after Office 97 things went more smoothly and now I don't have any real problems.
In my experience, users tend to route around known bugs, for example advanced automated formatting in MS Excel or complex layouts with styles in MS Word.
I had huge problems until MS Office XP SP1 at least. SP2 helped a lot, but I haven't used complex documents since then.
MS Office has to be their greatest product. It just works and I haven't ever had any issues with it
You must be a very basic user. I had plenty of users with MS Word or MS Excel files that couldn't be recovered — only option was opening an old copy, copying contents and pasting into a new document. Unless it's based on a good template, this entails lots of rework and grief. This simply doesn't happen with OpenOffice.org: the worst I've seen is needing change a troublesome font.
How so? As far as I know its only benefit over MS products is that it runs over GNU/Linux and Evolution, and perhaps has better LDAP and Kerberos compliance. Other than that it is just as proprietary, and less popular. And their Netware OS is still a joke.
Boeing isn't going to hire this guy this century. Or next. And neither will Honeywell. Both get similar flames and incoherent insults
The guy could use some editing, but I’ve seen neither flames nor incoherency there. By saying otherwise without justification, you are the one insulting.
you don't mess around with the legal system [t]here
Unless you care for your responsibility for hundreds, perhaps thousands of lifes.
especially the contempt of court issue, which resulted from him posting about a sub judice matter on his blog
The order applied only to Austria, didn’t it? Or worse, which his chances of success against European groupthink if he didn’t get some publicity and a legal defence fund thru his blog?
he should have listened to his first lawyer, who suggested he leave the country, and drop the matter. Anyone failing to heed advice from legal professionals which they pay for is only buying themselves trouble
What if he minds better his responsibility towards human life more than his own troubles?
the guy is a Baptist Churchgoer -- which tells me he's not very bright. I have yet to meet anyone who is both "super smart" and believes in the classical Christian God
Based on your caring more for trouble than for lifes, I guess I prefer his dumbness to your smartness. Not to mention that this your idea just shows how little you know about God — or humans, or yourself, or Philosophy.
So what? By that time MS had already stabbed IBM in the back by rebranding MS OS/2 3.0 NT as Windows, got their fraudulent licensing deals with OEMs, and estabilished its monopoly. All that with little more than MS DOS, Windows, Office and utter lack of ethics. Visual C++ played very little a part on all this.
it makes me expect them to back up their performance with something substantive
I am not here to show knowledge. And it doesn’t take deep expertise to know that the difference between a monolithic kernel and a multisserver microkernel goes much beyond dynamic vs static linking.
More to the point, it is not about source code modularisation (avoiding spaghetti code etc) but about extensibility, flexibility... thinks like Hurd translators, multiple personalities etc.
But why am I talking to you? You are a self-important know-everything bully.
Sorry, you flew right over my head. It sounds like you are trying to disparage me in an ad hominem fallacious argument, but it looks really ridiculous because I can’t really figure exactly what are you referring to.
Could you cite a specific example of where there are two specific regions of code within those systems that are not linked through a well defined interface
Can you say monolithic kernel and UI? Nothing like the Hurd or X. You can dislike microkernels and X, but you can't call Mac OS X the ultimate plug-in architecture.
how MS got its monopoly power:
Visual Studio on the development side
No, Visual Studio came much later and isn’t really as nearly a monopoly as the OS and office automation product lines. The monopoly comes from MS-DOS times, specially during the transition (via MS Windows) to the current NT product line.
The goal isn't for MS to disappear. We don't want them to get replaced by any single organization.
MS’ disappearance, or its transformation beyond recognition, wouldn’t mean their replacement by any other organisation. Neither Google nor Apple nor anyone else I can think of would have neither the will, nor the means, nor the competence to be in MS’ position should it disappear.
We just want them to lose enough monopoly power and influence so that the rest of the computer world can get around without MS stomping on whatever they don't like.
Actually this will hardly happen without either Bill Gates being humilliated by religious conversion or whatever, or without him being forced by courts — perhaps Europe would do, but the US really lost the opportunity here — to play fair by proper and timely documentation of everything needed for interoperability: APIs, protocols, file formats, perhaps even source code availability, and preferrably enforced by a company breakup in at least three entities.
It already looks like they've lost some control. Google is doing their own thing
Not as much as I’d like them. Their software’s still MS-W32 only, no Java or Mono or POSIX versions I can see and all of it as proprietary as can be.
Apple openly taunts MS now
So what? They are openly supporting the other leg of the Wintel duopoly now, forfeiting even the opportunity of supporting AMD as Sun’s doing. And they still badly need MS for its Office product, and Mac OS X is still proprietary and its own thing. The day they release real code, support OpenStep as a standard again, and push OpenOffice.org, NeoOffice/J or whatever then I'll think again. Nowadays they seem more keen on controlling the platform and fleecing customers as always they (self-defeatingly) have always done.
but neither of them are going to suddenly be ubiquitous on 90%+ of the world's computers
Google already is — but at most they are preventing the MS monopoly from spreading to the Internet, not really displacing anything already estabilished MS. So far they killed Altavista and displaced Yahoo!, at best.
don't want FOSS to replace Google, Apple, or MS.
I do. Not all of Google or Apple, or even MS — as Google has great web services which are really orthogonal to free software, and so do Apple’s and even MS’ hardware lines —, but certainly dominance or at least parity of free software equivalents to these three companies’ (and IBM’s, Oracle’s, SAP’s etc) software products could only be a good thing.
to keep each other honest
Again, unless Bill Gates gets humilliated either by the law or by God’s grace, I can’t see that happening.
Actually the text mentions a third: they threw away much of XP’s parts as distinguished from 2003, and used 2003 or some as-yet-unreleased successor of it.
The result of this is left as an exercise to the reader
Not that difficult. All this tells us at least two things.
First, MS was loosing control of Windows, so that there was an internal fork of NT, with the server version being higher-quality and the desktop one fancier. So what they did is to rewrite the fancy parts to conform to the higher-quality codebase.
Second, very little was actually rewritten — as per the story, they just used better components which were around there, just throwing away relatively recend code specific to the desktop which was no good and was redundant anyway, and better automated (and thus organised) much of their work.
And as an aside third, Vista won't be that great or different — it is just that they will be able to ship it with relatively little or no further delay (not forgetting that its features, for example what is now dubbed WinFS, were first promised for AD 1,996 in order to abort NeXTStep in 1,994, and some were already there in OS/400 and will be also in things like Gnome Storage), and to a standard of quality that will resemble more 2003 than ME.
Mac OS X is not that modular. GNU Hurd is far more, and even GNU/Linux.
from the kernel
Mac OS X’s kernel’ not modular at all. It has conflated the Mach microkernel, which has already been abandoned by the Hurd for its bad performance, with the monolithic BSD kernel. The result is something just as monolithic as BSD, but much larger, more complex and slow. Linux is not as fast or simple as BSD, but still much faster than Mac OS X — and both are just as modular.
In contrast, the Hurd on the Mach is a little bit slower but much more modular, and the new L4 version has the potential to be much faster and still much more modular, because it is a true microkernel with multiple servers.
SQL ain't relational. Relational is much simpler and more powerful than SQL.
the relational model is fundamentally the wrong model for semi-structured data. See www.namesys.com/whitepaper.html for why
I fear you based your whole work on a misunderstanding. When you say (at the paper) that sometimes one wants only a simple unordered set instead of the relational unordered set of ordered pairs, you are actually saying you don't want data types — because the ordered pairs of the relational model are actually type:value pairs, or in other words the most basic integrity constraint of data types. Nothing hinders one of implementing a data model with a simple data type of 'file', for example, and a hierarchical type system like the one proposed by Date & Darwen make that even more useful, with 'file' becoming a supertype of 'PDF', 'PS', 'DOC' etc...
Another fundamental mistake is that you talk about a set theoretical model as opposed to, or supplanting, the relational model. But the relational model is nothing more than an application of Set Theory coupled with Predicate Logic. So that doesn't make sense at all.
I could even tip Fabian Pascal on your paper as a DBDebunk Quote of the Week... but that'd be harsh treatment. I would advise you to understand better the relational model, its conceptual foundations and its advantages over SQL — perhaps then your work would be more widely acceptable.
Slashdot Mirror
In my experience, users tend to route around known bugs, for example advanced automated formatting in MS Excel or complex layouts with styles in MS Word.
I had huge problems until MS Office XP SP1 at least. SP2 helped a lot, but I haven't used complex documents since then.
You must be a very basic user. I had plenty of users with MS Word or MS Excel files that couldn't be recovered — only option was opening an old copy, copying contents and pasting into a new document. Unless it's based on a good template, this entails lots of rework and grief. This simply doesn't happen with OpenOffice.org: the worst I've seen is needing change a troublesome font.
I can't quite pin it, but everytime I read something by Nelson I have this feeling he's on crack or something the like.
More to the point, I never saw a well-presented summary of his ideas, allowing one to evaluate: concepts, possibilities, hurdles, the way there.
This proves nothing, Japan and software don't usually mix well outside of gaming and embedded gizmos.
So who would be the private investors?
Yes, but... the idea is that this is different stuff, not needing an airport for example.
How so? As far as I know its only benefit over MS products is that it runs over GNU/Linux and Evolution, and perhaps has better LDAP and Kerberos compliance. Other than that it is just as proprietary, and less popular. And their Netware OS is still a joke.
No, we are just comparing it to something better (POSIX systems) instead of something worse (Netware, MS W95).
Yes, it looks like it. I have seen more than once people calling my own static world-wide web page a blog.
The guy could use some editing, but I’ve seen neither flames nor incoherency there. By saying otherwise without justification, you are the one insulting.
Unless you care for your responsibility for hundreds, perhaps thousands of lifes.
The order applied only to Austria, didn’t it? Or worse, which his chances of success against European groupthink if he didn’t get some publicity and a legal defence fund thru his blog?
What if he minds better his responsibility towards human life more than his own troubles?
Based on your caring more for trouble than for lifes, I guess I prefer his dumbness to your smartness. Not to mention that this your idea just shows how little you know about God — or humans, or yourself, or Philosophy.
So what? By that time MS had already stabbed IBM in the back by rebranding MS OS/2 3.0 NT as Windows, got their fraudulent licensing deals with OEMs, and estabilished its monopoly. All that with little more than MS DOS, Windows, Office and utter lack of ethics. Visual C++ played very little a part on all this.
A true microkernel and a window system able to support separation of mechanics and policy.
But it seems now I am flying straight over your head.
I am not here to show knowledge. And it doesn’t take deep expertise to know that the difference between a monolithic kernel and a multisserver microkernel goes much beyond dynamic vs static linking.
More to the point, it is not about source code modularisation (avoiding spaghetti code etc) but about extensibility, flexibility... thinks like Hurd translators, multiple personalities etc.
But why am I talking to you? You are a self-important know-everything bully.
Sorry, you flew right over my head. It sounds like you are trying to disparage me in an ad hominem fallacious argument, but it looks really ridiculous because I can’t really figure exactly what are you referring to.
Can you say monolithic kernel and UI? Nothing like the Hurd or X. You can dislike microkernels and X, but you can't call Mac OS X the ultimate plug-in architecture.
No, Visual Studio came much later and isn’t really as nearly a monopoly as the OS and office automation product lines. The monopoly comes from MS-DOS times, specially during the transition (via MS Windows) to the current NT product line.
Not quite. RDP isn’t actually as responsive as NX, and uses up much more resources.
MS’ disappearance, or its transformation beyond recognition, wouldn’t mean their replacement by any other organisation. Neither Google nor Apple nor anyone else I can think of would have neither the will, nor the means, nor the competence to be in MS’ position should it disappear.
Actually this will hardly happen without either Bill Gates being humilliated by religious conversion or whatever, or without him being forced by courts — perhaps Europe would do, but the US really lost the opportunity here — to play fair by proper and timely documentation of everything needed for interoperability: APIs, protocols, file formats, perhaps even source code availability, and preferrably enforced by a company breakup in at least three entities.
Not as much as I’d like them. Their software’s still MS-W32 only, no Java or Mono or POSIX versions I can see and all of it as proprietary as can be.
So what? They are openly supporting the other leg of the Wintel duopoly now, forfeiting even the opportunity of supporting AMD as Sun’s doing. And they still badly need MS for its Office product, and Mac OS X is still proprietary and its own thing. The day they release real code, support OpenStep as a standard again, and push OpenOffice.org, NeoOffice/J or whatever then I'll think again. Nowadays they seem more keen on controlling the platform and fleecing customers as always they (self-defeatingly) have always done.
Google already is — but at most they are preventing the MS monopoly from spreading to the Internet, not really displacing anything already estabilished MS. So far they killed Altavista and displaced Yahoo!, at best.
I do. Not all of Google or Apple, or even MS — as Google has great web services which are really orthogonal to free software, and so do Apple’s and even MS’ hardware lines —, but certainly dominance or at least parity of free software equivalents to these three companies’ (and IBM’s, Oracle’s, SAP’s etc) software products could only be a good thing.
Again, unless Bill Gates gets humilliated either by the law or by God’s grace, I can’t see that happening.
Actually the text mentions a third: they threw away much of XP’s parts as distinguished from 2003, and used 2003 or some as-yet-unreleased successor of it.
Not that difficult. All this tells us at least two things.
First, MS was loosing control of Windows, so that there was an internal fork of NT, with the server version being higher-quality and the desktop one fancier. So what they did is to rewrite the fancy parts to conform to the higher-quality codebase.
Second, very little was actually rewritten — as per the story, they just used better components which were around there, just throwing away relatively recend code specific to the desktop which was no good and was redundant anyway, and better automated (and thus organised) much of their work.
And as an aside third, Vista won't be that great or different — it is just that they will be able to ship it with relatively little or no further delay (not forgetting that its features, for example what is now dubbed WinFS, were first promised for AD 1,996 in order to abort NeXTStep in 1,994, and some were already there in OS/400 and will be also in things like Gnome Storage), and to a standard of quality that will resemble more 2003 than ME.
Mac OS X is not that modular. GNU Hurd is far more, and even GNU/Linux.
Mac OS X’s kernel’ not modular at all. It has conflated the Mach microkernel, which has already been abandoned by the Hurd for its bad performance, with the monolithic BSD kernel. The result is something just as monolithic as BSD, but much larger, more complex and slow. Linux is not as fast or simple as BSD, but still much faster than Mac OS X — and both are just as modular.
In contrast, the Hurd on the Mach is a little bit slower but much more modular, and the new L4 version has the potential to be much faster and still much more modular, because it is a true microkernel with multiple servers.
The Mac OS X GUI’s not modular at all X is.
Apples and oranges are bitter.
But actually apples ain't oranges: the latter are citric, while the former are sweet.
There are Alphora Dataphor (federated), Duro (library), and Rel (in development). Not to mention former systems like G-Exec and IBM BS/12.
But he can't justify it as being better than an RDBMS.
SQL ain't relational. Relational is much simpler and more powerful than SQL.
I fear you based your whole work on a misunderstanding. When you say (at the paper) that sometimes one wants only a simple unordered set instead of the relational unordered set of ordered pairs, you are actually saying you don't want data types — because the ordered pairs of the relational model are actually type:value pairs, or in other words the most basic integrity constraint of data types. Nothing hinders one of implementing a data model with a simple data type of 'file', for example, and a hierarchical type system like the one proposed by Date & Darwen make that even more useful, with 'file' becoming a supertype of 'PDF', 'PS', 'DOC' etc...
Another fundamental mistake is that you talk about a set theoretical model as opposed to, or supplanting, the relational model. But the relational model is nothing more than an application of Set Theory coupled with Predicate Logic. So that doesn't make sense at all.
I could even tip Fabian Pascal on your paper as a DBDebunk Quote of the Week... but that'd be harsh treatment. I would advise you to understand better the relational model, its conceptual foundations and its advantages over SQL — perhaps then your work would be more widely acceptable.
Quite right, you're bloody well right.
References? You just talked over my head.