Better, but still a long way to go
on
Gnome 2.14 Review
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· Score: 2, Insightful
I have been running beta versions of 2.14 as part of Fedora FC5 test3 for a while, and I'm very impressed by its speed, and increased pollish compared to previous Gnome versions.
However, there are still a lot of things missing before it is ready for the Enterprise desktop.
For one thing, usermanagement seam to be for local users only. There is no way to manage users over LDAP. The same thing is true for sabayonne.
Another problem is the tools in the System->Administration menu. They all requires you to enter a root password to be used. This makes it impossible to have many people perform limited adminstrative functions. They should really use sudo for this. (I think Ubuntu allready do that).
Yet another thing I would have like to see, is hiding of files like/etc,/proc,/dev,/usr,/lib,/boot,/sbin,/selinux,... by default for ordinary users. These folders are mainly of interest for system administrators and developers, but this group most certainly know how to show hidden files. By hiding these directories folders containing business oriented stuff becomes easier to find.
You can test this for yourself by createing a.hidden file in your / directory containing the names of the directories you want to hide. Unfortunately.hidden only works in the Nautilus windows and not in filedialogs, where the disadvantage of having too many choises are a much bigger problem.
This is great if you live in a big city with lots of WiFi hotspots, but I doubt Microsoft will provide the infrastructure to make it work in the coutryside. This would mean that these people would have to rely on traditional cell phone service providers. The cost for these people would probably go up drastically if Microsoft grabs all the customers in more profitable areas.
There are also other issues, e.g. in many countries emergency calls needs to be tracable so that help can be sent even if the caller doesn't know where he is or is too badly injured to tell. Will Microsoft be able to provide this?
It is not as simple as just look at the percentage of users that use a certain browser.
The choise of browser also is an indication whether the user is likely to buy something or not, at least if you sell software or some other computer related thing
A user that still runs IE3 may be less likely to change things, or buy anything new than a user that runs the latest version of IE or even have shown enough initiative to upgrade to Firefox or Opera.
So 10% user share for Firefox, would likely be of more business value than 10% IE5 users.
You underestimate the power of social engineering. If you know a little about your target you could probably trick that person to visit a certain page.
E.g. you could act as a sales person for something the person is interested in, and call the person in question with some very good offer, and make sure the person needs to visit a certain page to take advantage of it. Or you could send an e-mail with more information.
If that doesn't work you could try DNS spoofing. E.g. last time you visited google, are you sure that you really visitied the real google and not a proxy site that inserted harmful code.
Java and C# are extremely similar, so from a learning point of view ist shouldn't matter what language you chose. Both will help you understand basic OO concepts.
However, as you use Linux I would recommend Java. Not that you can't run C# applications on Linux, you can. The big difference is that Sun, the creator of Java supports it on Linux, while there is no such thing as Microsoft.Net on Linux. In C# you will always have to rely on mono to keep up with new things in the Microsoft implementation and somtimes mono may lag behind.
Using Java EE it is also possible to create web services, so you will not have any problems communicating with.Net stuff if you use java, doing the opposit is also possible but usually requires a lot more coding.
Finally, the development tools are better for java, at least if you run Linux. I'm of course thinking of Eclipse.
Sure, advanced users like Mr Torvalds probably are better served by a desktop environmnent like KDE. Here they can configure things that "idiot" doesn't care about or even know exists.
The problem is, that there are more "idiot" users out there in the business world than there are Linus Torvaldses. If we design for the Linus Torvaldses of the world, Linux will get a very small user base and that will make Linux less interesting to companies porting software and drivers for the Linux platform.
The elite user is also perfectly capable of replacing a simple Gnome deskop with another more advanced one (e.g. KDE). However, the "idiots" will not be able to replace KDE with Gnome. That's why Gnome is better.
When it comes to GUI design the "it will confuse the user" point of view, is just as valid as the "it is too complex to do" point of view. Not realizing that, is a very common mistake by people with an engineering or computer science background.
Even though emacs is a very good editor and development platform that for a long time have filled the purpose of being a swiss army knife for the software developer, I think its days of glory are over.
Sure there will be emacs for many years to come, but I guess that Eclipse will more and more play that role for the generation of developers that grew up with graphical user interfaces. More and more programming languages gets supported by Eclipse, and the support of the existing ones seam to get better and better, and the community around it are getting stronger and stronger.
Even so, its nice to see that old goodies like emacs are still supported and continue to evolve.
Water is used as reflector for dipol antennas at sea (you only need the upper half of the antenna). Wouldn't that mean that you should be able to see humans (made of 80% water) inside buildings by using radar/microwave technology. If that was possible, perhaps you could use lip reading, to see what people are saying. Lips ar much bigger than 3mm.
I have a 13" screen on my current laptop. When I'm buying a new one I would probably want it to be smaller rather than bigger. Perhaps 12" with 1024x768 resolution, with a weght that hopfully will be below 1 kg.
What the article really is saying, is that the end is near for the standard desktop computer. These new large screen semi portable "laptops" will replace them. The price of standard desktops are allready falling rapidly.
I suspect these screens will have some sort of battery power. How long will that last, how am I supposed to m save a newspaper clip of some important peace of news? How can I be sure that the information doesn't change over time. E.g. there could be an offending but selling headline, but when I try to sue for libel a couple of days later I can't prove it as it by then have changed to something less offending.
What about historical research? Even with ordinary paper/ink based information future generations will probably have much less knowledge of our culture than we have of e.g. the culture of the ancient Rome. With this kind of technology the historical horizon will move even closer to our own time.
I really can't see why the parent have been modded "Insightful". Some of the statements are plain wrong even if we talk about the current production version of MySQL. The article is talking about the soon MySQL 5.0x soon to be ready for production that have most of the features a real database should have. It is still lacking compared to other free databases such as PostgreSQL and Firebird, but version 5 is a real improvement. Now you have things like triggers, stored procedures, views and sub-queries. If you use strict mode integrity checking will work reasonably.
What I'm currently miss the most in the new version is that it can't handle domains and the ability add check constraints as you create tables is somewhat lacking. So, even if MySQL have done a tremendous job improving their product I would still go for PostgreSQL, or Firbird any day both for technical and legal reasons. Both Postgresql and Firebird also seam to be better at internationalization.
The fact that Oracle just bought the company that supplies the default MySQL storage engine doesn't spell good for the future. Even though MySQL could continue to use InnoDB in the future under the GPL licence it is in Oracles power to raise the licence fees for commercial use. That would mean less incomes to MySQL AB and that could hurt their ability to develop the product further. However, at the time Oracle have not said anything about raising the prices other than that the licence deal with MySQL is going to be renegotiated next year. To me that sounds a bit ominous.
So, if you are going to hate or dismiss MySQL do it for the right reasons, and not for their technical failures in the past.
People/companies are not writing bad code because they are sloppy or doesn't want their code to be secure or correct. They write bad code because there really is no way ensuring the security today. If there were, price insensitive things like battle ships would not be dead in the water because of software error. I suppose you could make code reasonably secure for certain certified environments e.g. Running a certain build of MS-Office on a certain build of Windows XP in a certain hardware in a specified configuration.
What if the user doesn't run it under the conditions specified e.g. connect it to the internet and internet was not covered by the specification should the developer be liable then? Of course you could hold the developer liable no matter what. But that would put software development in a different position than all other products. E.g should a building contractor of a high building be held responsible for the damage to a parked car outside the building caused by somebody jumping from the roof in the act of committing suicide? I think not, even though the errors in building construction making this possible and the means to fix them is much more evident than most software problems.
The only thing that will happen if this was introduced is that software prices would go up radically as software companies or individual developers need to make sure the make a profit even if they have to pay damages now and then. I.e. the price of the software will have to pay more lawyer and insurance fees. If this is introduced in a country the cost of running a business will increase significantly, and I am not just talking about software business. How many businesses would afford to have the cost of their IT infrastructure increased by several orders of magnitude. A country that introduced such laws would kill all business that need some kind of IT support, at least if it did not also have very high customs fees or taxes for imported products and services.
As for the software industry of such a country you would probably see fewer and bigger companies with the money to bury customers claiming their rights in legal process for a very long time perhaps until they go out of business before they get their money. The fact that there was fewer actors in the market would in itself raise the price of software due to less competition. It would also slow down the speed of development. If you for instance create a new version of an office productivity suit, you would probably want to test it for several years on a group of subjects that have waived all their legal rights before you release it to the general public. Then you would like to profit from that investment for a very long time. Perhaps 20 years or so.
First, Xara is a competitor to Inkscape and Sodipody not Gimp.
Second, I think Linux has much less to offer to the average home user than it has to business. E.g. Linux have much fewer games and othe entertainment software availble. The administration tools are designed to handle hundreds of users or more and are overly complex for single/few user home systems.
So if Linux ever will get major market penetration that will most likely not happen by Linux winning home users over from windows. It will be by large organizations that can benefit more from the features available in Linux. The home users will then follow.
In other words the more applications that fit on a professional Linux desktop the better. Xara seams to fit that profile very well.
It's a good thing that we get usability studies on commonly used desktop environments used in Linux, but I think the people who evalute them need to know a little more about Unix/Linux before giving recommendations on how to solve the problems the users encounter.
One example: In one of the tests the users have problem setting the time. The recommendation is that this should not require root login. And sure that would make the task of setting the time much easier, but it would also possibly break things like kerberos or NFS file sharing. There is also other users to take into account. Letting ordinary users change the time also have security implications as it makes the track record of various loggs useless.
The proper question to ask, would be why should an ordinary user need to change the time in the first place? Why not make it simpler to hook up to a time server. That way the user wouldn't need to worry. What the ordinary user should be allowed to change would be what timezone used in his clock.
If such feelings for learning new software is commmon, that really spells bad news for Microsoft. Their Office 12 product that is supposed to be released next year will be completely different from their current version. The menus will be gone, and there will be som tablike toolbars instead. Compared to learning all that new stuff, learning the differences in Staroffice will be very easy.
If you are going to use a bioagent in war, you have to make sure that your own tropus are protected. Vaccination would be a good way of doing that as various kinds of protective suits will limit the soldiers ability to fight. This is why this kind of news gets reacted on.
Not that I really think bio warfare would be something the US would do. It would simply be too much bad publisity. After all they have strong enough army to succesfully fight most countries without resorting to such methods.
My guess is that they do this to make sure they are protected from all the terrorists that under the Bush administration seam to have grown just as common as communists were in the 1950s.
I don't think it is reasonable that a hardware company should pay for copyright infrignements made by the user of the hardware. Afrer all we don't charge gun manefactuerers with murder in case sombody should use their legally bought gun to kill sombody.
Even so, Jens of Sweden is not my hero.
He really know how to cut down costs. One of his way of doing this is by not honering warranty agreements to customers that have had the misfortune of getting a fawlty product.
According to an article in todays number of Computer Sweden, all the leading Swedish chains of stores in electronics have decided to stop doing business with Jens of Sweden due to a large number of dissatisfied customers.
The article also states that several complaints on Jens of Sweden to the Swedish National Board of consumer policies have been filed over the last year
I think they are too late for that. The market share of the MS Office 2003 suit is about the same as for OpenOffice.org 1.x (around 15% for both of them). This makes OpenOffice.org the biggest competitor to MS-Office today.
Changeing the user interface even more could seriously alleniate users of the still most common MS-Office 2000. This would be dangerous as OpenOffice.org 2.0 almost looks like it was desinged to be a suitable upgrade for that group of users.
From what I see in the screen shots it would require significantly less training to upgrade to OOo 2.0 than to MS Office 12. Not to mention that OOo 2.0 doesn't require an upgrade to the latest version of windows.
If Microsoft contiues like this, I would not be surprised if OpenOffice.org have grown to at least 30% in the next five years.
Sure, switching to OpenOffice or some future version of Staroffice may require some training. However, so would switching to to MS-Office 12 and that would be needed to get the new Microsoft XML format.
OpenOffice.org 2.0 is designed to be very similar to current versions of MS office, so I guess the training required to switch would not be more extensive than what would be needed if you upgraded from one version of MS-Office to the next.
By the time the switch is supposed to happen the next version of StarOffice will be out and Sun will sell support and training for that as well as for OpenOffice.org
BTW, In my experience, the training offered when switching from one version of MS-Office to the other often is next to none. Office workers are often supposed to pick up new skills as they work.
Given the extrem similaryty, this would probably work with OpenOffice as well. At least had my 70+ year old mother, that is not a frequent/.-er, no problem using it instead of MS-Office, and I guess that would be true for most office workers of MA as well.
Further more, the OpenDocument format is XML based, so is the new closed Microsoft format.
This means that most of the infrastructure to handle the new OpenDocument format is most likely allready present in MS-Office. My guess is that Microsoft could develop OpenDocument support in less than a man month. Perhaps even quicker if they allready have sombody who are read up on the OpenDocument specification.
The only reason they don't support OpenDocument is to lock out their competitors. This time it backfired, and now they are complaining about the risk of being locked out of MA.
I also fail to see how a migration to some OpenDocument capable office suit would be much more expensive than to convert to Microsofts XML based format. Doing that would require all desktop to upgrade to winXP or later, and there would be conversion costs for old.doc documents just like there would be if you used some OpenDocumnet compatible software.
The weak spot in this is, that for it to work, the user have deny the executable from running. Most users don't. Especially not if the e-mail containing an the executable contains some plausible explanaiton why they should allow ti to run. E.g. telling them that it is an important secrurity update from Apple.
Today Linux have a very good GUI in the form of Gnome. It is simple elegant and well desinged, from a usability perspective it is far better than anything we have seen from Microsoft so far. (KDE is not bad either by the way).
The problem is that this very good desktop seam to be targeted at home users. Unfortunately the number of software titles suited for the home user (e.g. games) is quite small. Home users seldom have much use for the advanced management features that comes with Linux.
For corporate use Linux have a lot more to give. There are good office suits, e-mail programs, webbrowsers, and now lately even calendar tools, and more is emerging every day.
The problem is that the management tools for the corporate Linux desktop arn't good enough. Sure, you can do a lot by scripts, but it is not easy enough to do it.
One example: why doesn't Gnome user management tools support LDAP. Why isn't there a LDAP backend for GConf where settings for the users desktops could easily be managed centrally. This is things that need to happen before Linux gets the credit it deserves on the corporate desktop.
I tested the mozilla site with an old IE5 browser True, the mozilla pages doesn't look as good in IE as they do in Firefox. However the site is still readable and I can still download the browser. And it the page doesn't look horribly broken if you don't know how it is supposed to look. This is not much of a problem. Unless of course IE6 does a worse job than IE5, but that is generally not the case.
What would be more interesting is to know how it would look in IE7. If that can handle the rounded corners, and web developers continues their tradition of developing for the latest version of IE then firefox will have excellent marketing opportunities. The most common desktop in business is still win2k, and that will not run IE7. So they will have to use some other browser to get better web experience.
Is there anybody that have tested the mozilla pages using IE7?
Slashdot Mirror
I have been running beta versions of 2.14 as part of Fedora FC5 test3 for a while, and I'm very impressed by its speed, and increased pollish compared to previous Gnome versions.
/etc, /proc, /dev, /usr, /lib, /boot, /sbin, /selinux,... by default for ordinary users. These folders are mainly of interest for system administrators and developers, but this group most certainly know how to show hidden files. By hiding these directories folders containing business oriented stuff becomes easier to find.
.hidden file in your / directory containing the names of the directories you want to hide. Unfortunately .hidden only works in the Nautilus windows and not in filedialogs, where the disadvantage of having too many choises are a much bigger problem.
However, there are still a lot of things missing before it is ready for the Enterprise desktop.
For one thing, usermanagement seam to be for local users only. There is no way to manage users over LDAP. The same thing is true for sabayonne.
Another problem is the tools in the System->Administration menu. They all requires you to enter a root password to be used. This makes it impossible to have many people perform limited adminstrative functions. They should really use sudo for this. (I think Ubuntu allready do that).
Yet another thing I would have like to see, is hiding of files like
You can test this for yourself by createing a
This is great if you live in a big city with lots of WiFi hotspots, but I doubt Microsoft will provide the infrastructure to make it work in the coutryside. This would mean that these people would have to rely on traditional cell phone service providers. The cost for these people would probably go up drastically if Microsoft grabs all the customers in more profitable areas.
There are also other issues, e.g. in many countries emergency calls needs to be tracable so that help can be sent even if the caller doesn't know where he is or is too badly injured to tell. Will Microsoft be able to provide this?
It is not as simple as just look at the percentage of users that use a certain browser.
The choise of browser also is an indication whether the user is likely to buy something or not, at least if you sell software or some other computer related thing
A user that still runs IE3 may be less likely to change things, or buy anything new than a user that runs the latest version of IE or even have shown enough initiative to upgrade to Firefox or Opera.
So 10% user share for Firefox, would likely be of more business value than 10% IE5 users.
You underestimate the power of social engineering. If you know a little about your target you could probably trick that person to visit a certain page.
E.g. you could act as a sales person for something the person is interested in, and call the person in question with some very good offer, and make sure the person needs to visit a certain page to take advantage of it. Or you could send an e-mail with more information.
If that doesn't work you could try DNS spoofing. E.g. last time you visited google, are you sure that you really visitied the real google and not a proxy site that inserted harmful code.
Java and C# are extremely similar, so from a learning point of view ist shouldn't matter what language you chose. Both will help you understand basic OO concepts.
.Net on Linux. In C# you will always have to rely on mono to keep up with new things in the Microsoft implementation and somtimes mono may lag behind.
.Net stuff if you use java, doing the opposit is also possible but usually requires a lot more coding.
However, as you use Linux I would recommend Java. Not that you can't run C# applications on Linux, you can. The big difference is that Sun, the creator of Java supports it on Linux, while there is no such thing as Microsoft
Using Java EE it is also possible to create web services, so you will not have any problems communicating with
Finally, the development tools are better for java, at least if you run Linux. I'm of course thinking of Eclipse.
Sure, advanced users like Mr Torvalds probably are better served by a desktop environmnent like KDE. Here they can configure things that "idiot" doesn't care about or even know exists.
The problem is, that there are more "idiot" users out there in the business world than there are Linus Torvaldses. If we design for the Linus Torvaldses of the world, Linux will get a very small user base and that will make Linux less interesting to companies porting software and drivers for the Linux platform.
The elite user is also perfectly capable of replacing a simple Gnome deskop with another more advanced one (e.g. KDE). However, the "idiots" will not be able to replace KDE with Gnome. That's why Gnome is better.
When it comes to GUI design the "it will confuse the user" point of view, is just as valid as the "it is too complex to do" point of view. Not realizing that, is a very common mistake by people with an engineering or computer science background.
Even though emacs is a very good editor and development platform that for a long time have filled the purpose of being a swiss army knife for the software developer, I think its days of glory are over.
Sure there will be emacs for many years to come, but I guess that Eclipse will more and more play that role for the generation of developers that grew up with graphical user interfaces. More and more programming languages gets supported by Eclipse, and the support of the existing ones seam to get better and better, and the community around it are getting stronger and stronger.
Even so, its nice to see that old goodies like emacs are still supported and continue to evolve.
Water is used as reflector for dipol antennas at sea (you only need the upper half of the antenna).
Wouldn't that mean that you should be able to see humans (made of 80% water) inside buildings by using radar/microwave technology. If that was possible, perhaps you could use lip reading, to see what people are saying. Lips ar much bigger than 3mm.
I have a 13" screen on my current laptop. When I'm buying a new one I would probably want it to be smaller rather than bigger. Perhaps 12" with 1024x768 resolution, with a weght that hopfully will be below 1 kg.
What the article really is saying, is that the end is near for the standard desktop computer. These new large screen semi portable "laptops" will replace them. The price of standard desktops are allready falling rapidly.
I suspect these screens will have some sort of battery power. How long will that last, how am I supposed to m save a newspaper clip of some important peace of news? How can I be sure that the information doesn't change over time. E.g. there could be an offending but selling headline, but when I try to sue for libel a couple of days later I can't prove it as it by then have changed to something less offending.
What about historical research? Even with ordinary paper/ink based information future generations will probably have much less knowledge of our culture than we have of e.g. the culture of the ancient Rome.
With this kind of technology the historical horizon will move even closer to our own time.
I really can't see why the parent have been modded "Insightful". Some of the statements are plain wrong even if we talk about the current production version of MySQL. The article is talking about the soon MySQL 5.0x soon to be ready for production that have most of the features a real database should have. It is still lacking compared to other free databases such as PostgreSQL and Firebird, but version 5 is a real improvement. Now you have things like triggers, stored procedures, views and sub-queries. If you use strict mode integrity checking will work reasonably.
What I'm currently miss the most in the new version is that it can't handle domains and the ability add check constraints as you create tables is somewhat lacking. So, even if MySQL have done a tremendous job improving their product I would still go for PostgreSQL, or Firbird any day both for technical and legal reasons. Both Postgresql and Firebird also seam to be better at internationalization.
The fact that Oracle just bought the company that supplies the default MySQL storage engine doesn't spell good for the future. Even though MySQL could continue to use InnoDB in the future under the GPL licence it is in Oracles power to raise the licence fees for commercial use. That would mean less incomes to MySQL AB and that could hurt their ability to develop the product further. However, at the time Oracle have not said anything about raising the prices other than that the licence deal with MySQL is going to be renegotiated next year. To me that sounds a bit ominous.
So, if you are going to hate or dismiss MySQL do it for the right reasons, and not for their technical failures in the past.
People/companies are not writing bad code because they are sloppy or doesn't want their code to be secure or correct. They write bad code because there really is no way ensuring the security today. If there were, price insensitive things like battle ships would not be dead in the water because of software error. I suppose you could make code reasonably secure for certain certified environments e.g. Running a certain build of MS-Office on a certain build of Windows XP in a certain hardware in a specified configuration.
What if the user doesn't run it under the conditions specified e.g. connect it to the internet and internet was not covered by the specification should the developer be liable then? Of course you could hold the developer liable no matter what. But that would put software development in a different position than all other products. E.g should a building contractor of a high building be held responsible for the damage to a parked car outside the building caused by somebody jumping from the roof in the act of committing suicide? I think not, even though the errors in building construction making this possible and the means to fix them is much more evident than most software problems.
The only thing that will happen if this was introduced is that software prices would go up radically as software companies or individual developers need to make sure the make a profit even if they have to pay damages now and then. I.e. the price of the software will have to pay more lawyer and insurance fees. If this is introduced in a country the cost of running a business will increase significantly, and I am not just talking about software business. How many businesses would afford to have the cost of their IT infrastructure increased by several orders of magnitude. A country that introduced such laws would kill all business that need some kind of IT support, at least if it did not also have very high customs fees or taxes for imported products and services.
As for the software industry of such a country you would probably see fewer and bigger companies with the money to bury customers claiming their rights in legal process for a very long time perhaps until they go out of business before they get their money. The fact that there was fewer actors in the market would in itself raise the price of software due to less competition. It would also slow down the speed of development. If you for instance create a new version of an office productivity suit, you would probably want to test it for several years on a group of subjects that have waived all their legal rights before you release it to the general public. Then you would like to profit from that investment for a very long time. Perhaps 20 years or so.
First, Xara is a competitor to Inkscape and Sodipody not Gimp.
Second, I think Linux has much less to offer to the average home user than it has to business. E.g. Linux have much fewer games and othe entertainment software availble. The administration tools are designed to handle hundreds of users or more and are overly complex for single/few user home systems.
So if Linux ever will get major market penetration that will most likely not happen by Linux winning home
users over from windows. It will be by large organizations that can benefit more from the features available in Linux. The home users will then follow.
In other words the more applications that fit on a professional Linux desktop the better. Xara seams to fit that profile very well.
It's a good thing that we get usability studies on commonly used desktop environments used in Linux, but I think the people who evalute them need to know a little more about Unix/Linux before giving recommendations on how to solve the problems the users encounter.
One example: In one of the tests the users have problem setting the time. The recommendation is that this should not require root login. And sure that would make the task of setting the time much easier, but it would also possibly break things like kerberos or NFS file sharing. There is also other users to take into account. Letting ordinary users change the time also have security implications as it makes the track record of various loggs useless.
The proper question to ask, would be why should an ordinary user need to change the time in the first place? Why not make it simpler to hook up to a time server. That way the user wouldn't need to worry.
What the ordinary user should be allowed to change would be what timezone used in his clock.
If such feelings for learning new software is commmon, that really spells bad news for Microsoft.
Their Office 12 product that is supposed to be released next year will be completely different from their current version. The menus will be gone, and there will be som tablike toolbars instead. Compared to learning all that new stuff, learning the differences in Staroffice will be very easy.
If you are going to use a bioagent in war, you have to make sure that your own tropus are protected.
Vaccination would be a good way of doing that as various kinds of protective suits will limit the
soldiers ability to fight. This is why this kind of news gets reacted on.
Not that I really think bio warfare would be something the US would do. It would simply be too much
bad publisity. After all they have strong enough army to succesfully fight most countries without resorting
to such methods.
My guess is that they do this to make sure they are protected from all the terrorists that under the Bush administration seam to have grown just as common as communists were in the 1950s.
I don't think it is reasonable that a hardware company should pay for copyright infrignements made by the user of the hardware. Afrer all we don't charge gun manefactuerers with murder in case sombody should use their legally bought gun to kill sombody.
1 9/20050919075347_CS084/20050919075347_CS084.dbp.as p
Even so, Jens of Sweden is not my hero.
He really know how to cut down costs. One of his way of doing this is by not honering warranty agreements to customers that have had the misfortune of getting a fawlty product.
According to an article in todays number of Computer Sweden, all the leading Swedish chains of stores in electronics have decided to stop doing business with Jens of Sweden due to a large number of dissatisfied customers.
The article also states that several complaints on Jens of Sweden to the Swedish National Board of consumer policies have been filed over the last year
For those of you that read Swedish the article is on:
http://computersweden.idg.se/ArticlePages/200509/
I have no need for dual boot any more, so I go for the Vista Beer Coaster edition instead.
I think they are too late for that. The market share of the MS Office 2003 suit is about the same as for OpenOffice.org 1.x (around 15% for both of them). This makes OpenOffice.org the biggest competitor to MS-Office today.
Changeing the user interface even more could seriously alleniate users of the still most common MS-Office 2000. This would be dangerous as OpenOffice.org 2.0 almost looks like it was desinged to be a suitable upgrade for that group of users.
From what I see in the screen shots it would require significantly less training to upgrade to OOo 2.0 than to MS Office 12. Not to mention that OOo 2.0 doesn't require an upgrade to the latest version of windows.
If Microsoft contiues like this, I would not be surprised if OpenOffice.org have grown to at least 30% in the next five years.
Sure, switching to OpenOffice or some future version of Staroffice may require some training. However, so would switching to to MS-Office 12 and that would be needed to get the new Microsoft XML format.
/.-er, no problem using it instead of MS-Office, and I guess that would be true for most office workers of MA as well.
OpenOffice.org 2.0 is designed to be very similar to current versions of MS office, so I guess the training required to switch would not be more extensive than what would be needed if you upgraded from one version of MS-Office to the next.
By the time the switch is supposed to happen the next version of StarOffice will be out and Sun will sell support and training for that as well as for OpenOffice.org
BTW, In my experience, the training offered when switching from one version of MS-Office to the other often is next to none. Office workers are often supposed to pick up new skills as they work.
Given the extrem similaryty, this would probably work with OpenOffice as well. At least had my 70+ year old mother, that is not a frequent
Further more, the OpenDocument format is XML based, so is the new closed Microsoft format.
.doc documents just like there would be if you used some OpenDocumnet compatible software.
This means that most of the infrastructure to handle the new OpenDocument format is most likely allready present in MS-Office. My guess is that Microsoft could develop OpenDocument support in less than a man month. Perhaps even quicker if they allready have sombody who are read up on the OpenDocument specification.
The only reason they don't support OpenDocument is to lock out their competitors. This time it backfired, and now they are complaining about the risk of being locked out of MA.
I also fail to see how a migration to some OpenDocument capable office suit would be much more expensive than to convert to Microsofts XML based format. Doing that would require all desktop to upgrade to winXP or later, and there would be conversion costs for old
The weak spot in this is, that for it to work, the user have deny the executable from running. Most users don't. Especially not if the e-mail containing an the executable contains some plausible explanaiton why they should allow ti to run. E.g. telling them that it is an important secrurity update from Apple.
Starter Edition, Home Basic Edition, Home Premium Edition, Professional Edition, Small Business Edition, Enterprise Edition, and Ultimate Edition
I don't care how many flavors they have. Just give me a Working Edition
It depends on what you mean by ready.
Today Linux have a very good GUI in the form of Gnome. It is simple elegant and well desinged, from a usability perspective it is far better than anything we have seen from Microsoft so far. (KDE is not bad either by the way).
The problem is that this very good desktop seam to be targeted at home users. Unfortunately the number of software titles suited for the home user (e.g. games) is quite small. Home users seldom have much use for the advanced management features that comes with Linux.
For corporate use Linux have a lot more to give. There are good office suits, e-mail programs, webbrowsers, and now lately even calendar tools, and more is emerging every day.
The problem is that the management tools for the corporate Linux desktop arn't good enough. Sure, you can do a lot by scripts, but it is not easy enough to do it.
One example: why doesn't Gnome user management tools support LDAP. Why isn't there a LDAP backend for GConf where settings for the users desktops could easily be managed centrally. This is things that need to happen before Linux gets the credit it deserves on the corporate desktop.
I tested the mozilla site with an old IE5 browser
True, the mozilla pages doesn't look as good in IE as they do in Firefox. However the site is still readable and I can still download the browser. And it the page doesn't look horribly broken if you don't know how it is supposed to look. This is not much of a problem. Unless of course IE6 does a worse job than IE5, but that is generally not the case.
What would be more interesting is to know how it would look in IE7. If that can handle the rounded corners, and web developers continues their tradition of developing for the latest version of IE then firefox will have excellent marketing opportunities. The most common desktop in business is still win2k, and that will not run IE7. So they will have to use some other browser to get better web experience.
Is there anybody that have tested the mozilla pages using IE7?