More than that. There was even a movie made about it that was quite generous to his own point of view, and arguably even villified the editor who kicked him out for being unethical.
Yeah, it sounds a bit as I thought it might be. I guess if the volunteers stepping forward happen to be more familiar with Windows, then that's often what schools will be more likely to end up with.
I know schools tend to teach things, but especially around younger children I would have thought that they'd be much better at teaching things like maths and reading and so on, which teachers are trained to teach. It's a point for some cases, though.
The report may well be perfectly valid, but I'm a little suspicious of it without further information, if only because the main cost normally hyped for Open Source Software tends to be the training cost. (I'll welcome being corrected.) From the article:
The association analysed costs at 33 schools which use paid-for software, and compared them with 15 which have pioneered the use of free programs, known as open source, and the pared-down hardware to run them.
It's difficult to judge this because the report hasn't been released and the article isn't very specific. I'd be interested, however, to know what kinds of prior skills the people at the 15 OSS schools had before they began, versus those at the 33 Microsoft schools. For all we know from the article, these 15 schools had the only 15 staff who are at all familiar with open source software in the entire UK education system. This is unlikely, but my intended point is that the actual cost could be dependent on what skills are available to the school within their existing staff.
If the IT staff at the OSS schools were already confident with installing, configuring and maintaining OSS software, it may be that it was no problem and they could have the low-cost benefits of free software. For all we know, however, the staff at the Microsoft schools might have been regular teachers with more important teaching responsibilities than how to administer the computers. Using Microsoft software would clearly cost more, but what matters is how it'd compare with training all the necessary staff to use OSS.
Staff at Microsoft schools may have had little or no OSS experience, and almost no hope of successfully setting up or administering an open source system without some serious help from an expert. This would be compared with plugging in a pre-installed Microsoft PC similar to their home PC, and running a few setup programs for various educational software, that is.
What's the current status of random people being able to randomly install and use open source software in useful ways? Without having had to go through an installation from that point of view for some time, it's hard for me to know.
Anyway, this isn't to say that the OSS installation and configuration issues couldn't be bypassed in some other way that might still work out to be cheaper. Perhaps it's still not too expensive to simply train people. Alternatively, depending on how serious the curriculum was, an education department might offer a service to configure computers for schools, and perhaps even administer them remotely.
I have trouble understanding why companies like Symantec are treated with so much authority by various media as security experts. Whether you know about computer security or not, Symantec clearly have a solid commercial interest in making people feel as paranoid as possible about using any domain in which Symantec might be able to sell them something. Simply knowing that should ring some alarm bells for any respectable journalist.
Symantec, as with several other similar companies, have latched on big time to patching over other people's shoddy security practices to the point where the entire purpose of their business is to provide temporary fixes for someone else's recurring mistakes. (Mostly Microsoft, in this case.) If Microsoft decided to make Windows more secure in certain places and thus make less mistakes, as they have been doing recently, the whole business model of security companies becomes much more flakey. It says something about the improvements that Microsoft is making when you start to see these companies branch out by announcing that other platforms (eg. Mac, cellphones, etc) might have some "shocking" security holes that (surprise surprise) could be fixed by using their products.
I think it's great that former virus scanning companies have decided to re-identify themselves as "security" companies, because it implies that they don't see their future in the potentially obsolete dead-end trade of scanning people's disks and incoming emails for viruses. It's silly, however, to take a lot of their press releases factually and seriously when they're "coincidentally" making their products appear more useful than they might actually be.
Symantec can provide all the security products that it likes, for as long as there's a demand for them. I don't doubt that its products are useful in many situations, but I'd much rather get risk assessment information from independent security experts. The laziness of many journalists would be astounding if it wasn't such a common thing -- they're just being mouthpieces for the corporations.
Anyway, it's nice to see Symantec's claims actually being disputed, although it's worth noting that the organisation disputing it clearly has its own commercial interests in reassuring people that phones are safe.
This "study" really, is very unscientific and somewhat disturbing to a statistian like me.
I don't disagree. To its credit, however:
The article never claims to be a "study". It claims to be a survey, which is essentially what it is even if it's not well conducted.
The article is completely up-front about stating that the results should be taken with a grain of salt. The concerns are stated very clearly in the second paragraph of the article before any actual data is given, and are quite strongly repeated again, at the end. The text goes as far as asking readers for feedback about the survey's accuracy in the forum.
I think the greater danger is when data, such as this, gets picked up by the media in ways that are completely out of context. Most responsible people who I know are very cautious about stating limitations with data that they're presenting. That aside, I've repeatedly witnessed the very same people being cited out of context by overzealous and lazy media who want an attention-grabbing headline, and pick out whatever words or data that matches the story they've decided to tell.
If anyone's to blame for anything here, it would be the slashdot editors for presenting it as if it had some kind of authority. Even then, though, following the link from slashdot to the actual survey makes it pretty obvious... which is something that a lot of journalists in the real world won't even bother to provide.
A text interface is the WORST interface to give somebody who's never used the system. If a GUI is designed well, you can tell a user what their goal is and they'll work it otu. With a text UI, the user will fly over to Google.
Doesn't Google already have a text UI? That is, between all of the graphical white space around the sides of where the user actually types the text explaining what they want.
I would have classified the Google interface as a very well designed text interface. Consequently, I'm not sure if it's worth ruling out text UI's as a rule, simply because most of those that currently exist are expert ones and probably aren't suited to a beginner.
If you could sit a new user in front of a computer and say to them "type what you want", and it worked correctly, it would be one of the most straightforward interfaces for many people to understand. Coincidentally, this is almost exactly what Google aims to do, and their technology for doing it is pretty good.
What plan do you have? Text Messaging always costs a lot more than talking. Not to mention many plans have free weekend talking where as the text message will still cost way too much for using the exact same technology that simply has a branded name to trick consumers into paying more.
I'm in New Zealand and I don't use my phone much, so it suits me to be on a prepay plan. From what I understand, NZ has one of the most expensive mobile phone industries in the world. (Perhaps it's lack of competition, since there's only Vodafone and Telecom competing.)
Text is nearly always cheaper here than voice, especially on prepay plans. At least on my plan, though, there's something similar to a prisoner's dilemma going on with it.
On off-peak rates, for instance, I have an option of calling someone for a minute (49 cents minimum), or sending a text message (20 cents). In the latter case, it's more likely that I'll send a couple, but it's still only 40 cents so I save money. Meanwhile, the person with whom I'm corresponding will reply with at least one, possibly two.
Therefore in nearly any thumb-killing text conversation that's worth perhaps a 30 second phone call at best, Vodafone is likely to make between 60 and 80 cents, yet neither person pays for the cost of an entire 1 minute call.
Maybe one day I'll have more money to squander and get a better plan, but I'd just as soon throw away my phone. It's helpful to have around sometimes so that people can get hold of me however.
[--snip--] And for every farmer that charges for produce, there will be thousands who would be better off if they got the produce for free.
If someone were prepared to produce food and give it away, I'd be fine with that. It's what people do with their own vegetable gardens all the time, after all. The fact that it doesn't happen everywhere means that there's a viable business in producing and selling food. But just because someone's producing and selling food shouldn't be a reason to complain about someone else giving it away.
If the government was paying the person a benefit, then of course I'd want the person to be aiming to get off the benefit. But if developing and/or maintaining one's gardening skills through self-initiative happens to be a good way to do that, then good on 'em.
The benefit's not there to "pay" people to do stuff. If you're on it, then it should be your primary job to get off it. It's there to support someone while they work to find another source of income, as I tried to say before.
OSS development is something that people will do anyway in their free time, just like gardening. If an OSS product that's developed and provided for free happens to undermine a commercial product, then it's too bad for that product.
It's also credible to say that people with good OSS development skills may have a better chance of employment than people without them. I think the point of this whole exercise is to give some credibility to the development of OSS as the maintenance or development of one's skills with the aim of future employment. Otherwise someone could quite validly be developing their employment prospects for a good job, but have their efforts ignored by a naive employment official because they're not doing anything for recognised organisations.
I have no problem with this, as long as people who develop OSS are still working to get a job that doesn't require the benefit. If the same could be said about gardening, or somehow magically producing and giving away vehicles for free whilst receiving a benefit, then fine.
What happens when the aussie economy does better with a legion of state sponsored oss programmers?
I think it's worth considering that for any company that produces closed source commercial software, there will probably be many others that could benefit from and improve their productivity with good open source software, but can't necessarily afford to pay for the developers themselves, nor the commercial counterparts.
Before jumpling to conclusions that it's state-sponsored competition, I think that this angle should be considered. The economy is made of more than just the commercial software production industry, just as the IT industry encompasses more than simply commercial software development.
Is this worth state sponsorship? Perhaps, or perhaps not, or maybe it's at the very least a good place for interested people to be while they're between paid work, as the article suggests.
Keep in mind that contributing to OSS while on a benefit doesn't release someone from their obligations of getting off the benefit, nor should it. It does give the appropriate people an activity in which they can maintain their skills whilst they're looking for other work. I think this organisation is mostly trying to formalise it, to make it a credible and understood activity for government agencies.
This might seem like an odd perspective, but if people are put out of work by the availability of open source competition and are contributing to the problem simply to remain 'on the dole', doesn't this system effectively screw professional programmers?
It's an interesting perspective to take. At the very least, though, I think that any argument along those lines would have to be weighed out against arguments that:
The improvement of improved open source products, which are available for free, boosts the potential productivity of other businesses that rely on them. The main exception to this might be the specific businesses who might produce competitive products, and many of these aren't based in Australia, anyway. Companies who merely re-sell and support competitive products may still be able to move their business to open source equivalents.
By encouraging people to work on open source products, the same people are improving their skills, and their qualifications for deploying open source products effectively... particularly the ones in which they've been involved.
Without more information I don't know how much credibility these arguments have, but I think they'd need to be considered.
I think it's brilliant, but I don't think it'd be too long before some software consortium/lobby group/group of "concerned citizens" pulls out the whole "don't use government resources to promote the anti-competitive forces of OSS" argument.
I don't see that happening, myself. If it did, though, perhaps anyone who has a problem with it could put their money where their mouth is and volunteer to employ some of these people to work on closed source commercialised code instead.
If you are a home user or a small business, OOo is likely already a reasonable choice even if you need to deal with other people's Word documents frequently.
I use OpenOffice a lot, and from my experience its Word converter has improved dramatically in recent times.
Usually I'll only use a Word format if someone asks for it. I have to admit, though, that I still feel awkward saving something as a Word document and assuming that it'll look okay to the person who opens it.
If it's important, I'll check it in Word, and often discover that the page boundaries are messed up or something similar. To be realistic, though, I'll often open a word-saved document in another installation of Word and have very similar problems.
Despite what I said in earlier comments, I think it's most likely that Word documents are simply flawed. Maybe their specifications aren't good enough to reliably guarantee that documents will look and act the same. (It's hard to know when the specs aren't open.) Trying to be absolutely compatible with them might be a dead-end if they're not well enough defined in the first place. I think the eventual solution for compatibility should just be to ditch the format in favour of something better, if that's possible to do.
Even this dude's short sighted comment doesn't dispute HTML in any way.
If you don't mind me asking, how exactly is it short-sighted to state that the recruitment agents I've dealt with generally prefer Word documents and that they have reasons for it?
However convoluted their reasoning is, it's 100% correct.
Apparently he doesn't care to have any control over pagination and line-wrapping in his CV - he's surely alone in that!
If you actually read what I said, I never said that I liked using a Word document. I never even said what I liked. I produce my CV as HTML and sometimes PDF, and I prefer to give it to people in that order. (Ideally I'll just give them a URL if they'll accept it.)
The point I was making, in response to another post, was about recruitment agents and what they like. Just because they want a Word document doesn't mean I think it's a good idea.
They can just keep.doc as the default option for saving files. Most users never change the defaults, that's why I still get forwarded messages as attatchmets from outlook users.
I suspect that one of the (admittedly several) reasons that Word managed to knock out Wordperfect so many years ago was that Wordperfect didn't make a huge effort to be compatible with the competition. WordPerfect Corporation took its users for granted, and it was very slow off the blocks in a lot of ways.
Microsoft went to a lot of effort to make Word as compatible as possible with Wordperfect files, just as OpenOffice and several others are doing now, but Wordperfect Corporation didn't go to as much effort in returning the favour for Microsoft Word. My understanding is that it was more like 95% compatibility for a long time. The end result was that Word could cleanly deal with two formats, but Wordperfect could only reliably deal with its own.
The consequence? Once Word documents had reached a critical mass due to certain "other" reasons, people tended to go for the application that would allow them to easily deal with both types of documents rather than only Wordperfect files. This, of course, turned out to be Microsoft Word, and adoption of it was accelerated.
OpenDocument may not be quite the same situation, because with the OpenDocument format being... well... open, it wouldn't necessarily be too difficult for Microsoft to add support if everyone suddenly decided that they wanted it. This would be a victory in itself for other office applications, though, because it would immediately give Word-using businesses and governments the opportunity of distributing files that more people than just Word users can reliably access.
If there's a critical mass of non-Word users (which could even be a combination of Openoffice, Koffice, and whatever else), it's enough reason for many organisations to seriously consider what their standard document formats should be.
Over this period, most of the time when I sent my resume out, the response-- even when the sent file was just an HTML file, that you double click and it opens in MSIE-- was "I can't figure out how to open your resume, do you have a.doc?"
I'm in the process of looking for work now, and I've found that recruitment agents in particular tend to prefer Word documents over something like PDF or HTML.
This isn't because they can't open the latter -- it's because they like to be able to easily edit them. When a recruitment agent hands your resume to a potential employer, they'll usually want to remove identifying information from your resume. This, of course, prevents the employer from approching you directly, in which case the recruitment agent might not get their commission.
Granted that this isn't quite the same as not being able to open a resume at all, but recruitment agents in particular do often have an ulterior motive for wanting a Word document rather than a PDF, for instance.
Re:Good news, even for Sid users.
on
Sarge is Now Frozen
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· Score: 2, Insightful
If they really are releasing Sarge without X.org, this is a perfect example of just this mentality. Debian is the *only* major distribution that hasn't made the switch.
Wow. As a somewhat laid-back debian desktop user who primarily runs the testing builds, my thoughts were mostly about how we can finally start to test X.org now that sarge is going to be out of the way.
Bitching about not having it until now didn't really occur to me.
Of course, I don't think Sarge will get all of the Debian desktop users back. I hope that community is fine with its role of being a server distro.
Do we have any numbers on how many casual desktop users actually left Debian for its late release?
I'm a desktop debain user and I've been running sarge for at least 18 months, with no serious problems and it's worked great. The unofficial support from the package maintainers and upstream developers is at least as reliable as any official support. I'm also pretty sure that I'm not finding myself having to deal with any problems more complicated than what already exist in most other distro's.
I can definitely understand the problem that a lot of businesses may have with running something not considered official, though.
Given that online purchases involve a potential purchaser having to evaluate a virtual product, rather than something tangible, how can they be surprised?
I've been loosely involved with this to the point of having been asked to help with a usability evaluation to determine for a business why so many of their shopping carts were being abandoned. Actually, more specifically, they wanted to have less of them abandoned so they'd sell more. (As a disclaimer, I wasn't strongly involved, so this post is more about my own subjective views on the matter.)
I was quite surprised by this because it occured to me that many people probably weren't using the shopping carts with any intention of buying in the first place. If they wanted to actually sell more, it might be other parts of their business or website that they'd need to focus on changing.
This doesn't mean that it wouldn't be possible to make changes to the shopping cart so that less people would actually use it for things other than shopping.
I'm sure that a lot of people use it to catalogue thing that they think they might be interested in, but want to investigate further. Many online stores simply don't offer any other kind of wish-list tool for shoppers to use, thus if you don't want to forget something, it's necessary to use the shopping cart.
There's also a big issue with figuring out a total price. Often a site won't give any indication of the shipping costs until some kind of indication of wanting purchase has actually been made. Shipping is a huge issue for many international buyers -- where I am (New Zealand), buying a book online can easily end up being twice the advertised price, since shipping will often cost on the order of US$25! Especially if it's weight-based.
But really I don't understand what the problem is -- businesses should just learn to evaluate their shopping carts with different expectations. If people actually want to buy something, a reasonably designed shopping cart probably isn't going to put them off. If businesses don't want people to use the shopping carts for things other than making final purchases, they should provide more information and tools for users to use elsewhere on the website.
Personally, I don't see how any government can in good conscience spend money on a solution, when there is a free, standards based alternative.
I fully agree that this may not be the right time or place for a government to spend, and as others have pointed out, free software doesn't necessarily mean free. That aside, though, excessive government spending is not unusual and it's not always unjustified. I think the situation's at least slightly more complicated than you make out, however.
In technology or elsewhere, governments will often deliberately arrange to pump extra money into an industry to stimulate it, keep people employed, or keep it going through difficult times so it doesn't collapse before the market comes around again. At the very least, the US government could argue that it's sponsoring Microsoft, which is a US company that employs US workers (despite its overseas interests) and, with its software exports, brings a lot of money into the US economy.
Personally I don't think the IT industry normally requires this type of government sponsorship, however, especially if much of the money is actually going off-shore rather than being recycled within the local economy, as is the case with many non-US countries. In many ways, it'd arguably make more sense for such governments to deploy free software, and circulate money to local people to deploy and support it. In fact, this is exactly what actually is happening in several non-US countries. Doing so keeps more money within the local economy, instead of draining it off to US companies such as Microsoft, and it helps to train local people... if only because Open Source tends to encourage more training and understanding than typical Microsoft products.
Even then it's complex, though, because many of the other contries involved still have economies that are built around big international companies, which tend to deploy and support Microsoft, but also invest lots of money locally.
If no time travellers turn up on May 7th, will everyone stop promoting it after the date?
Personally I would have thought it'd make sense to give a bit more advanced notice than a week, if only to give people a chance to get the word around more beforehand (thus more likely to be archived).
Lets just hope some webmasters don't start doing what some IE designers have done, blocked out an entire website because of not using the correct browser.
For what it's worth, Adobe's had an SVG plugin that works nicely in Windows/IE for at least three or four years, now, so hopefully nobody will see a need to lock out IE users. My own experience with trying to run the non-Windows builds of it in Firefox on Linux or NetBSD, even recently, has been adequate at best, but having Firefox natively support SVG on a wide range of operating systems finally offers an alternative.
The down-side for Internet Explorer users, as the slashdot summary mentioned, is that the plugin architecture means any SVG still needs to be restricted within a rectangular box. This means that it can't be interspersed in the rest of the page. It still allows for SVG-supporting website admins to make their content available to IE users, though.
Without restricting sites by web browser, I hope people do start using SVG more often. The format's been standardised for years -- if we don't use it, there's less motivation for application developers to fix bugs, write efficient code, and bother properly supporting it.
I'd love to see Mapquest/GoogleMaps/etc start sending maps in SVG. They currently use low-resolution formats for the screen, and they look terrible when printed, especially street names.
I agree, as long as you're still implying that the data remain selective. Sending a street map of an entire country so a user could zoom in on a particular street seems somewhat wasteful and, at present, unrealistic. Using SVG to make the lines and scale clear would seem to make perfect sense.
Everyone has known it was going to be called Tiger for the last YEAR. Why do they wait until release day to file a lawsuit?
I'm not sure that I agree. I can't speak for everyone, but personally I wasn't aware of it until recently. I don't spend a lot of time following popular media, nor do I follow Mac-related news in any great detail.
Whatever Tiger Direct's motivation for waiting until the day before, I personally still think that at least part of the responsibility should be attributed to Apple... assuming Tiger Direct can demonstrate that it has a case. Apple knew they were going to be releasing a very high profile product, and they obviously have the legal resources to check this stuff out in advance.
It's also not exactly difficult to perform a search on existing trademarks. Despite their reputation for managing patents, the USPTO does actually provide quite a straightforward interface for checking on trademarks. Searching for Tiger and Software -- surely something that should be checked in association with an Operating System, I found several that looked suspiciously similar within a few seconds.
Maybe Apple management simply thought they'd deal with it later if and when it became a problem, but Apple's corporate influence shouldn't deny another company the right to protect what it's already established within the bounds of the law.
Slashdot Mirror
More than that. There was even a movie made about it that was quite generous to his own point of view, and arguably even villified the editor who kicked him out for being unethical.
Yeah, it sounds a bit as I thought it might be. I guess if the volunteers stepping forward happen to be more familiar with Windows, then that's often what schools will be more likely to end up with.
I know schools tend to teach things, but especially around younger children I would have thought that they'd be much better at teaching things like maths and reading and so on, which teachers are trained to teach. It's a point for some cases, though.
The report may well be perfectly valid, but I'm a little suspicious of it without further information, if only because the main cost normally hyped for Open Source Software tends to be the training cost. (I'll welcome being corrected.) From the article:
It's difficult to judge this because the report hasn't been released and the article isn't very specific. I'd be interested, however, to know what kinds of prior skills the people at the 15 OSS schools had before they began, versus those at the 33 Microsoft schools. For all we know from the article, these 15 schools had the only 15 staff who are at all familiar with open source software in the entire UK education system. This is unlikely, but my intended point is that the actual cost could be dependent on what skills are available to the school within their existing staff.
If the IT staff at the OSS schools were already confident with installing, configuring and maintaining OSS software, it may be that it was no problem and they could have the low-cost benefits of free software. For all we know, however, the staff at the Microsoft schools might have been regular teachers with more important teaching responsibilities than how to administer the computers. Using Microsoft software would clearly cost more, but what matters is how it'd compare with training all the necessary staff to use OSS.
Staff at Microsoft schools may have had little or no OSS experience, and almost no hope of successfully setting up or administering an open source system without some serious help from an expert. This would be compared with plugging in a pre-installed Microsoft PC similar to their home PC, and running a few setup programs for various educational software, that is.
What's the current status of random people being able to randomly install and use open source software in useful ways? Without having had to go through an installation from that point of view for some time, it's hard for me to know.
Anyway, this isn't to say that the OSS installation and configuration issues couldn't be bypassed in some other way that might still work out to be cheaper. Perhaps it's still not too expensive to simply train people. Alternatively, depending on how serious the curriculum was, an education department might offer a service to configure computers for schools, and perhaps even administer them remotely.
I have trouble understanding why companies like Symantec are treated with so much authority by various media as security experts. Whether you know about computer security or not, Symantec clearly have a solid commercial interest in making people feel as paranoid as possible about using any domain in which Symantec might be able to sell them something. Simply knowing that should ring some alarm bells for any respectable journalist.
Symantec, as with several other similar companies, have latched on big time to patching over other people's shoddy security practices to the point where the entire purpose of their business is to provide temporary fixes for someone else's recurring mistakes. (Mostly Microsoft, in this case.) If Microsoft decided to make Windows more secure in certain places and thus make less mistakes, as they have been doing recently, the whole business model of security companies becomes much more flakey. It says something about the improvements that Microsoft is making when you start to see these companies branch out by announcing that other platforms (eg. Mac, cellphones, etc) might have some "shocking" security holes that (surprise surprise) could be fixed by using their products.
I think it's great that former virus scanning companies have decided to re-identify themselves as "security" companies, because it implies that they don't see their future in the potentially obsolete dead-end trade of scanning people's disks and incoming emails for viruses. It's silly, however, to take a lot of their press releases factually and seriously when they're "coincidentally" making their products appear more useful than they might actually be.
Symantec can provide all the security products that it likes, for as long as there's a demand for them. I don't doubt that its products are useful in many situations, but I'd much rather get risk assessment information from independent security experts. The laziness of many journalists would be astounding if it wasn't such a common thing -- they're just being mouthpieces for the corporations.
Anyway, it's nice to see Symantec's claims actually being disputed, although it's worth noting that the organisation disputing it clearly has its own commercial interests in reassuring people that phones are safe.
I don't disagree. To its credit, however:
I think the greater danger is when data, such as this, gets picked up by the media in ways that are completely out of context. Most responsible people who I know are very cautious about stating limitations with data that they're presenting. That aside, I've repeatedly witnessed the very same people being cited out of context by overzealous and lazy media who want an attention-grabbing headline, and pick out whatever words or data that matches the story they've decided to tell.
If anyone's to blame for anything here, it would be the slashdot editors for presenting it as if it had some kind of authority. Even then, though, following the link from slashdot to the actual survey makes it pretty obvious... which is something that a lot of journalists in the real world won't even bother to provide.
Doesn't Google already have a text UI? That is, between all of the graphical white space around the sides of where the user actually types the text explaining what they want.
I would have classified the Google interface as a very well designed text interface. Consequently, I'm not sure if it's worth ruling out text UI's as a rule, simply because most of those that currently exist are expert ones and probably aren't suited to a beginner.
If you could sit a new user in front of a computer and say to them "type what you want", and it worked correctly, it would be one of the most straightforward interfaces for many people to understand. Coincidentally, this is almost exactly what Google aims to do, and their technology for doing it is pretty good.
I'm in New Zealand and I don't use my phone much, so it suits me to be on a prepay plan. From what I understand, NZ has one of the most expensive mobile phone industries in the world. (Perhaps it's lack of competition, since there's only Vodafone and Telecom competing.)
Text is nearly always cheaper here than voice, especially on prepay plans. At least on my plan, though, there's something similar to a prisoner's dilemma going on with it.
On off-peak rates, for instance, I have an option of calling someone for a minute (49 cents minimum), or sending a text message (20 cents). In the latter case, it's more likely that I'll send a couple, but it's still only 40 cents so I save money. Meanwhile, the person with whom I'm corresponding will reply with at least one, possibly two.
Therefore in nearly any thumb-killing text conversation that's worth perhaps a 30 second phone call at best, Vodafone is likely to make between 60 and 80 cents, yet neither person pays for the cost of an entire 1 minute call.
Maybe one day I'll have more money to squander and get a better plan, but I'd just as soon throw away my phone. It's helpful to have around sometimes so that people can get hold of me however.
If someone were prepared to produce food and give it away, I'd be fine with that. It's what people do with their own vegetable gardens all the time, after all. The fact that it doesn't happen everywhere means that there's a viable business in producing and selling food. But just because someone's producing and selling food shouldn't be a reason to complain about someone else giving it away.
If the government was paying the person a benefit, then of course I'd want the person to be aiming to get off the benefit. But if developing and/or maintaining one's gardening skills through self-initiative happens to be a good way to do that, then good on 'em.
The benefit's not there to "pay" people to do stuff. If you're on it, then it should be your primary job to get off it. It's there to support someone while they work to find another source of income, as I tried to say before.
OSS development is something that people will do anyway in their free time, just like gardening. If an OSS product that's developed and provided for free happens to undermine a commercial product, then it's too bad for that product.
It's also credible to say that people with good OSS development skills may have a better chance of employment than people without them. I think the point of this whole exercise is to give some credibility to the development of OSS as the maintenance or development of one's skills with the aim of future employment. Otherwise someone could quite validly be developing their employment prospects for a good job, but have their efforts ignored by a naive employment official because they're not doing anything for recognised organisations.
I have no problem with this, as long as people who develop OSS are still working to get a job that doesn't require the benefit. If the same could be said about gardening, or somehow magically producing and giving away vehicles for free whilst receiving a benefit, then fine.
I think it's worth considering that for any company that produces closed source commercial software, there will probably be many others that could benefit from and improve their productivity with good open source software, but can't necessarily afford to pay for the developers themselves, nor the commercial counterparts.
Before jumpling to conclusions that it's state-sponsored competition, I think that this angle should be considered. The economy is made of more than just the commercial software production industry, just as the IT industry encompasses more than simply commercial software development.
Is this worth state sponsorship? Perhaps, or perhaps not, or maybe it's at the very least a good place for interested people to be while they're between paid work, as the article suggests.
Keep in mind that contributing to OSS while on a benefit doesn't release someone from their obligations of getting off the benefit, nor should it. It does give the appropriate people an activity in which they can maintain their skills whilst they're looking for other work. I think this organisation is mostly trying to formalise it, to make it a credible and understood activity for government agencies.
It's an interesting perspective to take. At the very least, though, I think that any argument along those lines would have to be weighed out against arguments that:
Without more information I don't know how much credibility these arguments have, but I think they'd need to be considered.
I don't see that happening, myself. If it did, though, perhaps anyone who has a problem with it could put their money where their mouth is and volunteer to employ some of these people to work on closed source commercialised code instead.
I use OpenOffice a lot, and from my experience its Word converter has improved dramatically in recent times.
Usually I'll only use a Word format if someone asks for it. I have to admit, though, that I still feel awkward saving something as a Word document and assuming that it'll look okay to the person who opens it.
If it's important, I'll check it in Word, and often discover that the page boundaries are messed up or something similar. To be realistic, though, I'll often open a word-saved document in another installation of Word and have very similar problems.
Despite what I said in earlier comments, I think it's most likely that Word documents are simply flawed. Maybe their specifications aren't good enough to reliably guarantee that documents will look and act the same. (It's hard to know when the specs aren't open.) Trying to be absolutely compatible with them might be a dead-end if they're not well enough defined in the first place. I think the eventual solution for compatibility should just be to ditch the format in favour of something better, if that's possible to do.
I don't disagree with you about recruitment agents, or about Word.
Unfortunately, my opinions don't prevent me from having to deal with either of them at times when I'm looking for a job.
If you don't mind me asking, how exactly is it short-sighted to state that the recruitment agents I've dealt with generally prefer Word documents and that they have reasons for it?
However convoluted their reasoning is, it's 100% correct.
If you actually read what I said, I never said that I liked using a Word document. I never even said what I liked. I produce my CV as HTML and sometimes PDF, and I prefer to give it to people in that order. (Ideally I'll just give them a URL if they'll accept it.)
The point I was making, in response to another post, was about recruitment agents and what they like. Just because they want a Word document doesn't mean I think it's a good idea.
I suspect that one of the (admittedly several) reasons that Word managed to knock out Wordperfect so many years ago was that Wordperfect didn't make a huge effort to be compatible with the competition. WordPerfect Corporation took its users for granted, and it was very slow off the blocks in a lot of ways.
Microsoft went to a lot of effort to make Word as compatible as possible with Wordperfect files, just as OpenOffice and several others are doing now, but Wordperfect Corporation didn't go to as much effort in returning the favour for Microsoft Word. My understanding is that it was more like 95% compatibility for a long time. The end result was that Word could cleanly deal with two formats, but Wordperfect could only reliably deal with its own.
The consequence? Once Word documents had reached a critical mass due to certain "other" reasons, people tended to go for the application that would allow them to easily deal with both types of documents rather than only Wordperfect files. This, of course, turned out to be Microsoft Word, and adoption of it was accelerated.
OpenDocument may not be quite the same situation, because with the OpenDocument format being... well... open, it wouldn't necessarily be too difficult for Microsoft to add support if everyone suddenly decided that they wanted it. This would be a victory in itself for other office applications, though, because it would immediately give Word-using businesses and governments the opportunity of distributing files that more people than just Word users can reliably access.
If there's a critical mass of non-Word users (which could even be a combination of Openoffice, Koffice, and whatever else), it's enough reason for many organisations to seriously consider what their standard document formats should be.
I'm in the process of looking for work now, and I've found that recruitment agents in particular tend to prefer Word documents over something like PDF or HTML.
This isn't because they can't open the latter -- it's because they like to be able to easily edit them. When a recruitment agent hands your resume to a potential employer, they'll usually want to remove identifying information from your resume. This, of course, prevents the employer from approching you directly, in which case the recruitment agent might not get their commission.
Granted that this isn't quite the same as not being able to open a resume at all, but recruitment agents in particular do often have an ulterior motive for wanting a Word document rather than a PDF, for instance.
Wow. As a somewhat laid-back debian desktop user who primarily runs the testing builds, my thoughts were mostly about how we can finally start to test X.org now that sarge is going to be out of the way.
Bitching about not having it until now didn't really occur to me.
Do we have any numbers on how many casual desktop users actually left Debian for its late release?
I'm a desktop debain user and I've been running sarge for at least 18 months, with no serious problems and it's worked great. The unofficial support from the package maintainers and upstream developers is at least as reliable as any official support. I'm also pretty sure that I'm not finding myself having to deal with any problems more complicated than what already exist in most other distro's.
I can definitely understand the problem that a lot of businesses may have with running something not considered official, though.
I've been loosely involved with this to the point of having been asked to help with a usability evaluation to determine for a business why so many of their shopping carts were being abandoned. Actually, more specifically, they wanted to have less of them abandoned so they'd sell more. (As a disclaimer, I wasn't strongly involved, so this post is more about my own subjective views on the matter.)
I was quite surprised by this because it occured to me that many people probably weren't using the shopping carts with any intention of buying in the first place. If they wanted to actually sell more, it might be other parts of their business or website that they'd need to focus on changing.
This doesn't mean that it wouldn't be possible to make changes to the shopping cart so that less people would actually use it for things other than shopping.
I'm sure that a lot of people use it to catalogue thing that they think they might be interested in, but want to investigate further. Many online stores simply don't offer any other kind of wish-list tool for shoppers to use, thus if you don't want to forget something, it's necessary to use the shopping cart.
There's also a big issue with figuring out a total price. Often a site won't give any indication of the shipping costs until some kind of indication of wanting purchase has actually been made. Shipping is a huge issue for many international buyers -- where I am (New Zealand), buying a book online can easily end up being twice the advertised price, since shipping will often cost on the order of US$25! Especially if it's weight-based.
But really I don't understand what the problem is -- businesses should just learn to evaluate their shopping carts with different expectations. If people actually want to buy something, a reasonably designed shopping cart probably isn't going to put them off. If businesses don't want people to use the shopping carts for things other than making final purchases, they should provide more information and tools for users to use elsewhere on the website.
I fully agree that this may not be the right time or place for a government to spend, and as others have pointed out, free software doesn't necessarily mean free. That aside, though, excessive government spending is not unusual and it's not always unjustified. I think the situation's at least slightly more complicated than you make out, however.
In technology or elsewhere, governments will often deliberately arrange to pump extra money into an industry to stimulate it, keep people employed, or keep it going through difficult times so it doesn't collapse before the market comes around again. At the very least, the US government could argue that it's sponsoring Microsoft, which is a US company that employs US workers (despite its overseas interests) and, with its software exports, brings a lot of money into the US economy.
Personally I don't think the IT industry normally requires this type of government sponsorship, however, especially if much of the money is actually going off-shore rather than being recycled within the local economy, as is the case with many non-US countries. In many ways, it'd arguably make more sense for such governments to deploy free software, and circulate money to local people to deploy and support it. In fact, this is exactly what actually is happening in several non-US countries. Doing so keeps more money within the local economy, instead of draining it off to US companies such as Microsoft, and it helps to train local people... if only because Open Source tends to encourage more training and understanding than typical Microsoft products.
Even then it's complex, though, because many of the other contries involved still have economies that are built around big international companies, which tend to deploy and support Microsoft, but also invest lots of money locally.
If no time travellers turn up on May 7th, will everyone stop promoting it after the date?
Personally I would have thought it'd make sense to give a bit more advanced notice than a week, if only to give people a chance to get the word around more beforehand (thus more likely to be archived).
For what it's worth, Adobe's had an SVG plugin that works nicely in Windows/IE for at least three or four years, now, so hopefully nobody will see a need to lock out IE users. My own experience with trying to run the non-Windows builds of it in Firefox on Linux or NetBSD, even recently, has been adequate at best, but having Firefox natively support SVG on a wide range of operating systems finally offers an alternative.
The down-side for Internet Explorer users, as the slashdot summary mentioned, is that the plugin architecture means any SVG still needs to be restricted within a rectangular box. This means that it can't be interspersed in the rest of the page. It still allows for SVG-supporting website admins to make their content available to IE users, though.
Without restricting sites by web browser, I hope people do start using SVG more often. The format's been standardised for years -- if we don't use it, there's less motivation for application developers to fix bugs, write efficient code, and bother properly supporting it.
I agree, as long as you're still implying that the data remain selective. Sending a street map of an entire country so a user could zoom in on a particular street seems somewhat wasteful and, at present, unrealistic. Using SVG to make the lines and scale clear would seem to make perfect sense.
I'm not sure that I agree. I can't speak for everyone, but personally I wasn't aware of it until recently. I don't spend a lot of time following popular media, nor do I follow Mac-related news in any great detail.
Whatever Tiger Direct's motivation for waiting until the day before, I personally still think that at least part of the responsibility should be attributed to Apple... assuming Tiger Direct can demonstrate that it has a case. Apple knew they were going to be releasing a very high profile product, and they obviously have the legal resources to check this stuff out in advance.
It's also not exactly difficult to perform a search on existing trademarks. Despite their reputation for managing patents, the USPTO does actually provide quite a straightforward interface for checking on trademarks. Searching for Tiger and Software -- surely something that should be checked in association with an Operating System, I found several that looked suspiciously similar within a few seconds.
Maybe Apple management simply thought they'd deal with it later if and when it became a problem, but Apple's corporate influence shouldn't deny another company the right to protect what it's already established within the bounds of the law.