People have a difficult enough time communicating via speech to each other. Does anyone truly believe that talking to a PC or a PDA is the panacea that the hype tells us it is going to be? I worked extensively with IBM's VoiceType Dictation system for years and while I enjoyed dictating some things the useability for system, application, or web navigation was zero. People who think that a PDA needs speech do not understand PDAs.
This is probably how it will progress. Microsoft Office for Linux appears. It has a lot of problems and everyone says Microsoft doesn't know what they're doing and that Linux is fine; Office is screwed. Then Microsoft releases Microsoft Linux, and the problems go away! And Microsoft says that they, as a professional development company, know how to make a business platform and that a loose-knit bunch of geeks running around playing with source code do not. Their "corrections" to solve problems in Linux has allowed their product to work reliably; not any changes to their Office code.
Regardless of where the real problems lie, Microsoft has the $$$$ to run a PR and Ad campaign to drive this point home into the non-technical people who make major purchasing decisions. The rest of us can whimper and cry at will about what is "right" or whatever; but it will be the OS/2 story all over again.
Then the "Microsoft Office on Microsoft Linux" campaign kicks into full swing. "Fort those of you who actually want to consider running Linux".
My wife recently changed her Windows NT system over to Linux. She is not a typical user; she is a certified NT administrator. She has worked professionally in the IS field supporting products such as NetWare and NT for several years. At my urging, and her own frustrations with NT, she agreed to change.
I told her to scan the RedHat (6.1) supported hardware sites and build herself a new machine. (She is also a hardware geek.) She did so.
The installation went kind of fine; the networking information screens were not presented and no networking stuff was configured. We did that after the fact.
I use KDE and she opted to do the same so she could ask questions or compare what she was doing against my system. RedHat, despite saying NO to all the gnome stuff, still loaded gnome and made it the default on the system. She was very frustrated with that and had a few choice words to say about their not following the user's instructions. Even with Windows, when you ask to install a product, it doesn't go off on its own and install another. (RedHat did the same thing on my system when I updated from 6.0 to 6.1)
She does a lot of work for other people from home these days and is active in our County's Master Gardener program. This means a lot of printing. RedHat 6.1 couldn't find the printer port. At all. Same thing happened during my upgrade from 6.0 to 6.1; a printing system suddenly became a non-printing system. She installed netscape and used kppp to get onto the internet and started searching for the answer. "The RedHat icons on the desktop are cute, but totally useless", was her next observation. No information about lack of seeing a printer port anywhere on the RedHat site.
Three days later she found a reference to the printing problem on one of the newsgroups and added a line to here conf.modules file that allowed the operating system to see the printer port. The situation left a tarnish against RedHat that remains three months after the installation.
Other issues she has:
Star Office is not even a little bit user friendly (compared to MS Office; which she has used for 12 years and even taught for a couple of years in the early 90s). The commands are not associated the way most people expect them to be. Most people coming to Linux will be coming from a Microsoft environment; the command structure of software on Linux should at least mimic those on Microsoft Windows based products for the common things: like text alignment in the spreadsheet? She also cannot doubleclick to select a directory when looking for a file, but must click on "filter" every time. (Star Office is the only product that this is a limitation in on her machine.) (I'm letting her try Applixware, a product I've used for 2+ years, next week.)
Netscape just disappears. Not cores, just "goes away" every so often. Acroread doesn't work at all and the default PDF viewer shows the top 2/3rds of pages only.
The concept of having to "mount" and "unmount" the floppy was a big obstacle.
There are other issues, but I think this more than supports Charles Connell's point. And this from someone who is more than comfortable with computers; the installation, configuration, and maintenance for hardware and software.
I love Linux, but for the typical end user, it has a LONG ways to go. And I can't even imagine it being an "open the box and go product". (I purchased an iMac the week they were released just to see if the hype about "open the box and go" was true. Less than 5 minutes after opening the box I had upgraded the RAM and was surfing the internet. So it is possible.)
Now that they've announced an interest in the Linux market, I'll wait for whatever they produce. That way I won't have to deal with these "no names" who came out of nowhere to push Linux. Besides, I'm sure with Microsoft's resources, they'll do it better. Uh... Haven't we heard this one before? And Microsoft has legions of people used to doing exactly this kind of thing. The PR machine at Microsoft is apparently cranking up against Linux in the best way possible. How many other companies have gone under because of this kind of announcement? Dave Bennett
multiple licenses in a single product
on
Hole in GNU GPL?
·
· Score: 1
The gnu license, while well intentioned, is doomed. It cannot infect anything that touches it. Period. If this were so, then a string of musical notes, say CDE, played in that order, would prevent any other piece of music from having that sequence in it. Even if the entire rest of the context was so different as to not in any way resemble the original piece. Multiple licenses can coexist to cover various pieces of a work. Start Netscape and read the list of copyright owners, known and unknown, who may, or may not, hold copyrights to certain portions of the work. I look for IBM or Microsoft to release a branded version of Linux in the next year that incorporates some of their proprietary stuff that they do not open up. Who is going to put up the $$$$ to fight that for the GPL? No one. But I'll be we have a good discussion about how "that sucks" here on slashdot! Dave
When we recently rebuilt all of our servers my staff presented me with a variety of naming conventions for our servers. I rejected all of them.
My reasoning is that if all of our servers are named after the 7 Dwarfs, then once you guess one name, you're onto an idea for the others' names. Larger lists (table of elements, episodes of the original Star Trek, etc.). As a security precaution, I do not want anyone to have a clue about anything on our network.
As a result, we have completely unrelated names across our environment. The person responsible for a server knows its name, other people need not care.
Dave Bennett Chief Information Officer Inland Truck Parts Company
This is not an unusual request and I wouldn't give it any thought at all. Do your job.
If employee X is viewing porn and employee Y sees this, and is offended by it, the employer is liable for protecting employee Y, not safeguarding employee X's "privacy" or "rights". Our company has been hit by this and it is an open and shut case in the courtroom with employee Y a winner every time.
In fact, the newest scam is for an employee Y to just take a job at a place with the intent of pulling such a stunt.
A variation of this scam is for a Customer to enter a business. They see PCs in place and in casual conversation ask if they have internet access. If the answer is "yes", the Customer later files a suit against the business claiming they were exposed to pornography while "shopping" in the business. If a review of the legally obtained cache files and the cache index file of computers visible from where the "customer" says they were standing reveals porn sites were visited at some time, another slam dunk and the business loses.
It is not going to be unusual for businesses to request what they have of you. Get used to it. They are trying to cover their butts.
Dave Bennett Chief Information Officer Inland Truck Parts Company
This is a very normal process. When I moved to a new city 5 years ago, everything was new. My wife and I investigated every mall, home improvement store, and "good" restaurant we could. As time progressed, we stopped going "everywhere" and settled in on the few places that were "comfortable" or "convenient" for us.
The internet is the same way. Everything was new to everyone at first, but people gravitate to what is comfortable or convenient for them. I know that personnally I only visit certain websites that meet my personal set of criteria. (They have to load the page I select in 10 seconds or less, the information I'm seeking must be readily available: 60 seconds or less, ordering of products must be readily understood and easily accomplished. Security and privacy are very much required.) Of course, my wife has her own set of criteria when she's online as I'm sure everyone does.
The web is an evolving place and I have to laugh at the "studies" that predict $x of advertising or sales on the 'net in 5 years or whatever. It'll be another 5 years before the net is a stable place that can be predictable.
I put Linux into our organization big time. It is on all desktops, on our own thin clients, all of our servers, all development boxes, and in routers. All development being done for the company _must_ work on Linux is a rule I put in place. Yet, I've moved on mentally to the Next Big Thing.
The Next Big Thing that I've been predicting for the last 4 years is Personal Computing Devices. Things like the Palm V I have become inseparable from. I use it for _everything_. eMail, notes, document writing & reading, spreadsheet, and development of new Palm applications. Quartus Forth and RsrcEdit allow me to create applications 100% on the device itself without going external at all.
The device is portable and meets 95% of my computing needs while still giving me a platform to play on.
Sure, my laptop is a 3 pound Sony running RedHat Linux 6.0 that is light enough to take anywhere, but I find myself using it for only a couple of things: internet browsing when I want to see images and the creation of printed materials to be distributed to others (KLyx). The Palm V gives me computing power and the ultimate in portability.
OK, occasionally I have to take my Canon BJ-80 so I can print from the Palm V via infrared link, but 99% of the people I share data with have Palm devices also. And the uses for and users of the device are everywhere.
My wife uses hers to manage our household and farm and is never more than a few feet away from it. I walked into the kitchen when I arrived at home the other evening and she had it laid out on the stove among steaming pots and pans where she was entering notes on the jam making process she was involved in.
Personal Computing Devices are tools that real people can use to actually their day to day lives. The true power of PCs have never been realized by the masses. (I still see users close app1 when the want to access app2, then close app2 and restart app1 every day.) The power of Personal Computing Devices such as the Palm are self realizing.
These are the NBT.
Dave Bennett Chief Information Officer Inland Truck Parts Company
I attended the CTIA conference in New Orleans earlier this year and the presentations about internet access from BellSouth' perspective was enlightening. Anything that is not Microsoft Windows or Windows CE based isn't even on the map at BellSouth. Period. According to the presentations I saw only Windows and Windows CE devices were the future, nothing else.:)
is what it was called for the last three years while it was being drafted. So why are you all surprised at this? It has been coming on for three years. Everyone has criticized it and casts votes against it and asked for it to go away to no avail. A lot of BIG $$ from the software industry behind this one.
It will most certainly effect the printing, video and audio industries as well. From past experiences it doesn't look like arguing against it in this forum at this point will do any good. (It hasn't to date.) The best thing is to get ready for the arguing at your State Government level. (I'm sure a few free copies of Windows for Government use will oil the passage of this one though.)
The biggest thing is that in the bowels of this proposal is the excusing from liability of software companies for anything arising from faults in their software... Which explains why Microsoft is such a big pusher of this legislation.
Of course, it'll put it on par with Open Source...
Dave Bennett Chief Information Officer Inland Truck Parts Company
I saw an interesting comment on the GPL last year in an article on the UCC 2B website. The attorney writing an explanation of what liability meant in the software arena commented that "writers of GPL'd software had legal liabilities for their code despite the inclusion of the GPL." His argument was that from a legal perspective, _any_ restriction placed on the user of the software automatically conferred liability for the product to the user. The restriction placed on the user of GPL software is that they have to leave it open. Which this person felt was enough to win the liability argument in court.
I think the "urge" is silly. The purpose of any computer is what its end usefulness is. Just to have Linux on a machine to say so is worthless unless there is actually a value attached to having Linux.
Also, most people miss the point completely of what a palm computing device is for. They were not designed to be a primary input device, but rather to be more of an information query device.
We are writing business applications for the Palm computing device. We allow simple queries on the device that then connect either via the internet or over an 800 number for real time information access for inventory & ordering from our system. The most complex thing you can expect someone to enter is a short note.
Using Linux on such a device is overkill delux. In fact, the Palm OS is probably overkill.
"Linux everywhere" is just as silly a goal as "Windows everywhere". Just because a pipe wrench will adjust to fit any size nut doesn't mean it is the proper tool for the job.
But if you really must carry Linux around 100% of the time, do what I do. Install it on a 3 pound Sony 505FX. (266mhz pentium w/MMX)
So this is Microsoft's opportunity to extend & devour? The Linux version could not have "all the features" of the Windows version, or lag a rev or two behind the Windows version. (As happened with Word and Excel for OS/2.)
I can see the ads now, "To get all the features you have to 'upgrade' to Microsoft Windows"...
Slashdot Mirror
People have a difficult enough time communicating
via speech to each other. Does anyone truly believe
that talking to a PC or a PDA is the panacea that
the hype tells us it is going to be? I worked
extensively with IBM's VoiceType Dictation system
for years and while I enjoyed dictating some things
the useability for system, application, or web
navigation was zero. People who think that a PDA
needs speech do not understand PDAs.
This is probably how it will progress. Microsoft Office for Linux appears. It has a lot of problems and everyone says Microsoft doesn't know what they're doing and that Linux is fine; Office is screwed. Then Microsoft releases Microsoft Linux, and the problems go away! And Microsoft says that they, as a professional development company, know how to make a business platform and that a loose-knit bunch of geeks running around playing with source code do not. Their "corrections" to solve problems in Linux has allowed their product to work reliably; not any changes to their Office code.
Regardless of where the real problems lie, Microsoft has the $$$$ to run a PR and Ad campaign to drive this point home into the non-technical people who make major purchasing decisions. The rest of us can whimper and cry at will about what is "right" or whatever; but it will be the OS/2 story all over again.
Then the "Microsoft Office on Microsoft Linux" campaign kicks into full swing. "Fort those of you who actually want to consider running Linux".
Dave
My wife recently changed her Windows NT system over to Linux. She is not a typical user; she is a certified NT administrator. She has worked professionally in the IS field supporting products such as NetWare and NT for several years. At my urging, and her own frustrations with NT, she agreed to change.
I told her to scan the RedHat (6.1) supported hardware sites and build herself a new machine. (She is also a hardware geek.) She did so.
The installation went kind of fine; the networking information screens were not presented and no networking stuff was configured. We did that after the fact.
I use KDE and she opted to do the same so she could ask questions or compare what she was doing against my system. RedHat, despite saying NO to all the gnome stuff, still loaded gnome and made it the default on the system. She was very frustrated with that and had a few choice words to say about their not following the user's instructions. Even with Windows, when you ask to install a product, it doesn't go off on its own and install another. (RedHat did the same thing on my system when I updated from 6.0 to 6.1)
She does a lot of work for other people from home these days and is active in our County's Master Gardener program. This means a lot of printing. RedHat 6.1 couldn't find the printer port. At all. Same thing happened during my upgrade from 6.0 to 6.1; a printing system suddenly became a non-printing system. She installed netscape and used kppp to get onto the internet and started searching for the answer. "The RedHat icons on the desktop are cute, but totally useless", was her next observation. No information about lack of seeing a printer port anywhere on the RedHat site.
Three days later she found a reference to the printing problem on one of the newsgroups and added a line to here conf.modules file that allowed the operating system to see the printer port. The situation left a tarnish against RedHat that remains three months after the installation.
Other issues she has:
Star Office is not even a little bit user friendly (compared to MS Office; which she has used for 12 years and even taught for a couple of years in the early 90s). The commands are not associated the way most people expect them to be. Most people coming to Linux will be coming from a Microsoft environment; the command structure of software on Linux should at least mimic those on Microsoft Windows based products for the common things: like text alignment in the spreadsheet? She also cannot doubleclick to select a directory when looking for a file, but must click on "filter" every time. (Star Office is the only product that this is a limitation in on her machine.) (I'm letting her try Applixware, a product I've used for 2+ years, next week.)
Netscape just disappears. Not cores, just "goes away" every so often. Acroread doesn't work at all and the default PDF viewer shows the top 2/3rds of pages only.
The concept of having to "mount" and "unmount" the floppy was a big obstacle.
There are other issues, but I think this more than supports Charles Connell's point. And this from someone who is more than comfortable with computers; the installation, configuration, and maintenance for hardware and software.
I love Linux, but for the typical end user, it has a LONG ways to go. And I can't even imagine it being an "open the box and go product". (I purchased an iMac the week they were released just to see if the hype about "open the box and go" was true. Less than 5 minutes after opening the box I had upgraded the RAM and was surfing the internet. So it is possible.)
Dave Bennett
Now that they've announced an interest in the Linux market, I'll wait for whatever they produce. That way I won't have to deal with these "no names" who came out of nowhere to push Linux. Besides, I'm sure with Microsoft's resources, they'll do it better. Uh... Haven't we heard this one before? And Microsoft has legions of people used to doing exactly this kind of thing. The PR machine at Microsoft is apparently cranking up against Linux in the best way possible. How many other companies have gone under because of this kind of announcement? Dave Bennett
The gnu license, while well intentioned, is doomed. It cannot infect anything that touches it. Period. If this were so, then a string of musical notes, say CDE, played in that order, would prevent any other piece of music from having that sequence in it. Even if the entire rest of the context was so different as to not in any way resemble the original piece. Multiple licenses can coexist to cover various pieces of a work. Start Netscape and read the list of copyright owners, known and unknown, who may, or may not, hold copyrights to certain portions of the work. I look for IBM or Microsoft to release a branded version of Linux in the next year that incorporates some of their proprietary stuff that they do not open up. Who is going to put up the $$$$ to fight that for the GPL? No one. But I'll be we have a good discussion about how "that sucks" here on slashdot! Dave
When we recently rebuilt all of our servers my staff presented me with a variety of naming conventions for our servers. I rejected all of them.
My reasoning is that if all of our servers are named after the 7 Dwarfs, then once you guess one name, you're onto an idea for the others' names. Larger lists (table of elements, episodes of the original Star Trek, etc.). As a security precaution, I do not want anyone to have a clue about anything on our network.
As a result, we have completely unrelated names across our environment. The person responsible for a server knows its name, other people need not care.
Dave Bennett
Chief Information Officer
Inland Truck Parts Company
This is not an unusual request and I wouldn't give it any thought at all. Do your job.
If employee X is viewing porn and employee Y sees this, and is offended by it, the employer is liable for protecting employee Y, not safeguarding employee X's "privacy" or "rights". Our company has been hit by this and it is an open and shut case in the courtroom with employee Y a winner every time.
In fact, the newest scam is for an employee Y to just take a job at a place with the intent of pulling such a stunt.
A variation of this scam is for a Customer to enter a business. They see PCs in place and in casual conversation ask if they have internet access. If the answer is "yes", the Customer later files a suit against the business claiming they were exposed to pornography while "shopping" in the business. If a review of the legally obtained cache files and the cache index file of computers visible from where the "customer" says they were standing reveals porn sites were visited at some time, another slam dunk and the business loses.
It is not going to be unusual for businesses to request what they have of you. Get used to it. They are trying to cover their butts.
Dave Bennett
Chief Information Officer
Inland Truck Parts Company
This is a very normal process. When I moved to a new city 5 years ago, everything was new. My wife and I investigated every mall, home improvement store, and "good" restaurant we could. As time progressed, we stopped going "everywhere" and settled in on the few places that were "comfortable" or "convenient" for us.
The internet is the same way. Everything was new to everyone at first, but people gravitate to what is comfortable or convenient for them. I know that personnally I only visit certain websites that meet my personal set of criteria. (They have to load the page I select in 10 seconds or less, the information I'm seeking must be readily available: 60 seconds or less, ordering of products must be readily understood and easily accomplished. Security and privacy are very much required.) Of course, my wife has her own set of criteria when she's online as I'm sure everyone does.
The web is an evolving place and I have to laugh at the "studies" that predict $x of advertising or sales on the 'net in 5 years or whatever. It'll be another 5 years before the net is a stable place that can be predictable.
Dave Bennett
CIO
Inland Truck Parts Company
...Goes Unpunished!
I put Linux into our organization big time. It is on all desktops, on our own thin clients, all of our servers, all development boxes, and in routers. All development being done for the company _must_ work on Linux is a rule I put in place. Yet, I've moved on mentally to the Next Big Thing.
The Next Big Thing that I've been predicting for the last 4 years is Personal Computing Devices. Things like the Palm V I have become inseparable from. I use it for _everything_. eMail, notes, document writing & reading, spreadsheet, and development of new Palm applications. Quartus Forth and RsrcEdit allow me to create applications 100% on the device itself without going external at all.
The device is portable and meets 95% of my computing needs while still giving me a platform to play on.
Sure, my laptop is a 3 pound Sony running RedHat Linux 6.0 that is light enough to take anywhere, but I find myself using it for only a couple of things: internet browsing when I want to see images and the creation of printed materials to be distributed to others (KLyx). The Palm V gives me computing power and the ultimate in portability.
OK, occasionally I have to take my Canon BJ-80 so I can print from the Palm V via infrared link, but 99% of the people I share data with have Palm devices also. And the uses for and users of the device are everywhere.
My wife uses hers to manage our household and farm and is never more than a few feet away from it. I walked into the kitchen when I arrived at home the other evening and she had it laid out on the stove among steaming pots and pans where she was entering notes on the jam making process she was involved in.
Personal Computing Devices are tools that real people can use to actually their day to day lives. The true power of PCs have never been realized by the masses. (I still see users close app1 when the want to access app2, then close app2 and restart app1 every day.) The power of Personal Computing Devices such as the Palm are self realizing.
These are the NBT.
Dave Bennett
Chief Information Officer
Inland Truck Parts Company
Where are the Windows/286 and Windows/386 products on this history of guis page? Windows/386 was the most stable product Microsoft ever released.
Dave Bennett
I attended the CTIA conference in New Orleans earlier this year and the presentations about internet access from BellSouth' perspective was enlightening. Anything that is not Microsoft Windows or Windows CE based isn't even on the map at BellSouth. Period. According to the presentations I saw only Windows and Windows CE devices were the future, nothing else. :)
While the plan is good thinking overall, what is the plan to pick up the garbage later?
is what it was called for the last three years while it was being drafted. So why are you all surprised at this? It has been coming on for three years. Everyone has criticized it and casts votes against it and asked for it to go away to no avail. A lot of BIG $$ from the software industry behind this one.
It will most certainly effect the printing, video and audio industries as well. From past experiences it doesn't look like arguing against it in this forum at this point will do any good. (It hasn't to date.) The best thing is to get ready for the arguing at your State Government level. (I'm sure a few free copies of Windows for Government use will oil the passage of this one though.)
The biggest thing is that in the bowels of this proposal is the excusing from liability of software companies for anything arising from faults in their software... Which explains why Microsoft is such a big pusher of this legislation.
Of course, it'll put it on par with Open Source...
Dave Bennett
Chief Information Officer
Inland Truck Parts Company
I saw an interesting comment on the GPL last year in an article on the UCC 2B website. The attorney writing an explanation of what liability meant in the software arena commented that "writers of GPL'd software had legal liabilities for their code despite the inclusion of the GPL." His argument was that from a legal perspective, _any_ restriction placed on the user of the software automatically conferred liability for the product to the user. The restriction placed on the user of GPL software is that they have to leave it open. Which this person felt was enough to win the liability argument in court.
I think the "urge" is silly. The purpose of any computer is what its end usefulness is. Just to have Linux on a machine to say so is worthless unless there is actually a value attached to having Linux.
Also, most people miss the point completely of what a palm computing device is for. They were not designed to be a primary input device, but rather to be more of an information query device.
We are writing business applications for the Palm computing device. We allow simple queries on the device that then connect either via the internet or over an 800 number for real time information access for inventory & ordering from our system. The most complex thing you can expect someone to enter is a short note.
Using Linux on such a device is overkill delux. In fact, the Palm OS is probably overkill.
"Linux everywhere" is just as silly a goal as "Windows everywhere". Just because a pipe wrench will adjust to fit any size nut doesn't mean it is the proper tool for the job.
But if you really must carry Linux around 100% of the time, do what I do. Install it on a 3 pound Sony 505FX. (266mhz pentium w/MMX)
So this is Microsoft's opportunity to extend & devour? The Linux version could not have "all the features" of the Windows version, or lag a rev or two behind the Windows version. (As happened with Word and Excel for OS/2.)
I can see the ads now, "To get all the features you have to 'upgrade' to Microsoft Windows"...