Re:Why did they drop it in the first place...
on
Can GnuPG Deliver?
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· Score: 1
It took me forever to figure out that their PGP encryption product was McAfee E-Business server or something like that. Price quote for a single CPU license came to something like $15,000. That was the only PGP encryption product (excluding hardware firewalls and such) that I was able to find. By McAfee? E-business Server? That sounds like something similar Lotus. Maybe it is, and PGP is just one small facet of its functionality. Either way I decided to forego the heartburn and try GnuPG (and I'm glad that I did).
I have several applications that require backend batch encryption of files in order to automate processes. GnuPG handles this beautifully; for instance, in Java I can start a new runtime process with the argument "--passphrase-fd 0" and then write the passphrase to the process's standard input stream. I can't fathom how I would go about this with NAI's solution (even if licensing didn't prevent me from using it in a commercial setting).
I also see uses in online E-mail forms (webmail). Someone writes a message, adds attachments, and passes the whole mime encoded mess to a servlet or CGI that runs it through gpg. The user wouldn't even have to be aware of it.
p.s. For those of you who are wondering, yes, I tried Cryptix. I couldn't figure it out (it's not documented *at all*), and it doesn't run with JDK 1.4. GnuPG was a life saver.
It seems to me as if these companies are setting up these services to fail. They go on and on to the press about opportunity and demand, but really they can't figure out how to make the profits they are accustomed to using this new medium. So they make a token effort, and in a year when they are unable to make a profit (due largely to consumer disgust at their overly restrictive policies), they can turn to legislators and the press and get that much more sympathy. They want to look like the good guys--if they make it look like they're trying and can't succeed against the vicious criminal consumer, they'll do just that.
The worst possible thing that could happen is that these services actually succeed and become competitive. Then they can say goodbye to that 86% cut off the top and actually have to work for a living.
I ran some of my Word documents through it and a few things jump out at me:
1. Font and style importing seems to work perfectly 2. It destroys any table formatting you have, and in some cases drops the entire table (leaving only the contents as lines of text) 3. It won't wrap tables. Tables get pushed to the beginning of the next page. 4. It drops any kind of bullets you may have had. Again, the text is still there, it's just no longer bulletted 5. It can't align text vertically (title pages have all the text scrunched up at the top). This is a feature I wish more word processors supported. 6. OLE objects? Forget it. 7. Word drawing tools/objects? Forget it.
Also, when saving into Office format, this is what I noticed:
1. Word can't even load some documents with tables--it complains that the tables are corrupt 2. Table formatting is gone 3. Bullets are gone
And last, but not least, when saving as HTML I got these results:
1. Table formatting is gone (you get ugly 3-D 4px borders, HTML default) 2. Bullets are gone 3. Font formatting seems to work perfectly
However, I did notice some endearing things:
1. You can select non-contiguous portions of text and format them 2. Styles and table formatting are intuitive and easy, assuming you unlearn the way you do it in Word. 3. Menu options are more informative 4. Fewer unnecessary features (less clutter, more room for frequently used options on the main menus) 5. Spreadsheet has impressive functionality
Moral of the story: if you use gobeProductive and ONLY gobeProductive, it's pretty darn good. But if you have to interface with ANYTHING else, you're S.O.L.
We get PCs from Dell, wipe them completely, and put our own disk images on them according to department (different departments, different needs). All of our software licensing is done directly through the software vendors. This actually saves us a lot of time an money.
The largest obstacle for office suites to overcome is file format compatibility. Star Office 6.0 beta completely destroys Word 2000 documents, and forget about Word importing Star Office documents. In order to overcome this a company would have to make a sweeping, blanket change in software policies so that everyone used the same productivity suite.
But then I can only imagine the numbers of people bringing illegal copies of Office from home and using that in order to avoid learning how to use different software. Most people in non-technical positions (order management, billing) have no concept of copyrights and audits. It's much safer for the company to buy a license for Office and not worry about it.
Those kinds of things bothered me too, but what hurt the most was the way Elves were portrayed. Agent Elrond aside ("What good is a Ring of Power, Mr. Baggins, if you are unable to speak!"), they all seemed kind of surly. Call me crazy, but that isn't the "Merry and sad at the same time" concept Tolkien had in mind. That, and why twist Sauruman's role in the whole affair? Instead of Sauron's dupe he becomes a fanboy hatchet man, and all of the sudden you have wizard fights that look like bad episodes of Xena, Warrior Princess. Things like this bother me because they're not done in the interest of time, but more out of extravagance and sensationalism. Maybe Jackson was true to the fans, but he wasn't true to the spirit of the novels.
That's why I don't think this movie deserves best adaptation or whatever. Great makeup, terrific cinematography, and outstanding setting--give it Best Picture, I don't care--but please, don't parade this as the profoundly perfect adaptation everyone seems to think it is.
What I want to know is if they've fixed that bug that randomly drops all your font settings. There is nothing I hate more than opening up KDE and seeing everything in 14pt bold sans-serif.
Which is interesting, because Microsoft bundles this functionality into XP Pro. So if you have an XP Pro box with remote desktop enabled, and a bunch of XP (Home, Pro, whatever) boxes running the remote desktop client, then there is seemingly no need to run VNC (or PCAnywhere for that matter).
I wonder what the reasoning behind this was. Does the remote desktop application give you multiple desktops? I know VNC doesn't. It's not like Microsoft is losing money there, and there doesn't seem to be a huge market for this sort of thing. Why the exclusionary tactics?
Symantec and Microsoft have always been partnered in one form or fashion. The disk defragmentation utitilies and such that are bundled with Windows 95 and 98 are written by Symantec. I wouldn't surprise me if Symantec acquired a (discounted? free?) license to run PCAnywhere on XP.
Last I checked Mozilla wasn't build into the kernel...
If you want to look at good, componentized development, take a gander at Gnome or KDE. KDE can be installed without Konqueror. Gnome can be run without Sawfish. If some weak, communist open source project can do it, why can't Microsoft?
Yeah but with languages Java and Ada you get principles without symantics. The biggest obstacles to learning for a C++ student are little syntax hang ups. A lot of the time the code will be done in an hour and the student will spend weeks getting the thing to compile and run without a segfault.
Give a student a language where they don't have to write a lot of their own low-level classes, a well-defined API, and a strongly-typed language with no razor-thin distinctions between pointers and references, and you allow them to focus on logic, design, and problem-solving.
Then make it platform agnostic, add garbage collection, replace cryptic segfault messages with meaningful exceptions, a powerful, free IDE (Forte), extensive online documentation (Java online documentation and tutorial trails), the ability to easily create graphical elements (AWT and Swing), and suddnely the emphasis is once again on the problem.
This is why Universities are going to Java, as opposed to gcc, g++, or Visual Studio. Even.NET, with it's illustrious C# falls short of many of these points. If people would open their eyes for a second and see beyond the performance issues, they'd realize what a great language Java really is for learning.
I would gladly buy an MT T-shirt if they weren't so damn girly. That, and I don't think I can stomach another white T-shirt. If they had like, say, 3/4 baseball shirts or something creative I might reconsider. That nothwithstanding, I am definitely going to buy his book if/when if comes out. I also plan to buy Scott Kurtz's PvP Online retrospective when it comes out. I have already purchased Penny Arcade's comic book (hardcover, $35). There's a couple reasons for this, but the biggest one is my desire to support the artist.
The lesson I've learned from all of this philosophical posturing and subsequent backlash is simple: most people are cheap bastards. Am I getting ripped off? For the actual product I get in the mail, probably. But for the satisfaction of knowing that I'm not some self-righteous hypocritical leech, I definitely get my money's worth.
If this passes, I'm out of a job. I work for probably the last major competitive CLEC in the southeast. We have over 60,000 lines in service, and something like 7,500 more added in the month of January; we are cash-positive; and we have a business plan that is working better than we ever hoped. We've spent the last year busting our asses to get our service levels to world class levels, and we lead the industry in many areas. A lot of folks put in a lot of time and effort into making this thing work.
When 2001 hit, we had layoffs. Now this. It's really sad and frustrating that we have to go through this kind of anxiety every year.
So yes this is a problem. It's a very big problem. Just maybe not for you.
I imagine future versions of RedHat Professional and SuSE Professional will include StarOffice 6.0 for no extra charge. Supposedly some of the money received by the distro manufacturers goes to offset the cost of commercial/non-free software, such as StarOffice 5.2 (whichever version the were charging for).
Of course, this only works if you *buy* the distros, which I would recommend to anyone, given the added support and documentation it comes with.
Personally, I wouldn't mind paying $150 per seat for for StarOffice, given that Microsoft's offering weighs in at $300 or more.
AFAIK it is possible, but "frowned upon," and if they ever find you you'll lose your account. Not that they will. Still, it's not farfetched to think that maybe this guy was totally honest up until the point where his daughter needed cancer treatment or something. 6000 transactions would take a *long* time, even if you were doing it illegitimately.
Re:can it copy and paste between apps yet?
on
GNOME 2.0 Beta
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· Score: 1
I'm waiting for CDE-style cut, copy, and paste strokes. Like SHIFT-DEL, SHIFT-INS, CTRL-C, CTRL-V, CTRL-X...it may sound lame, but I grew up on Windows and Solaris, and the X clipboard is just...well...shitty. Copying and pasting URLs is a nightmare unless you have Konqueror where you can hit that little X. That auto-select middle-click crap is for the birds.
I haven't really used Gnome, but I'm getting fed up with Klipper...is any of this implemented in Gnome?
I would love to, provided they toured more than one time per album and visited more than 20 cities. Bands like Tool, Metallica, and Britney Spears don't have to play a lot of small venues--they play a few huge ones and call it quits. And those are the ones with enough money to travel. Athenaeum, one of my favorite bands, has a tremendous committment to their fans--they send out E-mails announcing tour dates, and they tour constantly in their home region--but they can't make it anywhere near where I live.
I would personally prefer to see one live concert a month rather than buy 4 CDs. Too bad I am not able to.
Maybe the copyright time period should be an interval with an upper and lower bound. For instance, at least 20 years, but not exceeding the author's lifetime + 20 years. I don't think an author should have to watch his work be taken from him, mangled, mutilated, and redistributed while he is alive (if he so chooses).
I know that I am very proud of my works (in this case, software), and it would irk me to no end to have to fork that over to the masses and watch as they alter my works as they see fit and spread it around. That could usher in a whole new era of censhorship accomplished flooding the market (i.e. public schools) with derivatives.
At the very least add a provision where there must be a prominent mention that any derived works came from a specific author, and that the derived work in no way reflects the author's opinions or skill, and that the original author can be in no way held liable for any content within. Again, the 'lifetime' provision pretty much takes care of this, and I'd hate to see it go away (for copyrights, at least).
I'm not saying have a DTD for every major tool. I'm saying have a DTD for logically similar components. The DTD for each would act as an interface, and the XML would then be an implementation. You could write an object model layer that serialized/unserialized XML documents into objects and worked from there, using a well-defined series of DTDs.
That's the proper way to do it with XML. If you just want to store heirarchies of values, use LDAP.
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dselect sure could use a facelift, though.
It took me forever to figure out that their PGP encryption product was McAfee E-Business server or something like that. Price quote for a single CPU license came to something like $15,000. That was the only PGP encryption product (excluding hardware firewalls and such) that I was able to find. By McAfee? E-business Server? That sounds like something similar Lotus. Maybe it is, and PGP is just one small facet of its functionality. Either way I decided to forego the heartburn and try GnuPG (and I'm glad that I did).
I have several applications that require backend batch encryption of files in order to automate processes. GnuPG handles this beautifully; for instance, in Java I can start a new runtime process with the argument "--passphrase-fd 0" and then write the passphrase to the process's standard input stream. I can't fathom how I would go about this with NAI's solution (even if licensing didn't prevent me from using it in a commercial setting).
I also see uses in online E-mail forms (webmail). Someone writes a message, adds attachments, and passes the whole mime encoded mess to a servlet or CGI that runs it through gpg. The user wouldn't even have to be aware of it.
p.s. For those of you who are wondering, yes, I tried Cryptix. I couldn't figure it out (it's not documented *at all*), and it doesn't run with JDK 1.4. GnuPG was a life saver.
It seems to me as if these companies are setting up these services to fail. They go on and on to the press about opportunity and demand, but really they can't figure out how to make the profits they are accustomed to using this new medium. So they make a token effort, and in a year when they are unable to make a profit (due largely to consumer disgust at their overly restrictive policies), they can turn to legislators and the press and get that much more sympathy. They want to look like the good guys--if they make it look like they're trying and can't succeed against the vicious criminal consumer, they'll do just that.
The worst possible thing that could happen is that these services actually succeed and become competitive. Then they can say goodbye to that 86% cut off the top and actually have to work for a living.
I ran some of my Word documents through it and a few things jump out at me:
1. Font and style importing seems to work perfectly
2. It destroys any table formatting you have, and in some cases drops the entire table (leaving only the contents as lines of text)
3. It won't wrap tables. Tables get pushed to the beginning of the next page.
4. It drops any kind of bullets you may have had. Again, the text is still there, it's just no longer bulletted
5. It can't align text vertically (title pages have all the text scrunched up at the top). This is a feature I wish more word processors supported.
6. OLE objects? Forget it.
7. Word drawing tools/objects? Forget it.
Also, when saving into Office format, this is what I noticed:
1. Word can't even load some documents with tables--it complains that the tables are corrupt
2. Table formatting is gone
3. Bullets are gone
And last, but not least, when saving as HTML I got these results:
1. Table formatting is gone (you get ugly 3-D 4px borders, HTML default)
2. Bullets are gone
3. Font formatting seems to work perfectly
However, I did notice some endearing things:
1. You can select non-contiguous portions of text and format them
2. Styles and table formatting are intuitive and easy, assuming you unlearn the way you do it in Word.
3. Menu options are more informative
4. Fewer unnecessary features (less clutter, more room for frequently used options on the main menus)
5. Spreadsheet has impressive functionality
Moral of the story: if you use gobeProductive and ONLY gobeProductive, it's pretty darn good. But if you have to interface with ANYTHING else, you're S.O.L.
We get PCs from Dell, wipe them completely, and put our own disk images on them according to department (different departments, different needs). All of our software licensing is done directly through the software vendors. This actually saves us a lot of time an money.
The largest obstacle for office suites to overcome is file format compatibility. Star Office 6.0 beta completely destroys Word 2000 documents, and forget about Word importing Star Office documents. In order to overcome this a company would have to make a sweeping, blanket change in software policies so that everyone used the same productivity suite.
But then I can only imagine the numbers of people bringing illegal copies of Office from home and using that in order to avoid learning how to use different software. Most people in non-technical positions (order management, billing) have no concept of copyrights and audits. It's much safer for the company to buy a license for Office and not worry about it.
Those kinds of things bothered me too, but what hurt the most was the way Elves were portrayed. Agent Elrond aside ("What good is a Ring of Power, Mr. Baggins, if you are unable to speak!"), they all seemed kind of surly. Call me crazy, but that isn't the "Merry and sad at the same time" concept Tolkien had in mind. That, and why twist Sauruman's role in the whole affair? Instead of Sauron's dupe he becomes a fanboy hatchet man, and all of the sudden you have wizard fights that look like bad episodes of Xena, Warrior Princess. Things like this bother me because they're not done in the interest of time, but more out of extravagance and sensationalism. Maybe Jackson was true to the fans, but he wasn't true to the spirit of the novels.
That's why I don't think this movie deserves best adaptation or whatever. Great makeup, terrific cinematography, and outstanding setting--give it Best Picture, I don't care--but please, don't parade this as the profoundly perfect adaptation everyone seems to think it is.
What I want to know is if they've fixed that bug that randomly drops all your font settings. There is nothing I hate more than opening up KDE and seeing everything in 14pt bold sans-serif.
Which is interesting, because Microsoft bundles this functionality into XP Pro. So if you have an XP Pro box with remote desktop enabled, and a bunch of XP (Home, Pro, whatever) boxes running the remote desktop client, then there is seemingly no need to run VNC (or PCAnywhere for that matter).
I wonder what the reasoning behind this was. Does the remote desktop application give you multiple desktops? I know VNC doesn't. It's not like Microsoft is losing money there, and there doesn't seem to be a huge market for this sort of thing. Why the exclusionary tactics?
Symantec and Microsoft have always been partnered in one form or fashion. The disk defragmentation utitilies and such that are bundled with Windows 95 and 98 are written by Symantec. I wouldn't surprise me if Symantec acquired a (discounted? free?) license to run PCAnywhere on XP.
Getting an idea here...
Only subscribers can post/sell, but anyone can view/buy...
Hmm...
Last I checked Mozilla wasn't build into the kernel...
If you want to look at good, componentized development, take a gander at Gnome or KDE. KDE can be installed without Konqueror. Gnome can be run without Sawfish. If some weak, communist open source project can do it, why can't Microsoft?
Yeah but with languages Java and Ada you get principles without symantics. The biggest obstacles to learning for a C++ student are little syntax hang ups. A lot of the time the code will be done in an hour and the student will spend weeks getting the thing to compile and run without a segfault.
.NET, with it's illustrious C# falls short of many of these points. If people would open their eyes for a second and see beyond the performance issues, they'd realize what a great language Java really is for learning.
Give a student a language where they don't have to write a lot of their own low-level classes, a well-defined API, and a strongly-typed language with no razor-thin distinctions between pointers and references, and you allow them to focus on logic, design, and problem-solving.
Then make it platform agnostic, add garbage collection, replace cryptic segfault messages with meaningful exceptions, a powerful, free IDE (Forte), extensive online documentation (Java online documentation and tutorial trails), the ability to easily create graphical elements (AWT and Swing), and suddnely the emphasis is once again on the problem.
This is why Universities are going to Java, as opposed to gcc, g++, or Visual Studio. Even
I always figured people were bisexual because they wanted to increase their odds of having sex...
I would gladly buy an MT T-shirt if they weren't so damn girly. That, and I don't think I can stomach another white T-shirt. If they had like, say, 3/4 baseball shirts or something creative I might reconsider. That nothwithstanding, I am definitely going to buy his book if/when if comes out. I also plan to buy Scott Kurtz's PvP Online retrospective when it comes out. I have already purchased Penny Arcade's comic book (hardcover, $35). There's a couple reasons for this, but the biggest one is my desire to support the artist.
The lesson I've learned from all of this philosophical posturing and subsequent backlash is simple: most people are cheap bastards. Am I getting ripped off? For the actual product I get in the mail, probably. But for the satisfaction of knowing that I'm not some self-righteous hypocritical leech, I definitely get my money's worth.
If this passes, I'm out of a job. I work for probably the last major competitive CLEC in the southeast. We have over 60,000 lines in service, and something like 7,500 more added in the month of January; we are cash-positive; and we have a business plan that is working better than we ever hoped. We've spent the last year busting our asses to get our service levels to world class levels, and we lead the industry in many areas. A lot of folks put in a lot of time and effort into making this thing work.
When 2001 hit, we had layoffs. Now this. It's really sad and frustrating that we have to go through this kind of anxiety every year.
So yes this is a problem. It's a very big problem. Just maybe not for you.
I imagine future versions of RedHat Professional and SuSE Professional will include StarOffice 6.0 for no extra charge. Supposedly some of the money received by the distro manufacturers goes to offset the cost of commercial/non-free software, such as StarOffice 5.2 (whichever version the were charging for).
Of course, this only works if you *buy* the distros, which I would recommend to anyone, given the added support and documentation it comes with.
Personally, I wouldn't mind paying $150 per seat for for StarOffice, given that Microsoft's offering weighs in at $300 or more.
AFAIK it is possible, but "frowned upon," and if they ever find you you'll lose your account. Not that they will. Still, it's not farfetched to think that maybe this guy was totally honest up until the point where his daughter needed cancer treatment or something. 6000 transactions would take a *long* time, even if you were doing it illegitimately.
Imagine a beowulf cluster of these...
I'm waiting for CDE-style cut, copy, and paste strokes. Like SHIFT-DEL, SHIFT-INS, CTRL-C, CTRL-V, CTRL-X...it may sound lame, but I grew up on Windows and Solaris, and the X clipboard is just...well...shitty. Copying and pasting URLs is a nightmare unless you have Konqueror where you can hit that little X. That auto-select middle-click crap is for the birds.
I haven't really used Gnome, but I'm getting fed up with Klipper...is any of this implemented in Gnome?
Easy. A lie in the past is still a lie.
"I'm sorry Nintendo, but I just sold my last one today..."
eBay time.
I would love to, provided they toured more than one time per album and visited more than 20 cities. Bands like Tool, Metallica, and Britney Spears don't have to play a lot of small venues--they play a few huge ones and call it quits. And those are the ones with enough money to travel. Athenaeum, one of my favorite bands, has a tremendous committment to their fans--they send out E-mails announcing tour dates, and they tour constantly in their home region--but they can't make it anywhere near where I live.
I would personally prefer to see one live concert a month rather than buy 4 CDs. Too bad I am not able to.
Maybe the copyright time period should be an interval with an upper and lower bound. For instance, at least 20 years, but not exceeding the author's lifetime + 20 years. I don't think an author should have to watch his work be taken from him, mangled, mutilated, and redistributed while he is alive (if he so chooses).
I know that I am very proud of my works (in this case, software), and it would irk me to no end to have to fork that over to the masses and watch as they alter my works as they see fit and spread it around. That could usher in a whole new era of censhorship accomplished flooding the market (i.e. public schools) with derivatives.
At the very least add a provision where there must be a prominent mention that any derived works came from a specific author, and that the derived work in no way reflects the author's opinions or skill, and that the original author can be in no way held liable for any content within. Again, the 'lifetime' provision pretty much takes care of this, and I'd hate to see it go away (for copyrights, at least).
I'm not saying have a DTD for every major tool. I'm saying have a DTD for logically similar components. The DTD for each would act as an interface, and the XML would then be an implementation. You could write an object model layer that serialized/unserialized XML documents into objects and worked from there, using a well-defined series of DTDs.
That's the proper way to do it with XML. If you just want to store heirarchies of values, use LDAP.