Which was worse? The fact that Microsoft askef for it to be removed or the fact that the UN happily agreed to it?
Really it seems a bit shallow to start speculating on what's happened here. Claiming that "The UN happily agreed to it" is synonymous to claiming that the "US government" happily agreed to every tiny thing promoted by any and every employee or official associated with it. Clearly Microsoft got their way, but it's unclear just how involved the UN as an entity actually was. It could just as easily have been an accidentally flawed process that would have been stopped if anyone further up had realised what was going on.
The UN is an organisation like any other -- it's made up of its members. Its primary function, above anything else, is to provide a structure so that countries can communicate and cooperate with each other. Things don't happen spontaneously to achieve this, though. They happen because its members make them happen.
If you or anyone else want to change how the UN deals with Microsoft, perhaps its time to rally your nation's government, as your most direct UN representative, to speak out against the influence that Microsoft appears to've had in this case and actually make a difference. Point out and make a big thing of the FSF's complaints.
Of course, if you're from the US, I doubt you're likely to get the US Government speaking out against Microsoft in any shape or form. Microsoft is a multi-billion dollar company that brings billions of dollars into the US economy every year, and consuming almost no limited resources to achieve this. If free software put and end to Microsoft, it would also take a noticible amount of money from the US economy. Personally I think that the real problem is just as much to do with the systems in the US that allow Microsoft to act the way it does in the first place.
Thanks for posting that. The UN certainly isn't perfect in a lot of ways, but it does a lot of things really well. Sometimes I think all of that gets hidden under arguments over things like the UN General Assembly, which does have a few problems but that's hardly surprising given its intended function.
A lot of social change can take place because old people (and more specifically, old people ideas) die.
Asimov wrote some really interesting science fiction along these lines, tied in with his various robot sagas. My memory's not too great, so someone might correct me if I'm too far off.
One of the underlying themes was the conflict between Spacers and Settlers, where the Spacers were those who'd taken off early with the technology (especially robots to look after them in every conceivable way), colonised a handful of worlds, but then become relatively stagnant. Longer lifespans and insulated lifestyles caused them to put a high value on life such that they simply failed to progress. It also meant that views and stereotypes in the Spacer society lingered for hundreds of years, because the people who held them didn't die off, and their reproduction rate fell through the floor.
The Settlers, meanwhile, who'd rejected certain technology (especially robotic) earlier on, never ended up being protected or insulated in the same way. They had shorter lifespans, particularly due to things like more average hygiene and disease, but as a civilisation they were much more progressive, to the point where they were overtaking the Spacers within a few hundred years.
$400,000,000 just to launch this thing into a geosynchronous transfer orbit (not counting construction costs). I assume the fuel to move it isn't included in the 20 ton estimate either (since it will burn off on the way) so that would need to be lifted as well.
To be fair, though, NASA spends (or used to spend) an average of $450,000,000 per Space Shuttle mission. If it were shown to be feasible and potentially useful, that sort of cost doesn't seem completely out of proportion. More expensive, certainly, but probably not by several orders of magnitude if it were done well.
People on the moon however I think is a much better idea as with a few basic supplies it could become self sufficiant what with all the free water and an ample back yard to stick solar pannels
Are you sure about "free water"? Last I checked, any significant amount of water on the Moon was still just a hypothesis. Apollo astronauts found none, the Lunar Prospector found none, and the best bet seems to be that it might exist in some of the shaded craters near the poles.
This is quite important, because transporting water to the Moon (from Earth at least) is likely to be very expensive. In the longer term, chances are it would have to be extracted from the Moon somehow if it's there, or obtainted from somewhere else.
What would a web designed by the World Intellectual Property Organisation or the Disney Corporation have looked like? It would have looked more like pay-television, or Minitel, the French computer network.
Perhaps as The Microsoft Network was originally supposed to be? Before everyone decided that they didn't care for it, that is.
For those who don't remember back to 1995, Microsoft had originally intended to make The Internet obsolete by leveraging its OS monopoly to steer everyone to the alternative network controlled and administered by Microsoft. In such a scenario, anyone who wanted to serve up content would have to deal with (and probably pay) Microsoft.
If it helps to know, there's a bug in bugzilla (look up #176958) that's being used to list all known exploits of the popup blocking. (It's set up to be blocked by all other bugs that list popup exploits.)
Some of them have been un-fixed for quite a while, unfortunately. If I were an annoying website admin who wanted to beat the popup blocker, I'd probably be routinely checking this bug for new exploits. I can't complain too much given that I'm not putting the time aside to fix them myself, I guess.
But that's just not what it's all about. Linux is a kernel, not an OS. The problem is the Linux OSes fragmentation. There is not one, but many Linuxes fighting for the crown, and this is weakening their common kernel: Linux.
I for one am glad that there are a variety of distros competing with each other. I much prefer it over Windows where there's a single monopolist provider who gets to dictate how long it'll be before I can have what features I want, if ever. Microsoft simply doesn't have any serious competition for the bulk of it's customers, and that's why Windows is often so stagnant in many places.
I think it'll be great if linux distro providers can agree on some standards where it makes sense, to make it easier to understand and migrate between distro's, but seriously hope that all the talk of "linux" "competing" with Windows never results in a lack of options, a lack of competition, and with only "good enough" features for 80% of people.
Linux has to made more useable "out of the box", expert users can always strip-down their install or use only certain tools or pick "expert" distros.
I think part of the issue is that many people -- both linux evangalists and those who criticise -- absolutely confuse the linux and open source concept with the distribution.
I use linux, but really I use Debian. Debian just happens to be build on the linux kernel and a collection of Open Source software and technology. A huge advantage of using Debian is that it's very compatible with a vast amount of software out there, including software that wasn't written specifically for Debain.
The same can and should be said for the likes of Red Hat, Suse, Ubantu, Slackware, and whatever other operating systems are out there. The distributions are competing with Windows. They're companies and organisations, which produce products, goods and services. Let Red Hat compete with Windows, or Ubantu can compete with Windows... if the people involved in those projects choose to direct them as such. Maybe one or two distros might even combine if they think it's going to be beneficial.
"Linux", however, is either an abstract entity under the power of nobody, or a kernel at best depending on how the term is used. To say that "linux" should be competing with Windows just doesn't make sense. For exactly the same reason, it makes no sense to state that "Linux" should consolidate and stop being fragmented. A distribution can consolidate all it likes, but thanks to the open source philosophy, more forks will always develop to cater for what other people actually want, rather than the boring homogeneous edition that's intended to be "good enough" for 80% of people.
After 8 years, it's ancient. Three year support is closer to the "standard" in the industry with 5 years being a good company/product to deal with.
I've just started work for a government agency (not US), where there's a legal requirement that all documents have to remain accessible for a minimum of 25 years. The solution to this appears to be to keep them stored in a central repository (we use WorkSite from Interwoven).
The problem I see with this, which I intend to comment on at an appropriate time, is that everything stored in the repository is stored as a Word document. Even if the documents are available in 25 years, we're still relying on Microsoft to keep its products backwardly compatible for that long. You're absolutely right that the industry moves quickly, but unfortunately that's not an acceptable answer for us with file formats.
25 years before today, there was no standard platform, Windows didn't exist, IBM had only recently hired Bill Gates and Paul Allen to create an operating system for their new design of PC, and VisiCalc and WordStar had only recently been released and were in the process of becoming relatively popular.
I have personal Microsoft documents that are only 12 years old (notably MS Works 2.0) that are impossible to open with any modern software. Especially as I don't run Windows any more (just as I didn't 25 years ago), I have no way of opening them short of scraping out the text strings. The format was closed in the first instance, and Microsoft decided to drop support. Relying on old software really isn't an option, because it won't be available in any supported form in the future. (If the software's available, supported, and not coded to expire, the platform and API's that it requires probably won't be.)
If we even occasionally had to open closed format documents from 25 years ago as a legal requirement on our modern Windows/Office platforms, we've be having an awful time. The only thing letting us off to date (in my organisation) is that we've only been keeping electronic documents since the late 1990's. Open formats are tremendously important, because at the very least, they're documented. There's no more relying on a closed source vendor to access your data.
I'm not sure that this will cut down on piracy, but it will certainly be interesting to watch what happens. This is one area where DRM would work very well. There are others, of course, but this one application is a good place for DRM and encryption etc.
The way I've read the article, I don't think that DRM has anything to do with their reasoning as to why this will cut down on piracy. For all we know from the article, they might not even be incorporating DRM in their digital copies.
The main problem seems to be that it simply takes so long to get celluloid copies rolled out to everywhere at the same time, and a large part of this is because the expense makes it difficult for smaller theatres to get movies quickly. People then buy from the pirates because the genuine copies aren't available.
It's similar to what happens in developed countries outside the US when the industry tries to hold up a movie or TV show's international release for anything from months to years until whatever overseas seasons they think will be most profitable. People ignore the industry and simply pirate copies from the US. (Hence the regionised DVD players, which have been an attempt by the MPAA to make it difficult or illegal for people to import and export movies between countries independently from the industry.)
The main difference seems to be that Bollywood isn't withholding movies intentionally --- it simply can't get them around everywhere quickly enough. Lower cost digital systems mean that Bollywood distributors can distribute more widely and more quickly to the much smaller population centres, meaning that people will have less incentive to pirate the movies.
You might be right, but I'm reasonably sure that IBM is pushing some kind of Linux initiative in New Zealand. One of my friends at uni (in NZ) ended up with an IBM job that was essentially Linux-centred. As far as I know, the job was a direct result of IBM's pushing of Linux -- whether he's providing Linux services or just working in-house, I'm not sure.
The punch line? He sent it as an attachment, in.DOC format.
This probably isn't very relevant -- I presume what you mean is that he sent it as a Microsoft Word document. Back in 1994 I remember that the.DOC format was more well known for being plain ASCII text --- it was a common extension for electronic software user manuals everywhere.
Somewhere along the line, Microsoft decided to make it the default extension for Microsoft Word. I'm not sure if it was used in Word for DOS, but Word for Windows certainly became much more popular than the DOS one had ever been for all sorts of reasons. One of them was perhaps that shortly after Word for Windows was released, wherever it was installed, people who double-clicked on a.doc file in Windows would then be opening it on Word... never mind that it was plain ASCII text.
The authors gripes about not being able to see the code in it's entirety are complete BS. All you have to do is expand the conveniently hidden setup and autogenerated code and you can read to your hearts content.
I used to hate auto-generated code, but I don't hate it as much with Visual Studio. (Disclaimer: My experience with Visual Studio is restricted to some reasonably specific uses of it, so it might not apply for everyone.)
The reason I hated generated code was because it wasn't complete. A wizard of some sort would generate between hundreds of thousands of lines of code to get a project started, after which you'd proceed to fill in the gaps.
This was perfectly fine until you'd realise that you wanted to change something... which would require either starting a new project from scratch, or diving into the generated code and spending a long time figuring out what's going on. At this point, there's hardly a point in having had it generated in the first place.
What Visual Studio tends to do, though, is keep links between the generated code and the interface used to generate so you can continue to modify anything through the same interface that was used to create it. If you use the design view of a form to add components, you'll be able to continue to use the design view to modify those components. There's no need to understand the code used to build them, because the interface through which they were created is frequently rich enough to do everything to them that's necessary.
I guess I don't mind Visual Studio generating and hiding code, simply because it does such a great job of making sure that if I decide to go down that route, I can be confident that I'll never have to read or understand it in the future.
Just remember that the US of A is THE number one power on this planet and the implications of that. No, if we go over to the Dark Side I can personally promise everyone that they won't be worrying about what we order ICANN to do to the root name servers; no you guys will be far too busy cowering in terror from our war machine.
It's not war or invasion that other nations are likely to be concerned about. Blowing things up is only the final option of a long chain of ways the USA can influence other nations... and the USA is already well known for using it's influence in one area to force other governments to do things they don't want to do in other areas.
eg. The Australian government recently sent troops to Iraq not because it believed in supporting the war, or because most Australians particularly believed in supporting the war. It sent troops primarily because the United States Federal Government informed it that the chances of a Free Trade deal with the biggest economy in the world would go through the floor if it didn't. This action would hurt the US a tiny bit and it hurts Australia a lot. The economic implications of this being what they were, the Australian government decided to sell themselves out.
If the US decides to attack another country, cutting off DNS will probably only cause a minor effect compared with everything else going on. In peace time, though, it's very influential. Most developed countries rely heavily on the Internet, and DNS is an integral part of it. The USA will obviously try to protect what control it presently has. It has no down-side for the US (apart from continued bad publicity), and all disadvantages are shouldered by other nations. That doesn't automatically make it a fair arrangement, any more than (for instance) the US's declaration that it doesn't recognise other countries' claims on Antarctica but reserves the rights to make and defend its own claims.
It shouldn't be a surprise that many governments don't like seeing the USA in control of yet another part of their economy and wellbeing. The USA's economic influence over other nations means that the world has overblown drug legislation, the world has overblown copyright legislation, the world has all sorts of idiotic laws, and all because it suits the USA. It's not really a wonder that the world wants to separate its economic reliance on the USA as much as possible.
ISO 8601 is more consistent (to me at least, biggest to smallest). It also seems that it would be easier to sort.
I usually use largest ot smallest when I'm writing a date that'll need to be sorted for exactly this reason. It slots into an alphanumeric sorting system much more easily. To be honest, though, I much prefer smallest to largest when I'm writing and reading dates in day-to-day life.
Stuff I do tends to fluctuate much more on a day and month level within the groups that I deal with it, so it makes perfect sense to have the most commonly changing parts of the date given at the beginning. If the year was first, I'd forever be locating the month and day in the middle, and that takes longer.
The standard US system of mm-dd-yyyy just seems strange to me. It doesn't seem to make sense, and I don't use it unless I'm forced to. (eg. Some software requiring it as an entry format.)
And by keeping the software expensive you drain resources from training.
On the other hand, you also redirect resources straight back to the USA... which is why there's (unfortunately) a substantial incentive for the US government, in particular, to sponsor Microsoft Software, and other US companies, for aid. It means that hundreds of millions of dollars from the aid budget comes straight back again. As the price of software goes up, the proportion of the aid money that comes back also rises.
There isn't much incentive for malicious people to crash people's browsers.
While we're discussing it, can anyone point me a way to get a browser (notably IE and possibly other browsers) out of the following?
<script>
<!--
while(1) {
alert('Try to close this window now.');
}
-->
</script>
I've occasionally found myself getting my browser in an unbreakable loop in the past when coding Javascript, and have had to shut down the process and restart.
I'm not sure what part of the U.N. is pitiful. The General Assembly might appear quite crippled, but that's the part of the U.N. that's there to provide a forum for countries to argue with each other. Other than the General Assembly, The U.N. does have a very good record for running large international organisations, many of which are run efficiently enough that most people don't hear about them.
I, for one, would like to see more detail about the proposal of how the U.N. plans to do it. Considering the track record of the US Federal Government, it honestly wouldn't surprise me if the UN could do a better job.
How can an XML file format be incompatible with the GPL?
The reasoning might be tied up with patents in one way or another, as a couple of other responses to your post have suggested.
I'm not sure if it'd be too far off to just assume that Microsoft's spreading more FUD, though. Certain people and departments within Microsoft have shown again and again that they're happy to apply Microsoft's own skewed interpretation of the GPL when it suits them... which essentially amounts to "Use GPL'd software and it'll virally affect the licenses on all of your own software, crippling your business."
I could go off on how a word processor/presentation program really should have no underlying need to address more than 2GB of memory, but I'll leave that for another time...
As someone else pointed out, I think it's more about cleanly compiling on 64-bit systems than about accessing more memory. That aside, though, what about the following?
Very large spreadsheets. It wouldn't be common, but there could certainly be times when someone wants to store large grids of numbers in big spreadsheets.
Third party extensions. This is quite specialist, but people do tend to do all sorts of specialist things when writing third party extensions. Preventing 64-bit memory access seems like just another thing that'd cause problems for someone trying to write them.
Asked why, I answered, "Because the music publishers do not have any media costs other than bandwidth and royalties. Excluding the royalties (which are a constant), bandwidth is MUCH cheaper than jewel cases, CD, physical distribution costs (trucking of the CDs, etc...) and the artwork."
On the other hand (and I'm not at all trying to support the music cartel when I say this), consider what might happen if online music was cheap:
People would buy music online much more frequently.
Less people would buy CD's and other tangible media.
Production of CD's would become infeasible (as not enough people buy them).
Music stores most go out of business, or switch to some other product.
People stop thinking of music as a tangible product.
Because tangible media is no longer required to maintain attention and imply added value, the barrier to entry for the industry drops substantially.
New, non-cartel music providers are born, licensing music in non-tangible media that appears to have as much value as the status quo. After all, radio plays for some music aside, what's so different about the bulk of popular music except that it can also be bought in stores on CD's?
The music industry can no longer be a price-fixing cartel, because it's suddenly undercut by genuine competition.
Existing industry members have to radically change their business model to something much less profitable, or go out of business.
What it comes down to is that the existence of online distribution is a serious threat to the status quo of the music industry. The sooner people get used to using it, the sooner people will realise that they don't necessarily need big media companies for "good" music.
It's in the interests of the existing industry to do as much as possible to discourage people from taking advantage of online distribution. They're not just greedy because they want more money -- they're concerned they'll lose people's loyalty of people are allowed to see the alternatives.
What we're seeing in the real world isn't even perfect capitalism, it's a mixture of capitalist and socialist ideas.
I would have thought that by the same token, it woundn't be too difficult to claim that what we've seen so far in the real world hasn't been perfect communism, either. It's been a mixture of communism and dictatorships.
I like LaTeX, but you know the default presentation in the standard document classes was only meant to be a quick demo, right? It was assumed that serious writers/publications would all create their own classes using sensible typesetting preferences.
I really like the idea behind LaTeX -- I've used it for about 5 years now (mostly academically), but I've always had problems when it's come to writing my own classes and packages.
I've found LaTeX is fine to a certain point, but I've also found that as soon as it comes to writing any sort of presentation code, the documentation becomes a lot harder to find and usefully comprehend. I've also had a lot of problems figuring out TeX and LaTeX as languages at all.
There seems to be so much potential for conflict between packages, and the whole thing feels quite flakey. Even in standardly-provided classes, I've lost count of the number of times where I've read things like "it's okay to do this, but make sure you don't do it at the same time as that, or you'll have problems". They're numerous things like not being able to use a table recursively, or having a page environment act like a page 90% of the time, but inexplicably break with the other 10%. Maybe it's something like being able to get the width of object A and being able to set the width of cell B, but not being able to insert the result of one into the parameter for the other.
The need to compile something two, three or four times just to make sure references are all up-to-date seems a little unnecesary and overly-complex in today's world. It might help for compiling large documents without much memory, but in today's world it seems a bit awkward when weighing it against the possibility of making a compilation mistake. (Okay, I use a Makefile for my compiles, but I still think it's something the compiler should really be doing itself.)
For anything beyond basic writing (which to be fair is often more than enough), the language is full of exceptions and inconsistencies. I've always found that to be quite frustrating. I'm sure that part or all of it might be because I've missed some fundamental points of the language, but I've not yet been able to identify what they actually are.
I do like the concept behind LaTeX. I realise it's a type-setting language, and that puts certain restrictions on it. It's just that when using it, I've often felt like I'm dealing with a language that was built on some dated 1970's programming concepts and restrictions, and has never seriously improved over all this time. Even though it's probably not as powerful, I find it much more convenient (and enjoyable) to just mark up things I write in some basic HTML, which I'm confident will work much more consistently if I try to do anything non-trivial.
Heh, we (programmers) are often told (by our usability groups) that the direction we need to go in is to first do what is familiar to the user. And so we must copy MS first, then innovate second.
Eh? What kind of usability groups do you listen to? (I'm not familiar with the KDE ones.) I'm not a fully qualified expert on every aspect of HCI, but I've done a reasonable amount of usability work (both academic and industry), and my personal view on this is that Microsoft has essentially just screwed us over. There's no ideal solution to this problem, but it's fair enough to say that there are a lot of things about MS Windows that are really bad.
It depends what your usability goals are, I guess, whether it's to satisfy people in the short term (but not necessarily "help" them), or to risk giving people something that's too unfamiliar for them to want to even try it. It sounds as if your usability groups are going for the marketing approach.
Slashdot Mirror
Really it seems a bit shallow to start speculating on what's happened here. Claiming that "The UN happily agreed to it" is synonymous to claiming that the "US government" happily agreed to every tiny thing promoted by any and every employee or official associated with it. Clearly Microsoft got their way, but it's unclear just how involved the UN as an entity actually was. It could just as easily have been an accidentally flawed process that would have been stopped if anyone further up had realised what was going on.
The UN is an organisation like any other -- it's made up of its members. Its primary function, above anything else, is to provide a structure so that countries can communicate and cooperate with each other. Things don't happen spontaneously to achieve this, though. They happen because its members make them happen.
If you or anyone else want to change how the UN deals with Microsoft, perhaps its time to rally your nation's government, as your most direct UN representative, to speak out against the influence that Microsoft appears to've had in this case and actually make a difference. Point out and make a big thing of the FSF's complaints.
Of course, if you're from the US, I doubt you're likely to get the US Government speaking out against Microsoft in any shape or form. Microsoft is a multi-billion dollar company that brings billions of dollars into the US economy every year, and consuming almost no limited resources to achieve this. If free software put and end to Microsoft, it would also take a noticible amount of money from the US economy. Personally I think that the real problem is just as much to do with the systems in the US that allow Microsoft to act the way it does in the first place.
Thanks for posting that. The UN certainly isn't perfect in a lot of ways, but it does a lot of things really well. Sometimes I think all of that gets hidden under arguments over things like the UN General Assembly, which does have a few problems but that's hardly surprising given its intended function.
Asimov wrote some really interesting science fiction along these lines, tied in with his various robot sagas. My memory's not too great, so someone might correct me if I'm too far off.
One of the underlying themes was the conflict between Spacers and Settlers, where the Spacers were those who'd taken off early with the technology (especially robots to look after them in every conceivable way), colonised a handful of worlds, but then become relatively stagnant. Longer lifespans and insulated lifestyles caused them to put a high value on life such that they simply failed to progress. It also meant that views and stereotypes in the Spacer society lingered for hundreds of years, because the people who held them didn't die off, and their reproduction rate fell through the floor.
The Settlers, meanwhile, who'd rejected certain technology (especially robotic) earlier on, never ended up being protected or insulated in the same way. They had shorter lifespans, particularly due to things like more average hygiene and disease, but as a civilisation they were much more progressive, to the point where they were overtaking the Spacers within a few hundred years.
To be fair, though, NASA spends (or used to spend) an average of $450,000,000 per Space Shuttle mission. If it were shown to be feasible and potentially useful, that sort of cost doesn't seem completely out of proportion. More expensive, certainly, but probably not by several orders of magnitude if it were done well.
Are you sure about "free water"? Last I checked, any significant amount of water on the Moon was still just a hypothesis. Apollo astronauts found none, the Lunar Prospector found none, and the best bet seems to be that it might exist in some of the shaded craters near the poles.
This is quite important, because transporting water to the Moon (from Earth at least) is likely to be very expensive. In the longer term, chances are it would have to be extracted from the Moon somehow if it's there, or obtainted from somewhere else.
Perhaps as The Microsoft Network was originally supposed to be? Before everyone decided that they didn't care for it, that is.
For those who don't remember back to 1995, Microsoft had originally intended to make The Internet obsolete by leveraging its OS monopoly to steer everyone to the alternative network controlled and administered by Microsoft. In such a scenario, anyone who wanted to serve up content would have to deal with (and probably pay) Microsoft.
If it helps to know, there's a bug in bugzilla (look up #176958) that's being used to list all known exploits of the popup blocking. (It's set up to be blocked by all other bugs that list popup exploits.)
Some of them have been un-fixed for quite a while, unfortunately. If I were an annoying website admin who wanted to beat the popup blocker, I'd probably be routinely checking this bug for new exploits. I can't complain too much given that I'm not putting the time aside to fix them myself, I guess.
I for one am glad that there are a variety of distros competing with each other. I much prefer it over Windows where there's a single monopolist provider who gets to dictate how long it'll be before I can have what features I want, if ever. Microsoft simply doesn't have any serious competition for the bulk of it's customers, and that's why Windows is often so stagnant in many places.
I think it'll be great if linux distro providers can agree on some standards where it makes sense, to make it easier to understand and migrate between distro's, but seriously hope that all the talk of "linux" "competing" with Windows never results in a lack of options, a lack of competition, and with only "good enough" features for 80% of people.
I think part of the issue is that many people -- both linux evangalists and those who criticise -- absolutely confuse the linux and open source concept with the distribution.
I use linux, but really I use Debian. Debian just happens to be build on the linux kernel and a collection of Open Source software and technology. A huge advantage of using Debian is that it's very compatible with a vast amount of software out there, including software that wasn't written specifically for Debain.
The same can and should be said for the likes of Red Hat, Suse, Ubantu, Slackware, and whatever other operating systems are out there. The distributions are competing with Windows. They're companies and organisations, which produce products, goods and services. Let Red Hat compete with Windows, or Ubantu can compete with Windows... if the people involved in those projects choose to direct them as such. Maybe one or two distros might even combine if they think it's going to be beneficial.
"Linux", however, is either an abstract entity under the power of nobody, or a kernel at best depending on how the term is used. To say that "linux" should be competing with Windows just doesn't make sense. For exactly the same reason, it makes no sense to state that "Linux" should consolidate and stop being fragmented. A distribution can consolidate all it likes, but thanks to the open source philosophy, more forks will always develop to cater for what other people actually want, rather than the boring homogeneous edition that's intended to be "good enough" for 80% of people.
I've just started work for a government agency (not US), where there's a legal requirement that all documents have to remain accessible for a minimum of 25 years. The solution to this appears to be to keep them stored in a central repository (we use WorkSite from Interwoven).
The problem I see with this, which I intend to comment on at an appropriate time, is that everything stored in the repository is stored as a Word document. Even if the documents are available in 25 years, we're still relying on Microsoft to keep its products backwardly compatible for that long. You're absolutely right that the industry moves quickly, but unfortunately that's not an acceptable answer for us with file formats.
25 years before today, there was no standard platform, Windows didn't exist, IBM had only recently hired Bill Gates and Paul Allen to create an operating system for their new design of PC, and VisiCalc and WordStar had only recently been released and were in the process of becoming relatively popular.
I have personal Microsoft documents that are only 12 years old (notably MS Works 2.0) that are impossible to open with any modern software. Especially as I don't run Windows any more (just as I didn't 25 years ago), I have no way of opening them short of scraping out the text strings. The format was closed in the first instance, and Microsoft decided to drop support. Relying on old software really isn't an option, because it won't be available in any supported form in the future. (If the software's available, supported, and not coded to expire, the platform and API's that it requires probably won't be.)
If we even occasionally had to open closed format documents from 25 years ago as a legal requirement on our modern Windows/Office platforms, we've be having an awful time. The only thing letting us off to date (in my organisation) is that we've only been keeping electronic documents since the late 1990's. Open formats are tremendously important, because at the very least, they're documented. There's no more relying on a closed source vendor to access your data.
The way I've read the article, I don't think that DRM has anything to do with their reasoning as to why this will cut down on piracy. For all we know from the article, they might not even be incorporating DRM in their digital copies.
The main problem seems to be that it simply takes so long to get celluloid copies rolled out to everywhere at the same time, and a large part of this is because the expense makes it difficult for smaller theatres to get movies quickly. People then buy from the pirates because the genuine copies aren't available.
It's similar to what happens in developed countries outside the US when the industry tries to hold up a movie or TV show's international release for anything from months to years until whatever overseas seasons they think will be most profitable. People ignore the industry and simply pirate copies from the US. (Hence the regionised DVD players, which have been an attempt by the MPAA to make it difficult or illegal for people to import and export movies between countries independently from the industry.)
The main difference seems to be that Bollywood isn't withholding movies intentionally --- it simply can't get them around everywhere quickly enough. Lower cost digital systems mean that Bollywood distributors can distribute more widely and more quickly to the much smaller population centres, meaning that people will have less incentive to pirate the movies.
You might be right, but I'm reasonably sure that IBM is pushing some kind of Linux initiative in New Zealand. One of my friends at uni (in NZ) ended up with an IBM job that was essentially Linux-centred. As far as I know, the job was a direct result of IBM's pushing of Linux -- whether he's providing Linux services or just working in-house, I'm not sure.
This probably isn't very relevant -- I presume what you mean is that he sent it as a Microsoft Word document. Back in 1994 I remember that the .DOC format was more well known for being plain ASCII text --- it was a common extension for electronic software user manuals everywhere.
Somewhere along the line, Microsoft decided to make it the default extension for Microsoft Word. I'm not sure if it was used in Word for DOS, but Word for Windows certainly became much more popular than the DOS one had ever been for all sorts of reasons. One of them was perhaps that shortly after Word for Windows was released, wherever it was installed, people who double-clicked on a .doc file in Windows would then be opening it on Word... never mind that it was plain ASCII text.
I used to hate auto-generated code, but I don't hate it as much with Visual Studio. (Disclaimer: My experience with Visual Studio is restricted to some reasonably specific uses of it, so it might not apply for everyone.)
The reason I hated generated code was because it wasn't complete. A wizard of some sort would generate between hundreds of thousands of lines of code to get a project started, after which you'd proceed to fill in the gaps.
This was perfectly fine until you'd realise that you wanted to change something... which would require either starting a new project from scratch, or diving into the generated code and spending a long time figuring out what's going on. At this point, there's hardly a point in having had it generated in the first place.
What Visual Studio tends to do, though, is keep links between the generated code and the interface used to generate so you can continue to modify anything through the same interface that was used to create it. If you use the design view of a form to add components, you'll be able to continue to use the design view to modify those components. There's no need to understand the code used to build them, because the interface through which they were created is frequently rich enough to do everything to them that's necessary.
I guess I don't mind Visual Studio generating and hiding code, simply because it does such a great job of making sure that if I decide to go down that route, I can be confident that I'll never have to read or understand it in the future.
It's not war or invasion that other nations are likely to be concerned about. Blowing things up is only the final option of a long chain of ways the USA can influence other nations... and the USA is already well known for using it's influence in one area to force other governments to do things they don't want to do in other areas.
eg. The Australian government recently sent troops to Iraq not because it believed in supporting the war, or because most Australians particularly believed in supporting the war. It sent troops primarily because the United States Federal Government informed it that the chances of a Free Trade deal with the biggest economy in the world would go through the floor if it didn't. This action would hurt the US a tiny bit and it hurts Australia a lot. The economic implications of this being what they were, the Australian government decided to sell themselves out.
If the US decides to attack another country, cutting off DNS will probably only cause a minor effect compared with everything else going on. In peace time, though, it's very influential. Most developed countries rely heavily on the Internet, and DNS is an integral part of it. The USA will obviously try to protect what control it presently has. It has no down-side for the US (apart from continued bad publicity), and all disadvantages are shouldered by other nations. That doesn't automatically make it a fair arrangement, any more than (for instance) the US's declaration that it doesn't recognise other countries' claims on Antarctica but reserves the rights to make and defend its own claims.
It shouldn't be a surprise that many governments don't like seeing the USA in control of yet another part of their economy and wellbeing. The USA's economic influence over other nations means that the world has overblown drug legislation, the world has overblown copyright legislation, the world has all sorts of idiotic laws, and all because it suits the USA. It's not really a wonder that the world wants to separate its economic reliance on the USA as much as possible.
I usually use largest ot smallest when I'm writing a date that'll need to be sorted for exactly this reason. It slots into an alphanumeric sorting system much more easily. To be honest, though, I much prefer smallest to largest when I'm writing and reading dates in day-to-day life.
Stuff I do tends to fluctuate much more on a day and month level within the groups that I deal with it, so it makes perfect sense to have the most commonly changing parts of the date given at the beginning. If the year was first, I'd forever be locating the month and day in the middle, and that takes longer.
The standard US system of mm-dd-yyyy just seems strange to me. It doesn't seem to make sense, and I don't use it unless I'm forced to. (eg. Some software requiring it as an entry format.)
On the other hand, you also redirect resources straight back to the USA... which is why there's (unfortunately) a substantial incentive for the US government, in particular, to sponsor Microsoft Software, and other US companies, for aid. It means that hundreds of millions of dollars from the aid budget comes straight back again. As the price of software goes up, the proportion of the aid money that comes back also rises.
While we're discussing it, can anyone point me a way to get a browser (notably IE and possibly other browsers) out of the following?
<script><!--
while(1) {
alert('Try to close this window now.');
}
-->
</script>
I've occasionally found myself getting my browser in an unbreakable loop in the past when coding Javascript, and have had to shut down the process and restart.
I'm not sure what part of the U.N. is pitiful. The General Assembly might appear quite crippled, but that's the part of the U.N. that's there to provide a forum for countries to argue with each other. Other than the General Assembly, The U.N. does have a very good record for running large international organisations, many of which are run efficiently enough that most people don't hear about them.
I, for one, would like to see more detail about the proposal of how the U.N. plans to do it. Considering the track record of the US Federal Government, it honestly wouldn't surprise me if the UN could do a better job.
The reasoning might be tied up with patents in one way or another, as a couple of other responses to your post have suggested.
I'm not sure if it'd be too far off to just assume that Microsoft's spreading more FUD, though. Certain people and departments within Microsoft have shown again and again that they're happy to apply Microsoft's own skewed interpretation of the GPL when it suits them... which essentially amounts to "Use GPL'd software and it'll virally affect the licenses on all of your own software, crippling your business."
As someone else pointed out, I think it's more about cleanly compiling on 64-bit systems than about accessing more memory. That aside, though, what about the following?
On the other hand (and I'm not at all trying to support the music cartel when I say this), consider what might happen if online music was cheap:
What it comes down to is that the existence of online distribution is a serious threat to the status quo of the music industry. The sooner people get used to using it, the sooner people will realise that they don't necessarily need big media companies for "good" music.
It's in the interests of the existing industry to do as much as possible to discourage people from taking advantage of online distribution. They're not just greedy because they want more money -- they're concerned they'll lose people's loyalty of people are allowed to see the alternatives.
I would have thought that by the same token, it woundn't be too difficult to claim that what we've seen so far in the real world hasn't been perfect communism, either. It's been a mixture of communism and dictatorships.
I really like the idea behind LaTeX -- I've used it for about 5 years now (mostly academically), but I've always had problems when it's come to writing my own classes and packages.
I've found LaTeX is fine to a certain point, but I've also found that as soon as it comes to writing any sort of presentation code, the documentation becomes a lot harder to find and usefully comprehend. I've also had a lot of problems figuring out TeX and LaTeX as languages at all.
There seems to be so much potential for conflict between packages, and the whole thing feels quite flakey. Even in standardly-provided classes, I've lost count of the number of times where I've read things like "it's okay to do this, but make sure you don't do it at the same time as that, or you'll have problems". They're numerous things like not being able to use a table recursively, or having a page environment act like a page 90% of the time, but inexplicably break with the other 10%. Maybe it's something like being able to get the width of object A and being able to set the width of cell B, but not being able to insert the result of one into the parameter for the other.
The need to compile something two, three or four times just to make sure references are all up-to-date seems a little unnecesary and overly-complex in today's world. It might help for compiling large documents without much memory, but in today's world it seems a bit awkward when weighing it against the possibility of making a compilation mistake. (Okay, I use a Makefile for my compiles, but I still think it's something the compiler should really be doing itself.)
For anything beyond basic writing (which to be fair is often more than enough), the language is full of exceptions and inconsistencies. I've always found that to be quite frustrating. I'm sure that part or all of it might be because I've missed some fundamental points of the language, but I've not yet been able to identify what they actually are.
I do like the concept behind LaTeX. I realise it's a type-setting language, and that puts certain restrictions on it. It's just that when using it, I've often felt like I'm dealing with a language that was built on some dated 1970's programming concepts and restrictions, and has never seriously improved over all this time. Even though it's probably not as powerful, I find it much more convenient (and enjoyable) to just mark up things I write in some basic HTML, which I'm confident will work much more consistently if I try to do anything non-trivial.
Eh? What kind of usability groups do you listen to? (I'm not familiar with the KDE ones.) I'm not a fully qualified expert on every aspect of HCI, but I've done a reasonable amount of usability work (both academic and industry), and my personal view on this is that Microsoft has essentially just screwed us over. There's no ideal solution to this problem, but it's fair enough to say that there are a lot of things about MS Windows that are really bad.
It depends what your usability goals are, I guess, whether it's to satisfy people in the short term (but not necessarily "help" them), or to risk giving people something that's too unfamiliar for them to want to even try it. It sounds as if your usability groups are going for the marketing approach.