It's not the BIOS manufacturer. It's the 2 bit vendor with the hex editor and the BIOS flashing software.
Stoping that goy means blocking users from upgrades. _I_ won't buy a Motherboard whithout a flasheble BIOS these days. I have needed that feature too often.
Very simply. You make your CPUs so they announce to the world at bootup
AMD-K7-Athelon-500MHz Running at 800MHz.
There are 2 reasons AMD and iNTEL don't and won't do that however.
Reason Number 1. It would mean having different CPU dies for each chip they sell. They aren't going to do that. They prefer to simply build a batch of chips and depending on how clean they come out you put a label on to claim a specific clock speed. Yes. Specific clock speeds are determined after the fact before labeling is done, not before.
Reason Number 2. Any Information the CPU issues about itself must go through the BIOS 1st. The problem is that someone with the resources of a 2 bit 10 box a day CPU manufacturer can arrange to have the BIOS altered so the quote above would say nice things like.
AMD-K7-Athelon-800MHz Running at 800MHz.
Of course being crummy and moronic corporations they just refuse to level with the customer and will continue to mislead you all as to what exactly they sell and why. Frankly, I think people would be nicer to them if they leveled with us.
PS: As for Locking the BIOS. fat FSCKing chance. We have grown accustomed to adding new features and fixing old bugs by flashing the BIOS. We aren't even going back to the old days of swapping chips, let alone having no BIOS flexibility at all.
Actually I have and I still receive royalty payments for some of it. Even then keeping a game or a film behind copyright "Protection" too long dose more harm than good.
Right now the Copyright on creative works lasts much longer than the effective life of the original media. This means that if the production house that owns that old movie don't want to preserve it it will in all likelihood be lost forever. Same goes for those classic games. How many original Pacman arcade boxes are still around ? I mean _original_ as in with the stack overflow bug at some ridiculously high score.
My view ? Copyrights should last until the creator's youngest child turns 21 or 5 years after the creator dies if he has no juvenile children. There is too great a public loss from onexploited copyrighted works.
What about his children you say ? This is the reason I set the age at 21. Beyond that you should make your own living or exist on solid assets your parents left you.
As for corporations. You should limit how they can own IP. In cases where they do own it anyway then the duration is 20 years total.
Yes. I do make a distinction between IP and solid assets.
How dose all this affect these games that were created in the 80s ? Under my scheme they would be back on the " market" in a few years from now. As is you are always in danger of prosecution for using this.
but for the wrong reason. You see VIA at one point released a chipset designed to put sound, video, modem, etc... on a Super 7 motherboard.
The actual chipset sucked. Or at leased seamed to suck because the motherboards that ran with it sucked. However it still holds the record for the coolest chipset name I have seen.
It was called 'GRA'. Since it was made by 'VIA' the label on the board read VIAGRA. The fact that Socket 7 was old and near impotent at the time didn't help matters much:).
On to CPU sockets and Slots.
Why do AMD and Intel continue to pretend that CPUs are upgradeble ? It's been years since I have seen someone upgrade a computer by changing the CPU alone.
This is not a coincidence. Whenever new chips come out the older motherboards don't support them properly for one reason or another. This has even happened with Motherboards that had clock settings up to the higher speeds.
Typically a motherboard is limited to the fastest CPU currently on the market at the time it is released. If you save money by buying that board with a slower chip when it comes time to upgrade you generally find it prudent to simply skip the highest chip the board dose support and get a new CPU and board. Along with new RAM in some cases.
And speaking of RAM. Am I the only person who thinks the 72 pin SIMM was the pinnacle of module design ? Somehow the DIMM sockets we are all so fund of these days feel like they were designed to break easily. Having to push straight down with great force ( relative to what a SIMM requires ) doesn't help much.
It all feels like a scam but at least I can fondly remember those cheerful days when you could look a customer straight in the face and calmly recommend that he get viagra for his aging PC.
Telnet is now a generic term for opening a text window into a remote machine's command line. SSH is seen as simply an encrypted and secure telnet on the wrong port:)
It's already bad enough when you edit stuff in/etc by hand and Linuxconf chokes on it. Having different admin tools disagree on the proper formatting for these files would drive the inexperienced administrator up a wall.
The veteran admin is so accustomed to using a text editor via telnet he won't consider any other option. Even in situations where it is faster.
I had access to a BBS and wold upload images of ever refrence disk I could find to it. I usualy got around the lost disk problem by means of that archive.
To this day I don't know if it was legal. Not that I care much.
Back in the day PS/2s were top of the line machines.
The bus speads were higher than even EISA and you never had to fidle with jumpers.
Too bad the compatibility and price sucked so much. I remember needing a new power supply and hard drive for one PS/2 and finding it cheaper to get a new computer fro ma latter generation.
What's to understand ? All you need to know is that they are "kiddies" beyond that they know something about computers and are interested in networking etc.
Fact is a script kiddy is a graffiti kiddy with a laptop or a joy riding kiddy with a few root kits.
If you are really worried about script kiddies you should find productive uses for those idle hands as early as possible. The other approach being taken by authority now is just begging for disaster. You can't make them "unlearn" these techniques. Banging a few of them around and preventing them from earning a living ( Kevin ) will just give the rest a reason to seek revenge.
At the very least we have yet another generation of disaffected young men with dangerous skills and it's a whole lot simpler to get rid of the disaffection than to get rid of the dangerous ( if somewhat limited ) skills.
This is a flop waiting to happen. It has 2X the capacity of a CD and far less than a DVD. It is copy protected ( fat chance ) and requires new hardware to work.
What is the market for this thing ? How is it going to sell ?
Software authors will continue to use CD-ROM for anything that fits because copy protection is impractical for stuff users must install.
Movie people will still use DVD because frankly they own that format and have an installed base. Never mind that 1.3 Gig is too small for high res film.
That leaves users who want to make copies of there own stuff but alas CDR drives are down in the $170 range and blanks are rapidly approaching diskette price. $1 and less in bulk.
In order for this to move into the market it needs to be faster than CDRW and in the same price range even then there is a pretty good chance it will flop like LS120 and 2.8 meg floppies before it.
Dose anyone else remember 2.8 meg floppy ? Has anyone actually used a 2.8 meg diskette ? I have and it was the OS/2 setup disk for a high end PS/2. No 3rd parties ever adopted it as far as I know of. Compaq had the same prob with LS120 for some years until now it's irrelevant ( zip is cheaper too ).
In the removable storage business incremental improvements don't matter and less than DVD is no improvement at all. Sorry Sony, better luck next time.
Ahh the good old games. I remember when games had to be optimized and tweaked and seriously hacked in assembly in order to run on the slow desktops of the 80s. The biggest problem with those games is that they don't run too well on faster machines.
Correction they run extremely well and so fast that on the right hardware the game will be over before you realize it has started. My saving grace was a program named atslow. It would slow down your systems apparent performance to a level that let those old games be usable.
Recodeing a classic, any classic, inside Mozilla should have the same effect. The low resolutions and simple movements of older games are such that they can be run on modern hardware in even the slowest programing tools. Even Java and qbasic work.
This project should be a whole lot of fun. I'll definitely want to run through this code. Now howsabout building crazy climber as a kpart or a bonobo object so that we can embed it inside the calculator or make it a VIgore easter egg.
Look into the Troll Tech model. Depending on what your product is you may be able to sell it for profit while making it free and open source for those who honestly prefer this.
If your product is a software library that can be used as part of other products then do exactly what Troll Tech dose with the QPL license too.
If your product is a server that dishes out content over the web ( AKA Real Player ) You make provisions that people must pay you or fully allow wholesale copying of all the content they distribute.
There are other solutions for other situations the key thing is to make your software free for those dealing in free content and free software. If it is done that way while remaining open source there will never be enough incentive for competent people to produce a free ( bear and speech ) clone.
You see people who live by copyright will find it simpler and perhaps cheaper to pay your license fees. Meanwhile those who live by Free Software and Open content will have no need to clone your stuff once the original works OK and you accept patches.
For proof of this just read of on the QT history. Ohh.. and try not to have any GPL compatibility issues even if it means saying "Thou shalt not write GPL code with our software"
Jamaican Artists make a lot more money in Jamaica than artists do in any other small market ( 2.7 Million ).
The pirated music dosn't cut into record sales as a hit song in Jamaica generaly sells more copys than a hit in the US ( reletive to market size ). The truth is that those who buy ligitimate copys of music will do so regardless of the cheap copys.
BTW: Everyone but the realy hot platnum sellers like Whitny Huston makes most if not all there money off concerts. Bootleg salles have never cut into concert sales and never will.
Except in the case of an artist where bootlegs of his concert performance sucked so much nobody wanted to pay for a live performance.
In Jamaica we have copyright laws. These laws are generally ignored with respect to music. Stalls on the street openly peddle bootleg casets and CDs.
This is Jamaica I'm talking about. We put more songs on the US charts than any other foreign country. We have more music producers and recording studios per square mile than anywhere else on earth. The all-time most prolific artist was a Jamaican ( Denis Brown with approximately 128 unique albums and no complete count of singles. He died last year and was buried in hero's circle. Even he never had a complete collection of his recordings. That's hard when you started singing before Bob Marley released as many as 4 albums a year. )
Ohh and speaking of Bob. Album of the Century ( Legend ), Anthem of the Century ( One Love ) and Recording Artist of the century.
Before you even take size into consideration we produce more music than any other country except maybe the US and the jury is still out on that one.
Piracy is a scapegoat held up to confuse young artists who aren't seeing any money from all the hard work.
You know that paper stuff 99% of us don't have enough of?
Microsoft has no choice but to keep raising the price of it's software. Sales volumes are not growing fast enough to justify the stock valuation ( even after 1/2 of it dropped off ). When the total hardware of your PC costs under $300 paying another $300 for OS and Basic Office productivity becomes a pain. Dropping a grand for the retail boxes is just insane.
MS doesn't have features to justify the high sales volumes it has. That is rather the result of nobody else being able to read the files consistently.
All but two of the people I know who bought MSOffice retail did so because they had trouble reading new files. Those two bought it because the older version they had was too unstable to use on the systems they had. One couldn't get Access to start at all.
If and only if the file compatibility issue can be dealt with in a complete and consistent way Microsoft Office will go down and MS won't be able to do much about it.
This is the greatest testament to the success of Gimp I have seen yet. Basically Corel is saying "look you have Gimp so it's tough to sell you Photopaint. Instead we are going to give it away and hope you come back to purchase those things with cash value on the Linux market.
This is not new for Corel. This is the same company that for years gave away older versions of Corel draw with Diamond Video cards. Some motherboards come with Perfect Office 8 and there is a deal that should see Corel Linux and Office for Linux distributed in the same way. I haven't seen any signs of that yet though.
It's sad but one consequence of Linux' rapid growth is that Corel will likely go under before Microsoft is able to clearly measure our impact on the desktop. KOffice will be the next Office Suite to dominate the market and even that will not have the percentages that MSOffice holds now. My advise to Corel is to help out. Do your damnedest to work with everyone else who needs to Import MSOffice files and work with some kind of standard XML.
If file formats are removed as a serious market factor then Corel will be able to squeeze 4 or 5 years of solid sales out of it's clear user interface and strong feature set lead. Otherwise it will get crushed between MSOffice and KOffice.
PS : I do know about Gnome Office but it has quite a ways to go before it is near the Office of today. The main problem is that GOffice was designed and built in different camps with varied loyalty to the Gnome core. Eventually the various parts will be fully integrated but since they were not designed that way from the ground up it will take time.
I only hope they and KDE work towards a standard XML interpretation. That way I can continue to share even the most complex of documents with others regardless of what they choose.
As for the others. Applix and StarOffice both want to become the next MSOffice and dominate in the same proprietary way. This is why they are doomed to the same fate as OS/2. Corel at least is desperate enough to and well designed enough to look at such radical options.
The Bad news is that crime rates are high and the government kinda sucks.
The good news is that the network is starting to open up and 2 new companies have been licensed to do Cellular telephones locally. An ISP has been licensed to provide Island wide, wireless, digital, cable TV. In 3 years this will be a 4th phone company and a huge ISP.
We are a lot behind the curve but I think it's more fun to build the infrastructure than to go work in an established market. Around here we have 2/3 the residential telephones needed, we have a dozen ISPs that mostly suck, we have everything basically just starting out.
The downside of building infrastructure now is that we don't have affordable residential DSL or Cable modems yet. The upside is that we have nice scenery, more pretty girls per acre than anywhere else and we actually produce almost as much music as the US ( We have ~ 1/100 the population:).
Stuff changes. The Industrial revolution meant that India's farming population would be impoverished compared to the Manufacturing workers in the west. This has been true for a long time and is why the North won the US Civil war. Manufacturers make more money than farmers.
Unless you grow, process and market some specialized crop like Jamaican coffee.
These days India has not only caught the industrial revolution under it's progressive government but it has leapt into the information age and is now the prime outsourcing site for US software companies.
Slashdot Mirror
It's not the BIOS manufacturer.
It's the 2 bit vendor with the
hex editor and the BIOS flashing
software.
Stoping that goy means blocking
users from upgrades. _I_ won't
buy a Motherboard whithout a
flasheble BIOS these days. I
have needed that feature too
often.
Overclocking or runing without
a fan voids your waranty.
Enthusiasts like me accept that
at the bigining.
AMD is not responsible for
obviusly cooked chips.
If I explain what's wrong
with other solutions maybe
I have explained why AMD
and iNTEL chose the
unpopular clock locking
solution.
the moderators seem to
agree.
I thoght of that. And mentioned it.
People want upgradeble BIOSs. You have to
block end users and enthusists before you
afect two bit box makers and criminal CPU
retailers.
Very simply. You make your CPUs so they announce to the world at bootup
AMD-K7-Athelon-500MHz Running at 800MHz.
There are 2 reasons AMD and iNTEL don't and won't do that however.
Reason Number 1. It would mean having different CPU dies for each chip they sell. They aren't going to do that. They prefer to simply build a batch of chips and depending on how clean they come out you put a label on to claim a specific clock speed. Yes. Specific clock speeds are determined after the fact before labeling is done, not before.
Reason Number 2. Any Information the CPU issues about itself must go through the BIOS 1st. The problem is that someone with the resources of a 2 bit 10 box a day CPU manufacturer can arrange to have the BIOS altered so the quote above would say nice things like.
AMD-K7-Athelon-800MHz Running at 800MHz.
Of course being crummy and moronic corporations they just refuse to level with the customer and will continue to mislead you all as to what exactly they sell and why. Frankly, I think people would be nicer to them if they leveled with us.
PS: As for Locking the BIOS. fat FSCKing chance. We have grown accustomed to adding new features and fixing old bugs by flashing the BIOS. We aren't even going back to the old days of swapping chips, let alone having no BIOS flexibility at all.
Actually I have and I still receive royalty payments for some of it. Even then keeping a game or a film behind copyright "Protection" too long dose more harm than good.
Right now the Copyright on creative works lasts much longer than the effective life of the original media. This means that if the production house that owns that old movie don't want to preserve it it will in all likelihood be lost forever. Same goes for those classic games. How many original Pacman arcade boxes are still around ? I mean _original_ as in with the stack overflow bug at some ridiculously high score.
My view ? Copyrights should last until the creator's youngest child turns 21 or 5 years after the creator dies if he has no juvenile children. There is too great a public loss from onexploited copyrighted works.
What about his children you say ? This is the reason I set the age at 21. Beyond that you should make your own living or exist on solid assets your parents left you.
As for corporations. You should limit how they can own IP. In cases where they do own it anyway then the duration is 20 years total.
Yes. I do make a distinction between IP and solid assets.
How dose all this affect these games that were created in the 80s ? Under my scheme they would be back on the " market" in a few years from now. As is you are always in danger of prosecution for using this.
If it was about Preservation why are so many of the game authors and there employers upset ?
Ohh... Because they don't want these games preserved, they want all the old classics forgotten so they can sell new games and make more money.
Just goes to show that raising the duration of copyright to such an FSCKing long time as it's at now was a very domb idea.
Sure running a game on MAME isn't necessarily a copyright violation. But can we prove that ?
That depends. Which of those is the thing you do with dogh before you bake it ? That's the one I meant :)
but for the wrong reason. You see VIA at one point released a chipset designed to put sound, video, modem, etc... on a Super 7 motherboard.
:).
The actual chipset sucked. Or at leased seamed to suck because the motherboards that ran with it sucked. However it still holds the record for the coolest chipset name I have seen.
It was called 'GRA'. Since it was made by 'VIA' the label on the board read VIAGRA. The fact that Socket 7 was old and near impotent at the time didn't help matters much
On to CPU sockets and Slots.
Why do AMD and Intel continue to pretend that CPUs are upgradeble ? It's been years since I have seen someone upgrade a computer by changing the CPU alone.
This is not a coincidence. Whenever new chips come out the older motherboards don't support them properly for one reason or another. This has even happened with Motherboards that had clock settings up to the higher speeds.
Typically a motherboard is limited to the fastest CPU currently on the market at the time it is released. If you save money by buying that board with a slower chip when it comes time to upgrade you generally find it prudent to simply skip the highest chip the board dose support and get a new CPU and board. Along with new RAM in some cases.
And speaking of RAM. Am I the only person who thinks the 72 pin SIMM was the pinnacle of module design ? Somehow the DIMM sockets we are all so fund of these days feel like they were designed to break easily. Having to push straight down with great force ( relative to what a SIMM requires ) doesn't help much.
It all feels like a scam but at least I can fondly remember those cheerful days when you could look a customer straight in the face and calmly recommend that he get viagra for his aging PC.
Some OS vendors and hardware manufacturers have been delaying IPV6 support for too long.
However even MS now runs with IPV6 if neaded. Cisco, IBM Sun all have support. Linux of course has had it since 2.0.x
Telnet is now a generic term for opening a text window into a remote machine's command line. SSH is seen as simply an encrypted and secure telnet on the wrong port :)
You yanks realy are sick.
Even Cama Sutra dosn't consider that "sex". A signe of declining sanity coupled with extream hunger perhaps but it dosn't even involve genetilia.
Then again I have herd that some gay men have some sexual sensitivity in that area so this sounds like something they wold like.
Prety strange to people outside North America however.
It's already bad enough when you edit stuff in /etc by hand and Linuxconf chokes on it. Having different admin tools disagree on the proper formatting for these files would drive the inexperienced administrator up a wall.
The veteran admin is so accustomed to using a text editor via telnet he won't consider any other option. Even in situations where it is faster.
Yes such situations do exist.
I had access to a BBS and wold upload images of ever refrence disk I could find to it. I usualy got around the lost disk problem by means of that archive.
To this day I don't know if it was legal. Not that I care much.
Back in the day PS/2s were top of the line machines.
The bus speads were higher than even EISA and you never had to fidle with jumpers.
Too bad the compatibility and price sucked so much. I remember needing a new power supply and hard drive for one PS/2 and finding it cheaper to get a new computer fro ma latter generation.
What's to understand ? All you need to know is that they are "kiddies" beyond that they know something about computers and are interested in networking etc.
Fact is a script kiddy is a graffiti kiddy with a laptop or a joy riding kiddy with a few root kits.
If you are really worried about script kiddies you should find productive uses for those idle hands as early as possible. The other approach being taken by authority now is just begging for disaster. You can't make them "unlearn" these techniques. Banging a few of them around and preventing them from earning a living ( Kevin ) will just give the rest a reason to seek revenge.
At the very least we have yet another generation of disaffected young men with dangerous skills and it's a whole lot simpler to get rid of the disaffection than to get rid of the dangerous ( if somewhat limited ) skills.
This is a flop waiting to happen. It has 2X the capacity of a CD and far less than a DVD. It is copy protected ( fat chance ) and requires new hardware to work.
What is the market for this thing ? How is it going to sell ?
Software authors will continue to use CD-ROM for anything that fits because copy protection is impractical for stuff users must install.
Movie people will still use DVD because frankly they own that format and have an installed base. Never mind that 1.3 Gig is too small for high res film.
That leaves users who want to make copies of there own stuff but alas CDR drives are down in the $170 range and blanks are rapidly approaching diskette price. $1 and less in bulk.
In order for this to move into the market it needs to be faster than CDRW and in the same price range even then there is a pretty good chance it will flop like LS120 and 2.8 meg floppies before it.
Dose anyone else remember 2.8 meg floppy ? Has anyone actually used a 2.8 meg diskette ? I have and it was the OS/2 setup disk for a high end PS/2. No 3rd parties ever adopted it as far as I know of. Compaq had the same prob with LS120 for some years until now it's irrelevant ( zip is cheaper too ).
In the removable storage business incremental improvements don't matter and less than DVD is no improvement at all. Sorry Sony, better luck next time.
Ahh the good old games. I remember when games had to be optimized and tweaked and seriously hacked in assembly in order to run on the slow desktops of the 80s. The biggest problem with those games is that they don't run too well on faster machines.
Correction they run extremely well and so fast that on the right hardware the game will be over before you realize it has started. My saving grace was a program named atslow. It would slow down your systems apparent performance to a level that let those old games be usable.
Recodeing a classic, any classic, inside Mozilla should have the same effect. The low resolutions and simple movements of older games are such that they can be run on modern hardware in even the slowest programing tools. Even Java and qbasic work.
This project should be a whole lot of fun. I'll definitely want to run through this code. Now howsabout building crazy climber as a kpart or a bonobo object so that we can embed it inside the calculator or make it a VIgore easter egg.
Look into the Troll Tech model. Depending on what your product is you may be able to sell it for profit while making it free and open source for those who honestly prefer this.
If your product is a software library that can be used as part of other products then do exactly what Troll Tech dose with the QPL license too.
If your product is a server that dishes out content over the web ( AKA Real Player ) You make provisions that people must pay you or fully allow wholesale copying of all the content they distribute.
There are other solutions for other situations the key thing is to make your software free for those dealing in free content and free software. If it is done that way while remaining open source there will never be enough incentive for competent people to produce a free ( bear and speech ) clone.
You see people who live by copyright will find it simpler and perhaps cheaper to pay your license fees. Meanwhile those who live by Free Software and Open content will have no need to clone your stuff once the original works OK and you accept patches.
For proof of this just read of on the QT history. Ohh.. and try not to have any GPL compatibility issues even if it means saying "Thou shalt not write GPL code with our software"
Jamaican Artists make a lot more money in Jamaica than artists do in any other small market ( 2.7 Million ).
The pirated music dosn't cut into record sales as a hit song in Jamaica generaly sells more copys than a hit in the US ( reletive to market size ). The truth is that those who buy ligitimate copys of music will do so regardless of the cheap copys.
BTW: Everyone but the realy hot platnum sellers like Whitny Huston makes most if not all there money off concerts. Bootleg salles have never cut into concert sales and never will.
Except in the case of an artist where bootlegs of his concert performance sucked so much nobody wanted to pay for a live performance.
In Jamaica we have copyright laws. These laws are generally ignored with respect to music. Stalls on the street openly peddle bootleg casets and CDs.
This is Jamaica I'm talking about. We put more songs on the US charts than any other foreign country. We have more music producers and recording studios per square mile than anywhere else on earth. The all-time most prolific artist was a Jamaican ( Denis Brown with approximately 128 unique albums and no complete count of singles. He died last year and was buried in hero's circle. Even he never had a complete collection of his recordings. That's hard when you started singing before Bob Marley released as many as 4 albums a year. )
Ohh and speaking of Bob. Album of the Century ( Legend ), Anthem of the Century ( One Love ) and Recording Artist of the century.
Before you even take size into consideration we produce more music than any other country except maybe the US and the jury is still out on that one.
Piracy is a scapegoat held up to confuse young artists who aren't seeing any money from all the hard work.
You know that paper stuff 99% of us don't have enough of?
Microsoft has no choice but to keep raising the price of it's software. Sales volumes are not growing fast enough to justify the stock valuation ( even after 1/2 of it dropped off ). When the total hardware of your PC costs under $300 paying another $300 for OS and Basic Office productivity becomes a pain. Dropping a grand for the retail boxes is just insane.
MS doesn't have features to justify the high sales volumes it has. That is rather the result of nobody else being able to read the files consistently.
All but two of the people I know who bought MSOffice retail did so because they had trouble reading new files. Those two bought it because the older version they had was too unstable to use on the systems they had. One couldn't get Access to start at all.
If and only if the file compatibility issue can be dealt with in a complete and consistent way Microsoft Office will go down and MS won't be able to do much about it.
This is the greatest testament to the success of Gimp I have seen yet. Basically Corel is saying "look you have Gimp so it's tough to sell you Photopaint. Instead we are going to give it away and hope you come back to purchase those things with cash value on the Linux market.
This is not new for Corel. This is the same company that for years gave away older versions of Corel draw with Diamond Video cards. Some motherboards come with Perfect Office 8 and there is a deal that should see Corel Linux and Office for Linux distributed in the same way. I haven't seen any signs of that yet though.
It's sad but one consequence of Linux' rapid growth is that Corel will likely go under before Microsoft is able to clearly measure our impact on the desktop. KOffice will be the next Office Suite to dominate the market and even that will not have the percentages that MSOffice holds now. My advise to Corel is to help out. Do your damnedest to work with everyone else who needs to Import MSOffice files and work with some kind of standard XML.
If file formats are removed as a serious market factor then Corel will be able to squeeze 4 or 5 years of solid sales out of it's clear user interface and strong feature set lead. Otherwise it will get crushed between MSOffice and KOffice.
PS : I do know about Gnome Office but it has quite a ways to go before it is near the Office of today. The main problem is that GOffice was designed and built in different camps with varied loyalty to the Gnome core. Eventually the various parts will be fully integrated but since they were not designed that way from the ground up it will take time.
I only hope they and KDE work towards a standard XML interpretation. That way I can continue to share even the most complex of documents with others regardless of what they choose.
As for the others. Applix and StarOffice both want to become the next MSOffice and dominate in the same proprietary way. This is why they are doomed to the same fate as OS/2. Corel at least is desperate enough to and well designed enough to look at such radical options.
I have good news and bad news.
:).
The Bad news is that crime rates are high and the government kinda sucks.
The good news is that the network is starting to open up and 2 new companies have been licensed to do Cellular telephones locally. An ISP has been licensed to provide Island wide, wireless, digital, cable TV. In 3 years this will be a 4th phone company and a huge ISP.
We are a lot behind the curve but I think it's more fun to build the infrastructure than to go work in an established market. Around here we have 2/3 the residential telephones needed, we have a dozen ISPs that mostly suck, we have everything basically just starting out.
The downside of building infrastructure now is that we don't have affordable residential DSL or Cable modems yet. The upside is that we have nice scenery, more pretty girls per acre than anywhere else and we actually produce almost as much music as the US ( We have ~ 1/100 the population
Stuff changes. The Industrial revolution meant that India's farming population would be impoverished compared to the Manufacturing workers in the west. This has been true for a long time and is why the North won the US Civil war. Manufacturers make more money than farmers.
Unless you grow, process and market some specialized crop like Jamaican coffee.
These days India has not only caught the industrial revolution under it's progressive government but it has leapt into the information age and is now the prime outsourcing site for US software companies.