What's the difference between companies like Verso, Yahoo, Cisco and Google which help the Chinese Communists oppress people, and the oil companies, industrial giants, and weapons manufacturers that have supported tyrants in exhange for access to their markets?
How many innocent people are in jail, or worse, because of their help? How much more free would the Chinese people be, and how much weaker would the Communist grip on power be, if it wasn't for the assistance of these tech companies? "Don't be evil"? -- How impressive and bold that they support free software, but not freedom (as in speech) for human beings.
It's easy for me to say; I don't have to take the risk. These companies certainly have a difficult dilemma and have other responsibilities to shareholders and employees. In their position, everyone wants to say, 'I just want to keep my head down and mind my own business'. Taking sides is a risky, costly, sometimes wasted (if Cisco doesn't provide firewalls, someone else will) and often unappreciated sacrifice.
But I think that with their power comes responsibility, and their freedom is due to the sacrifices of those who came before them. I would think Jerry Yang (Yahoo founder, born in Taiwan) and Sergey Brin (Google founder, born under Communist rule in the then USSR) would be especially sensitive to this issue.
(In fairness, I only have heard second hand what Google, Yahoo and Cicso do in China. Verso seems to proudly advertise their support for the Chinese Communists. And this publicity is probably helping their share price.)
I was curious who was behind the Epoch Times. Their website does not identify the publisher -- never a good sign (like posting as Anonymous Coward... )
The only information I could find, after a brief search, was the following which says it is supported, and maybe published and operated, by the Fulan Gong movement:
You will find some interesting commentary in this book which they (publish? support?):
On How the Communist Party Is an Anti-Universe Force In the last hundred years, the sudden invasion by the communist specter has created a force against nature and humanity, causing limitless agony and tragedy. It has also pushed civilization to the brink of destruction. It has become an extremely malevolent force against the universe.
In any case, I agree with the poster above: Know your source. I am not happy about the tech company's support of the Chinese communists, but I don't believe everything I read about it.
It's not breezy, consumer friendly reporting of scientific oddities, but succinct, clear writing about serious science, complete with contextual explanations.
I don't bother with anything else.
Isn't Palm a success?
on
Palm's Mistakes
·
· Score: 4, Informative
People have been saying Palm lost the market for years, but don't they still own as much of the market as any competitor? Isn't the Treo 600/650 a huge success?
I own a Win Mobile 2003 device, and I would never give it to one of my users. It's far too complicated. To the degree that most people want the basic address book, calendar/todo, and notes, the Palm is far superior: Endless battery life, far more stable, far easier UI.
I'd be interested to hear what someone with real expertise says about the report, especially the section where they describe what is well established regarding IQ. I note that report comes from an anthropology dept., not psychology.
Also, slightly off-topic: Why do scientists use these pop racial taxonomies, like black, white, Ashkenazi, etc? Is there any evidence that these 'races' actually represent something? Something biological? Something cultural? Most people, AFAIK, are a mix going back tens of thousands of years (of course).
(As is often pointed out: Someone with one black and one white parent is usually called "black".)
Reading your_mother_sews_soc's original post, he never applies his observed intelligence of his friends and relatives to Ashkenazi Jews as a whole. You put those words into his mouth all by yourself.
After reading your comment, I went back and reread your_mother_sew_soc's original post, thinking I had made a mistake.
It wouldn't be my first, but I don't think I did in this case. ymss doesn't explicitly make the connection, but implies it in many ways. For one thing, he posted it in a disccusion of a report on the causes of IQ in Ashkenazi Jewish people as a whole. I don't think he was just sharing a personal story about his family!
I agree that the study is extremely preliminary, which makes me think the only newsworthy part of it is the racism issue.
This report and the coverage are dangerously irrepsonsible.
1) It's sensationalism; the science itself isn't newsworthy: It's hypothesis has no supporting data (it's untested) and IMHO very speculative and discusses a somewhat esoteric issue: The potential for natural selection in certain circumstances to cause increased IQ.
2) Most importantly, by dividing people into 'races' and saying one 'race' is naturally stronger than others, ideas like this encourage people to identify with their 'races' and feel threatened by other 'races'. And racists propogandists will exaggerate and spin it saying, 'not only are Jewish people naturally smarter, as you always suspected, but as you notice they are also naturally agressive, prone to greed and evil,' implying the threat.
We are instinctively tribalistic and prone to killing each other. Nothing is more dangerous -- wars, tens of millions of deaths, devestation -- all wrought by these ideas.
It's the exact tactics of Milosovic in former Yugoslavia, Bin Laden, the Hutus in Rwanda (1 million murdered), Hindu nationalists in India, the Nazis, and countless more. It's an old, old trick with a very 'successful' track record.
I have no problem with science breaking social taboo, but the scientists are responsible for the consequences of their actions. Being anthropologists, I assume they know those consequences.
They should have taken care to bracket their report with careful statements, discouraging people from taking the ideas too far. They should (IMHO) publish more data and less loose speculation.
Consider this statement: During the 20th century, they made up about 3% of the US population but won 27% of the US Nobel science prizes and 25% of the ACM Turing awards. They account for more than half of world chess champions.
That has no meaning whatsoever -- Where are the Jewish world leaders in Go? Software engineering? I wonder why so few women, blacks and latinos win Nobel Prizes? Chess championships?
We are each born with a range of potential abilities in each area, and our effort/training determine where in that range we land.
What is that based on? How much is determed at conception, in the womb, at birth, early development, later development, health, environment (parents, stimulation), practice/effort -- early in life or later, confidence, teaching,...? How do these factors interact? I'd love to know.
I hate political correctness
Ah, the new political correctness. Say it loud and proud!
It seems that your friends and relatives are smart, therefore Ashkenazi Jews have a smart gene?
Unfortunately, you didn't get your copy of it -- even if both are true (one is anecdote, the other untested theory), one would have nothing to do with the other.
Think: Would the magic gene cause a difference so great that a casual observer notices? Would the difference be consistent across a whole family? Across a whole group? Is the average Ashkenazi smarter, or all Ashkenazis? Smarter than whom -- can't other groups have genetic variation? Are you part of one of those other groups, too? Is your family pure Ashkenazi (what does that mean?)? Could other things cause your family to be "smart"?
What does smart mean? Agreeing with you? Most people, if you ask them, are smarter than average.
It reminds me of Garrison Keillor: and all the children are above average.
Verizon calls their EV-DO service 'BroadbandAccess'; I have it on an Audiovox XV6600 phone (Windows Mobile and phone).
My experience
The service works very well and has been as reliable as my cellular voice calls. I forget it's there or that it's anything revolutionary, which is a good sign of it's usability. Latency is high, but it's just a little annoying in practice; I haven't tried anything interactive like chat, but some people claim to have used VOIP and iChat video conferencing with great success -- see these resources for that and other useful info: http://evdoinfo.com/ http://evdoforums.com/
Note that upload speed is only promised to be 60-80 Kbps.
The Audiovox XV6600 phone is low quality: Bugs, crashes, talktime way too little (extra/larger battery almost required) , earpiece volume too low, bluetooth problems, etc etc etc. For early adopters only, really. I wanted it EV-DO badly enough, so I decided to live with it. The best resources on the phone (really an HTC Blue Angel, rebranded): http://www.xda-developers.com/ http://www.pdaphonehome.com/
The phone is ~$45/month for unlimited service. A pcmcia card is ~$80/month. Note that the terms of service prohibit using the phone as to provide access to other devices.
Terms of service
Verizon's terms of service probibit downloading or streaming music, and other things. If you use the phone, the terms prohibit using it to bridge Internet service to other devices. More details here: http://evdoforums.com/about77.html
OTOH, I've never heard of that being enforced, but I'm not sure that I would.
I recently spent time researching hi-resolution handhelds (VGA or better). Here's a list for you to google. All vary in specs, but are comparable; some are import only, recently retired and/or available "soon".
* oqo
* Samsung Nexio S160 and XP30
* Fujitsu LOOX 718, 720, v70, and.U Pocket,
* Sharp Zaurus SL-C3000, -1000, -860, -760
* Dell Axim X50v
* HP hx4700
* Asus MyPal a730
* Toshiba e830
* Sony PCG-U101, VGN-U71, VGN-U50
* NTTDocomo Sigmarion III
* Psion / PsionTeklogix Netbook Pro 3000
* Danger Hiptop2 ( VGA)
* Tiqit Tiqit
* Vulcan Flipstart
* Voq Professional Phone ( VGA)
* HTC Blue Angel (rebranded as Audiovox XV6600, among others; VGA; but some models run on EV-DO networks(!))
It was first included in WP 9 (a.k.a. WP 2000), IIRC. By then, the battle was long over; I don't think WordPerfect was ever competitive in the 32 bit market, which goes back to August 1995.
Also, I haven't played with it much, but I'd bet VBA integration with WP isn't as strong as it is with Word.
the software was still plauged with stability and support problems for most of the decade.
Perhaps that FUD hurt WP, but it wasn't true. I supported it for several businesses and stability was very good; few complained about it in the user community. Support sucked, but was no worse than support from the competition.
Something else I should have added to my previous list of Word advantages: Visual basic, and object oriented formats. Both allowed corporate IT to cost-effectively develop programs to automate MS Office. WordPerfect's macros, while impressive in their own way, didn't address those needs as well.
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.
Completely off topic: A reasonable suspicion, but that's not what happened:
WordPerfect prided itself on converting everything, even arcane formats (for example, on WP 2000, I can save in MultiMate and Navy DIF Standard formats, whatever that is). I recall no unusual problems with Word (no conversion is perfect).
Nor was WordPerfect technically inferior. In one PC Magazine review at the time, even 16 bit WordPerfect beat 32 bit Word.
Word's advantages were, 1) They came out with a 16 bit Windows 3.1 version first. 2) They came out with a 32 bit Windows version way ahead of the competition. There were complaints that they took advantage of inside info on Win95. 3) Word was bundled with Excel -- that was the beginning of 'office suites'. 4) Microsoft, already holding the Windows monopoly, licensed Office to PC manufacturers in the following way: The manufacturer buys one Office license fee for every machine they sell, whether or not the customer buys Office. Guess what came with every new PC?
The gov't eventually made MS change the last strategy on anti-trust grounds.
A lovely chat, but I thought the point of the interview was to "clear the air" on the recent "squabbles", etc within the community. Here's the original/. post requesting interview questions:
There have been several recent reports of squabbles and problems involving Mozilla and Firefox development. In an attempt to clear the air about what's going on inside the Mozilla Project and the Mozilla Foundation, Mitchell Baker has agreed to answer 10 - 12 Slashdot questions.
None of that was ever addressed, except maybe a little about Moz 1.8.
Not to mention the format was terrible -- it prevented long questions and had too much nonsense chat -- and Roblimo never challenged her. He was her buddy, not a journalist. Next time, just reprint a press release; who needs an interviewer?
At least in the U.S., most ISPs provide virtually unlimited bandwidth to home users at a flat rate.
It works very well for me, and I understand the other advantages, but if the home ISPs made money per Kb downloaded, they'd no doubt see file sharing as a good source of revenue and would find more ways to support it, technically and politically.
Repeatedly, I see that members of the 'community' have expectations of the Mozilla Foundation that aren't met. MoFo and the community seem to perceive their respective roles and responsibilities completely differently. I'm hoping you can help bring together the two perspectives.
Many members of the 'community' seem to expect management and development of the various projects to be as open as the code, and they often complain that MoFo makes decisions without consulting, warning or even notifying the community.
Examples include the decision to release Firefox 1.0 based on Moz 1.7 instead of 1.8, the decision to stop MoFo development of Mozilla Application Suite, and the business relationship that makes Google the home page.
On a smaller scale, in my limited experience I've seen some community requests and patches ignored or dismissed summarily, though I've seen some accepted and/or discussed.
I don't know that MoFo's approach toward the community is good or bad -- I can imagine the limitations of interacting with so many people -- but at least expectations should be clarified. I've been participating for over four years and I'm still not sure what to expect. It's difficult to contribute if you don't know where help is desired or needed. Finding out in hindsight and seeing hours of work wasted is frustrating and inefficient. I think clarifying the roles would improve efficiency and improve retention of contributors.
What is MoFo's official, internal policy regarding the MoFo's and the community's roles and how they function? What is the de facto policy -- how does it really function in your experience?
What resources are dedicated to community interaction? Finally, what can be done to improve the situation, at least by aligning expectations with reality.
Or perhaps I haven't described the issue well: Does MoFo see a foundation and a community? Does it see something more subtly defined? Something completely different?
If they abandoned Mozilla Suite and its users, how do I know they won't abandon the current Firefox or Thunderbird apps?
That's the question every business will ask before adopting any other Moz app, if Mozilla Foundation abandons the Mozilla Suite. In fact, some will ask it about any FOSS product. That particular FUD already exists; this move would reinforce it.
It might seem unlikely that Firefox would be abandoned, but what happens to 1.0 when FF 2.0 comes out? Support and maintenance for old products is essential for any business customer; upgrading can be very expensive (deploying across thousands of computers, modifying any integrated software, etc) and often doesn't help the business' bottom line. IBM supports products forever, it seems; Microsoft supported Windows 98 until (last year?). The Linux 2.4 kernal is certainly maintaned; what about 2.2? IBM's name is behind Linux, anyway.
MoFo would look like an unreliable vendor with a good product. I posted in Slashdot previously that they aren't really community driven, which isn't necessarily a bad thing -- it's just different. It appears they may not be customer driven, either. What's driving MoFo?
WordPerfect's dominance in this sector -- both in terms of usage and product quality -- is completely gone, and has been for almost 10 years.
I have several law firms as clients, and all use WordPerfect. And so do many of the firms they deal with.
I think Word now leads the market for large firms, but WordPerfect does very well. Almost all legal industry specific apps are compatible with both Word and Wordperfect, for example, so there must still be a market out there.
As for quality -- I've never met a WordPerfect user who was happy to switch, even in hindsight. I'm sure there are some out there, but it's certainly not clear-cut that the legal industry prefers Word.
Slashdot Mirror
What's the difference between companies like Verso, Yahoo, Cisco and Google which help the Chinese Communists oppress people, and the oil companies, industrial giants, and weapons manufacturers that have supported tyrants in exhange for access to their markets?
How many innocent people are in jail, or worse, because of their help? How much more free would the Chinese people be, and how much weaker would the Communist grip on power be, if it wasn't for the assistance of these tech companies? "Don't be evil"? -- How impressive and bold that they support free software, but not freedom (as in speech) for human beings.
It's easy for me to say; I don't have to take the risk. These companies certainly have a difficult dilemma and have other responsibilities to shareholders and employees. In their position, everyone wants to say, 'I just want to keep my head down and mind my own business'. Taking sides is a risky, costly, sometimes wasted (if Cisco doesn't provide firewalls, someone else will) and often unappreciated sacrifice.
But I think that with their power comes responsibility, and their freedom is due to the sacrifices of those who came before them. I would think Jerry Yang (Yahoo founder, born in Taiwan) and Sergey Brin (Google founder, born under Communist rule in the then USSR) would be especially sensitive to this issue.
(In fairness, I only have heard second hand what Google, Yahoo and Cicso do in China. Verso seems to proudly advertise their support for the Chinese Communists. And this publicity is probably helping their share price.)
The only information I could find, after a brief search, was the following which says it is supported, and maybe published and operated, by the Fulan Gong movement:
http://www.chicagoreader.com/hottype/2005/051014_
You will find some interesting commentary in this book which they (publish? support?):
In any case, I agree with the poster above: Know your source. I am not happy about the tech company's support of the Chinese communists, but I don't believe everything I read about it.
Interesting; I never noticed they had editorials. In fairness, the point of editorials is opinion and partisanship.
In any case, the main, non-editorial, content is non-partisan as far as I know.
ScienceWeek, no competition:
http://scienceweek.com/
It's not breezy, consumer friendly reporting of scientific oddities, but succinct, clear writing about serious science, complete with contextual explanations.
I don't bother with anything else.
People have been saying Palm lost the market for years, but don't they still own as much of the market as any competitor? Isn't the Treo 600/650 a huge success?
I own a Win Mobile 2003 device, and I would never give it to one of my users. It's far too complicated. To the degree that most people want the basic address book, calendar/todo, and notes, the Palm is far superior: Endless battery life, far more stable, far easier UI.
I'd be interested to hear what someone with real expertise says about the report, especially the section where they describe what is well established regarding IQ. I note that report comes from an anthropology dept., not psychology.
Also, slightly off-topic: Why do scientists use these pop racial taxonomies, like black, white, Ashkenazi, etc? Is there any evidence that these 'races' actually represent something? Something biological? Something cultural? Most people, AFAIK, are a mix going back tens of thousands of years (of course).
(As is often pointed out: Someone with one black and one white parent is usually called "black".)
lorcha -
Reading your_mother_sews_soc's original post, he never applies his observed intelligence of his friends and relatives to Ashkenazi Jews as a whole. You put those words into his mouth all by yourself.
After reading your comment, I went back and reread your_mother_sew_soc's original post, thinking I had made a mistake.
It wouldn't be my first, but I don't think I did in this case. ymss doesn't explicitly make the connection, but implies it in many ways. For one thing, he posted it in a disccusion of a report on the causes of IQ in Ashkenazi Jewish people as a whole. I don't think he was just sharing a personal story about his family!
I agree that the study is extremely preliminary, which makes me think the only newsworthy part of it is the racism issue.
This report and the coverage are dangerously irrepsonsible.
1) It's sensationalism; the science itself isn't newsworthy: It's hypothesis has no supporting data (it's untested) and IMHO very speculative and discusses a somewhat esoteric issue: The potential for natural selection in certain circumstances to cause increased IQ.
2) Most importantly, by dividing people into 'races' and saying one 'race' is naturally stronger than others, ideas like this encourage people to identify with their 'races' and feel threatened by other 'races'. And racists propogandists will exaggerate and spin it saying, 'not only are Jewish people naturally smarter, as you always suspected, but as you notice they are also naturally agressive, prone to greed and evil,' implying the threat.
We are instinctively tribalistic and prone to killing each other. Nothing is more dangerous -- wars, tens of millions of deaths, devestation -- all wrought by these ideas.
It's the exact tactics of Milosovic in former Yugoslavia, Bin Laden, the Hutus in Rwanda (1 million murdered), Hindu nationalists in India, the Nazis, and countless more. It's an old, old trick with a very 'successful' track record.
I have no problem with science breaking social taboo, but the scientists are responsible for the consequences of their actions. Being anthropologists, I assume they know those consequences.
They should have taken care to bracket their report with careful statements, discouraging people from taking the ideas too far. They should (IMHO) publish more data and less loose speculation.
Consider this statement:
During the 20th century, they made up about 3% of the US
population but won 27% of the US Nobel science prizes and 25% of the ACM Turing awards. They account for more than half of world chess champions.
That has no meaning whatsoever -- Where are the Jewish world leaders in Go? Software engineering? I wonder why so few women, blacks and latinos win Nobel Prizes? Chess championships?
We are each born with a range of potential abilities in each area, and our effort/training determine where in that range we land.
...? How do these factors interact? I'd love to know.
What is that based on? How much is determed at conception, in the womb, at birth, early development, later development, health, environment (parents, stimulation), practice/effort -- early in life or later, confidence, teaching,
I hate political correctness
Ah, the new political correctness. Say it loud and proud!
It seems that your friends and relatives are smart, therefore Ashkenazi Jews have a smart gene?
Unfortunately, you didn't get your copy of it -- even if both are true (one is anecdote, the other untested theory), one would have nothing to do with the other.
Think: Would the magic gene cause a difference so great that a casual observer notices? Would the difference be consistent across a whole family? Across a whole group? Is the average Ashkenazi smarter, or all Ashkenazis? Smarter than whom -- can't other groups have genetic variation? Are you part of one of those other groups, too? Is your family pure Ashkenazi (what does that mean?)? Could other things cause your family to be "smart"?
What does smart mean? Agreeing with you? Most people, if you ask them, are smarter than average.
It reminds me of Garrison Keillor: and all the children are above average.
Verizon calls their EV-DO service 'BroadbandAccess'; I have it on an Audiovox XV6600 phone (Windows Mobile and phone).
My experience
The service works very well and has been as reliable as my cellular voice calls. I forget it's there or that it's anything revolutionary, which is a good sign of it's usability. Latency is high, but it's just a little annoying in practice; I haven't tried anything interactive like chat, but some people claim to have used VOIP and iChat video conferencing with great success -- see these resources for that and other useful info:
http://evdoinfo.com/
http://evdoforums.com/
Note that upload speed is only promised to be 60-80 Kbps.
The Audiovox XV6600 phone is low quality: Bugs, crashes, talktime way too little (extra/larger battery almost required) , earpiece volume too low, bluetooth problems, etc etc etc. For early adopters only, really. I wanted it EV-DO badly enough, so I decided to live with it. The best resources on the phone (really an HTC Blue Angel, rebranded):
http://www.xda-developers.com/
http://www.pdaphonehome.com/
The phone is ~$45/month for unlimited service. A pcmcia card is ~$80/month. Note that the terms of service prohibit using the phone as to provide access to other devices.
Terms of service
Verizon's terms of service probibit downloading or streaming music, and other things. If you use the phone, the terms prohibit using it to bridge Internet service to other devices. More details here:
http://evdoforums.com/about77.html
OTOH, I've never heard of that being enforced, but I'm not sure that I would.
Vendor plans for rollout
Some info here:
http://evdoforums.com/forum-9.html
#@$@! Slashdot removed the lesser than signs in front of VGA, which I guess I should have expected.
Anywhere in the list you see VGA , it should be < VGA (i.e. less than VGA).
What can you compare this to?
.U Pocket,
I recently spent time researching hi-resolution handhelds (VGA or better). Here's a list for you to google. All vary in specs, but are comparable; some are import only, recently retired and/or available "soon".
* oqo
* Samsung Nexio S160 and XP30
* Fujitsu LOOX 718, 720, v70, and
* Sharp Zaurus SL-C3000, -1000, -860, -760
* Dell Axim X50v
* HP hx4700
* Asus MyPal a730
* Toshiba e830
* Sony PCG-U101, VGN-U71, VGN-U50
* NTTDocomo Sigmarion III
* Psion / PsionTeklogix Netbook Pro 3000
* Danger Hiptop2 ( VGA)
* Tiqit Tiqit
* Vulcan Flipstart
* Voq Professional Phone ( VGA)
* HTC Blue Angel (rebranded as Audiovox XV6600, among others; VGA; but some models run on EV-DO networks(!))
http://www.alphasmart.com/
Doesn't quite meet your specs, but worth looking into.
I tried to help my 65+ year old father find a new phone recently. He doesn't care about technology, he just wants to make phone calls.
... I couldn't find a thing. We finally found him a used Kyocera 6035, which he loves.
He needs large, separated buttons and large fonts on the screen. He doesn't care about the size (up to a point).
I searched the web, the stores
Considering the number of older people in the US, Europe and Japan, I was amazed that all the phones were designed for someone in their 20s.
... at least, according to some articles they do. See my post on Mozillazine:# 10
http://mozillazine.org/talkback.html?article=6602
It would be very helpful if they would release them, even in some incomplete, unsupported state.
WordPerfect licenced VBA like 8 years ago.
It was first included in WP 9 (a.k.a. WP 2000), IIRC. By then, the battle was long over; I don't think WordPerfect was ever competitive in the 32 bit market, which goes back to August 1995.
Also, I haven't played with it much, but I'd bet VBA integration with WP isn't as strong as it is with Word.
The answer to your second question is, "yes".
the software was still plauged with stability and support problems for most of the decade.
Perhaps that FUD hurt WP, but it wasn't true. I supported it for several businesses and stability was very good; few complained about it in the user community. Support sucked, but was no worse than support from the competition.
Something else I should have added to my previous list of Word advantages: Visual basic, and object oriented formats. Both allowed corporate IT to cost-effectively develop programs to automate MS Office. WordPerfect's macros, while impressive in their own way, didn't address those needs as well.
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.
Completely off topic: A reasonable suspicion, but that's not what happened:
WordPerfect prided itself on converting everything, even arcane formats (for example, on WP 2000, I can save in MultiMate and Navy DIF Standard formats, whatever that is). I recall no unusual problems with Word (no conversion is perfect).
Nor was WordPerfect technically inferior. In one PC Magazine review at the time, even 16 bit WordPerfect beat 32 bit Word.
Word's advantages were,
1) They came out with a 16 bit Windows 3.1 version first.
2) They came out with a 32 bit Windows version way ahead of the competition. There were complaints that they took advantage of inside info on Win95.
3) Word was bundled with Excel -- that was the beginning of 'office suites'.
4) Microsoft, already holding the Windows monopoly, licensed Office to PC manufacturers in the following way: The manufacturer buys one Office license fee for every machine they sell, whether or not the customer buys Office. Guess what came with every new PC?
The gov't eventually made MS change the last strategy on anti-trust grounds.
None of that was ever addressed, except maybe a little about Moz 1.8.
Not to mention the format was terrible -- it prevented long questions and had too much nonsense chat -- and Roblimo never challenged her. He was her buddy, not a journalist. Next time, just reprint a press release; who needs an interviewer?
At least in the U.S., most ISPs provide virtually unlimited bandwidth to home users at a flat rate.
It works very well for me, and I understand the other advantages, but if the home ISPs made money per Kb downloaded, they'd no doubt see file sharing as a good source of revenue and would find more ways to support it, technically and politically.
Repeatedly, I see that members of the 'community' have
expectations of the Mozilla Foundation that aren't met. MoFo and
the community seem to perceive their respective roles and
responsibilities completely differently. I'm hoping you can
help bring together the two perspectives.
Many members of the 'community' seem to expect management and
development of the various projects to be as open as the code,
and they often complain that MoFo makes decisions without
consulting, warning or even notifying the community.
Examples include the decision to release Firefox 1.0 based on Moz
1.7 instead of 1.8, the decision to stop MoFo development of
Mozilla Application Suite, and the business relationship that
makes Google the home page.
On a smaller scale, in my limited experience I've seen some
community requests and patches ignored or dismissed summarily,
though I've seen some accepted and/or discussed.
I don't know that MoFo's approach toward the community is good or
bad -- I can imagine the limitations of interacting with so many
people -- but at least expectations should be clarified. I've
been participating for over four years and I'm still not sure what
to expect. It's difficult to contribute if you don't know where
help is desired or needed. Finding out in hindsight and seeing
hours of work wasted is frustrating and inefficient. I think
clarifying the roles would improve efficiency and improve retention
of contributors.
What is MoFo's official, internal policy regarding the MoFo's and
the community's roles and how they function? What is the de
facto policy -- how does it really function in your experience?
What resources are dedicated to community interaction? Finally,
what can be done to improve the situation, at least by aligning
expectations with reality.
Or perhaps I haven't described the issue well: Does MoFo see a
foundation and a community? Does it see something more subtly
defined? Something completely different?
If they abandoned Mozilla Suite and its users, how do I know they won't abandon the current Firefox or Thunderbird apps?
That's the question every business will ask before adopting any other Moz app, if Mozilla Foundation abandons the Mozilla Suite. In fact, some will ask it about any FOSS product. That particular FUD already exists; this move would reinforce it.
It might seem unlikely that Firefox would be abandoned, but what happens to 1.0 when FF 2.0 comes out? Support and maintenance for old products is essential for any business customer; upgrading can be very expensive (deploying across thousands of computers, modifying any integrated software, etc) and often doesn't help the business' bottom line. IBM supports products forever, it seems; Microsoft supported Windows 98 until (last year?). The Linux 2.4 kernal is certainly maintaned; what about 2.2? IBM's name is behind Linux, anyway.
MoFo would look like an unreliable vendor with a good product. I posted in Slashdot previously that they aren't really community driven, which isn't necessarily a bad thing -- it's just different. It appears they may not be customer driven, either. What's driving MoFo?
That's not true: Federal Courts I know of require PDF.
My wife works for a Federal Appeals court; they use WordPerfect internally but require PDF filings.
Some clients are law firms; all their court filings are in PDF.
I have several law firms as clients, and all use WordPerfect. And so do many of the firms they deal with.
I think Word now leads the market for large firms, but WordPerfect does very well. Almost all legal industry specific apps are compatible with both Word and Wordperfect, for example, so there must still be a market out there.
As for quality -- I've never met a WordPerfect user who was happy to switch, even in hindsight. I'm sure there are some out there, but it's certainly not clear-cut that the legal industry prefers Word.