You are right - but that's why I think that the "battlefield" (if you will) is still open here. In other words it is still possible to defeat Microsoft in this field, although their position is quite strong and I think that underestimating.NET or dismissing it as just a "marketing spin" would be a grave mistake.
But we can forget about browser scene for now - here the outcome is pretty clear at the moment, whether we like it or not. There are niches for Mozilla, Opera and others but IE is a clear winner.
> Additionally, I've got AOL 5.0 loaded at home, and although it upgraded some things, it still uses IE and on the occasion when I pop open IE instead of Netscape outside of AOL, it says IE provided by AOL. Is AOL really going to make use of Netscape? I don't think so.
Also - let's face it - Netscape in its current state is not good enough (ie. slow, unstable, cumbersome to use etc.) to be a viable alternative to IE. Mozilla is much better although it is based on the same code but I don't think AOL will even think of using it.
Well, first of all most web developers today not only don't care about HTML - they don't exactly know what the HTML is (besides that it is a file format that is produced by their visual web creation tools when they click on "save"). The sad truth is that the "web empowering" of the masses (that I remember Tim O'Reilly speaking of in '97) takes place with FrontPage Express and ASP in Personal Web Servers on Windows and not VI and Perl on Linux as many of us have hoped back then.
Second, when it comes to presenting the content from web pages/services on various devices then there are tools that allow extracting the content from a web page (even IE oriented one) and presenting it in another markup language (like WML or a limited subset of HTML which is what most types of such devices use). One example of such a tool is the Oracle's Portal-to-Go product (currently sold as Oracle AS 9i WE). It is basically an XML based translation engine that on demand creates pages in various markup languages based on content from various sources including web pages and services. All it takes to add a new markup language on the output side is to add a new XSL that produces that language from the internal simple XML format. This tool is currently used mostly by cell-phone operators to create WML and Palm oriented portals from various web pages.
Why I wrote all this? To suggest that it might be a an option for a company that provides TV-web-surfing to use a tool like this rather than try to force millions of web page designers to comply with standards they don't even know of.
There is much more to XML, because for a programmer to use it efficiently you have to create an environment that basically hides the XML's text storage format and presents its data model instead (or - in fact - is able to produce an XML out of a data model).
> ummm... ever looked at http://xml.apache.org? I'm developing apps with this stuff every day.
Hm... I didn't know about this particular project, however, I'm afraid that it might still be not enough to counter MS's.NET initiative. XML is becoming the de-facto data exchange standard but with SOAP it might become also part of a truly distributed computing world. I'm not sure that this or other open source project is able to produce quickly tools that would be able to be a significant competition to Visual Studio.NET (especially given their current huge developer base with approx. 6 mln. copies sold).
The browser wars are over, but right now the battle for the transaction world begins. Microsoft's.NET is all about it and if others won't do something about it (and especially the Open Source community is very weak when it comes to XML & stuff related to it) then in three years time most business systems would speak to one another using Microsoft's architecture of "web services" etc.
Hm... it looks like they are required to only sign agreements with three other IM providers (like Jabber, maybe Microsoft) ensuring interoperability with their products. So they don't need to open up AIM and ICQ protocols to allow development of free alternative clients for various platforms. In fact, I'm not sure that opening the AIM and ICQ protocols would fulfill the commission's conditions. They have to sign agreements with other business entities to comply, releasing it all as RFCs wouldn't be enough.
This is sad news, because what the FCC has in fact said with this decision is that it doesn't recognize messaging platforms that are not owned by a business entity with which one can sign a contract. In other words FCC has said that it is OK if a messaging system is wholly proprietary and free software or free platforms are not a remedy to a monopoly problem.
This is far more dangerous. Today it would be used by movie companies to prevent what they consider "piracy". Tomorrow it would be used to prevent you from accessing any content that the authorities don't like.
And of course - there would be a log kept about what you view and what you don't, what you keep on your HDD etc.
I think it's great and I like the idea of an ISP a christian family could use without worrying what their kids might find on the net! What at pity that the Church here doesn't provide anything like this.
At the same time gamers don't learn basic social skills, don't know how to really interact with other human beings - apart from taking them into account as either opponents or teammates. But sooner or later such "gamer" as described by mr. Katz would realize that he (or she) has wasted the best years of his life on something that maybe taught him how to win but didn't tell him how to be happy - and make others happy.
And that's what is important in life, not how many points you scored or how many bucks you earned - but how happy you are. And there is no technology that could change this...
I wonder if ESR has even read MS's documents about.NET. This - and other signs - show that we have a paradigm shift coming and the matter of desktop dominance would soon be irrelevant. MS is now ambitiously aiming at having dominant position in e-business and data exchange between businesses with their current line of products (named.NET servers) and the vision of "programmable web" etc.
If they'll succeed with.NET then I wouldn't be surprised if they would start giving away basic desktop versions of Windows for free. Why? Because by then most information flowing on-line would flow through MS based systems and most transactions on-line would be made with MS systems.
However, most OpenSource advocates are too concentrated on technology to notice that coming.
Hm... you probably missed the point - the whole concept of "intellectual property" is something, that should not be taken for granted but rather reconsidered again. Maybe we got something wrong here. Maybe it has gone too far - from protecting you from others claiming that they invented your invention to making it illegal for others to see what your invention is about and use it.
Now, the former is OK but the later is insane and slows down the progress.
So, one day you wake up and you discover that your DNA - the very thing that makes your body what it is - is no longer yours! Your own government sold it to a private company.
Even Franz Kafka wouldn't come up with this one. This world is positively going insane.
It was interesting to see this item posted on./ today, as also today I heard from a friend of mine who works for a cellphone operator that Nokia informed them that they are canceling the 7110 and there would be no more shipments of this phone.
It was quite popular as it looked nice (and the way the flap operated reminded people of the Matrix movie) but its software was very buggy and there were also quality problems with the hardware. [I believe in that since the first I had broke down for no apparent reason and was replaced by Nokia under guarantee as they were unable to repair it. Second one works till this day but frequently hangs when using the WAP browser.]
Well, your argument sounds logical - but not to someone from the Ministry of Finance. If there is a way of squeezing a few more coins from the tax payer they'll do it no matter how insane it would be.
Which would mean that if I need software to do a specific thing and I decide to program it myself, I could be (theoretically) taxed for it. Right? I do benefit from the software, so there's no difference.
Let's forget now about common sense and logic and apply the other way of thinking - let's call it tax logic:
There is one important difference - you created the software yourself and not obtained it from someone else as a gift. Therefore the value was a result of your work and there is no transfer of goods to tax.
That said, who are we (as Americans, probably the majority of the readers on Slashdot) to say how another government should be run?
Well, in this case there is one good reason - if this way of taxing software actually works it can be reimplemented in other parts of the world. And I hope that is not something you would like to happen...
But to drift back to reality a bit, it seems the tax could argued down a bit by pointing the officials at RedHat's $30 RH7 package. There's enough of a price there that you might be able to convince them that that's what the retail value of the software is -- if all else fails, you can point out that it comes in a spiffy cardboard box like most commercial software.
In fact even a CD-ROM from a magazine is said to work - provided of course that you have an invoice for buying that magazine and such invoice was properly accounted for.
the software is free, and no benefit is directly conferred (i.e. it's always free, so there's no benefit) - it is not analagous to a 'free' company car or whatever
It depends on how you look at it. From the point of view of the tax office there is a benefit - namely you benefit from being able to do what the software enabled you to do. In other words the company benefits from using Star Office in a same way as it benefits from using MS Office - or any other office suite - by being able to use their computers to create documents or do simple business calculations.
If they have a general policy of taxing the value of things people and companies receive as gifts (and there is such a policy, for example if you receive a house as gift there is a hefty tax on that) then taxing benefit obtained by using free software seems even logical.
It's good to laugh - but you might be next. Do you think that Polish gov' is more greedy than any other government in the world (and especially in the EU)? If this thing works here then I'm pretty sure that other countries would follow.
However, I hope that it would be finally resolved to what it really was - a mistake by a tax officer who didn't know what free software is.
It's not that bad... However, the main problem is that since '97 it's not possible to complete the registration on-line - they require a paper form with signature of the domain's owner to be sent to them. And that really is crazy.
Slashdot Mirror
That can be explained quite easily - spies are professionals, most hackers are amateurs when it comes to covering their tracks.
So - when switching the power management in PCs off would be outlawed in California?
You are right - but that's why I think that the "battlefield" (if you will) is still open here. In other words it is still possible to defeat Microsoft in this field, although their position is quite strong and I think that underestimating .NET or dismissing it as just a "marketing spin" would be a grave mistake.
But we can forget about browser scene for now - here the outcome is pretty clear at the moment, whether we like it or not. There are niches for Mozilla, Opera and others but IE is a clear winner.
> Additionally, I've got AOL 5.0 loaded at home, and although it upgraded some things, it still uses IE and on the occasion when I pop open IE instead of Netscape outside of AOL, it says IE provided by AOL. Is AOL really going to make use of Netscape? I don't think so.
Also - let's face it - Netscape in its current state is not good enough (ie. slow, unstable, cumbersome to use etc.) to be a viable alternative to IE. Mozilla is much better although it is based on the same code but I don't think AOL will even think of using it.
Oh yeah, great... how many web sites in Chinese have you visited today?
Well, first of all most web developers today not only don't care about HTML - they don't exactly know what the HTML is (besides that it is a file format that is produced by their visual web creation tools when they click on "save"). The sad truth is that the "web empowering" of the masses (that I remember Tim O'Reilly speaking of in '97) takes place with FrontPage Express and ASP in Personal Web Servers on Windows and not VI and Perl on Linux as many of us have hoped back then.
Second, when it comes to presenting the content from web pages/services on various devices then there are tools that allow extracting the content from a web page (even IE oriented one) and presenting it in another markup language (like WML or a limited subset of HTML which is what most types of such devices use). One example of such a tool is the Oracle's Portal-to-Go product (currently sold as Oracle AS 9i WE). It is basically an XML based translation engine that on demand creates pages in various markup languages based on content from various sources including web pages and services. All it takes to add a new markup language on the output side is to add a new XSL that produces that language from the internal simple XML format. This tool is currently used mostly by cell-phone operators to create WML and Palm oriented portals from various web pages.
Why I wrote all this? To suggest that it might be a an option for a company that provides TV-web-surfing to use a tool like this rather than try to force millions of web page designers to comply with standards they don't even know of.
There is much more to XML, because for a programmer to use it efficiently you have to create an environment that basically hides the XML's text storage format and presents its data model instead (or - in fact - is able to produce an XML out of a data model).
> ummm ... ever looked at http://xml.apache.org? I'm developing apps with this stuff every day.
Hm... I didn't know about this particular project, however, I'm afraid that it might still be not enough to counter MS's .NET initiative. XML is becoming the de-facto data exchange standard but with SOAP it might become also part of a truly distributed computing world. I'm not sure that this or other open source project is able to produce quickly tools that would be able to be a significant competition to Visual Studio.NET (especially given their current huge developer base with approx. 6 mln. copies sold).
Commenting myself, but...
The browser wars are over, but right now the battle for the transaction world begins. Microsoft's .NET is all about it and if others won't do something about it (and especially the Open Source community is very weak when it comes to XML & stuff related to it) then in three years time most business systems would speak to one another using Microsoft's architecture of "web services" etc.
Can it be prevented? No. Browser wars were won by Microsoft a long time ago and right now it looks like there is not much we can do about it.
Hm... it looks like they are required to only sign agreements with three other IM providers (like Jabber, maybe Microsoft) ensuring interoperability with their products. So they don't need to open up AIM and ICQ protocols to allow development of free alternative clients for various platforms. In fact, I'm not sure that opening the AIM and ICQ protocols would fulfill the commission's conditions. They have to sign agreements with other business entities to comply, releasing it all as RFCs wouldn't be enough.
This is sad news, because what the FCC has in fact said with this decision is that it doesn't recognize messaging platforms that are not owned by a business entity with which one can sign a contract. In other words FCC has said that it is OK if a messaging system is wholly proprietary and free software or free platforms are not a remedy to a monopoly problem.
This is far more dangerous. Today it would be used by movie companies to prevent what they consider "piracy". Tomorrow it would be used to prevent you from accessing any content that the authorities don't like.
And of course - there would be a log kept about what you view and what you don't, what you keep on your HDD etc.
I think it's great and I like the idea of an ISP a christian family could use without worrying what their kids might find on the net! What at pity that the Church here doesn't provide anything like this.
At the same time gamers don't learn basic social skills, don't know how to really interact with other human beings - apart from taking them into account as either opponents or teammates. But sooner or later such "gamer" as described by mr. Katz would realize that he (or she) has wasted the best years of his life on something that maybe taught him how to win but didn't tell him how to be happy - and make others happy.
And that's what is important in life, not how many points you scored or how many bucks you earned - but how happy you are. And there is no technology that could change this...
I wonder if ESR has even read MS's documents about .NET. This - and other signs - show that we have a paradigm shift coming and the matter of desktop dominance would soon be irrelevant. MS is now ambitiously aiming at having dominant position in e-business and data exchange between businesses with their current line of products (named .NET servers) and the vision of "programmable web" etc.
If they'll succeed with .NET then I wouldn't be surprised if they would start giving away basic desktop versions of Windows for free. Why? Because by then most information flowing on-line would flow through MS based systems and most transactions on-line would be made with MS systems.
However, most OpenSource advocates are too concentrated on technology to notice that coming.
Hm... you probably missed the point - the whole concept of "intellectual property" is something, that should not be taken for granted but rather reconsidered again. Maybe we got something wrong here. Maybe it has gone too far - from protecting you from others claiming that they invented your invention to making it illegal for others to see what your invention is about and use it.
Now, the former is OK but the later is insane and slows down the progress.
So, one day you wake up and you discover that your DNA - the very thing that makes your body what it is - is no longer yours! Your own government sold it to a private company.
Even Franz Kafka wouldn't come up with this one. This world is positively going insane.
It was interesting to see this item posted on ./ today, as also today I heard from a friend of mine who works for a cellphone operator that Nokia informed them that they are canceling the 7110 and there would be no more shipments of this phone.
It was quite popular as it looked nice (and the way the flap operated reminded people of the Matrix movie) but its software was very buggy and there were also quality problems with the hardware. [I believe in that since the first I had broke down for no apparent reason and was replaced by Nokia under guarantee as they were unable to repair it. Second one works till this day but frequently hangs when using the WAP browser.]
Well, your argument sounds logical - but not to someone from the Ministry of Finance. If there is a way of squeezing a few more coins from the tax payer they'll do it no matter how insane it would be.
Which would mean that if I need software to do a specific thing and I decide to program it myself, I could be (theoretically) taxed for it. Right? I do benefit from the software, so there's no difference.
Let's forget now about common sense and logic and apply the other way of thinking - let's call it tax logic:
That said, who are we (as Americans, probably the majority of the readers on Slashdot) to say how another government should be run?
Well, in this case there is one good reason - if this way of taxing software actually works it can be reimplemented in other parts of the world. And I hope that is not something you would like to happen...
But to drift back to reality a bit, it seems the tax could argued down a bit by pointing the officials at RedHat's $30 RH7 package. There's enough of a price there that you might be able to convince them that that's what the retail value of the software is -- if all else fails, you can point out that it comes in a spiffy cardboard box like most commercial software.
In fact even a CD-ROM from a magazine is said to work - provided of course that you have an invoice for buying that magazine and such invoice was properly accounted for.
the software is free, and no benefit is directly conferred (i.e. it's always free, so there's no benefit) - it is not analagous to a 'free' company car or whatever
It depends on how you look at it. From the point of view of the tax office there is a benefit - namely you benefit from being able to do what the software enabled you to do. In other words the company benefits from using Star Office in a same way as it benefits from using MS Office - or any other office suite - by being able to use their computers to create documents or do simple business calculations.
If they have a general policy of taxing the value of things people and companies receive as gifts (and there is such a policy, for example if you receive a house as gift there is a hefty tax on that) then taxing benefit obtained by using free software seems even logical.
It's good to laugh - but you might be next. Do you think that Polish gov' is more greedy than any other government in the world (and especially in the EU)? If this thing works here then I'm pretty sure that other countries would follow.
However, I hope that it would be finally resolved to what it really was - a mistake by a tax officer who didn't know what free software is.
It's not that bad... However, the main problem is that since '97 it's not possible to complete the registration on-line - they require a paper form with signature of the domain's owner to be sent to them. And that really is crazy.
More on their site.