do the conflict checking and whatnot you get with the centralized system.
I'm dreading the day when they come around and say "okay, we're tired of not being able to schedule developers for meetings; you all need to switch over to Windows and Outlook." Anyone have any useful ideas?
This from a friend of mine who's a sales support engineer in their business-customer division.
(Also, while Cringely sometimes has interesting things to say, where Excite@Home's concerned, he's off his gourd. Remember his article a little while back about how unprofitable @Home absorbed poor profitable Excite and bled it to death? Never mind that the collapse in Web ad revenue is killing portals all over the place, that's got nothing to do with it -- just @Home's poor management, right?)
From the article: "What Apple objected to was not Aquafying Mozilla, but rather the way I was doing it via emulation, thus not giving Mozilla users a pure Aqua experience. Apple is willing to provide information for creating real Aqua experience for Mozilla."
Does Apple mean they insist that Mozilla use native OS X widgets if it wants to look like an Aqua application? From my (admittedly limited) understanding of the Mozilla architecture, this is impossible. Mozilla's appearance is all defined at run-time, and everything including its own buttons, menus, scroll bars, is a Mozilla custom component, not part of the OS standard UI toolkit.
Am I wrong? Please correct me. But it seems like the only thing you could do would be to write your own browser using native widgets, and embed the Gecko rendering engine, ala Galeon. Mozilla's not going to give you a "pure Aqua experience" unless you rewrite it from scratch.
You don't. Look, it's pretty simple. Say you have a developer named Fred who writes a program, FredWare. FredWare is automatically copyrighted under U.S. law. If you come across a copy of FredWare's source -- maybe Fred publishes it in a book -- and include it in your own program without explicit permission from Fred, you're violating Fred's copyright.
All without reading or signing a license of any kind. Fred didn't tell you that you could use his code, so you can't. That simple. It's the law.
Now, say Fred releases FredWare under the GPL. What you now have is that explicit permission that you were missing before -- with certain limitations. It's now legal for you to copy Fred's code and include it in your own program -- with certain limitations. The only permission Fred has given you to use it is the permission described in the GPL. Nothing in releasing the code under the GPL limits Fred's original copyright. If you're using his code in any other way (blindfolded so you can't read the license, singing la-la-la with your fingers in your ears, whatever), it doesn't matter that you haven't "signed" anything. You're violating his copyright and breaking the law.
The problem here is with the word "license". What the GPL means by "license" is really something pretty different from what your typical EULA means by "license".
Hell, even just having the paragraph drag handles and the hide-all-but-first-line-of-each-paragraph feature would be nice.
Amaya's undoubtedly an outstanding HTML editor, but I don't need an HTML editor, I need a word processor.
"Structure view" gives you a great tree represenation of the HTML markup, but it doesn't give you a tree representation of the logical structure of the document. Trivial example: I can use <h1> tags for my section headers and <h2> tags for my subsection headers, but there's no concept in HTML of the subsections being "contained" in the sections. Structure Mode can show my that my <body> tag contains some <h1> and <h2> tags, but it doesn't tell me one is "below" the other, nor does it let me promote a subsection to a section or demote a section to a subsection.
Have a look at the buttons on Word's Outline toolbar and tell me how Structure Mode implements each of those capabilities -- and once you've done that (which I'll be really surprised if you can do), tell me how it's at least as easy to use.
(By the way, this is also more or less why KWord's Document Structure tool doesn't do what I want. It probably does something a lot more interesting and powerful from a certain perspective, and I can see how being able to see all your tables, pictures, and whatnot at a glance would be useful, but it doesn't solve my immediate problem.)
When it comes to word processing, I'm looking for something that makes my life easier. :). Emacs outline mode is okay, but it's too intrusive -- I don't like the way it works by screwing around with the content of the text in the buffer. LaTeX, as far as I'm concerned, is one of those "Gee, this is really powerful -- maybe some day I'll learn it properly and then write a front end that I can actually use" projects.
I'd love it if they'd actually improve that to the point it became usable. Does anyone actually know where there are some screenshots of SO 6.0? I haven't been able to find any.
Funny, I had exactly the opposite response
I. Introduction
1. Blah
2. Blah blah
3. Blah blah blah
II. Blah, at greater length
...etc.
But it doesn't lend itself as well to treating your whole document as an outline, as opposed to creating outlines as prep work for creating "real" documents. Has it improved a lot in 6.1 vs. what it was in 5.x?
That said, I used to like WordPerfect a lot back in the DOS days. If I could run console-mode WordPerfect under Linux I'd probably do it -- what really gives me hives with WP for Linux is looking at the horrible X fonts in WYSIWYG mode. (I heard that the "server" version of WordPerfect for UNIX/Linux comes with console mode, but I was never able to get any information out of Corel about it, and they don't seem to offer it any more. Does anyone out there have any experience with this?)
Outline mode!
And it was pretty damn easy to come up with that. In fact every time the discussion of Office alternatives come up, it's like ripping the bandages off the wound. Even before you asked the question the bleeding had already started again. "Outline mode! Why the hell isn't there a word processor out there besides MS Word that has a decent outline mode?"
I'd pay for a Linux word processor with a decent outline mode. I don't know why no other word processing vendor (up to and including whoever the hell owns WordPerfect these days) has been able to match a feature that MS Word has had for a good ten years.
If you know a program that has one, let me know. And I'll tell you why it doesn't cut it.
I hate being addicted to MS Word, but I can't write anything more than about six pages long without outline mode.
Oh, and Star Office font handling sucks.
It sounds very nice, and I'm sure their intentions are good, but it doesn't look like it's contractually binding on AOL Time Warner in any way. What happens when they have a change of management and the new management decides -- pardon the expression -- all your DMOZ are belong to us?
Don't see the trailer. Continue to expect LOTR to be roughly on a par with Phantom Menace. Get blown out of your chair in December.
One could also point out that it's in their financial interest for UbiSoft to produce a high-quality game that sells better and gets them more royalties. :)
Hell, I expect the actual content in Myst III is pretty good, even if it maybe isn't as good as what the Millers would have done if they'd put their mind to it. It's a shame the publisher it ended up with is so screwed up, that's all.
(What's particularly sad about it is you just know Myst III is going to sell a quingigillion copies anyway, looking at Myst and Riven sales figures. It's just stupid, shortsighted greed on the behalf of the publishers that led them to this idiotic protection scheme. I'll bet they lose more sales due to the installation problems than they ever would have lost from piracy.)