I don't have specific URLs to cite to properly illustrate the details - apologies.
To the best of my knowledge, Borland settled out of court, and the $$$$ were sufficient to fund a substantial amount of Kylix development, as well as C++Builder and other Linux initatives.
I'm not aware of any formal Corel move toward litigation, but it is a fact that in the spring of 2001, M$ acquired a minority position in the ownership of Corel, at a cost of millions.
Corel Office 2000 for Linux was taken off the market in November 2001, and Corel didn't attend this year's Linucworldexpo at all.
This isn't the time and place to debate Java vs. php or Perl, say. In legal terms, Billy saw Java as a threat and did the goon number....and that's the legal issue behind this suit
Has anyone English been significantly affected by the addition of millions of Japanese pages?
Japanese websites and the implementation of the HTML image tag were the methods that led to my encountering anime for the first time.
Innovations, using the word in it's pre-M$ meaning, are seldom all good or all bad. This applies to the net in general and net users as a class in general, but people are individuals, not groups, and it's one of the peculiar features of the internet that online, they act that way especially.
I'm looking forward to future encounters with the kewl dudes. Lamers, OTOH I expect to pretty much just/ignore, the way most of us do already anyway.
Messages like those simply annoy their recipients, and get deleted, filtered or whatever, but there are enough idiots out there convinced that email is a surefire wat to become a billionaire overnight to keep the game going.
It doesn't work, and neither to popup ads, popunder ads and most banners. People online simply tend to interpret any form of advertising as interference with the flow of interactive communication.
It's taking forever for the knuckleheads to grasp, but with the loss of $1Trillion USD in dud dotcoms
they're beginning to catch on. The world will never be in short supply of idiots but eventually a mindset will emerge where: "everybody knows" spam is a waste of money to produce the same way "everybody knows" you have to run windoze.
The problem here is that there were a bunch of people running Excite@home; at least after the merger with a vision of the internet as the next generation of television broadcasting. Commercially produced content from central servers was gonna rule. Combine multimedia formats + the bandwidth to transmit them clearly and become a media conglomerate (overnight, please)
Cable companies have their own vision of what they think the net should be, or, more precisely, the direction they wish to steer their subscribers contractually, and in marketing terms. This is still unfolding now, but enough has transpired since November to illustrate their desire for an AOL-type service of tight user control: overmanaged, overintrusive, restricted to the point of uselessness and treating their customers as a byproduct of their business goal of selling information about them and their preferences and interests to marketeers. How well is this working out? Going by the fact that there are so many millions of complaints they can't afford or maintain supervisory control over the staff to answer them all is an indication their surefire plan to become overnight billionaires isn't very likely to happen either.
Customers who use the net know what they want to use the net for, and in almost all cases it isn't television nor a substitution for a trip to a shopping mall. ISPs, and especially broadband ISPs who just get that point and provide a reliable affordable carrier will succeed in the long run - not become billionaires overnight (which is a flaky ambition anyway) but they'll be around 10 years from now.
Another good analytical article is posted here on C|net
The really ironic thing is that the architects of the original @home network got it so right. I used it here for 2 and a half years and recommended it because it was demonstrably competitive: Static IP, OS agnostic real and complete internet, and the service was reliable - not perfect, but reliable. That's competitive.
The replacement comcast.net service unfortunately isn't, but I'm fortunate to be within DSL range so was able with some effort to move everything of mine over to these guys and so for me at least for now, all is well.
@home got it right, but it got derailed by a societical bollock stew of venture capitalists, pundits, investors, cable companies, regulators (by doing nothing) and finally it reached baknruptcy court which did the best they could with the mess; leading to my question:
I live in New Jersey, and don't remember exactly when photo licenses here were introduced - 12 or 14 years ago I think, about.
The way the Department of Motor Vehicles operates, photo licenses are only issued to applicants who apply for them in person at a DMV office, which is widely considered throughout the state to be an experience to be avoided at all costs. Renewals by mail or www are issued without photographs.
I hope this crook gets caught, but it's entirely possible if the guy has been driving for a few decades that DMV may have no photograph on file.
I don't find it odd that the trend to globalization would produce a backlash calling for nationalistic protection, but isn't it strange that both ideas are being sold to us with equal enthusiasm (pressure?) by the same people?
When Xandros axquired the codebase to the Linux distro from Corel they deal didn't include the Corel Office 2000 suite, which might be of interest to AOL if they're looking for Linux acquisitions.
This would give Steve Case the customer base for Wordperfect, Quattropro, Paradox, and Corel Presentations, along with the helper calendar and address book applets.
Assuming the Red Hat deal moves forward, AOL would have developer talent from that division to clear up the arguably minor, but critical glitches in that office suite and have an application of unique marketability for Linux corporate desktops.
CO2K relative pathing in the installation script is sloppy. I got around that by installing from root logged in as real root, but that shouldn't be necessary.
That FATAL ERROR dialog box on launch has gotta go. The fix isn't that elaborate: simply go into the/.wpo2000 folder in userland and delete the dead socket. Although it's not that hard, it's dumb, and something I would feel awkward about inflicting on a nontechnical user.
Some kind of simple GUI utility is needed to adjust the font size for the screen display in the
WINE implementation CO2K uses.
Looking ahead, the overall dependence on WINE is controversial, and something AOL might want to consider eliminating in a future release, given the availability of a budget and other resources.
The WINE implementation is a resource hog, and results in CO2K on Linux running as slow as it's Windoze counterpart. The suite is needed on the market now, however. Waiting for the length of time it would take to create a pure Linux version would be arguably counterproductive.
On the plus side:
Import and export filters for Word and Excel are the best I've ever encountered.
Paradox forms created in Windoze (or win-os2 in my case) work in Linux without any modification whatsoever. (The exception would be if I had anything coded internally that references a specific path.) The entire application programming language was ported successfully.
Offtopic request: If anyone has any insight into getting a mysql ODBC connection working in Paradox for Linux, please let me know.
If you for whatever reason have a whim for insecurity, you're still a menace to the rest of us. I have access.log files documenting codered and nimda attempts from last July to this afternoon to support this.
I've noticed a pattern in/. over the last couple of months, and it's illogical. The same m$ apologists who beyond reason shout that their platforms are securable are likely to lecture us on how bandwidth is expensive and that we should expect to pay more for it. (I'm not saying you're one of those guys).
Beyond that they percieve they don't have enough money, it's difficult to link the two notions sequentially.
Yielding to the corporate apologists for the sake of conversation, okay. Bandwidth has a total cost of production, let us stipulate. So the bandwidth consumed by codered and nimda can therefore be quantified into a currency value, even if the cost of some (or most) of the bandwidth is distortedly overpriced
Certification of individual connections by independent third parties is an excellent suggestion for the following reasons:
It's honest work for qualified people. Enough to benefit the economy. Really.
It's good for business models within the industry - users running demonstrably secure platforms like Linux or one of the BSDs (to name only a few) could be given privelages or discounts calculated upon their degree of armor.This could even be stratified, but knowing how MBA and marketing types love complex pricelists I dunno if I want to encourage this to extremes.
The security tests could, and should, produce specific and measurable feedback. M$ claim that codered and nimda have been successfully dealt with but my logs illustrate a different story, I don't care because my ISP pays for the bandwidth, but they need to worry, and so do their shareholders in the case of pubically-traded ISPs..
Actuarial computation isn't new - it predates business computing in fact by a coupla hundred years. Just as teenagers who wanna drive Corvettes have to pay accordingly high insurance premiums, users of risky operating systems should expect to pay additional charges to help, if not entirely cover the cost of hauling away the corpses.
This may not be of unique benefit to Billy, but it's perfectly fair and equitable to the rest of us on the planet.
I strongly suspect the difficulty here is that Borland just planted the damn thing in Kylix Open Edition without thinking.
Very stupid - and a shame. I'm a registered owner of the commercial server/developer edition of Kylix, and I've been following it closely since the official launch at last February's Linuxworldexpo. I don't see this as an attempt by Borland to deliberately engage in legal tactics to subvert the GPL, which they respect. Somebody screwed up.
It's profoundly ironic that Borland had the bad luck to make this kind of error in a product developed for the Linux community, for whom opensource licensing and the GPL are serious matters indeed.
If Borland were smart they would rectify the licensing situation and post an announcement here.
Kylix took literally years to code, and it would be a shame if the bad feeling incited by this kind of PR fiasco put off large numbers of developers otherwise open to working with the product, which is a truly thoughtful and careful port of Delphi.
I'm surprised some marketing bimbo in a $700 miniskirt hasn't already proposed the abolition of over-the-air radio and tv broadcasting to be replaced by some kind of subscription and/or micropayment per-use scheme with a name like a disease.
The hot new trend in the LAST 6 months, which hasn't been around long enough to be analyzed in depth or commented on much at a cultural level is simply gouging the consumer.
There are a lot of recent examples of schemes like these being initially launched. Some, like m$ passport and diddled CD manufacturing being covered here within the last month, but it's much too soon to declare any of them even profitable, let alone the kind of major alteration to the way we as a society use technology hinted at in the CNN story that prompted the posting.
I did hear broadcast this morning on Bloomberg and CNN though that retailers are complaining about a 26% drop in retail sales for this Christmas holiday under last year. There are a lot of additional contributing factors for this, but it still makes it abundantly obvious these new gimmicks aren't immediately selling like hotcakes.
Maybe whole sectors of the investor community, business school graduates, and the institutions that produce them need to be ground into catfood. They have a way of coming up with one dumb idea after another without contributing anything of value..
Remember "The New Economy" and "Profits don't matter"? Most of us were alive in 1999, but the purpose of all that free crap was motivated by the desire to build a large base of users which would lead to user-dependency. They half succeeded.
A great deal is said, here and elsewhere, about the unsophistication of the "average user", whaterer that is, and beyond talk, a great deal of new funding, in addition to the $1 Trillion USD already lost is now being put into cybergouge, but the reaction of the marketplace based on statistics we have available so far is interesting and gives rise to optimism.
From X-drive, to subscription Napster, to NetZero, to BlueMountain the ratio of free registrations to paying subscribers in aggregate is 0.03%. That's one third of one percent which is insufficient to sustain publically traded and financed operations on the scale these "goldmines of the future" have been structured to. Interestingly, the statistic bears an interesting proximity to the impression-to-purchase ratio of most banner ads, so get set for further rounds of layoff notices and spectacular bankruptcy announcements: There's gonna be a sequel to that movie coming soon to an economy near you.
Consumers don't need an advanced degree in economics to know when they're being %&$*ed up the keister. It's already entirely too easy for the "average user" to find himself with too much month left at the end of the money, and these dudes are making impressively astute decisions on what they really need and what they can do without paying for - much more insightful than the thinking of cybergouge executives and their backers.
So with that my fellow penguins, best wishes for a happy and successful 2002. Chances are it isn't gonna suck anywhere near as bad as some of the commentary of this posting implies.
Let me begin with the comment that the figure of 0.24% is statistically suspect, and that the Google statistic of 1% is also probably unrepresentatively low. The following is an attempt to illustrate why.
The majority of Linux installations are done in multiple boot configurations.Most mainstream distros, and even some of the more obscure ones presume that and are designed accordingly, and quite a lot of the online documentation and commentary seems to be slanted toward that assumption. I'm not saying that's a bad thing per se, nor am I suggesting that platform interoparability is trivial, but there's a downside.
When I first installed OS/2 here in 1994 I got rid of Windoze. If I wanted a m$ operating system I wouldn't have deleted the damn thing. Getting away from it was the whole point. I installed Linux for the first time at the end of 1999 onto a separate physical drive with much the same motivation. The whole idea was to learn the damn thing, and the only way to learn something is spend time with it. Incidentally - on compatible hardware, installing Linux with no multiple-boot issues to complicate the picture is a lot less effort than installing Windoze on a virgin HDD.
I spend a lot of time on IRC: In addition to discussing beer and girlies, a lot of those dialogs are taken up with details of software installation, includng many first-time Linux installations, and I can tell you of countless times where someone I've been helping comes online, reports the installation successful, collects his l337t haxxor certification and then boots straight back into windoze.
This posting got me thinking about "dormant penguin syndrome", and it's evidently a big-enough factor to be taken into thoughtful consideration for marketing and promotion purposes. (Or advocacy, for those of you reading this who are staunch anti-capitalists) M$ traps are all around - from preloaded bundles, to proprietary file formats, to ISPs like NetZero (and many others who charge steep fees) to websites that won't render right without IE, to games.......I don't want this to turn into an outright rant so I'll just make the comment that there's a lotta Windoze-centric aspects to the present computing infrastructure viewed in macro - and that's not an accident: M$ planned it that way.
Does that mean life without Windoze is impossible? Hell no, but the reason I know that for a fact is that I've been resisting and avoiding it long enough to know how to deal with the obstacles. It isn't usually even that difficult.
Take most of the "Linux isn't ready" postings on this thread and s/Linux/Windoze, or Apple or any other alternative. Ya kow what? The validity of the comments holds. Demand this morning a desktop operating system that's truly intuitive, fast, effortless and crafted to a standard of pure perfection? There aren't any - but why be impossible when you can be totally over the top? Insist on a flawless user installation onto multiple-boot systems m$ spent millions of dollars developing to engineer deliberate incompatibilities into.
Linux is ready - and the applications are ready, at least for those of us capable of writing a letter without an animated paperclip, but it's simplistic to think that a successful Linux installation == marketplace conuest.
Users with Linux installed need to spend more time using it at length, and the Linux community needs to spend more effort encouraging this. How well this all goes will determine the direction of computing in this decade. M$ is already upset enough about the trend to Linux to start whining and mouthing about it. Time will tell.
The best descriptive analysis I've read so far of the whole mess can be found here
In another news article yesterday (for which I lost the URL) I understand the FCC, which has jurisdiction, is moving quickly to extend their regulation of RF-Coax cable networks to bring cable service providers into congruity with DSL providers as far as their responsibilities to customers are concerned.
I hope so. Just spent a miserable weekend babysitting the glowlight on my cablemodem waiting to see if my Comcast connection would drop.
Even looking back over business history to before the era of the robber barons, I can't think of a single example of a corporation treating it's customers to such a squalid clownact.
Congressional oversight of the cable industry, and the FCC itself is provided by the House Subcommittee on Telecommunications and The Internet Those of you who agree might consider writing to these guys and letting them know that holding 4.1 million customers hostage is something that should never be allowed to ever happen again. I'm expecting a serious investigation in due course, as there should be.
On a more positive note, my connection here remained constant through the whole episode, and services are normal. I suppose to be fair I should also congratulate the negotiators from Comcast and the other cablecos and Excite for reaching an agreement rapidly under brutally difficult conditions.
I intended this reply to be a simple enthusiastic endorsement of Corel Office 2000 for Linux. CO2K came out in April 2000, noted in/. at the time, and I've been using it extensively since then, including frequent Save As.xls and.doc functions, which worked as expected.
Downsides, noted here last April are that CO2K uses it's own proprietary version of WINE, which performs about as sluggishly as a M$ product, and that it's commercial software, which many Linux users object to for religious reasons. Despite these complaints, which are true, CO2K is the strongly preferred choice of suite here, and it also has the advantage of name-recognition and loyalty among large numbers of users with administrative of clerical backgrounds.
I had intended to conclude by quickly mentioning the price, which is a lot lower than billyware. This is the point where the morning took a disturbing and Orwellian turn.
Corel Office for Linux has been withdrawn from the Corel website. Not only has the product itself no longer being offered for sale, but the entire support section is deleted, although the newsgroup
corel.wpoffice.office2000-linux is intact.
Using the message threads as my only available source of information [This was announced nowhere]
I gather the product was withdrawn sometime around the beginning of this month. Corel Support is quoted in one of the threads saying it's been "obsoleted".
http://www.softwareandstuff.com still have it listed as available for order at a price of $49 USD, but if you're interested pursuing this direction, act quickly.
Start with a Socket 7 or Super 7 MB. This could be AT or ATX. Socket 7 will run CPUs ranging from P75 to AMD-K62-550. Look for a board with plenty of accessory slots, since we seem to share a bias against integrated components. (The whole point of the original ISA spec in 1981 was that individual components could be replaced without obsoleting the rest of the platform.)
Look on Pricewatch or the "Buy it now" items on Ebay for bargains. Classical Ebay auctions are notorious for wasting time and having someone else plant a winning bid in the last 30 seconds of the auction, but "Buy it now" may actually result in servicable merchandise at low cost.
64 Mb of ram will be plenty for what you describe. Pick a suitable chassis (AT or ATX, depending what MB you decide on) add a cheap video card (Trident maybe?) and whatever size IDE drive you feel will be sufficient. CPU can be any Celeron, AMD or Cyrix you opt for. I would suggest 10/100 autosensing NICs, because it doesn't matter what ya connect'em to, and they can be had for around $15 each.
Shipping charges can be lowered by bundling a lot of components from a single supplier. These days, I've noticed also that quite a few hardware guys are offering free shipping. One exception to this though might be the CPU fan, assuming you don't opt for a heatsink. Since silent operation is a high priority you might want to contact CDW or someplace like that with the sales expertise to recommend a speciality fan optimized for quiet.
Good luck with the build. During the runup to Y2K I built a lot of machines along the same general spec for customers that just wanted to go on running their same old stuff on hardware compatible with a 4 byte year. Rough pricing for the stuff described above is around the $200 - $250 range.
Like many Linux users, I tried out a few distros before finding one that fit best for me, and felt most comfortable.
One of the attractions of working outside a software monopoly is that different developer communities and distro companies address separate groups of users with broadly differing priorities.
Are you a desktop user looking for ease of installation? Check out Mandrake if you haven't already. Are ya deeply into kernel research and looking for explicit control over every aspect of your platform? Sounds like you would find Slackware right up your alley. For someone like me with a lot of crossplatform experience, and a lot of diskspace, and server and developmental ambitions as well as desktop requirements, Suse is an excellent fit.
The only operating system I would unhesitatingly not recommend to anyone is Windoze, because it's no damn good, and it's developers are marketing it by methods that are not only ethically repugnant but unlawful.
I would recommend Redhat, at the top of the list, in fact, to a corporation with a number of users in a LAN environment where an estasblished support contract with the distro company is a major operational consideration, as well as an important marketing point. I wouldn't be surprised that one of the reasons they're in reasonably good shape is that Redhat have positioned themselves to be a very attractive choice to users who fit that role.
Due to reasons nothing to do with Linux, it's pretty excruciating to attempt to get excited about serious work of any description at the moment, but, OTOH, while I'm composing this comment, there are thousands of companies running M$ products who are having their day to day operations ripped apart by Nimda. A move to Redhat would be something I would suggest they consider.
Granted, [giving RIAA the benefit of the doubt - the claim actually sounds a little exaggerated to me] but these guys have licensing way beyond what they're in a position to deliver commercially at this moment.
The reason producers don't mind shelling out a few million in fees and promotions for major stars like sweet darling Britney is that they get it back plus a pretty huge return in exchange for planting the resulting merchandise on store shelves all over the planet. The cost per unit of manufacturing each item is practically invisible.
This process however isn't infinitely ongoing. Watching revenue like hawks, they're very quick to cease production and pull product, making way on the shelves for the next manufactured Hollywood sensation.
Napster users with working computer technology and collections of vinyl from the 1950s and 1960s say, or cassettes and CDs from later eras create mp3s with an entirely different motivation. They don't mind the effort and the fact that the bytes they compile happen to be sharable is simply a fortunate byproduct of the exercise.
IOW, I'm arguing it's one thing for RIAA to haul out briefcases full of fine print and whine. Acutally paying employees to generate several terabytes of downloadable content from analog at 3Mb a track would call for a major allocation of capital and other organizational resources. Incidentally - this investment would be completely speculative up front, with no track record to refer to regarding profitablity, marketing or operations.
So are they serious or were they just dissembling [under oath] because they don't like Napster and needed a convincing excuse to persuade a court to rule in their favor? One thing is clear: If they mean it, this isn't something that's gonna happen in the next half-hour.
I happen to agree with you completely that the principal attraction is that it's "empowered by a huge catalog".
In the case of Napster the catalog self-generated as a result of having several hunderd thousand simultaneously connected users opting [remember, they have a choice] to share titles that are there in the first place because they happen to like them personally. It's organic, and the catalog is as vast as the totality of human diversity because that's where it comes from.
In order to replicate anything close comercially, some company would have to pay people to research and generate a dataset as close to that as they could possibly get. (Not very)
I don't think the industry could afford that even if recording executives sold their limos and took the bus to work.
The circus got seriously underway here late last Saturday. At that time I made a short list which can be found here.
The cablemodem traffic is annoying but so far no system interference to report here. The attempted attacks just bounce off Apache. Add this to my ever-increasing list of reasons why I'm glad I don't run Windoze.
I have KOffice and Staroffice both installed here, but at the risk of igniting controversy have to say I have a clear preference for Corel 2K.
There are admittedly negatives: CO2K uses it's own doctored version of WINE (which doesn't interfere at all with my opensource version. (I like music anyway so I have plenty of HDD space.) CO2K is also a commercial product, and the default screenfont Corel installs is pathetically tiny and
difficult to modify.
On the positive side, Wordperfect, Quattropro and Paradox are carefully crafted ports, (there's some presentation stuff too, similar to Powerpoint that I don't really bother much with.)
Paradox for Linux will run code I wrote years ago using Win-OS2 or for that matter, win32 Paradox with no modifications whatsoever. This is the only onscreen example of pure crossplatform compatibility I've actually witnessed for myself for non-Java gui software.
In any case, I like it, despite the reservations I stated above. I'm not sorry I bought it and appreciate the effort Corel spent in it's engineering.
One more thing: MickeyD's PR bimbos in their $700 miniskirts pretending it doesn't exist are rather irritating.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't have specific URLs to cite to properly illustrate the details - apologies.
To the best of my knowledge, Borland settled out of court, and the $$$$ were sufficient to fund a substantial amount of Kylix development, as well as C++Builder and other Linux initatives.
I'm not aware of any formal Corel move toward litigation, but it is a fact that in the spring of 2001, M$ acquired a minority position in the ownership of Corel, at a cost of millions.
Corel Office 2000 for Linux was taken off the market in November 2001, and Corel didn't attend this year's Linucworldexpo at all.
This isn't the time and place to debate Java vs. php or Perl, say. In legal terms, Billy saw Java as a threat and did the goon number....and that's the legal issue behind this suit
Has anyone English been significantly affected by the addition of millions of Japanese pages?
/ignore, the way most of us do already anyway.
Japanese websites and the implementation of the HTML image tag were the methods that led to my encountering anime for the first time.
Innovations, using the word in it's pre-M$ meaning, are seldom all good or all bad. This applies to the net in general and net users as a class in general, but people are individuals, not groups, and it's one of the peculiar features of the internet that online, they act that way especially.
I'm looking forward to future encounters with the kewl dudes. Lamers, OTOH I expect to pretty much just
Messages like those simply annoy their recipients, and get deleted, filtered or whatever, but there are enough idiots out there convinced that email is a surefire wat to become a billionaire overnight to keep the game going.
It doesn't work, and neither to popup ads, popunder ads and most banners. People online simply tend to interpret any form of advertising as interference with the flow of interactive communication.
It's taking forever for the knuckleheads to grasp, but with the loss of $1Trillion USD in dud dotcoms they're beginning to catch on. The world will never be in short supply of idiots but eventually a mindset will emerge where: "everybody knows" spam is a waste of money to produce the same way "everybody knows" you have to run windoze.
The problem here is that there were a bunch of people running Excite@home; at least after the merger with a vision of the internet as the next generation of television broadcasting. Commercially produced content from central servers was gonna rule. Combine multimedia formats + the bandwidth to transmit them clearly and become a media conglomerate (overnight, please)
Cable companies have their own vision of what they think the net should be, or, more precisely, the direction they wish to steer their subscribers contractually, and in marketing terms. This is still unfolding now, but enough has transpired since November to illustrate their desire for an AOL-type service of tight user control: overmanaged, overintrusive, restricted to the point of uselessness and treating their customers as a byproduct of their business goal of selling information about them and their preferences and interests to marketeers. How well is this working out? Going by the fact that there are so many millions of complaints they can't afford or maintain supervisory control over the staff to answer them all is an indication their surefire plan to become overnight billionaires isn't very likely to happen either.
Customers who use the net know what they want to use the net for, and in almost all cases it isn't television nor a substitution for a trip to a shopping mall. ISPs, and especially broadband ISPs who just get that point and provide a reliable affordable carrier will succeed in the long run - not become billionaires overnight (which is a flaky ambition anyway) but they'll be around 10 years from now.
Another good analytical article is posted here on C|net
The really ironic thing is that the architects of the original @home network got it so right. I used it here for 2 and a half years and recommended it because it was demonstrably competitive: Static IP, OS agnostic real and complete internet, and the service was reliable - not perfect, but reliable. That's competitive.
The replacement comcast.net service unfortunately isn't, but I'm fortunate to be within DSL range so was able with some effort to move everything of mine over to these guys and so for me at least for now, all is well.
@home got it right, but it got derailed by a societical bollock stew of venture capitalists, pundits, investors, cable companies, regulators (by doing nothing) and finally it reached baknruptcy court which did the best they could with the mess; leading to my question:
Is America failing?
I live in New Jersey, and don't remember exactly when photo licenses here were introduced - 12 or 14 years ago I think, about.
The way the Department of Motor Vehicles operates, photo licenses are only issued to applicants who apply for them in person at a DMV office, which is widely considered throughout the state to be an experience to be avoided at all costs. Renewals by mail or www are issued without photographs.
I hope this crook gets caught, but it's entirely possible if the guy has been driving for a few decades that DMV may have no photograph on file.
I don't find it odd that the trend to globalization would produce a backlash calling for nationalistic protection, but isn't it strange that both ideas are being sold to us with equal enthusiasm (pressure?) by the same people?
Bigtime.
/.wpo2000 folder in userland and delete the dead socket. Although it's not that hard, it's dumb, and something I would feel awkward about inflicting on a nontechnical user.
When Xandros axquired the codebase to the Linux distro from Corel they deal didn't include the Corel Office 2000 suite, which might be of interest to AOL if they're looking for Linux acquisitions.
This would give Steve Case the customer base for Wordperfect, Quattropro, Paradox, and Corel Presentations, along with the helper calendar and address book applets.
Assuming the Red Hat deal moves forward, AOL would have developer talent from that division to clear up the arguably minor, but critical glitches in that office suite and have an application of unique marketability for Linux corporate desktops.
CO2K relative pathing in the installation script is sloppy. I got around that by installing from root logged in as real root, but that shouldn't be necessary.
That FATAL ERROR dialog box on launch has gotta go. The fix isn't that elaborate: simply go into the
Some kind of simple GUI utility is needed to adjust the font size for the screen display in the WINE implementation CO2K uses.
Looking ahead, the overall dependence on WINE is controversial, and something AOL might want to consider eliminating in a future release, given the availability of a budget and other resources. The WINE implementation is a resource hog, and results in CO2K on Linux running as slow as it's Windoze counterpart. The suite is needed on the market now, however. Waiting for the length of time it would take to create a pure Linux version would be arguably counterproductive.
On the plus side:
Import and export filters for Word and Excel are the best I've ever encountered.
Paradox forms created in Windoze (or win-os2 in my case) work in Linux without any modification whatsoever. (The exception would be if I had anything coded internally that references a specific path.) The entire application programming language was ported successfully.
Offtopic request: If anyone has any insight into getting a mysql ODBC connection working in Paradox for Linux, please let me know.
It's always a pleasure for me whenever I hear a comment from anyone who has read, and better yet, appreciates what he wrote.
What a programmer that dude woulda been.
Enough already.
Claiming the most secure version of windoze is like claiming to have the tallest building in Topeka, KS.
If you for whatever reason have a whim for insecurity, you're still a menace to the rest of us. I have access.log files documenting codered and nimda attempts from last July to this afternoon to support this.
/. over the last couple of months, and it's illogical. The same m$ apologists who beyond reason shout that their platforms are securable are likely to lecture us on how bandwidth is expensive and that we should expect to pay more for it. (I'm not saying you're one of those guys).
I've noticed a pattern in
Beyond that they percieve they don't have enough money, it's difficult to link the two notions sequentially.
Yielding to the corporate apologists for the sake of conversation, okay. Bandwidth has a total cost of production, let us stipulate. So the bandwidth consumed by codered and nimda can therefore be quantified into a currency value, even if the cost of some (or most) of the bandwidth is distortedly overpriced
Certification of individual connections by independent third parties is an excellent suggestion for the following reasons:
It's honest work for qualified people. Enough to benefit the economy. Really.
It's good for business models within the industry - users running demonstrably secure platforms like Linux or one of the BSDs (to name only a few) could be given privelages or discounts calculated upon their degree of armor.This could even be stratified, but knowing how MBA and marketing types love complex pricelists I dunno if I want to encourage this to extremes.
The security tests could, and should, produce specific and measurable feedback. M$ claim that codered and nimda have been successfully dealt with but my logs illustrate a different story, I don't care because my ISP pays for the bandwidth, but they need to worry, and so do their shareholders in the case of pubically-traded ISPs..
Actuarial computation isn't new - it predates business computing in fact by a coupla hundred years. Just as teenagers who wanna drive Corvettes have to pay accordingly high insurance premiums, users of risky operating systems should expect to pay additional charges to help, if not entirely cover the cost of hauling away the corpses.
This may not be of unique benefit to Billy, but it's perfectly fair and equitable to the rest of us on the planet.
I strongly suspect the difficulty here is that Borland just planted the damn thing in Kylix Open Edition without thinking.
Very stupid - and a shame. I'm a registered owner of the commercial server/developer edition of Kylix, and I've been following it closely since the official launch at last February's Linuxworldexpo. I don't see this as an attempt by Borland to deliberately engage in legal tactics to subvert the GPL, which they respect. Somebody screwed up.
It's profoundly ironic that Borland had the bad luck to make this kind of error in a product developed for the Linux community, for whom opensource licensing and the GPL are serious matters indeed.
If Borland were smart they would rectify the licensing situation and post an announcement here. Kylix took literally years to code, and it would be a shame if the bad feeling incited by this kind of PR fiasco put off large numbers of developers otherwise open to working with the product, which is a truly thoughtful and careful port of Delphi.
Breadhat
/. could have some kind of contest :)
Womandrake
Sooze
Californiadera
Maybe
I'm surprised some marketing bimbo in a $700 miniskirt hasn't already proposed the abolition of over-the-air radio and tv broadcasting to be replaced by some kind of subscription and/or micropayment per-use scheme with a name like a disease.
The hot new trend in the LAST 6 months, which hasn't been around long enough to be analyzed in depth or commented on much at a cultural level is simply gouging the consumer.
There are a lot of recent examples of schemes like these being initially launched. Some, like m$ passport and diddled CD manufacturing being covered here within the last month, but it's much too soon to declare any of them even profitable, let alone the kind of major alteration to the way we as a society use technology hinted at in the CNN story that prompted the posting.
I did hear broadcast this morning on Bloomberg and CNN though that retailers are complaining about a 26% drop in retail sales for this Christmas holiday under last year. There are a lot of additional contributing factors for this, but it still makes it abundantly obvious these new gimmicks aren't immediately selling like hotcakes.
Maybe whole sectors of the investor community, business school graduates, and the institutions that produce them need to be ground into catfood. They have a way of coming up with one dumb idea after another without contributing anything of value..
Remember "The New Economy" and "Profits don't matter"? Most of us were alive in 1999, but the purpose of all that free crap was motivated by the desire to build a large base of users which would lead to user-dependency. They half succeeded.
A great deal is said, here and elsewhere, about the unsophistication of the "average user", whaterer that is, and beyond talk, a great deal of new funding, in addition to the $1 Trillion USD already lost is now being put into cybergouge, but the reaction of the marketplace based on statistics we have available so far is interesting and gives rise to optimism.
From X-drive, to subscription Napster, to NetZero, to BlueMountain the ratio of free registrations to paying subscribers in aggregate is 0.03%. That's one third of one percent which is insufficient to sustain publically traded and financed operations on the scale these "goldmines of the future" have been structured to. Interestingly, the statistic bears an interesting proximity to the impression-to-purchase ratio of most banner ads, so get set for further rounds of layoff notices and spectacular bankruptcy announcements: There's gonna be a sequel to that movie coming soon to an economy near you.
Consumers don't need an advanced degree in economics to know when they're being %&$*ed up the keister. It's already entirely too easy for the "average user" to find himself with too much month left at the end of the money, and these dudes are making impressively astute decisions on what they really need and what they can do without paying for - much more insightful than the thinking of cybergouge executives and their backers.
So with that my fellow penguins, best wishes for a happy and successful 2002. Chances are it isn't gonna suck anywhere near as bad as some of the commentary of this posting implies.
is a good place to start research..Despite the name, they cover cable service in addition to dsl.
Let me begin with the comment that the figure of 0.24% is statistically suspect, and that the Google statistic of 1% is also probably unrepresentatively low. The following is an attempt to illustrate why.
The majority of Linux installations are done in multiple boot configurations.Most mainstream distros, and even some of the more obscure ones presume that and are designed accordingly, and quite a lot of the online documentation and commentary seems to be slanted toward that assumption. I'm not saying that's a bad thing per se, nor am I suggesting that platform interoparability is trivial, but there's a downside.
When I first installed OS/2 here in 1994 I got rid of Windoze. If I wanted a m$ operating system I wouldn't have deleted the damn thing. Getting away from it was the whole point. I installed Linux for the first time at the end of 1999 onto a separate physical drive with much the same motivation. The whole idea was to learn the damn thing, and the only way to learn something is spend time with it. Incidentally - on compatible hardware, installing Linux with no multiple-boot issues to complicate the picture is a lot less effort than installing Windoze on a virgin HDD.
I spend a lot of time on IRC: In addition to discussing beer and girlies, a lot of those dialogs are taken up with details of software installation, includng many first-time Linux installations, and I can tell you of countless times where someone I've been helping comes online, reports the installation successful, collects his l337t haxxor certification and then boots straight back into windoze.
This posting got me thinking about "dormant penguin syndrome", and it's evidently a big-enough factor to be taken into thoughtful consideration for marketing and promotion purposes. (Or advocacy, for those of you reading this who are staunch anti-capitalists) M$ traps are all around - from preloaded bundles, to proprietary file formats, to ISPs like NetZero (and many others who charge steep fees) to websites that won't render right without IE, to games.......I don't want this to turn into an outright rant so I'll just make the comment that there's a lotta Windoze-centric aspects to the present computing infrastructure viewed in macro - and that's not an accident: M$ planned it that way.
Does that mean life without Windoze is impossible? Hell no, but the reason I know that for a fact is that I've been resisting and avoiding it long enough to know how to deal with the obstacles. It isn't usually even that difficult.
Take most of the "Linux isn't ready" postings on this thread and s/Linux/Windoze, or Apple or any other alternative. Ya kow what? The validity of the comments holds. Demand this morning a desktop operating system that's truly intuitive, fast, effortless and crafted to a standard of pure perfection? There aren't any - but why be impossible when you can be totally over the top? Insist on a flawless user installation onto multiple-boot systems m$ spent millions of dollars developing to engineer deliberate incompatibilities into.
Linux is ready - and the applications are ready, at least for those of us capable of writing a letter without an animated paperclip, but it's simplistic to think that a successful Linux installation == marketplace conuest.
Users with Linux installed need to spend more time using it at length, and the Linux community needs to spend more effort encouraging this. How well this all goes will determine the direction of computing in this decade. M$ is already upset enough about the trend to Linux to start whining and mouthing about it. Time will tell.
The best descriptive analysis I've read so far of the whole mess can be found here
In another news article yesterday (for which I lost the URL) I understand the FCC, which has jurisdiction, is moving quickly to extend their regulation of RF-Coax cable networks to bring cable service providers into congruity with DSL providers as far as their responsibilities to customers are concerned.
I hope so. Just spent a miserable weekend babysitting the glowlight on my cablemodem waiting to see if my Comcast connection would drop.
Even looking back over business history to before the era of the robber barons, I can't think of a single example of a corporation treating it's customers to such a squalid clownact.
Congressional oversight of the cable industry, and the FCC itself is provided by the House Subcommittee on Telecommunications and The Internet Those of you who agree might consider writing to these guys and letting them know that holding 4.1 million customers hostage is something that should never be allowed to ever happen again. I'm expecting a serious investigation in due course, as there should be.
On a more positive note, my connection here remained constant through the whole episode, and services are normal. I suppose to be fair I should also congratulate the negotiators from Comcast and the other cablecos and Excite for reaching an agreement rapidly under brutally difficult conditions.
I intended this reply to be a simple enthusiastic endorsement of Corel Office 2000 for Linux. CO2K came out in April 2000, noted in /. at the time, and I've been using it extensively since then, including frequent Save As .xls and .doc functions, which worked as expected.
Downsides, noted here last April are that CO2K uses it's own proprietary version of WINE, which performs about as sluggishly as a M$ product, and that it's commercial software, which many Linux users object to for religious reasons. Despite these complaints, which are true, CO2K is the strongly preferred choice of suite here, and it also has the advantage of name-recognition and loyalty among large numbers of users with administrative of clerical backgrounds.
I had intended to conclude by quickly mentioning the price, which is a lot lower than billyware. This is the point where the morning took a disturbing and Orwellian turn.
Corel Office for Linux has been withdrawn from the Corel website. Not only has the product itself no longer being offered for sale, but the entire support section is deleted, although the newsgroup corel.wpoffice.office2000-linux is intact.
Using the message threads as my only available source of information [This was announced nowhere] I gather the product was withdrawn sometime around the beginning of this month. Corel Support is quoted in one of the threads saying it's been "obsoleted".
http://www.softwareandstuff.com still have it listed as available for order at a price of $49 USD, but if you're interested pursuing this direction, act quickly.
Start with a Socket 7 or Super 7 MB. This could be AT or ATX. Socket 7 will run CPUs ranging from P75 to AMD-K62-550. Look for a board with plenty of accessory slots, since we seem to share a bias against integrated components. (The whole point of the original ISA spec in 1981 was that individual components could be replaced without obsoleting the rest of the platform.)
Look on Pricewatch or the "Buy it now" items on Ebay for bargains. Classical Ebay auctions are notorious for wasting time and having someone else plant a winning bid in the last 30 seconds of the auction, but "Buy it now" may actually result in servicable merchandise at low cost.
64 Mb of ram will be plenty for what you describe. Pick a suitable chassis (AT or ATX, depending what MB you decide on) add a cheap video card (Trident maybe?) and whatever size IDE drive you feel will be sufficient. CPU can be any Celeron, AMD or Cyrix you opt for. I would suggest 10/100 autosensing NICs, because it doesn't matter what ya connect'em to, and they can be had for around $15 each.
Shipping charges can be lowered by bundling a lot of components from a single supplier. These days, I've noticed also that quite a few hardware guys are offering free shipping. One exception to this though might be the CPU fan, assuming you don't opt for a heatsink. Since silent operation is a high priority you might want to contact CDW or someplace like that with the sales expertise to recommend a speciality fan optimized for quiet.
Good luck with the build. During the runup to Y2K I built a lot of machines along the same general spec for customers that just wanted to go on running their same old stuff on hardware compatible with a 4 byte year. Rough pricing for the stuff described above is around the $200 - $250 range.
Like many Linux users, I tried out a few distros before finding one that fit best for me, and felt most comfortable.
One of the attractions of working outside a software monopoly is that different developer communities and distro companies address separate groups of users with broadly differing priorities.
Are you a desktop user looking for ease of installation? Check out Mandrake if you haven't already. Are ya deeply into kernel research and looking for explicit control over every aspect of your platform? Sounds like you would find Slackware right up your alley. For someone like me with a lot of crossplatform experience, and a lot of diskspace, and server and developmental ambitions as well as desktop requirements, Suse is an excellent fit.
The only operating system I would unhesitatingly not recommend to anyone is Windoze, because it's no damn good, and it's developers are marketing it by methods that are not only ethically repugnant but unlawful.
I would recommend Redhat, at the top of the list, in fact, to a corporation with a number of users in a LAN environment where an estasblished support contract with the distro company is a major operational consideration, as well as an important marketing point. I wouldn't be surprised that one of the reasons they're in reasonably good shape is that Redhat have positioned themselves to be a very attractive choice to users who fit that role.
Due to reasons nothing to do with Linux, it's pretty excruciating to attempt to get excited about serious work of any description at the moment, but, OTOH, while I'm composing this comment, there are thousands of companies running M$ products who are having their day to day operations ripped apart by Nimda. A move to Redhat would be something I would suggest they consider.
Granted, [giving RIAA the benefit of the doubt - the claim actually sounds a little exaggerated to me] but these guys have licensing way beyond what they're in a position to deliver commercially at this moment.
The reason producers don't mind shelling out a few million in fees and promotions for major stars like sweet darling Britney is that they get it back plus a pretty huge return in exchange for planting the resulting merchandise on store shelves all over the planet. The cost per unit of manufacturing each item is practically invisible.
This process however isn't infinitely ongoing. Watching revenue like hawks, they're very quick to cease production and pull product, making way on the shelves for the next manufactured Hollywood sensation.
Napster users with working computer technology and collections of vinyl from the 1950s and 1960s say, or cassettes and CDs from later eras create mp3s with an entirely different motivation. They don't mind the effort and the fact that the bytes they compile happen to be sharable is simply a fortunate byproduct of the exercise.
IOW, I'm arguing it's one thing for RIAA to haul out briefcases full of fine print and whine. Acutally paying employees to generate several terabytes of downloadable content from analog at 3Mb a track would call for a major allocation of capital and other organizational resources. Incidentally - this investment would be completely speculative up front, with no track record to refer to regarding profitablity, marketing or operations.
So are they serious or were they just dissembling [under oath] because they don't like Napster and needed a convincing excuse to persuade a court to rule in their favor? One thing is clear: If they mean it, this isn't something that's gonna happen in the next half-hour.
I happen to agree with you completely that the principal attraction is that it's "empowered by a huge catalog".
In the case of Napster the catalog self-generated as a result of having several hunderd thousand simultaneously connected users opting [remember, they have a choice] to share titles that are there in the first place because they happen to like them personally. It's organic, and the catalog is as vast as the totality of human diversity because that's where it comes from.
In order to replicate anything close comercially, some company would have to pay people to research and generate a dataset as close to that as they could possibly get. (Not very)
I don't think the industry could afford that even if recording executives sold their limos and took the bus to work.
The distinction between a command economy controlled out of Redmond and a command economy controlled out of Moscow is merely one of longitude.
The circus got seriously underway here late last Saturday. At that time I made a short list which can be found here.
The cablemodem traffic is annoying but so far no system interference to report here. The attempted attacks just bounce off Apache. Add this to my ever-increasing list of reasons why I'm glad I don't run Windoze.
A log of attack attempts here over the last 3 days can be found here
The patterns of frequency and source IPs speak for themselves. Interesting to note that I'm continuing to be attacked by both versions of the virus.
Thanks to Apache, they don't achieve anything, but the waste of bandwidth is stupid and annoying.
I'm thinking of getting in touch with doubleclick to negotiate advertising and make some money since my site is suddenly so popular.
I have KOffice and Staroffice both installed here, but at the risk of igniting controversy have to say I have a clear preference for Corel 2K.
There are admittedly negatives: CO2K uses it's own doctored version of WINE (which doesn't interfere at all with my opensource version. (I like music anyway so I have plenty of HDD space.) CO2K is also a commercial product, and the default screenfont Corel installs is pathetically tiny and difficult to modify.
On the positive side, Wordperfect, Quattropro and Paradox are carefully crafted ports, (there's some presentation stuff too, similar to Powerpoint that I don't really bother much with.)
Paradox for Linux will run code I wrote years ago using Win-OS2 or for that matter, win32 Paradox with no modifications whatsoever. This is the only onscreen example of pure crossplatform compatibility I've actually witnessed for myself for non-Java gui software.
In any case, I like it, despite the reservations I stated above. I'm not sorry I bought it and appreciate the effort Corel spent in it's engineering.
One more thing: MickeyD's PR bimbos in their $700 miniskirts pretending it doesn't exist are rather irritating.