I will be surprised if this continues in StarOffice 6. Sun is not seeing benefits from the open source version, and in the current economy $$$ matters. With the current slap no the wrist Microsoft is about to get, they need to get into gear with their competition, because the half-heartedly lame attempt Netscape and Sun have perfomed so far just doesn't cut it. More than ever, things seem like they will polarize into MS vs Linux and everything in the middle will perform sickly.
StarOffice is currently free as in beer and Sun can change the price from $0.00 to $125.00 any time they want. Since they have made a big deal about people not wanting to upgrade to Office XP (me being one of them) and that recent story about the government ordering thousands of copies of StarOffice, my guess is that they'll be doing this to get $$$ off the popularity of it Real Soon Now (TM).
I think one of the previous posters will be right, though. Sun will probably make a premium version for pay which will probably include the XML compatibility, and a free one that is not quite as feature-rich.
For all their bashing of Microsoft, these guys are walking in Bill's path.
I think you mean the Blade 100, because the Blade 1000 is certainly a lot more than $1000 and is a lot higher spec than that IDE junk Ultra5/10. It is more of a successor to the Ultra 80.
Back when Eudora 3.0 had just come out, I had a filter that would take all mail not actually addressed to me and not to any lists I was on and would put it into a separate folder. Then, I would do a resend of all the spam to each address in the folder so that the autoresponders would all reply to each other. There were quite a few of these sites that seemed to shut down for a couple of days and quite a few nasty messages I got back.
I'm guessing that since I was sending mail pretending to be those senders I could have been considered to be illegally spamming under this law, even if I was targetting spammers. Who spams the spammers?
The only thing that will truely solve the SPAM problem are market forces. When people decide that having to relay spam is costing them more money than it would to fight said abuse of their systems, we will see unsolicted commercial email disappear pretty darn quick.
So long as the pipes are fat enough and getting fatter by the day, spam will never consume enough resources for the ISPs to tell them to bug off. After all, they're paying customers, too, and to them they're just another higher than average bandwidth consuming user. The only really good thing to do is voluntary blocking of SPAM, but this means having experts at places like MAPS and the now defunct ORBS do the checking for the multitude of users. While I certainly like using MAPS at my mail servers, I recall hearing many voices in/. say they didn't like the idea. And as those experts become bigger, they get more and more corporate looking and thus they would one day look too Orwellian for the/.ers.
So what we are left with is no ORBS and this law. Hmmm. Expensive and lengthy litigation...instant and automated blocking, litigation or blocking, litigation or blocking. Tough choice, but I think I'd rather have the automated form of protection. Thank goodness we still have MAPS. The arm of the law can no longer keep up with the fast daily pace of the Internet. Does any of this still constitute speedy trial anymore?
That's what I meant by it being COBOL-ized into the background. There are people still programming plenty of valid applications in languages that most think are dead/dying but are actually alive and getting good use (see LISP). Java would still live on in the background as something that powers the engines of the net on the server side, but it would not be the applet driving Java that was in our faces for the past 7 or so years.
Sure, you and I and all the other power users can do the things that appear simple to us, but the grandmoms and lusers of the world, which make a great majority of the user base, will not have the first clue about how to deal with this and will just use whatever is on their machine. No, you didn't need javac, but somewhere in there was a jar file or something else working at the strings, which won't be there anymore. We'll have a plethora of ways to set up Java which will settle into an inconvenient and somehow incompatible mess.
At that point you'll snap out of it and wonder what all the hue and cry about C# is from the management.
It's a legitimate concern that a lot of applications that are available on the client side will become unusable because no one can agree to continue something that has become a defacto standard. The disappearance of the Netscape web browser is going to hasten this, because while the web is not a windows desktop, as someone pointed out below, stats show that IE is the dominant browser, so much of the userbase is IE. The other largest portion is Netscape, and that vacuum will quickly be filled whether you choose to think that is an informed response or not. Whatever fills it will not be the same cross-platform tool that was there before, so things like Netscape Calendar Server, buggy as it may be, are out the window. Sure there's Mozilla, but it's too alpha for anyone to seriously think of putting in place at any corporation that might have standardized on Netscape. Everything else is just a wanna-be joke if you have any sense of what it takes to support a large company with these tools.
And PSI and UUNET were the biggies back in 1990, so its like hearing about an old friend suddenly leaving town, for those of us who were online back then.
Wow. Imagine that you could just take one of these things, let it interview you to collect real information, turn off the learning, and then let people use it to learn your knowledge. People could use that to give an interface with human-like interaction in order to distribute knowledge, yet free themselves up to do real advancing work instead of stopping in the road to educate. That just means that those who can't will no longer have something to do.
Seriously, add some attitude and you would have a perfect replacement for most support engineers.
As long as we can ultimately "pull the plug" when need be, AI is beneficial.
What gives us the right to unplug it once it is plugged in? In essence, it boils down to "because we can" which is no more than "might makes right" which then goes to justify anything that you can get away with, even if that means someone with more might opposing you. I agree with the "having children/trailer park" comment above. We're not mature enough to have children and that maturity cannot accurately be measured in years.
Maybe/. should maintain some sort of spider that crawls any links posted to it and caches just the first page in case the site goes down. For the majority of sites, that first page is all that's needed. Of course, people could also use the google cache, for those long term static pages. This SlashCache (TM) could take up some serious space, especially if some dope tried to post an article full of links to pr0n sites, so graphics could have to be sacrificed. Still, it would be very useful.
Hypocrisy. Do you avoid adversedly impacting the world all the time, or only when it's convenient?
That computer you're using is a major part of the power consumption problems in the world, especially if *you* are doing nothing useful with it. But, it's very convenient for you to be entertained by it while you have nothing else to do.
That breath you just took eradicated many bacteria, preventing an eternity's worth of offspring from being produced from that tree of life, but it was very convenient for you.
It is also very convenient to keep flying stinging inserts out of the house, sometimes by killing them. The point is, life is full of these contradictions at every level, necessary evils, and the sooner you realize it, the less cynical your life will be.
Closer to the point, have you stopped watching television or cancelled your cable contract (even to the point of possibly getting an early disconnect penalty), knowing that many of the channels on there are owned by movie companies? Have you stopped going to the movies, or renting movies? Have you burned your collection of old tapes or DVDs? Hey, some of those other products in your home might also be produced or licensed by those companies! Dig through everything you own to find out and at the point that you decide it's no longer worth doing is where you've defined your level of convenience. Pretty high horse you got there, parner.
I'm afraid we're going to see nothing better than the "holographics rights" theme we were treated to in the past couple of seasons of Voyager.
The "what constitutes life", "what has a right to freedom", "who are we to define" themes, which are not silly, but handled immaturely and thus done a disservice.
Folks, everyone knows the Australians can't go into space. The ship is just going to come flying right back at the thrower after traveling a few yards!
Many years ago, Digital did this with their Alphas when they first came out around 1990. They did everything they could to bring attention to these fast guys, including putting out a number of white papers detailing its architecture and core design. Somehow they still could not break the Intel barrier despite their speed.
They gave logins to anyone who asked for one in order to see what could be done with the systems. They were always overloaded and it seemed like there was great interest in the machines, but eventually $$$ and non-native Intel compatibility limited them. Good luck to IBM.
I think we're going to see a real shake out of these products, hitting a critical mass with the number of tapeless set-top video recorders. With the ecomomy in a slump and companies like Palm that can't sell off their toys, these guys aren't going to have as much success either. Replay, Tivo, UltimateTV, and now this...
Can they be like the Playstations and Nintendos that still sell for $299 after all these years, or will the Dreamcast out of existence?
And have they thought about how they're going to seal the controls to keep the vaseline from leaking into everything?
Seriously, I can just see the humans of the future as big blobs just laying in their Poetic Tech Chair twitching and jerking their way through life with attendant Aibos and Palm-creatures zipping around them. Actual contact won't be necessary as we can stop and smell the roses right on the information highway.
If I choose not to use that software, then it might as well not be there
Except that -- as others have mentioned -- you can't turn some of it (MSN Messenger) off, so they're using memory, etc. and opening possible security holes (*cough* IE *cough*).
Bull. I loaded MSN Messenger on my system, didn't want it, and took it out of the registry Run item so it no longer loads. The average user won't do this, but then the average user isn't using gobs of memory, and if they have it, they're not using it. I don't want it, so I don't use it and I actively seek out the thing that will be better. Others do,too.
Everyone knows the apps that will come with Windows XPwill be no better than the ones available now from MS. Everyone will just go and load mIRC instead of using Comic Chat.
No, they won't. The "average" computer user will use whatever comes pre-installed on the computer, if it's good enough. Just like with evolution, a program doesn't have to be the best to survive, it just has to be good enough...
How many people still use OE for newsreading? A lot... and the primary reason is that it's already installed, and it's good enough. Downloading and installing Agent (or whatever) is simply too much effort. (Not to mention you'll have to do it all again when Windows guts itself in six months...).
This is why people complain about MS having unfair advantage in the marketplace... MS doesn't have to compete on quality or price. If they write a new app and incorporate it into the OS, it's going to take over, regardless of how it compares to the competition.
So you're the only guy who knows about Downloads.com and Winfiles.com and all those others? I know plenty of people who download something because a friend told them it was better and they used that instead of the stock stuff. These are people who I honestly don't trust to run a file manager. Sounds like it's a problem for you, though. If Microsoft came out with a virus checker, do you think Norton and McAfee would lose sales? The Microsoft products would be polka dotted crap. MS includes a defrag program with Windows, but people seek out DiskKeeper because the MS product doesn't go far enough, and this is their own file system!
Besides, are you afraid that Microsoft might actually put out a product that is superior to others? I won't step 10 feet near Netscrape.
Slashdot Mirror
I will be surprised if this continues in StarOffice 6. Sun is not seeing benefits from the open source version, and in the current economy $$$ matters. With the current slap no the wrist Microsoft is about to get, they need to get into gear with their competition, because the half-heartedly lame attempt Netscape and Sun have perfomed so far just doesn't cut it. More than ever, things seem like they will polarize into MS vs Linux and everything in the middle will perform sickly.
StarOffice is currently free as in beer and Sun can change the price from $0.00 to $125.00 any time they want. Since they have made a big deal about people not wanting to upgrade to Office XP (me being one of them) and that recent story about the government ordering thousands of copies of StarOffice, my guess is that they'll be doing this to get $$$ off the popularity of it Real Soon Now (TM).
I think one of the previous posters will be right, though. Sun will probably make a premium version for pay which will probably include the XML compatibility, and a free one that is not quite as feature-rich.
For all their bashing of Microsoft, these guys are walking in Bill's path.
I think you mean the Blade 100, because the Blade 1000 is certainly a lot more than $1000 and is a lot higher spec than that IDE junk Ultra5/10. It is more of a successor to the Ultra 80.
Back when Eudora 3.0 had just come out, I had a filter that would take all mail not actually addressed to me and not to any lists I was on and would put it into a separate folder. Then, I would do a resend of all the spam to each address in the folder so that the autoresponders would all reply to each other. There were quite a few of these sites that seemed to shut down for a couple of days and quite a few nasty messages I got back.
I'm guessing that since I was sending mail pretending to be those senders I could have been considered to be illegally spamming under this law, even if I was targetting spammers. Who spams the spammers?
The only thing that will truely solve the SPAM problem are market forces. When people decide that having to relay spam is costing them more money than it would to fight said abuse of their systems, we will see unsolicted commercial email disappear pretty darn quick.
So long as the pipes are fat enough and getting fatter by the day, spam will never consume enough resources for the ISPs to tell them to bug off. After all, they're paying customers, too, and to them they're just another higher than average bandwidth consuming user. The only really good thing to do is voluntary blocking of SPAM, but this means having experts at places like MAPS and the now defunct ORBS do the checking for the multitude of users. While I certainly like using MAPS at my mail servers, I recall hearing many voices in /. say they didn't like the idea. And as those experts become bigger, they get more and more corporate looking and thus they would one day look too Orwellian for the /.ers.
So what we are left with is no ORBS and this law. Hmmm. Expensive and lengthy litigation...instant and automated blocking, litigation or blocking, litigation or blocking. Tough choice, but I think I'd rather have the automated form of protection. Thank goodness we still have MAPS. The arm of the law can no longer keep up with the fast daily pace of the Internet. Does any of this still constitute speedy trial anymore?
That's what I meant by it being COBOL-ized into the background. There are people still programming plenty of valid applications in languages that most think are dead/dying but are actually alive and getting good use (see LISP). Java would still live on in the background as something that powers the engines of the net on the server side, but it would not be the applet driving Java that was in our faces for the past 7 or so years.
Sure, you and I and all the other power users can do the things that appear simple to us, but the grandmoms and lusers of the world, which make a great majority of the user base, will not have the first clue about how to deal with this and will just use whatever is on their machine. No, you didn't need javac, but somewhere in there was a jar file or something else working at the strings, which won't be there anymore. We'll have a plethora of ways to set up Java which will settle into an inconvenient and somehow incompatible mess.
At that point you'll snap out of it and wonder what all the hue and cry about C# is from the management.
Who the hell modded this down to Troll?
It's a legitimate concern that a lot of applications that are available on the client side will become unusable because no one can agree to continue something that has become a defacto standard. The disappearance of the Netscape web browser is going to hasten this, because while the web is not a windows desktop, as someone pointed out below, stats show that IE is the dominant browser, so much of the userbase is IE. The other largest portion is Netscape, and that vacuum will quickly be filled whether you choose to think that is an informed response or not. Whatever fills it will not be the same cross-platform tool that was there before, so things like Netscape Calendar Server, buggy as it may be, are out the window. Sure there's Mozilla, but it's too alpha for anyone to seriously think of putting in place at any corporation that might have standardized on Netscape. Everything else is just a wanna-be joke if you have any sense of what it takes to support a large company with these tools.
Rant rant rant
And PSI and UUNET were the biggies back in 1990, so its like hearing about an old friend suddenly leaving town, for those of us who were online back then.
I think this is a link to what you are talking about...
The Pulling Report
Shuttlecraft. Too small.
Wow. Imagine that you could just take one of these things, let it interview you to collect real information, turn off the learning, and then let people use it to learn your knowledge. People could use that to give an interface with human-like interaction in order to distribute knowledge, yet free themselves up to do real advancing work instead of stopping in the road to educate. That just means that those who can't will no longer have something to do.
Seriously, add some attitude and you would have a perfect replacement for most support engineers.
As long as we can ultimately "pull the plug" when need be, AI is beneficial.
What gives us the right to unplug it once it is plugged in? In essence, it boils down to "because we can" which is no more than "might makes right" which then goes to justify anything that you can get away with, even if that means someone with more might opposing you. I agree with the "having children/trailer park" comment above. We're not mature enough to have children and that maturity cannot accurately be measured in years.
Maybe /. should maintain some sort of spider that crawls any links posted to it and caches just the first page in case the site goes down. For the majority of sites, that first page is all that's needed. Of course, people could also use the google cache, for those long term static pages. This SlashCache (TM) could take up some serious space, especially if some dope tried to post an article full of links to pr0n sites, so graphics could have to be sacrificed. Still, it would be very useful.
Hypocrisy. Do you avoid adversedly impacting the world all the time, or only when it's convenient?
That computer you're using is a major part of the power consumption problems in the world, especially if *you* are doing nothing useful with it. But, it's very convenient for you to be entertained by it while you have nothing else to do.
That breath you just took eradicated many bacteria, preventing an eternity's worth of offspring from being produced from that tree of life, but it was very convenient for you.
It is also very convenient to keep flying stinging inserts out of the house, sometimes by killing them. The point is, life is full of these contradictions at every level, necessary evils, and the sooner you realize it, the less cynical your life will be.
Closer to the point, have you stopped watching television or cancelled your cable contract (even to the point of possibly getting an early disconnect penalty), knowing that many of the channels on there are owned by movie companies? Have you stopped going to the movies, or renting movies? Have you burned your collection of old tapes or DVDs? Hey, some of those other products in your home might also be produced or licensed by those companies! Dig through everything you own to find out and at the point that you decide it's no longer worth doing is where you've defined your level of convenience. Pretty high horse you got there, parner.
I'm afraid we're going to see nothing better than the "holographics rights" theme we were treated to in the past couple of seasons of Voyager.
The "what constitutes life", "what has a right to freedom", "who are we to define" themes, which are not silly, but handled immaturely and thus done a disservice.
Question...
What does getting a story acccepted do for you?
Folks, everyone knows the Australians can't go into space. The ship is just going to come flying right back at the thrower after traveling a few yards!
Many years ago, Digital did this with their Alphas when they first came out around 1990. They did everything they could to bring attention to these fast guys, including putting out a number of white papers detailing its architecture and core design. Somehow they still could not break the Intel barrier despite their speed.
They gave logins to anyone who asked for one in order to see what could be done with the systems. They were always overloaded and it seemed like there was great interest in the machines, but eventually $$$ and non-native Intel compatibility limited them. Good luck to IBM.
I think we're going to see a real shake out of these products, hitting a critical mass with the number of tapeless set-top video recorders. With the ecomomy in a slump and companies like Palm that can't sell off their toys, these guys aren't going to have as much success either. Replay, Tivo, UltimateTV, and now this...
Can they be like the Playstations and Nintendos that still sell for $299 after all these years, or will the Dreamcast out of existence?
And have they thought about how they're going to seal the controls to keep the vaseline from leaking into everything?
Seriously, I can just see the humans of the future as big blobs just laying in their Poetic Tech Chair twitching and jerking their way through life with attendant Aibos and Palm-creatures zipping around them. Actual contact won't be necessary as we can stop and smell the roses right on the information highway.
So where do I get my MCSX for administration of an XBox?
So what virus checker do you recommend for Windows platforms? Besides abstinance, of course. =)
Bull. I loaded MSN Messenger on my system, didn't want it, and took it out of the registry Run item so it no longer loads. The average user won't do this, but then the average user isn't using gobs of memory, and if they have it, they're not using it. I don't want it, so I don't use it and I actively seek out the thing that will be better. Others do ,too.
So you're the only guy who knows about Downloads.com and Winfiles.com and all those others? I know plenty of people who download something because a friend told them it was better and they used that instead of the stock stuff. These are people who I honestly don't trust to run a file manager. Sounds like it's a problem for you, though. If Microsoft came out with a virus checker, do you think Norton and McAfee would lose sales? The Microsoft products would be polka dotted crap. MS includes a defrag program with Windows, but people seek out DiskKeeper because the MS product doesn't go far enough, and this is their own file system!
Besides, are you afraid that Microsoft might actually put out a product that is superior to others? I won't step 10 feet near Netscrape.