I for one will feel VERY pissed off if I get a call in the next few days from Verizon, telling me that if I don't sign back on with them I will have no phone service. But that seems like precisely the implication of this ruling.
If Verizon is stupid enough to do this, it could very well be the death knell for POTS. Such a large regression in customer choice might be enough to push many people to going exclusively wireless for phone service (maybe broadband as well).
At work we're migrating from Exchange 2000 to 2003. Encountered so far: Undocumented limitations, "That's a feature, not a bug", regressions from previous versions, unexplained failures with oh-so-helpful (ie nonexistent) diagnostic information... And this is a clean install!
Ballmer's right, it's sooooooo much easier than Linux.
Actually, you can do this with PDF. Adobe's document reader allows you to fill in fields and save the modified document.
Serious, non-flamewar-in-the-other-thread technical question here:) Is that a new feature in 6?
In version 5 at least, I was quite annoyed to find out (after filling out my 1040 in PDF format), that the reader wouldn't let me save the document with the fields intact. The full-blown Acrobat, which we have installed on a few select computers at work, does let you save it, but as far as I can tell the reader can only print the completed form.
I ended up just printing to a Postscript file and saving that for my records...
Look, you can't go back and CHANGE YOUR POINT after I responded to it
Check the timestamps, this was brought up and replied to before you responded to it. The time window was only about 6 minutes though, so maybe you were already composing the reponse and didn't see that post. Sorry -- didn't mean to come across as jumping on you about it.
You can't just wave a shiny object around and say "Butbutbut you can't WRITE those formats, then!"
That was not my intention. Yes, I made a mistake. I should have said "use" instead of "read", and realized it almost immediately after posting. Thought about posting a quick follow up, but since I knew people would point out the readers even if I did, I figured it would be just as well to respond to one of them.
If there is interactive work, then the people on the outside can communicate with their contacts in the government, right? And if they don't have Word, and don't want to buy it, they can ask files to be sent in RTF.
This is probably more of an education issue than anything. Most of the people who work in government that I know would say, "What's RTF? Why can't you just use Word like everyone else?" (paraphrasing). Even then, the last time I tried to use Word filters to export to anything else the result was pretty awful. That was with Word 2000; I don't know if it's impoved any since then.
But there's lots of other arguments you can make like that...supposing the the government wanted to send you a file, edit it, and send it back...but you didn't have a computer at all? You'd have to buy your own computer! And internet service! The government also, in most states, requires you to have auto insurance...but it's not free!
The debate over whether electronic communication excludes the poor is an entirely different discussion. The situation here is akin to them requiring you to have a Dell computer, or Allstate insurance. The requirements may not be free (as in $), but you still some choice.
In any case, there IS OpenOffice, which in most cases CAN read and write Office documents.
It can read the current generation of Office documents, for the most part. The biggest problems I've encountered in it are with documents which were saved with the "protection" option enabled to make part of it read-only. There seem to be quite a few of those out there. OpenOffice can't read them at all. Irony is that this misfeature is trivial to remove for anyone who has MSWord/Excel.
The big picture, however, is that MS has the pieces in place to eventually stop this. Their new XML format is covered by patents, making it feasible for them to sue anybody who attempts to reverse engineer it or use it in a competing product. When Word 2008 or whatever drops support for saving to old formats, OO.o may not be a viable option anymore.
Typically I find that the extent of government document interaction is me downloading something in PDF
Some of the departments with more public exposure have gone PDF for forms and such. PDF is a little better than the MS formats as far as read-only data goes. They do make the specification available to the public, but restrict its distribution. So if Adobe one day decides to clamp down on the format and yank the specs, you're pretty much out of luck. I doubt they'll do that, but the possibility does exist.
Taking the license agreement at face value, I can't even quote the section that tells me I can't reproduce it. I suspect a short quote would still be covered under fair user, however.
In any case, I should point out that I have no problem with MS products in the business sector (other than technical problems). If the free market wants to use it, then let them. That's what freedom is supposed to be about. I'm just against governments letting themselves inadvertently become pawns of companies pushing proprietary formats.
There is a lot more involved in dealing with govt. than simply consuming documents. Sure, if you live in an authoritarian state when they dictate and the people have no voice, then yes, the reader would suffice. In a representative nation though, communication has to be a two-way street.
Sure, for simple messages you can send plain text or some other format (and hope that they know how to read it). What about something that gets passed back and forth between govt. officials/workers and people on the outside for review/comment/editing? This happens more often than you might think.
What will never happen, but would be awesome, would be for IBM or somebody to pump a load of money into increasing the performace/memory footprint of wxPython. Bring it up to the level of C#. It's Free and doesn't have all that Java baggage.
The next step to Utopia would of course be a wxQt port...
Right now we can tell our governments not to use MS Word doc format because it's only available to certain systems. If IBM port MS Office, governments will find it harder to understand the issues involved.
The argument shouldn't be that isn't not available, it should be that it's not right for a government to require you to give money to Microsoft in order to read official documents.
Joe Sixpack is sitting at his computer, watching a DVD. He thinks to himself, "hey, this scene is really cool. I'd love to have a screenshot of that as my desktop wallpaper." He pauses the movie and presses the printscreen button.
Most people using Windows won't use WiMP to play DVDs. They'll use whatever DVD player software was installed, since WiMP can't play DVDs without out (no MPEG-2 codec included by default). Which means they'll probably be using WinDVD, PowerDVD, etc., all of which have a handy 'screenshot' button right on the main interface.
You're not going to break into a port that does not respond.
Not necessarily true. Sometimes it's even possible to break in to hosts that don't respond. I remember reading about a vulnerability in tcpdump a while back (buffer overflow in one of the decoders). In theory, it would be possible to send traffic to another IP on the same subnet and end up rooting the sniffer...
Other than that, DOCSIS (in its most common configuration) is a very Big Brother-ish protocol, and your ISP will know what you're doing the minute you do it...
I don't really care about uncapping, but it would be nice to have a hacked firmware image that would pretend to speak DOCSIS but not actually give them any power to monitor or change anything...
It makes a lot more sense to do it at the cable modem. If they do it at the router, you basically end up with dropped packets.
Ummmmm, if you cap it at the cable modem and max out the cap there, you still end up with dropped packets. That's how IP works. If there's not enough bandwidth and the queues are full, drop the packet -- TCP takes it as a hint that it's sending data too fast.
and about 6 hours later before we were able to get updates for our enterprise anti-virus software (I won't mention the vendor).
No sense in hiding it. Gotta be Norton AV. I don't know how it ever became the "Enterprise Standard" AV when it's obvious to everyone how much it sucks.
What I did, when a copy of the AIDS computer virus showed up on a 5.25" floppy, was to take a junk PC, remove the network adaptor, then try installing it.
These days, you can use VMWare with a virtual network adapter (not connected to anything else) and nonpersistent disks. Great for day 0 when you need a quick fix and the AV companies haven't updated their signatures yet. Best part is when you're done, just close VMWare and --poof!--. Everything it did is gone and reset back to a pristine system.
For best results make sure the host system is running Linux or *BSD so it doesn't have a chance of getting accidentally infected.
If you really want these GTK apps, why don't you just switch to GNOME and use that for all applications? Then you will have a consistent desktop and will not be bothered with different file dialogs in your applications. And you will not have to change the source of the programs.
Go home, troll. Hint: It's not inconsistent dialogs that bother me, it's the fact that the GTK file selection dialogs SUCK royally.
Let's see... Crappy dialogs in the 3 gtk programs I use (gimp, audacity, gnucash) vs. crappy dialogs in EVERY program, I wonder which I'll choose. By the way, I use a lot more native KDE apps than GNOME apps. Gimp and Audacity aren't even GNOME programs at all -- they just use gtk. I hear GnuCash is working on separating the backend from the UI. Maybe we'll see a Qt port and I can finally delete all that GNOME baggage.
And FWIW, I was a die-hard GNOME user as of version 1.4. 2.0 was a serious regression in functionality and usability. It was so bad it drove me to KDE. When 2.2 came out I tried it to see if it was any better. It got quickly removed.
I just want a way to force OO.o and all GTK apps to use the KDE file dialog. I know there was that Qt event loop thing posted a while back, but it required some fairly intrusive changes to the source of the programs.
(yes, I know the parent post was a joke, but this is something we'll have to face _sometime_ before 2038)
Seriously, I've been experimenting with using 64-bit time_t's on FreeBSD/ia32 for a while. The base OS seems to be perfectly fine with it, but I've run in to all sorts of problems with software that assumes that sizeof(time_t) <= sizeof(long).
While I personally agree that it's just ionizing the air, two experiments with conflicting results isn't exactly scientific proof. I seem to recall a third experiment besides the NASA one but don't remember off the top of my head who performed it...
Unfortunately there hasn't been just a whole lot of real research into the effect, possibly due to the "UFO anti-gravity sekr3tz" air surrounding it.
Ah, I remember now. The third one was done by the Army Research Labs. The abstract for the paper is here. Unfortunately, the PDF itself seems to have been deleted from the official site (break out your tinfoil hats, heh), but there is a mirror. Looks like they didn't try the vacuum experiment, but theorized (and did some math based on) that the effect was the sum of two different forces: A smaller one (ionic wind) that would persist in a vacuum, and a larger one (charge drift) that required a fluid dielectric such as the air.
Slashdot Mirror
I for one will feel VERY pissed off if I get a call in the next few days from Verizon, telling me that if I don't sign back on with them I will have no phone service. But that seems like precisely the implication of this ruling.
If Verizon is stupid enough to do this, it could very well be the death knell for POTS. Such a large regression in customer choice might be enough to push many people to going exclusively wireless for phone service (maybe broadband as well).
At work we're migrating from Exchange 2000 to 2003. Encountered so far: Undocumented limitations, "That's a feature, not a bug", regressions from previous versions, unexplained failures with oh-so-helpful (ie nonexistent) diagnostic information... And this is a clean install!
Ballmer's right, it's sooooooo much easier than Linux.
If you mean do they "eat their own dogfood?", then yes. Subversion has hosted itself for quite some time now.
Actually, you can do this with PDF. Adobe's document reader allows you to fill in fields and save the modified document.
:) Is that a new feature in 6?
Serious, non-flamewar-in-the-other-thread technical question here
In version 5 at least, I was quite annoyed to find out (after filling out my 1040 in PDF format), that the reader wouldn't let me save the document with the fields intact. The full-blown Acrobat, which we have installed on a few select computers at work, does let you save it, but as far as I can tell the reader can only print the completed form.
I ended up just printing to a Postscript file and saving that for my records...
Look, you can't go back and CHANGE YOUR POINT after I responded to it
Check the timestamps, this was brought up and replied to before you responded to it. The time window was only about 6 minutes though, so maybe you were already composing the reponse and didn't see that post. Sorry -- didn't mean to come across as jumping on you about it.
You can't just wave a shiny object around and say "Butbutbut you can't WRITE those formats, then!"
That was not my intention. Yes, I made a mistake. I should have said "use" instead of "read", and realized it almost immediately after posting. Thought about posting a quick follow up, but since I knew people would point out the readers even if I did, I figured it would be just as well to respond to one of them.
If there is interactive work, then the people on the outside can communicate with their contacts in the government, right? And if they don't have Word, and don't want to buy it, they can ask files to be sent in RTF.
This is probably more of an education issue than anything. Most of the people who work in government that I know would say, "What's RTF? Why can't you just use Word like everyone else?" (paraphrasing). Even then, the last time I tried to use Word filters to export to anything else the result was pretty awful. That was with Word 2000; I don't know if it's impoved any since then.
But there's lots of other arguments you can make like that...supposing the the government wanted to send you a file, edit it, and send it back...but you didn't have a computer at all? You'd have to buy your own computer! And internet service! The government also, in most states, requires you to have auto insurance...but it's not free!
The debate over whether electronic communication excludes the poor is an entirely different discussion. The situation here is akin to them requiring you to have a Dell computer, or Allstate insurance. The requirements may not be free (as in $), but you still some choice.
In any case, there IS OpenOffice, which in most cases CAN read and write Office documents.
It can read the current generation of Office documents, for the most part. The biggest problems I've encountered in it are with documents which were saved with the "protection" option enabled to make part of it read-only. There seem to be quite a few of those out there. OpenOffice can't read them at all. Irony is that this misfeature is trivial to remove for anyone who has MSWord/Excel.
The big picture, however, is that MS has the pieces in place to eventually stop this. Their new XML format is covered by patents, making it feasible for them to sue anybody who attempts to reverse engineer it or use it in a competing product. When Word 2008 or whatever drops support for saving to old formats, OO.o may not be a viable option anymore.
Typically I find that the extent of government document interaction is me downloading something in PDF
Some of the departments with more public exposure have gone PDF for forms and such. PDF is a little better than the MS formats as far as read-only data goes. They do make the specification available to the public, but restrict its distribution. So if Adobe one day decides to clamp down on the format and yank the specs, you're pretty much out of luck. I doubt they'll do that, but the possibility does exist.
Taking the license agreement at face value, I can't even quote the section that tells me I can't reproduce it. I suspect a short quote would still be covered under fair user, however.
In any case, I should point out that I have no problem with MS products in the business sector (other than technical problems). If the free market wants to use it, then let them. That's what freedom is supposed to be about. I'm just against governments letting themselves inadvertently become pawns of companies pushing proprietary formats.
lol, that cracked me up for some strange reason. If I hadn't already posted, this would get +1, teh funny.
On virtually any other point about Microsoft I would likely agree with you, but on this one, you're wrong.
I have already replied to this point.
There is a lot more involved in dealing with govt. than simply consuming documents. Sure, if you live in an authoritarian state when they dictate and the people have no voice, then yes, the reader would suffice. In a representative nation though, communication has to be a two-way street.
Sure, for simple messages you can send plain text or some other format (and hope that they know how to read it). What about something that gets passed back and forth between govt. officials/workers and people on the outside for review/comment/editing? This happens more often than you might think.
BTW.... There are entirely FREE Readers for ALL M$ Office Products at the their downloads section
Okay, then change the above post to "read/modify/submit" official documents, or otherwise interact with your government.
What will never happen, but would be awesome, would be for IBM or somebody to pump a load of money into increasing the performace/memory footprint of wxPython. Bring it up to the level of C#. It's Free and doesn't have all that Java baggage.
The next step to Utopia would of course be a wxQt port...
Netcraft confirms?
Right now we can tell our governments not to use MS Word doc format because it's only available to certain systems. If IBM port MS Office, governments will find it harder to understand the issues involved.
The argument shouldn't be that isn't not available, it should be that it's not right for a government to require you to give money to Microsoft in order to read official documents.
Please stand clear of the doors, por favor mantenganse alejado de las puertas.
:)
Whoa! That's the last thing I expected to see in a Slashdot sig.
Been my favorite Spanish phrase since a group of us heard it on the Disney/Orlando monorail. We rode that thing so much that it kind of stuck
Joe Sixpack is sitting at his computer, watching a DVD. He thinks to himself, "hey, this scene is really cool. I'd love to have a screenshot of that as my desktop wallpaper." He pauses the movie and presses the printscreen button.
Most people using Windows won't use WiMP to play DVDs. They'll use whatever DVD player software was installed, since WiMP can't play DVDs without out (no MPEG-2 codec included by default). Which means they'll probably be using WinDVD, PowerDVD, etc., all of which have a handy 'screenshot' button right on the main interface.
...the other one that is more familiar to DOS/Windows x86 assembly programmers (which is used by the NASM assmebler).
The 'other one' is the Intel standard.
(Note: I have sent emails to Senators that were responded to via snail mail, I'm pretty sure they treat it all the same).
Yep, they treat it all the same. E-mail gets ignored just as efficiently as snail mail and faxes.
You're not going to break into a port that does not respond.
Not necessarily true. Sometimes it's even possible to break in to hosts that don't respond. I remember reading about a vulnerability in tcpdump a while back (buffer overflow in one of the decoders). In theory, it would be possible to send traffic to another IP on the same subnet and end up rooting the sniffer...
Other than that, DOCSIS (in its most common configuration) is a very Big Brother-ish protocol, and your ISP will know what you're doing the minute you do it...
I don't really care about uncapping, but it would be nice to have a hacked firmware image that would pretend to speak DOCSIS but not actually give them any power to monitor or change anything...
It makes a lot more sense to do it at the cable modem. If they do it at the router, you basically end up with dropped packets.
Ummmmm, if you cap it at the cable modem and max out the cap there, you still end up with dropped packets. That's how IP works. If there's not enough bandwidth and the queues are full, drop the packet -- TCP takes it as a hint that it's sending data too fast.
and about 6 hours later before we were able to get updates for our enterprise anti-virus software (I won't mention the vendor).
No sense in hiding it. Gotta be Norton AV. I don't know how it ever became the "Enterprise Standard" AV when it's obvious to everyone how much it sucks.
What I did, when a copy of the AIDS computer virus showed up on a 5.25" floppy, was to take a junk PC, remove the network adaptor, then try installing it.
These days, you can use VMWare with a virtual network adapter (not connected to anything else) and nonpersistent disks. Great for day 0 when you need a quick fix and the AV companies haven't updated their signatures yet. Best part is when you're done, just close VMWare and --poof!--. Everything it did is gone and reset back to a pristine system.
For best results make sure the host system is running Linux or *BSD so it doesn't have a chance of getting accidentally infected.
If you really want these GTK apps, why don't you just switch to GNOME and use that for all applications? Then you will have a consistent desktop and will not be bothered with different file dialogs in your applications. And you will not have to change the source of the programs.
Go home, troll. Hint: It's not inconsistent dialogs that bother me, it's the fact that the GTK file selection dialogs SUCK royally.
Let's see... Crappy dialogs in the 3 gtk programs I use (gimp, audacity, gnucash) vs. crappy dialogs in EVERY program, I wonder which I'll choose. By the way, I use a lot more native KDE apps than GNOME apps. Gimp and Audacity aren't even GNOME programs at all -- they just use gtk. I hear GnuCash is working on separating the backend from the UI. Maybe we'll see a Qt port and I can finally delete all that GNOME baggage.
And FWIW, I was a die-hard GNOME user as of version 1.4. 2.0 was a serious regression in functionality and usability. It was so bad it drove me to KDE. When 2.2 came out I tried it to see if it was any better. It got quickly removed.
this is not a flame or a troll
Every troll says that. Kind of like, "This is not spam", or "this is not a marketing call"...
I just want a way to force OO.o and all GTK apps to use the KDE file dialog. I know there was that Qt event loop thing posted a while back, but it required some fairly intrusive changes to the source of the programs.
...and watch all your software break.
(yes, I know the parent post was a joke, but this is something we'll have to face _sometime_ before 2038)
Seriously, I've been experimenting with using 64-bit time_t's on FreeBSD/ia32 for a while. The base OS seems to be perfectly fine with it, but I've run in to all sorts of problems with software that assumes that sizeof(time_t) <= sizeof(long).
While I personally agree that it's just ionizing the air, two experiments with conflicting results isn't exactly scientific proof. I seem to recall a third experiment besides the NASA one but don't remember off the top of my head who performed it...
Unfortunately there hasn't been just a whole lot of real research into the effect, possibly due to the "UFO anti-gravity sekr3tz" air surrounding it.
Ah, I remember now. The third one was done by the Army Research Labs. The abstract for the paper is here. Unfortunately, the PDF itself seems to have been deleted from the official site (break out your tinfoil hats, heh), but there is a mirror.
Looks like they didn't try the vacuum experiment, but theorized (and did some math based on) that the effect was the sum of two different forces: A smaller one (ionic wind) that would persist in a vacuum, and a larger one (charge drift) that required a fluid dielectric such as the air.