I wrote the article, and I'm sorry if it gave you that impression. There was a certain amount about the goodness and importance of software copyright which got squeezed for space reasons. The specific phrase I missed was that copyright and patent are the good and bad cholesterol of software IP.
I don't now know whether most pirtate copies of software are converted into legitimate ones, but it has been said often enough about the way software spread in the Nineties tht it seems reasonable, and that was the perod I thought of. Certainly, pirate copies of MS office are a huge bar the spread of openoffice, as pirate copies of windows must be to Linux. They cost no more money and much less time.
This -- or something like it -- is much the best hope for a reasonable copyright regime. Governments are going to have to fix copyright, because no one else will protect the interests of the people who create this stuff. The labels and corporations generally are not on the side of the creators, and most of the consumers of digital property will rip you off blind if they can.
If the problem is left to the untramelled market playing by American rules, you get nothing between free or monopoly, which is what has happened to the consumer software business.
A copyright levy is a political fix that is better than the more obviously technological ones, like DRM, since it will produce more of the music, software, and other digital goods which benefit society than any of the alternatives.
You may say this argument is unproven: how else to find out but encouraging the EU to have one regime, America another, and see which one works better?
Ecco Pro, which was commercially developed until 1998, is powerful, stable, free to download now, and may soon be open sourced. It is a fantastic contact and project manager, and a good PIM. I still haven't found a better program for journalists and researchers. Other fans include Scott Rosenberg at Salon.
A quick look at Issuezilla displays 3752 unfixed defects in Openoffice. The oldest, id #166, was opened on Nov 16, 2000.
This is not a well-maintained Yugo.
made me give up linux again altogether
on
Suse 9.1 Reviews?
·
· Score: 1
I tried upgrading from 8.2 on a little fileserver. This is an ancient 500mhz K6-2 but with 512mb RAM which sits on a windows/samba network at home. After a lot of trouble I had it working well -- ie invisibly -- for about six months, and then one night it crashed and when it came up again would not find the network or accept an address from the dhcp server. No idea why it crashed. This happened unattended in the middle of the night.
So I poked around on google a bit, and found other people had been having problems with dhcp on 8.2, cured by setting "acpi=off" in the boot sequence. Astonishingly intuitive, even by Linux standards. Anyway, I tried it, and it didn't work.
Since 9.1 is out, I thought I would buy an upgrade and see if that fixed it. This is, after all, version 9.1, which suggests a degree of stability and sophistication, right?
Sat there shovelling CDs in for an upgrade for two hours, fortunately with a good book. Everything seemed to be working slickly. The machine goes online as it should and offeres to get upgrades at the end of the installation process. I agree to this. It upgrades some small stuff, and, curiously, the kernel, and then asks to reboot.
Ah. At the end of the reboot, I try to log in, and after the username and password, it hangs. No prompt appears. After about five minutes, a message about eval being unable to fork.
OK. Try the rescue CD. This works, in as much as the machine boots happily into the rescue system. But nothing I do will make it boot into a working system form the hard disk. In the end, I reinstalled the whole thing from scratch. Guess what. It still couldn't negotiate properly a DHCP lease.
Nor is it secure. this machine is in a pretty common configuration: a small network behind a router/wireless thing olugged into a cable modem. So it needs to know that other machines on the 19.168 subnet are trusted, and nothing else is, even though they are both plugged into the same network card. Christ only knows how you tell the suse firewall this. I never did find out. I could only get the networking working by turning the firewall off altogether.
On top of that it was dog slow running KDE 3.2 on this (admittedly ancient) hardware. It took four or five seconds just to open configuration files for editing. So after wasting a whole day like this, I gave up, booted it back into Windows 2000, and everything just bloody well works. WinVNC is slow, but no slower than KDE. A lightweight windows webserver is infinitely easier to configure than apache. Activestate perl is easier to upgrade. All I want is to serve a few files and run a home installation of movable type. It's rather shocking to discover how much better Windows is than Linux for this purpose.
OOo can track changes better than you think. What it lacks, compared to MS Word, are comment bubbles and easily visible sticky notes. That's to say there are notes, but they don't pop up into comment bubbles (there is an RFE in the bug system for this). The change tracking is excellent, though, allowing you to filter by user, and even by type of change ("I want to see all deletions made by Cheney to the Intelligence reports and all additions by Chalabi" -- that kind of thing).
There is a drawing tool, and a very fine one.
There is no project management, which might be useful, and no note taking tool. I would argue against the note taker anyway, since this sort of stuff is available on any OS anyway.
I have just spent a week working in BBC Radio 4. Their scripts are written -- according to the file format -- in Word 95. At least two of the editing rooms were running Windows 98.
There is in fact a perfectly good word count macro that does everything people keep asking for. It's here, in a.sxw file that installs it, with a bunch of other stuff. If you don't trust self-installing macros (and you shouldn't), just read all the code and copy and paste over what you want.
What the project needs just as much as evangelism is people who will do bug triage join the qa project for that and python hackers. Since version 1.1, you can write extensions for OOo in Python.
Uh, no. Sulston and Horvitz observed apoptosis while working together at the MRC lab i Cambridge, UK. I know this because I have a book in prf about the worm, and have talked at length to both men about the process. Sulston was the first man to see it happening. Horvitz' lab later isolated the genes involved.
Never mind the demo. Why is there no product? Their Python/QT IDE, blackadder, has been "in Beta" since February 2001, when I paid $50 for a copy. Since then there has been one further beta release, in about June 2001; there has been a book published about how to use it. But there is no sign on their website or elsewhere that any actual product will ever be released.
It may be a hassle over licensing QT3. I don't know. But the least they could do is say so and if the product is dead, admit it.
OOo/Star Office is not written in Java and works perfectly well without Java even being present on the machine. This question comes up every month or two on the OOo mailing lists.
There are small, ugly, but functional macros to do word counts in open/sot/star office (and to count selections, so long as they're not in tables) here
If anyone knows knows anything about the API and can improve them, please do.
If you think a gene can be so simply defined, you don't know enough biology. I'm in the middle of writing a book about the sequencing of c. elegans, so I do know a little about these complexities.
One point is that a single stretch of DNA can be sliced and transcribed in several different ways by the RNA machinery in the cell to specify several different proteins. How many genes do you then count?
Another is that you can't (of course) simply read down the sequence and say "there's a gene" even if you can say "there's a repetitive sequence that looks pretty much like junk". There's no algorithm for looking at a sequence of DNA and saying "this is a gene and it produces that protein."
Anyone seriously interested in checking out the real complexities of the various definitions of "gene" should check out Evelyn Fox Keller's little book "The century of the gene". There are lots of working scientists who'd say her distinctions don't matter too much in practice. But there are none who'd disagree with her facts.
And I know at least one very very smart and experienced genetecist (Sydney Brenner) who is convinced that there are at least 60,000 human genes in the genome. This just isn't a question that can be solved either from first principles or by any quick and simple form of counting.
There is a project to digitise all the Victorian fiction ever published: Chadwyck-Healey are doing it. I wrote about it in Wired UK some years ago. The same firm has done the whole of English poetry -- every single poem published in English before 1900 -- but it is expensive and subscription only.
The case hinged on the fact that Demon kept the article on its news spool. If any British user wants to read libellous Usenet postings, the answer is to do so through an American news feed, which is not that difficult to organise. Mr Justice Morland's opinion, read carefully, shows that he thought Godfrey an aggravating kook, who none the less was libelled. English libel law is horrible. Trust me: I'm a journalist. But Demon's liability arose only because they kept the messages on their news spool even after being warned not to. Had the libel been in email Demon would have been safe. I don't see either that they could have been sued simply because their subscribers were able to access it on Dejanews, or some random web site. But it remains true that this will have a chilling effect on British ISPs. There is a story this afternoon that Outrage, a gay pressure group, has just had its website hosed because the provider was worried they might at some future date use it to libel someone. But sites like that will just move offshore. The real trouble is the expense and unpredictablity of British libel law.
Slashdot Mirror
I wrote the article, and I'm sorry if it gave you that impression. There was a certain amount about the goodness and importance of software copyright which got squeezed for space reasons. The specific phrase I missed was that copyright and patent are the good and bad cholesterol of software IP.
I don't now know whether most pirtate copies of software are converted into legitimate ones, but it has been said often enough about the way software spread in the Nineties tht it seems reasonable, and that was the perod I thought of. Certainly, pirate copies of MS office are a huge bar the spread of openoffice, as pirate copies of windows must be to Linux. They cost no more money and much less time.
There's a decent piece in today's Guardian about patents on software. Interest declared: I wrote it.
This -- or something like it -- is much the best hope for a reasonable copyright regime. Governments are going to have to fix copyright, because no one else will protect the interests of the people who create this stuff. The labels and corporations generally are not on the side of the creators, and most of the consumers of digital property will rip you off blind if they can.
If the problem is left to the untramelled market playing by American rules, you get nothing between free or monopoly, which is what has happened to the consumer software business.
A copyright levy is a political fix that is better than the more obviously technological ones, like DRM, since it will produce more of the music, software, and other digital goods which benefit society than any of the alternatives.
You may say this argument is unproven: how else to find out but encouraging the EU to have one regime, America another, and see which one works better?
Ecco Pro, which was commercially developed until 1998, is powerful, stable, free to download now, and may soon be open sourced. It is a fantastic contact and project manager, and a good PIM. I still haven't found a better program for journalists and researchers. Other fans include Scott Rosenberg at Salon.
This is not a well-maintained Yugo.
I tried upgrading from 8.2 on a little fileserver. This is an ancient 500mhz K6-2 but with 512mb RAM which sits on a windows/samba network at home. After a lot of trouble I had it working well -- ie invisibly -- for about six months, and then one night it crashed and when it came up again would not find the network or accept an address from the dhcp server. No idea why it crashed. This happened unattended in the middle of the night.
So I poked around on google a bit, and found other people had been having problems with dhcp on 8.2, cured by setting "acpi=off" in the boot sequence. Astonishingly intuitive, even by Linux standards. Anyway, I tried it, and it didn't work.
Since 9.1 is out, I thought I would buy an upgrade and see if that fixed it. This is, after all, version 9.1, which suggests a degree of stability and sophistication, right?
Sat there shovelling CDs in for an upgrade for two hours, fortunately with a good book. Everything seemed to be working slickly. The machine goes online as it should and offeres to get upgrades at the end of the installation process. I agree to this. It upgrades some small stuff, and, curiously, the kernel, and then asks to reboot.
Ah. At the end of the reboot, I try to log in, and after the username and password, it hangs. No prompt appears. After about five minutes, a message about eval being unable to fork.
OK. Try the rescue CD. This works, in as much as the machine boots happily into the rescue system. But nothing I do will make it boot into a working system form the hard disk. In the end, I reinstalled the whole thing from scratch. Guess what. It still couldn't negotiate properly a DHCP lease.
Nor is it secure. this machine is in a pretty common configuration: a small network behind a router/wireless thing olugged into a cable modem. So it needs to know that other machines on the 19.168 subnet are trusted, and nothing else is, even though they are both plugged into the same network card. Christ only knows how you tell the suse firewall this. I never did find out. I could only get the networking working by turning the firewall off altogether.
On top of that it was dog slow running KDE 3.2 on this (admittedly ancient) hardware. It took four or five seconds just to open configuration files for editing. So after wasting a whole day like this, I gave up, booted it back into Windows 2000, and everything just bloody well works. WinVNC is slow, but no slower than KDE. A lightweight windows webserver is infinitely easier to configure than apache. Activestate perl is easier to upgrade. All I want is to serve a few files and run a home installation of movable type. It's rather shocking to discover how much better Windows is than Linux for this purpose.
OOo can track changes better than you think. What it lacks, compared to MS Word, are comment bubbles and easily visible sticky notes. That's to say there are notes, but they don't pop up into comment bubbles (there is an RFE in the bug system for this). The change tracking is excellent, though, allowing you to filter by user, and even by type of change ("I want to see all deletions made by Cheney to the Intelligence reports and all additions by Chalabi" -- that kind of thing).
There is a drawing tool, and a very fine one.
There is no project management, which might be useful, and no note taking tool. I would argue against the note taker anyway, since this sort of stuff is available on any OS anyway.
I have just spent a week working in BBC Radio 4. Their scripts are written -- according to the file format -- in Word 95. At least two of the editing rooms were running Windows 98.
There is in fact a perfectly good word count macro that does everything people keep asking for. It's here, in a .sxw file that installs it, with a bunch of other stuff. If you don't trust self-installing macros (and you shouldn't), just read all the code and copy and paste over what you want.
What the project needs just as much as evangelism is people who will do bug triage join the qa project for that and python hackers. Since version 1.1, you can write extensions for OOo in Python.
Uh, no. Sulston and Horvitz observed apoptosis while working together at the MRC lab i Cambridge, UK. I know this because I have a book in prf about the worm, and have talked at length to both men about the process. Sulston was the first man to see it happening. Horvitz' lab later isolated the genes involved.
It may be a hassle over licensing QT3. I don't know. But the least they could do is say so and if the product is dead, admit it.
OOo/Star Office is not written in Java and works perfectly well without Java even being present on the machine. This question comes up every month or two on the OOo mailing lists.
here
If anyone knows knows anything about the API and can improve them, please do.
If you think a gene can be so simply defined, you don't know enough biology. I'm in the middle of writing a book about the sequencing of c. elegans, so I do know a little about these complexities.
One point is that a single stretch of DNA can be sliced and transcribed in several different ways by the RNA machinery in the cell to specify several different proteins. How many genes do you then count?
Another is that you can't (of course) simply read down the sequence and say "there's a gene" even if you can say "there's a repetitive sequence that looks pretty much like junk". There's no algorithm for looking at a sequence of DNA and saying "this is a gene and it produces that protein."
Anyone seriously interested in checking out the real complexities of the various definitions of "gene" should check out Evelyn Fox Keller's little book "The century of the gene". There are lots of working scientists who'd say her distinctions don't matter too much in practice. But there are none who'd disagree with her facts.
And I know at least one very very smart and experienced genetecist (Sydney Brenner) who is convinced that there are at least 60,000 human genes in the genome. This just isn't a question that can be solved either from first principles or by any quick and simple form of counting.
There is a project to digitise all the Victorian fiction ever published: Chadwyck-Healey are doing it. I wrote about it in Wired UK some years ago. The same firm has done the whole of English poetry -- every single poem published in English before 1900 -- but it is expensive and subscription only.
The case hinged on the fact that Demon kept the article on its news spool. If any British user wants to read libellous Usenet postings, the answer is to do so through an American news feed, which is not that difficult to organise. Mr Justice Morland's opinion, read carefully, shows that he thought Godfrey an aggravating kook, who none the less was libelled. English libel law is horrible. Trust me: I'm a journalist. But Demon's liability arose only because they kept the messages on their news spool even after being warned not to. Had the libel been in email Demon would have been safe. I don't see either that they could have been sued simply because their subscribers were able to access it on Dejanews, or some random web site. But it remains true that this will have a chilling effect on British ISPs. There is a story this afternoon that Outrage, a gay pressure group, has just had its website hosed because the provider was worried they might at some future date use it to libel someone. But sites like that will just move offshore. The real trouble is the expense and unpredictablity of British libel law.