As a tax i dont see any reason why this would be a good idea, but if it were done as an MP3 ISP then it might work.
In fact David Bowie has his own ISP and the incentive of extra content makes it worthwhile for fans to pay more. http://www.davidbowie.com/ http://www.metroacti ve.com/papers/metro/10.29.98/b owie-9843.html
Extra content (although secondary to ease of use) is one of the big reasons people choose AOL and it is makes sense for an ISP to restrict the content so that only its subscribers can get it. Or at least get it easily reliably legitimately conveniently and most importantly at high speed!
A bit of added value and a lot of convenience and people dont feel so cheated paying 15 bucks to get the music on a litle plastic disk. If an ISP can add value and convienience it might just work.
But as a Tax on ISPs it has not a hope in hell.
-- why cant slashdot automatically make valid URLs clickable?
I-I-I-I'm wicked and I'm lazy Ooooh, don't you wanna save me http://www.talking-heads.net/lazy.html
I have heard Alan Cox speak in public and was very impressed by how reasonable he is.
> don't do it. That should be argument enough
I think the Anonymous Coward accidentally has a relevant point.
It is quite likely that he would not make much effort to convince a user to switch, he seemed to be a firm believer of "the right tool for the right job". Of course you dont have to throw out or even stop using either windows or mac to also use Linux. As to compatibility Wine has gotten much much better. Seeing as you have already paid for windows you may as well keep using it for all your legacy stuff as long as it lasts. Keep in mind that all Microsoft Operating systems are not the same, windows XP is a fair bit different from Windows 95 and a earth shatteringly different from windows 3.11
Here are some links for those of you, who like me have never heard of either Sarrus or Lighthouse until now.
http://www.javaworld.com/javaworld/jw-03-1998/jw -0 3-lighthouse.html warning to supporters of Sun, the article makes very unflattering suggestions and comparisons between Sun Microsystems and Microsoft.
Lighthouse Design: "object-oriented productivity applications" (aka Office Suite) "word processor, spreadsheet, presentation system, and even a database"
"written in... Objective-C... and the platform... OpenStep"
More information about Lighthouse, the premise of the article is Sun should sell Lighthouse to Apple OS X users. http://maccentral.macworld.com/news/0012/21.maco sx . html Interestingly their word processor was called OpenWrite.
Sarrus Software, a java calendar application called "pencil me in". (the domain http://www.sarrus.com has expired). The press release about the aquissition of Sarrus by Sun earlier this year http://search.java.sun.com/ClickThru?qt=sarrus&url =http%3A%2F%2Fjava.sun.com%2Fpr%2F1997%2Fdec%2Fspo tnews%2Fsn971203.html&pathInfo=%2Fsearch%2Fjava%2F index.jsp&hitNum=1&col=java&col=jdc&col=wireless -- why doesn't slashdot automatically make valid URLs into clickable links?
It is _possible_ but using the Equation Editor is painful. It is so much faster to get a simple LaTeX template and learn to how to $ include an inline equation $ or do a paragraph of maths
> Is there work in progress on both Abiword and OpenOffice to read each others files?
Yes, but Abiword got the short end of the stick. Take at look at the documentation for the OpenOffice.org file format, its huge and it does EVERTHING. http://xml.openoffice.org/xml_specification_draf t. pdf
What is particularly cool about the Abiword file format is that it is uncompressed XML. All it needs is a small stylesheet and XML capable browsers like Mozilla could make a decent attempt at displaying Abiword documents without needing a plugin. (At the moment it just displays the text with line breaks).
> Ok...hummm...how much XML is in AbiWord, by the way?
The Abiword native file format is uncompressed plaintext XML, it also supports gzip and bzip2 compressed XML.
> Tables are nontrivial to implement correctly
There are more types of tables than just HTML/XML tables. HTML tables can be scalable, or fixed size. Abiword is a WYSIWYG (What you see is what you get) word processor and there are lots of little details that must be done correctly or you the print out will suck ass.
There are also complicated layout and user interface issues. Try selecting table column, try merging tables.
Programming always seems easier than it actually is, but then everything looks easy when it is done by an expert and some things are actually easy, but only when you know how.
AbiSource was started with a grand vision to provide a Cross Platform (XP) frame work and Office Suite. Among the other programs planned were AbiCalc, AbiShow, and AbiDraw.
But the funding never came and the corporate backing left and Abiword is now an entirely volunteer run project.
It was suggested that some one might expand the AbiSource frame work to more applications that just Abiword and start AbiCalc http://www.abisource.com/mailinglists/abi word-dev/ 02/Mar/0512.html
The idea did not take off. Providing a smaller faster cross platform alternative to the openoffice.org spreadsheet or Gnumeric did not take anyones interest. In the end the guy who suggested it gave up having been convinced that it was a better idea to wait until a GTK only verison of Gnumeric was ported to Windows.
The abiword developers do plan to add better support for Vector Graphics as part of the next version of Abiword, so AbiDraw may eventually become more than just vaporware.
With the existance of the Mozilla Platform and the Open Office.org suite the need for a cross platfrom Office suite there is much more cross platfrom open source software and Gnome is gradually becoming more and more portable so it seems unlikely that AbiCalc and other cross platform using the Abisource framework will ever come into existance.
Some amusing quotes (quoted verbatim) from the Abiword mailing list http://abisource.com/mailinglists/abiword-de v/02/M ay/0330.html
If there'd been more advance notice, it might have been fun to do the standard press release trick of soliciting quotes from *other people* to introduce those ideas.
For example, here are some TOTALLY MADE UP QUOTES, putting words in the mouths of prominent people that I KNOW VERY WELL THEY'D NEVER SAY:
"AbiWord is the latest and finest example of the kinds of powerfully
usable software that can be developed, from scratch, by a world-wide
team of volunteers collaborating under the terms of the GNU GPL.
More free software! I love it!"
-- Richard Stallman, Free Software Foundation
"I never leave kernel mode unless I have to. I try to leave all that
pixel-pushing stuff out in userland to others. Thank goodness for
the folks on the AbiWord team. Now I can skim all those useless email
attachments before I delete them!"
-- Linus Torvalds, Linux
"Hey, how come we're the only major desktop operating system that
AbiWord doesn't run natively on? What do I have to do to get someone to
finish the Cocoa port? Can I just sneak them into the next Pixar release
party or will I actually have to pay them?"
-- Steve Jobs, Apple
"AbiSource... has started developing, in particular, a very high-quality
word processor for the Linux environment."
-- Paul Maritz, Microsoft Sr VP of platforms and applications
Microsoft does actually follow the RFT standard, because RFT is a Microsoft standard.
Microsoft set the standard, if Microsoft change how it is done then there you go a new standard.
Abiword had problems sharing documents with Open Office as its support for RTF is quite old and they are putting their effort into the binary word document format.
Im really glad that MPlayer sorted out all the licensing nastiness. http://www.mplayerhq.hu/homepage/
It is shame there is no standard media player for linux, although it is only slighlty less unpleasant for windows users trying get Quicktime, RealPlayer, Media and Winamp3 (currently beta, even plays DivX) to coexist on the same machine.
Xines support for DivX (with a little help from wine) alone makes it worth using for me but aside from that i really dont like Xine.
I like Gnome, I like KDE and I think the open source software has become hugely more easy to use in the past few years. Xine however has possilby the worst interface I have ever had the misfortune to use.
Someone decided that it would be a good idea to implement their own file open dialog and playlist and design in a way that bears no resemblance to any other interface i have ever used. Using, or at least trying to use Xine is cruel and unusual punishment.
I suggested it to a friend who wanted to watch some DivX files and the interface was so bad it mad him laugh (then cry).
And to add even more potential for confusion it uses its own skinning system.
Gnome Xine will hopefully be a vast improvement and have the sense to bear at least some resemblence to quicktime/microsoft mediaplayer/realplayer.
If you can get away with it make them use webmail. It is a lot simpler but not as powerful but for most users (especially the users who cannot fix even the simplest problems with their email let alone support their own personal choice of email client).
Free and open source solutions.
IMP Webmail http://www.horde.org/imp/
Squirrel Mail - Webmail for Nuts http://www.squirrelmail.org/
Less features means less work for admininstrators and less things that can go wrong (virii). Of course slashdotters are always going own about the Calendar and collaboration features of prioprietary desktop solutions such as Lotus Notes and Outlook+Exchange.
He obviously has never watched the BBC. You pay your TV license and there is absolutely no commercial advertising. Same goes for the radio stations and website.
If a television station really wanted to they could charge a subscription fee instead of showing
advertising, of course most stations try and do both.
The advertisements last 3 minutes and tv exec's are surprised that people dont sit obediently watching the ad's.
It is not that particularly object to watching advertisments, often they are the best thing on tv. What bugs me is seeing the same advertisments over and over again for crap i dont want.
In the words of Austin Powers:
Missus,
Will ya
Make me tea?
Make love to me?
Put on the teley?
To the BBC!
To the BBC,
Yeah! Yeah! Yeah!
BBC 1!
BBC 2!
BBC 3!
BBC 4!
BBC 5!
BBC 6!
BBC 7!
BBC heaven!
The problem with that is RTF is a Microsoft standard they can and will change it when they feel like.
Open Office "supports" a very old version of RTF unlike Abiword which attempts to match Microsoft Office as close as possible. So Abiword and OpenOffice dont interoperate as well as they should.
Hopefully the new XML formats will converge and replace de facto standard of RTF.
Abiword, Dia, and many KDE applications use gzip compression but openoffice/staroffice use zip compression.
This document explains the
rationale behind the ZIP-based package format. The decision was made after an elaborate discussion on the XML dev mailing list, whose archive can be consulted for additional detail.
I feel strongly that files should not be compressed by default to avoid confusion.
Zip does at least allow variable/partial compresion so if they cared to there could be a text comment explaining that it is in fact zip compressed XML and still compress the rest of the document.
Visual Basic may not be free, the Visual Studio is one of Microsofts more impressive pieces of software, but surely there you can get a non-Visual version somewhere.
Not all XML are created equal. Saying two documents can be in XML format and be totally differently. Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) and MathML are two totally different XML documents.
That said XSLT has the potential to allow people easily convert between similar and even completely different XML grammars. Im sure the Abiword and Kword people would love if some one came forward and wrote the necessary XML StyleSheet to Transform between Abiword and KWord.
Have you ever read the specification for the StarOffice XML format? It is huge. It does everything. The Abiword file format by comparison is tiny and simplistic, it does not even do tables for crying out load.
It is likely that Abiword and Kword will migrate towards better compatibility, but these things take time and need developers. Both Abiword and Kword are run by volunteers, whereas StarOffice has funding. You would think StarOffice would try a little harder to interoperate with them. Which leads nicely on to why RTF sucks. RTF is a Microsoft Standard, meaning even though Microsoft write the standard themselves they still dont even stick to it, so trying to interoperate with is a nightmare. Checkout this bug, directly a result of the shitty "Standard". http://www.openoffice.org/issues/show_bug.cgi?id =2 244
Being in a different time zone it seemed way too late for Aprils fools jokes.
Before 12pm only!
I thought maybe Slashdot had finally come to its senses and started to use TEXT BASED ADVERTISING as both Google and Kuro5hin.org do.
This is actually a better idea than wasting bandwidth on huge great big add banners (i dont have shockwave and im damd if im gonna install it just to see a stupid advert).
"Abi word does OK at reading some word files but does not even have an option to save a file as a.doc"
It does now. You really should upgrade, or you could give it a few weeks since v1.0 is due soon. For all the people who did not know that you could simply rename an document.rtf to document.doc and have the recepient be none the wiser Abiword has the option to save as.doc even though it may only really be a renamed RFT document and an altogther ulgy trick it is what the users wanted.
Microsoft has to tolerate this kind of ugliness, afaik older versions of MSword did something similar.
Slashdot Mirror
As a tax i dont see any reason why this would be a good idea, but if it were done as an MP3 ISP then it might work.
i ve.com/papers/metro/10.29.98/b owie-9843.html
In fact David Bowie has his own ISP and the incentive of extra content makes it worthwhile for fans to pay more.
http://www.davidbowie.com/
http://www.metroact
Extra content (although secondary to ease of use) is one of the big reasons people choose AOL and it is makes sense for an ISP to restrict the content so that only its subscribers can get it. Or at least get it easily reliably legitimately conveniently and most importantly at high speed!
A bit of added value and a lot of convenience and people dont feel so cheated paying 15 bucks to get the music on a litle plastic disk.
If an ISP can add value and convienience it might just work.
But as a Tax on ISPs it has not a hope in hell.
--
why cant slashdot automatically make valid URLs clickable?
I-I-I-I'm wicked and I'm lazy
Ooooh, don't you wanna save me
http://www.talking-heads.net/lazy.html
At what point does a Star Wars party become a public performance? How much is fair use. (i think this was even discussed recently).
Copyright law sucks. It is all a horrible mess.
I have heard Alan Cox speak in public and was very impressed by how reasonable he is.
> don't do it. That should be argument enough
I think the Anonymous Coward accidentally has a relevant point.
It is quite likely that he would not make much effort to convince a user to switch, he seemed to be a firm believer of "the right tool for the right job". Of course you dont have to throw out or even stop using either windows or mac to also use Linux. As to compatibility Wine has gotten much much better.
Seeing as you have already paid for windows you may as well keep using it for all your legacy stuff as long as it lasts. Keep in mind that all Microsoft Operating systems are not the same, windows XP is a fair bit different from Windows 95 and a earth shatteringly different from windows 3.11
Linux, try it you might like it!
Here are some links for those of you, who like me have never heard of either Sarrus or Lighthouse until now.
w -0 3-lighthouse.html
... Objective-C ... and the platform ... OpenStep"
o sx . html
l =http%3A%2F%2Fjava.sun.com%2Fpr%2F1997%2Fdec%2Fspo tnews%2Fsn971203.html&pathInfo=%2Fsearch%2Fjava%2F index.jsp&hitNum=1&col=java&col=jdc&col=wireless
http://www.javaworld.com/javaworld/jw-03-1998/j
warning to supporters of Sun, the article makes very unflattering suggestions and comparisons between Sun Microsystems and Microsoft.
Lighthouse Design:
"object-oriented productivity applications" (aka Office Suite) "word processor, spreadsheet, presentation system, and even a database"
"written in
More information about Lighthouse, the premise of the article is Sun should sell Lighthouse to Apple OS X users.
http://maccentral.macworld.com/news/0012/21.mac
Interestingly their word processor was called OpenWrite.
Sarrus Software, a java calendar application called "pencil me in". (the domain http://www.sarrus.com has expired). The press release about the aquissition of Sarrus by Sun earlier this year http://search.java.sun.com/ClickThru?qt=sarrus&ur
--
why doesn't slashdot automatically make valid URLs into clickable links?
It is _possible_ but using the Equation Editor is painful.
It is so much faster to get a simple LaTeX template and learn to how to $ include an inline equation $ or do a paragraph of maths
\[
equation goes here
\]
Waaaaay easier.
> Is there work in progress on both Abiword and OpenOffice to read each others files?
f t. pdf
Yes, but Abiword got the short end of the stick. Take at look at the documentation for the OpenOffice.org file format, its huge and it does EVERTHING.
http://xml.openoffice.org/xml_specification_dra
What is particularly cool about the Abiword file format is that it is uncompressed XML. All it needs is a small stylesheet and XML capable browsers like Mozilla could make a decent attempt at displaying Abiword documents without needing a plugin. (At the moment it just displays the text with line breaks).
> Sounds really cool. Just as long as Abi the Ant doesn't appear on my desktop and offer to help me type a letter.
Anyone else think having a Bug for a mascot is a bad idea?
:P
The Ant even has a webpage
http://abisource.com/~abi/
> Ok...hummm...how much XML is in AbiWord, by the way?
The Abiword native file format is uncompressed plaintext XML, it also supports gzip and bzip2 compressed XML.
> Tables are nontrivial to implement correctly
There are more types of tables than just HTML/XML tables. HTML tables can be scalable, or fixed size. Abiword is a WYSIWYG (What you see is what you get) word processor and there are lots of little details that must be done correctly or you the print out will suck ass.
There are also complicated layout and user interface issues.
Try selecting table column, try merging tables.
Programming always seems easier than it actually is, but then everything looks easy when it is done by an expert and some things are actually easy, but only when you know how.
confused? i know i am.
AbiCalc the AbiSource SpreadSheet ...
/ 14 / biword.html
i word-dev/ 02/Mar/0512.html
... that is never likely to be implemented
http://linux.oreillynet.com/pub/a/linux/2002/03
AbiSource was started with a grand vision to provide a Cross Platform (XP) frame work and Office Suite.
Among the other programs planned were AbiCalc, AbiShow, and AbiDraw.
But the funding never came and the corporate backing left and Abiword is now an entirely volunteer run project.
It was suggested that some one might expand the AbiSource frame work to more applications that just Abiword and start AbiCalc
http://www.abisource.com/mailinglists/ab
The idea did not take off. Providing a smaller faster cross platform alternative to the openoffice.org spreadsheet or Gnumeric did not take anyones interest. In the end the guy who suggested it gave up having been convinced that it was a better idea to wait until a GTK only verison of Gnumeric was ported to Windows.
The abiword developers do plan to add better support for Vector Graphics as part of the next version of Abiword, so AbiDraw may eventually become more than just vaporware.
With the existance of the Mozilla Platform and the Open Office.org suite the need for a cross platfrom Office suite there is much more cross platfrom open source software and Gnome is gradually becoming more and more portable so it seems unlikely that AbiCalc and other cross platform using the Abisource framework will ever come into existance.
Some amusing quotes (quoted verbatim) from the Abiword mailing liste v/02/M ay/0330.html
... has started developing, in particular, a very high-quality
p ts/jan99/01-28-am.asp
http://abisource.com/mailinglists/abiword-d
If there'd been more advance notice, it might have been fun to do the
standard press release trick of soliciting quotes from *other people* to
introduce those ideas.
For example, here are some TOTALLY MADE UP QUOTES, putting words in the
mouths of prominent people that I KNOW VERY WELL THEY'D NEVER SAY:
"AbiWord is the latest and finest example of the kinds of powerfully
usable software that can be developed, from scratch, by a world-wide
team of volunteers collaborating under the terms of the GNU GPL.
More free software! I love it!"
-- Richard Stallman, Free Software Foundation
"I never leave kernel mode unless I have to. I try to leave all that
pixel-pushing stuff out in userland to others. Thank goodness for
the folks on the AbiWord team. Now I can skim all those useless email
attachments before I delete them!"
-- Linus Torvalds, Linux
"Hey, how come we're the only major desktop operating system that
AbiWord doesn't run natively on? What do I have to do to get someone to
finish the Cocoa port? Can I just sneak them into the next Pixar release
party or will I actually have to pay them?"
-- Steve Jobs, Apple
"AbiSource
word processor for the Linux environment."
-- Paul Maritz, Microsoft Sr VP of platforms and applications
Oops. Actually, the last quote *is* real:
http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/trial/transcri
--
Totally Karma Whoring...
Microsoft does actually follow the RFT standard, because RFT is a Microsoft standard.
Microsoft set the standard, if Microsoft change how it is done then there you go a new standard.
Abiword had problems sharing documents with Open Office as its support for RTF is quite old and they are putting their effort into the binary word document format.
Im really glad that MPlayer sorted out all the licensing nastiness.
http://www.mplayerhq.hu/homepage/
It is shame there is no standard media player for linux, although it is only slighlty less unpleasant for windows users trying get Quicktime, RealPlayer, Media and Winamp3 (currently beta, even plays DivX) to coexist on the same machine.
Xine however has possilby the worst interface I have ever had the misfortune to use.
Someone decided that it would be a good idea to implement their own file open dialog and playlist and design in a way that bears no resemblance to any other interface i have ever used. Using, or at least trying to use Xine is cruel and unusual punishment.
I suggested it to a friend who wanted to watch some DivX files and the interface was so bad it mad him laugh (then cry).
And to add even more potential for confusion it uses its own skinning system.
Gnome Xine will hopefully be a vast improvement and have the sense to bear at least some resemblence to quicktime/microsoft mediaplayer/realplayer.
If you can get away with it make them use webmail. It is a lot simpler but not as powerful but for most users (especially the users who cannot fix even the simplest problems with their email let alone support their own personal choice of email client).
Free and open source solutions.
IMP Webmail
http://www.horde.org/imp/
Squirrel Mail - Webmail for Nuts
http://www.squirrelmail.org/
Less features means less work for admininstrators and less things that can go wrong (virii).
Of course slashdotters are always going own about the Calendar and collaboration features of prioprietary desktop solutions such as Lotus Notes and Outlook+Exchange.
--
This is not a Troll
Valhalla may be the home of the Norse Gods, where warriors slain in battle go when they die
... but what i really want to know is what is the connection between SkipJack and Valhalla.
Enigma (7.1) and Skipjack(7.2) were both encryption algorithms
For explanations of the older release names:
http://freshrpms.net/redhat.html?links=on
http://www.smoogespace.com/documents/behind_the_
(why cant slashcode automatically convert all valid URLs into clickable hyperlinks eh?)
http://www.gnome.org/projects/gb/
Gnumeric does plan to support Visual Basic scripts using Gnome Basic
http://news.gnome.org/gnome-news/972544387/inde
I wish slashdot would automatically convert these into clickable hyperlinks, im too lazy to make them clickable
If a television station really wanted to they could charge a subscription fee instead of showing advertising, of course most stations try and do both.
The advertisements last 3 minutes and tv exec's are surprised that people dont sit obediently watching the ad's.
It is not that particularly object to watching advertisments, often they are the best thing on tv. What bugs me is seeing the same advertisments over and over again for crap i dont want.
In the words of Austin Powers:
The problem with that is RTF is a Microsoft standard they can and will change it when they feel like.
Open Office "supports" a very old version of RTF unlike Abiword which attempts to match Microsoft Office as close as possible. So Abiword and OpenOffice dont interoperate as well as they should.
Hopefully the new XML formats will converge and replace de facto standard of RTF.
Abiword, Dia, and many KDE applications use gzip compression but openoffice/staroffice use zip compression.
I feel strongly that files should not be compressed by default to avoid confusion.
Zip does at least allow variable/partial compresion so if they cared to there could be a text comment explaining that it is in fact zip compressed XML and still compress the rest of the document.
> I have seen many VB apps claim to be under the GPL; but since Visual Basic has no open source compiler, no sir, they are not.
Gnome Basic dude!
http://www.gnome.org/projects/gb/
Might be good place to start.
Visual Basic may not be free, the Visual Studio is one of Microsofts more impressive pieces of software, but surely there you can get a non-Visual version somewhere.
horde.org/imp
sucks way less than any other webmail
Not all XML are created equal. Saying two documents can be in XML format and be totally differently. Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) and MathML are two totally different XML documents.
d =2 244
That said XSLT has the potential to allow people easily convert between similar and even completely different XML grammars. Im sure the Abiword and Kword people would love if some one came forward and wrote the necessary XML StyleSheet to Transform between Abiword and KWord.
Have you ever read the specification for the StarOffice XML format?
It is huge. It does everything.
The Abiword file format by comparison is tiny and simplistic, it does not even do tables for crying out load.
It is likely that Abiword and Kword will migrate towards better compatibility, but these things take time and need developers.
Both Abiword and Kword are run by volunteers, whereas StarOffice has funding. You would think StarOffice would try a little harder to interoperate with them.
Which leads nicely on to why RTF sucks. RTF is a Microsoft Standard, meaning even though Microsoft write the standard themselves they still dont even stick to it, so trying to interoperate with is a nightmare.
Checkout this bug, directly a result of the shitty "Standard".
http://www.openoffice.org/issues/show_bug.cgi?i
Bono, that nice man from U2 trying to get politicians to drop third world debt?
You probably mean Sonny Bono, who died in a tragic skiing accident (he hit a tree). Karma?
Being in a different time zone it seemed way too late for Aprils fools jokes.
Before 12pm only!
I thought maybe Slashdot had finally come to its senses and started to use TEXT BASED ADVERTISING as both Google and Kuro5hin.org do.
This is actually a better idea than wasting bandwidth on huge great big add banners (i dont have shockwave and im damd if im gonna install it just to see a stupid advert).
"Abi word does OK at reading some word files but does not even have an option to save a file as a .doc"
.doc even though it may only really be a renamed RFT document and an altogther ulgy trick it is what the users wanted.
It does now. You really should upgrade, or you could give it a few weeks since v1.0 is due soon.
For all the people who did not know that you could simply rename an document.rtf to document.doc and have the recepient be none the wiser Abiword has the option to save as
Microsoft has to tolerate this kind of ugliness, afaik older versions of MSword did something similar.
http://xenu.net