Actually, last time I checked, Transgaming said that they will release the source each time their subscrition numbers increase by another 25,000. Or something like that. Plus transgaming have already donated a lot of DirectX stuff back without having ANY subscribers, so I think their intentions are good. So no; it won't be a closed fork.
I was wondering where all the good marijuana had gotten to. Billy has it!
After paying $50,000 in Win2k / Office XP fees, we will certainly be looking for ways OUT of this sort of thing, not INTO it.
We already have StarOffice 5.2 / 6-Beta on most desktops. But it's always good to get a little more motivation.
Maybe I should go back to trying to get Kylix to stay up for more than 5 minutes...
Unfortunately that is EXACTLY what will happen. I believe the response has already been prepared, but they will likely wait a few weeks to make it look like someone is doing something.
I contacted the ACCC (Australian Consumer & Competition Commissions) and they basically said that they have NO POWER AT ALL to affect in any way products not made in Australia. Sounds a lot like the 'flag of convience' crap that is going here at the moment. The ACCC is only a token organisation to give the impression of fullfilling their said purpose, so as to not have someone else get the idea and do it themselves.
Nothing to see here. Move right along please. FNORD!
I don't see the problem myself. It's small. It's useful. You can turn it off.
Actually, I'd even ask: can we have an option to make it hover at the top instead of scrolling off the page?
Other changes are OK too. I would rather see Slashdot get a bit more commercial than non-existant.
Crank on!
I can see a few Linux gamers looking sideways at it, but for the sake of Linux's reputation, I hope no Windows games actually expect to get any action from anything other than Starcraft and Half-Life. Sorry but it's true. Plus we need some Linux ports that take full advantage of LINUX, not a Windows compatibility layer trying to be something it isn't.
The FBI, the Americal oil cartel the Bush family , etc all have a lot to be gained from Windows being the ubiqutous standard, and it all stems from things like Federal Corruption.
There is no point having spying software if some renegades choose to use a secure system that DOESN'T include back-doors to allow the governement to monitor its sheep. Do you think you have a choice? Just how much money do you have anyway? Hopefully more than the Oil cartel, the pharmecutical drug cartel, the Bush family...
Oh yeah. One last thing: you'd better have some pretty freakin big guns.
I have heard than when IPV6 becomes the standard, forging headers will be much more difficult (impossible?).
I propose that owners of email address be allowed to set arbitrary delivery charges on all mail coming into THEIR account. After all, it is THEIR account. I would charge $2 per email, which I would refund to all those authorised senders automatically upon delivery (ie authorised senders pay a net amount of nothing).
And the spammers pay. Finally, the spammers pay!
I have one of the first Irongate chipsets, and my system locks hard about 75% of the time I try to start X. And don't even dream about trying to get into X a second time. (By the way even though my MB - a Gigabyte - has an early Irongate, apparently ALL Irongates are affected.) I have made repeated bug-reports to AMD over the past 9 months, and they always email back with the EXACT same BS saying they are "...working on the issue with distibutions and hope to have a fix soon...". I have now promised AMD that I will take advantage of every oportunity to bitch about their shitty products until they FIX it, which I know they never will.
Buy a Pentium 4 system. Maybe it's more expensive, but at least it works....
The initial reaction in most (70%) of cases was "WTF is this. How do I start my Excel?" Actually people STILL refer to StarCalc as Excel:(
Most people slipped into using it quite well. The biggest question was "Where do I find xxxx?" and the answer is usually "That menu item is over there now...". There haven't been any requests for features that StarOffice doesn't have - it's just a matter of locating the feature, and most people are fine doing this themselves.
There are of course a few people who insist on calling me every time they can't find what they want, and for those people I make a FAQ web site, and direct them to it. If they still give me problems, I complain to their supervisor, and they are told to pay attention and stop wasting time. This group of people represent probably 3% of users.
On the flip-side of the coin, there are probably 40% of people who admit regularly that StarOffice 5.2 is actuallly BETTER than Office 97. I get comments like "It's much easier to lay out columns", "The help system is better", "The formatting features are more powerful", "Things are where they should be" and such... I expect there are a further 40% who really don't care / notice the difference, which leaves 20% of users wishing they still had M$ Office, and I just remind them that 1) we are saving a LOT of money, and 2) a new version is on the way which addresses most of their issues (what happened to my desktop)
The general nature of the business? Well everybody does a little word processing, which is actually a large change for us because 2 years ago we employed 2 Word Processors full-time. This is fairly basic stuff - 2-3 page reports to clients. Our account managers use StarCalc for their own internal calculations, but MOST spreadsheets we send out to clients are produced by Excel (see below) by the analysts. Our accounts department is running StarCalc, and our billing department is about to switch (ETA 2 months).
For those interested, our business NUS Consulting: http://www.nusconsulting.com is a utilites cost-analysis company. We analyse our clients' energy, fuel, fleet and telecommunications costs, find them savings and form consortiums to give our customers some bargaining power.
Our analysts, as I said, are quite dependant on legacy VB code in Excel, so they are the only ones stuck with it for now, but we will HAVE to get them away from that, because we are outgrowing it. Most of our Excel workbooks will initially be replaced by Access / SQL Server, and eventually Kylix / MySQL.
Out of businness, eh? Hello M$!
Well as I said we have ALREADY converted, and the retraining took a total of 30 minutes worth of personal learning on the part of each user.
How different do you think it is anyway.
You open StarWriter. You type your document. You press the spell-check button. You save. You print. Dude you are strange!
And we saved $30,000 (Australian) this year, and probably the same again every 2 years.
What have you been smoking?
Messes up the desktop? Um. No.
Crashes - actually it (StarOffice 5.2) crashes less than Office XP, and maybe a little more than Office 97, but then StarOffice 6 will fix that...
Interchangable probs? What are you talking about. We have no probs sending files back an forth between StarOffice and Office 97 & XP.
Are you from M$???
Or you just wanna be from M$...
Well...
We just completed a StarOffice 5.2 rollout.
This was in direct response to some very threatening letters we received from the BSAA (Business Software Association of Australia). In hindsight, it was just a scare-campaign to fool us into buying more software - and it half worked. We bought Win2000 licenses for MOST PCs. And we bought Office XP for those who absolutely needed our legacy VB code in Excel. We use Access (developer) to create and distribute our database front-ends - the developer version lets you distibute an Access 'viewer' type package without having a license for Access.
The most interesting change for us though was StarOffice - about 85% of our staff who were using Office 97 are now using it, and we have 2 people trialling StarOffice 6-beta.
Also, I recently bought Borland's Kylix (www.borland.com/kylix). It's Delphi for Linux (Rapid Application Development, for those who don't know). I am half-way through creating our first Kylix-based database front-end (I'm presently testing it out at home, talking to M$ $QL Server on Win2k running under VMWare!!! Ha!). We are about 6 weeks away from our first Linux box on the desktop. It'll be running Netscape 6.1 (it has a spell checker for email - what can I say?), StarOffice 6-beta, and my Kylix-based database front-end. Oh - by the way - Kylix is available for FREE download if you only create open-source projects with it (I bought the Desktop Developer anyway...).
If all goes according to plan, I will start on the (very) long task of rebuilding our database front-ends under Kylix, but as I said - it will take time... I estimate that in 5 years (and my boss backs me up on this) we will be running a fully Linux-based office, and the only commercial app we'll be using will be Kylix.
... charging only the commericial outfilts? It's ridiculous to charge open-source efforts like Mozilla to conform to standards pushed by the W3C. But I have no problem with charging people who make money from selling / pushing their web browsers. They obviously have the money for it.
Development of E has slowed down 'cause Rasterman was SACKED from VA Linux, along with all the other E developers, DRI developers, and assorted cool thing developers. So everyone is now looking for another job instead of working on E (which was their job - well the E developer's job - you know what I mean...)
So is it stable under linux, unlike AMD's crap?
Their Irongate / AGP issues, which have been known for NINE FUCKING MONTHS now, are driving me back to Intel. I can't type 'startx' without first doing an emergency disc-sync in case the whole system locks hard. And it usually does. Well done AMD. I know support the more expensive and most likely technologically inferior Intel chips over your unstable crap.
I read that book, and yes it is a much more consistent theory than the big bang theory. I am constantly amazed by the rate at which new types of matter are invented to hold together the fraying edges of the big bang theory. As I can see other people have also read this book, and... well... it seems that most people simpily can't handle scientific truth when it goes against pre-conceived ideas. Their loss...
... at work. 30 or so users now, against 10 with M$ Office, and only because of some complicated macros we have in Excel. And they'll convert, slowly...
People bitched a bit to start with, but now I'm getting people say they're getting used to it, and they like this and that about it...
The only valid complaint we have now is that it's big and slow. So we're waiting on version 6. We'd use OpenOffice but it's spell checker doesn't work yet.
I didn't think much of the article. I think you'll be hard pressed to find an organisation that needs more than StarOffice. Most of the resistance I've seen is purely resistance to change. And the change is fast enough. People aren't so stupid that they can't learn that the button that used to be 'here' is now 'there'. And those smart enough to know how to used advanced features in M$ Office can figure out how to do it again. Anyway I noticed most people stopped asking questions after about 2 weeks.
One question about the article:
WTF is Word-compatible email?
Is it the same as people-compatible cars or something?
I can see nVidia or ATI or Matrox wanting to keep their intellectual property / trade secrets / whatever to themselves, but Trident? Really? Trident?
I'll keep that in mind whenever I buy cheap shit graphics cards for work; I'd never buy one for home either way...
This would be true in the cases of big computer retailers. People who go straight to a retailer will buy what they've heard of most - it's a human trait to do this when in doubt. And the big retailers can afford to offer more expensive chips because their customers are so clueless that they'll easily pay what the price tag says for the latest hardware with the biggest numbers associated with it. But that only worst for a first sale. After a household has a computer for a year, SOMEONE in the house will work out what's going on, and then they'll go to the little computer shop on the corner, or the guy trading out of his garage. And they have a different issue entirely. They are selling to people who want POWER at the least price. And you'll find that they sell mostly Athlons. Not exclusively, but mostly...
As I've seen other people point out, just under $500,000 isn't too bad. I am a proud owner of Quake 3 and Tribes 2, and for those who haven't tried them - they are VERY impressive. And they carry that famed Linux stability advantage over their Windows versions.
Loki has brought us SDL and OpenAL. They have brought us MANY improvements to XFree86 & video card drivers. And Loki is the fun face of Linux.
So what is everyone waiting for? It's quite obvious that no-one is going to bail Loki out except for US. So go and buy a game. Get your friends to buy a game.
Know anyone with a pirated Loki title? Do what I do (no, not dob them in). Pressure them. Pressure yourself. Pay for those games. Keep it going...
If Loki goes down, can you imagine people's reaction to any more Linux games? Yeah. Pretty likely, huh?
The Linux community prides itself on the COMMUNITY aspect, and that means helping out others; both for the sake of the other, and for the sake of the ALL.
Buy some games please.
Thankyou.
While torching a dealership may seem a little harsh, it only seems that way from a VERY limited point of view; from the point of view of Western Short-Sighted Capitalism.
However look at the HUGE risks being played to attain the magic $$$, and spread your focus over a couple of million years and many billion lifetimes. From this point of view, the profits of a few fat-arsed capitalists doesn't even register on the scale.
Companies such as these should be SHUT DOWN, and their directors prevented from ever again being in a position of such power - lest they put all life on Earth in jeapardy yet again.
Of course the protestor's actions don't exactly fit into the Western legal system's idea of what is acceptable. But to me, this kind of protest is FAR more acceptable than the actions they are protesting about, and should therefore receive a full pardon, and maybe even a Nobel prize.
But visionaries are often crucified long before the world recognises them.
I've used Slackware 7.0, 7.1, a Slackware_Current from a few months after 7.1, and a Slackware_Current from about a month ago.
I think they're justified in calling it 8.0. There are a LOT of new features & packages over the upgrade from 7.0 to 7.1. It has a 2.4.5 kernel, xfree86-4.1.0, gnome-1.4, kde-2.1 (I think), and even has a gcc-3 package on the contrib cd.
Slackware rocks!
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, last time I checked, Transgaming said that they will release the source each time their subscrition numbers increase by another 25,000. Or something like that. Plus transgaming have already donated a lot of DirectX stuff back without having ANY subscribers, so I think their intentions are good. So no; it won't be a closed fork.
I was wondering where all the good marijuana had gotten to. Billy has it!
After paying $50,000 in Win2k / Office XP fees, we will certainly be looking for ways OUT of this sort of thing, not INTO it.
We already have StarOffice 5.2 / 6-Beta on most desktops. But it's always good to get a little more motivation.
Maybe I should go back to trying to get Kylix to stay up for more than 5 minutes...
Unfortunately that is EXACTLY what will happen. I believe the response has already been prepared, but they will likely wait a few weeks to make it look like someone is doing something.
I contacted the ACCC (Australian Consumer & Competition Commissions) and they basically said that they have NO POWER AT ALL to affect in any way products not made in Australia. Sounds a lot like the 'flag of convience' crap that is going here at the moment. The ACCC is only a token organisation to give the impression of fullfilling their said purpose, so as to not have someone else get the idea and do it themselves.
Nothing to see here. Move right along please. FNORD!
I don't see the problem myself. It's small. It's useful. You can turn it off.
Actually, I'd even ask: can we have an option to make it hover at the top instead of scrolling off the page?
Other changes are OK too. I would rather see Slashdot get a bit more commercial than non-existant.
Crank on!
I can see a few Linux gamers looking sideways at it, but for the sake of Linux's reputation, I hope no Windows games actually expect to get any action from anything other than Starcraft and Half-Life. Sorry but it's true. Plus we need some Linux ports that take full advantage of LINUX, not a Windows compatibility layer trying to be something it isn't.
The FBI, the Americal oil cartel the Bush family , etc all have a lot to be gained from Windows being the ubiqutous standard, and it all stems from things like Federal Corruption. There is no point having spying software if some renegades choose to use a secure system that DOESN'T include back-doors to allow the governement to monitor its sheep. Do you think you have a choice? Just how much money do you have anyway? Hopefully more than the Oil cartel, the pharmecutical drug cartel, the Bush family ...
Oh yeah. One last thing: you'd better have some pretty freakin big guns.
I have heard than when IPV6 becomes the standard, forging headers will be much more difficult (impossible?).
I propose that owners of email address be allowed to set arbitrary delivery charges on all mail coming into THEIR account. After all, it is THEIR account. I would charge $2 per email, which I would refund to all those authorised senders automatically upon delivery (ie authorised senders pay a net amount of nothing).
And the spammers pay. Finally, the spammers pay!
I have one of the first Irongate chipsets, and my system locks hard about 75% of the time I try to start X. And don't even dream about trying to get into X a second time. (By the way even though my MB - a Gigabyte - has an early Irongate, apparently ALL Irongates are affected.) I have made repeated bug-reports to AMD over the past 9 months, and they always email back with the EXACT same BS saying they are "...working on the issue with distibutions and hope to have a fix soon...". I have now promised AMD that I will take advantage of every oportunity to bitch about their shitty products until they FIX it, which I know they never will.
Buy a Pentium 4 system. Maybe it's more expensive, but at least it works....
... oh wait. You've heard it many times before.
Ummmmmm. Screw it, I'll tell you one more time...
The initial reaction in most (70%) of cases was "WTF is this. How do I start my Excel?" Actually people STILL refer to StarCalc as Excel :(
Most people slipped into using it quite well. The biggest question was "Where do I find xxxx?" and the answer is usually "That menu item is over there now...". There haven't been any requests for features that StarOffice doesn't have - it's just a matter of locating the feature, and most people are fine doing this themselves.
There are of course a few people who insist on calling me every time they can't find what they want, and for those people I make a FAQ web site, and direct them to it. If they still give me problems, I complain to their supervisor, and they are told to pay attention and stop wasting time. This group of people represent probably 3% of users.
On the flip-side of the coin, there are probably 40% of people who admit regularly that StarOffice 5.2 is actuallly BETTER than Office 97. I get comments like "It's much easier to lay out columns", "The help system is better", "The formatting features are more powerful", "Things are where they should be" and such... I expect there are a further 40% who really don't care / notice the difference, which leaves 20% of users wishing they still had M$ Office, and I just remind them that 1) we are saving a LOT of money, and 2) a new version is on the way which addresses most of their issues (what happened to my desktop)
The general nature of the business? Well everybody does a little word processing, which is actually a large change for us because 2 years ago we employed 2 Word Processors full-time. This is fairly basic stuff - 2-3 page reports to clients. Our account managers use StarCalc for their own internal calculations, but MOST spreadsheets we send out to clients are produced by Excel (see below) by the analysts. Our accounts department is running StarCalc, and our billing department is about to switch (ETA 2 months).
For those interested, our business NUS Consulting: http://www.nusconsulting.com is a utilites cost-analysis company. We analyse our clients' energy, fuel, fleet and telecommunications costs, find them savings and form consortiums to give our customers some bargaining power.
Our analysts, as I said, are quite dependant on legacy VB code in Excel, so they are the only ones stuck with it for now, but we will HAVE to get them away from that, because we are outgrowing it. Most of our Excel workbooks will initially be replaced by Access / SQL Server, and eventually Kylix / MySQL.
Out of businness, eh? Hello M$!
Well as I said we have ALREADY converted, and the retraining took a total of 30 minutes worth of personal learning on the part of each user.
How different do you think it is anyway.
You open StarWriter. You type your document. You press the spell-check button. You save. You print. Dude you are strange!
And we saved $30,000 (Australian) this year, and probably the same again every 2 years.
It's for testing only, here at home.
I'm not stupid...
What have you been smoking?
Messes up the desktop? Um. No.
Crashes - actually it (StarOffice 5.2) crashes less than Office XP, and maybe a little more than Office 97, but then StarOffice 6 will fix that...
Interchangable probs? What are you talking about. We have no probs sending files back an forth between StarOffice and Office 97 & XP.
Are you from M$???
Or you just wanna be from M$...
Well...
We just completed a StarOffice 5.2 rollout.
This was in direct response to some very threatening letters we received from the BSAA (Business Software Association of Australia). In hindsight, it was just a scare-campaign to fool us into buying more software - and it half worked. We bought Win2000 licenses for MOST PCs. And we bought Office XP for those who absolutely needed our legacy VB code in Excel. We use Access (developer) to create and distribute our database front-ends - the developer version lets you distibute an Access 'viewer' type package without having a license for Access.
The most interesting change for us though was StarOffice - about 85% of our staff who were using Office 97 are now using it, and we have 2 people trialling StarOffice 6-beta.
Also, I recently bought Borland's Kylix (www.borland.com/kylix). It's Delphi for Linux (Rapid Application Development, for those who don't know). I am half-way through creating our first Kylix-based database front-end (I'm presently testing it out at home, talking to M$ $QL Server on Win2k running under VMWare!!! Ha!). We are about 6 weeks away from our first Linux box on the desktop. It'll be running Netscape 6.1 (it has a spell checker for email - what can I say?), StarOffice 6-beta, and my Kylix-based database front-end. Oh - by the way - Kylix is available for FREE download if you only create open-source projects with it (I bought the Desktop Developer anyway...).
If all goes according to plan, I will start on the (very) long task of rebuilding our database front-ends under Kylix, but as I said - it will take time... I estimate that in 5 years (and my boss backs me up on this) we will be running a fully Linux-based office, and the only commercial app we'll be using will be Kylix.
... charging only the commericial outfilts? It's ridiculous to charge open-source efforts like Mozilla to conform to standards pushed by the W3C. But I have no problem with charging people who make money from selling / pushing their web browsers. They obviously have the money for it.
Development of E has slowed down 'cause Rasterman was SACKED from VA Linux, along with all the other E developers, DRI developers, and assorted cool thing developers. So everyone is now looking for another job instead of working on E (which was their job - well the E developer's job - you know what I mean...)
So is it stable under linux, unlike AMD's crap?
Their Irongate / AGP issues, which have been known for NINE FUCKING MONTHS now, are driving me back to Intel. I can't type 'startx' without first doing an emergency disc-sync in case the whole system locks hard. And it usually does. Well done AMD. I know support the more expensive and most likely technologically inferior Intel chips over your unstable crap.
I read that book, and yes it is a much more consistent theory than the big bang theory. I am constantly amazed by the rate at which new types of matter are invented to hold together the fraying edges of the big bang theory. As I can see other people have also read this book, and ... well ... it seems that most people simpily can't handle scientific truth when it goes against pre-conceived ideas. Their loss...
HeHe. Hit the nail right on the head.
Note to USA: there are other lands, out over the sea...
... at work. 30 or so users now, against 10 with M$ Office, and only because of some complicated macros we have in Excel. And they'll convert, slowly...
People bitched a bit to start with, but now I'm getting people say they're getting used to it, and they like this and that about it...
The only valid complaint we have now is that it's big and slow. So we're waiting on version 6. We'd use OpenOffice but it's spell checker doesn't work yet.
I didn't think much of the article. I think you'll be hard pressed to find an organisation that needs more than StarOffice. Most of the resistance I've seen is purely resistance to change. And the change is fast enough. People aren't so stupid that they can't learn that the button that used to be 'here' is now 'there'. And those smart enough to know how to used advanced features in M$ Office can figure out how to do it again. Anyway I noticed most people stopped asking questions after about 2 weeks.
One question about the article:
WTF is Word-compatible email?
Is it the same as people-compatible cars or something?
I can see nVidia or ATI or Matrox wanting to keep their intellectual property / trade secrets / whatever to themselves, but Trident? Really? Trident?
I'll keep that in mind whenever I buy cheap shit graphics cards for work; I'd never buy one for home either way...
This would be true in the cases of big computer retailers. People who go straight to a retailer will buy what they've heard of most - it's a human trait to do this when in doubt. And the big retailers can afford to offer more expensive chips because their customers are so clueless that they'll easily pay what the price tag says for the latest hardware with the biggest numbers associated with it. But that only worst for a first sale. After a household has a computer for a year, SOMEONE in the house will work out what's going on, and then they'll go to the little computer shop on the corner, or the guy trading out of his garage. And they have a different issue entirely. They are selling to people who want POWER at the least price. And you'll find that they sell mostly Athlons. Not exclusively, but mostly...
As I've seen other people point out, just under $500,000 isn't too bad. I am a proud owner of Quake 3 and Tribes 2, and for those who haven't tried them - they are VERY impressive. And they carry that famed Linux stability advantage over their Windows versions.
Loki has brought us SDL and OpenAL. They have brought us MANY improvements to XFree86 & video card drivers. And Loki is the fun face of Linux.
So what is everyone waiting for? It's quite obvious that no-one is going to bail Loki out except for US. So go and buy a game. Get your friends to buy a game.
Know anyone with a pirated Loki title? Do what I do (no, not dob them in). Pressure them. Pressure yourself. Pay for those games. Keep it going...
If Loki goes down, can you imagine people's reaction to any more Linux games? Yeah. Pretty likely, huh?
The Linux community prides itself on the COMMUNITY aspect, and that means helping out others; both for the sake of the other, and for the sake of the ALL.
Buy some games please.
Thankyou.
While torching a dealership may seem a little harsh, it only seems that way from a VERY limited point of view; from the point of view of Western Short-Sighted Capitalism.
However look at the HUGE risks being played to attain the magic $$$, and spread your focus over a couple of million years and many billion lifetimes. From this point of view, the profits of a few fat-arsed capitalists doesn't even register on the scale.
Companies such as these should be SHUT DOWN, and their directors prevented from ever again being in a position of such power - lest they put all life on Earth in jeapardy yet again.
Of course the protestor's actions don't exactly fit into the Western legal system's idea of what is acceptable. But to me, this kind of protest is FAR more acceptable than the actions they are protesting about, and should therefore receive a full pardon, and maybe even a Nobel prize.
But visionaries are often crucified long before the world recognises them.
I've used Slackware 7.0, 7.1, a Slackware_Current from a few months after 7.1, and a Slackware_Current from about a month ago.
I think they're justified in calling it 8.0. There are a LOT of new features & packages over the upgrade from 7.0 to 7.1. It has a 2.4.5 kernel, xfree86-4.1.0, gnome-1.4, kde-2.1 (I think), and even has a gcc-3 package on the contrib cd.
Slackware rocks!
Dan