Photoshop uses Qt, so porting it to Gtk doesn't make a whole lot of sense. If it is possible (and it probably is) to use the native Qt libraries for all the Qt stuff, and only use Wine for Windows specific things, it seems like a reasonably manageable job. Getting all the plugins to work might be an entirely different story though.
As pointed out above, most people are pragmatic, they don't care about freedom, nor do they care about price (they download the software anyway). They just want the best tool for the job.
I've long given up on arguing about price or freedom, my single argument is very simple: "Use X, it is better."
There is no need to argue why product X is better, most people will just believe it. Afterall, they don't know a lot about computers, and if a professional/geek says so, it's probably true.
But please don't use this argument unless you believe the software really is better. In many cases that is true. We don't want to scare anybody away.
I'm saying that that idea you expressed right there, that we refrain from torture because it's the "only way" we can protect our own troops, is utter nonsense.
The reverse is ofcourse more accurate, but just doesn't sound as good: If you don't refrain from torture, there is "no way" to protect the troops.
I assume you are talking about the Gumball. You might have heard that someone was killed during that event earlier this year. That was done by this guys team, Team Polizei. Look them up on youtube or something. They made a few hilarious videos, but in the end they are just very stupid and very irresponsible.
You don't have to break a law to get a gun. But as soon as you start using it you'd better be very carefull. Except for a few very well defined cases (sport, hunting, self-defense), using your gun is illegal.
Even in the cases named above, using your gun in the wrong way will send you to jail.
One of the disadvantages of camera systems is that they create a false sense of security, that actually decreases security. Some people think they are safe because of the camera's, and therefore don't use their common sense and start playing hero (eg fight with a thug holding a knife, instead of just handing over your wallet) under the assumption that the police will arive shortly. Other people will use the cameras as an excuse for not doing anything themselves. Instead of helping the victim of a robbery, or trying to memorise the face of the robber, they assume that the cameras will take care of it. A third disadvantage is that cameras only provide evidence of crimes allready committed. They will not step forward to stop a crime, like a real cop would do. They can only help in catching the criminal, if you are lucky. The story above shows that actually getting any evidence from the cameras is not a given fact either. Finally, if the government turns mad, or we get some kind of dictator, I don't want them to learn that I protested for freedom in the past. They might hold it against me.
Both the Dutch and the Belgiums understand that fries should be dipped in mayonaise, nothing else. Ofcourse you need real mayonaise, instead of the slimey grease that is sold as mayonaise in some less enlightened parts of the world. For the record, proper mayonaise is slightly sour.
This software will not give a guaranteed Real/Fake judgement about paintings. Instead it will give an opinion, that can help a human expert in deriving an answer. Such an opinion could be "This picture matches a Van Gogh picture from his late period." It's up to a human to determine if that supports or refutes the claims made about a picture. This does not differ from what human experts do in their head. The big advantage is that this piece of software makes that information measurable. An expert does not have to depend only on his gut feeling, but he can also use objective evidence from this software.
Some customer called me while doing tech support for a large cable ISP. He started by complementing us for the good reliability. In the past he had lots of trouble with our service, but the last few months had been great. Everything was still working fine, but he noticed that his neighbor (who was also a customer) had a much faster connection. After going through his connection settings I learned that he was not using his cable modem at all. Instead he was using his telephone modem to connect to some provider in the US (from Europe)! I can't recall if I dared to tell him what was going on.
One day, doing tech support for a large ISP, some fuckwit called to complain that his Internet didn't work on thursday evenings. Standard procedure was to check the LEDS on the customers modem. This guy couldn't locate them, because it was to dark in the basement. He couldn't get any light in there, because there was only one socket in the basement, and his wife was using it the vacuum clean the hallway. I asked him to ask his wife to unplug the vacuum cleaner, and put the plug to his cable modem back in, and everything worked again...
This is a big step forward. The Belgium federal government might not be the biggest government in the world, it's still a big (read rich) government. You can bet your ass that many sotware companies are allready thinking of how they can make money out of this. This will increase the amount of secondary support and software available for OpenOffice.
Also, if your biggest customer is the government (which is true for many companies), it would be logical to use the same file format. Especially if you can use it for free.
Thirdly, if the government publishes documents on it's website, they will now do it in ODF, instead of MS-Office. Which means that many civilians will install ODF compatible software, just to read them.
Re:Hard Problems and Large Corporations
on
WinFS Gets the Axe
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· Score: 1
Money can buy you smart people. But it can't buy you the guarantee that they will have good ideas, nor that their managers prevent them from doing the right thing. Microsoft has a long tradition of screwing up good idea's and wasting the efforts of smart people. In many ways the Reiser team is at an advantage because they are small, and do not have to deal with five layers of management with personal agenda's.
Steve tried to fix the PC, and he failed. Microsoft Engineers tried it, and they also failed to solve the problem. Now you can buy the same service from Microsoft. The service _not_ to get your pc fixed?
I'd like to remark that most of the Dutch think that our marihuana policy is essentialy correct. Ofcourse we have many different views, but the general opinion is that marihuana itself is not a real problem.
It's not entirely without issues, but in general alcohol and tabbacco cause more problems. Most of the marihuana related problems are legal problems (you can get a license to sell marihuana, but not to grow it. Growing is still done in a criminal setting).
We have far less problems with marihuana users then the countries that surround us. I have never seen any form of violence in a coffeeshop, while pub fights are almost normal.
What I'm trying to say is, look at the facts. Don't believe what some company with a big stake in the outcome tells you.
The most horrible thing about this is that they can actually pull this off. There are many ways of getting web pages from blocked site A, past the censor, into my own system. It's much harder with e-mail. SMTP always uses port 25 . While it has become normal for many protocols to specify a port (http://www.example.com:12345) that's not possible with e-mail. Anyone with an ISP that blocks port 25 knows that it's near impossible to do anything about it. Your only option is to host your SMTP server at another ISP. If the EU declares that all ISP's should block port 25, except for their own (taxed) mail servers, there is not a lot one can do about it.
Some individual nerds will start using tunnels to remote systems, but for 99% of the population this is impossible. Any tool that would automatically circumvent the firewall would instantly be taken over by spammers.
Your forget that Germany already was a democracy. After the war the Germans did not have to be convinced of democracy, only to have a new round of elections. FYI Hitler himself was elected. One might argue that Hitler manipulated the elections, but the same can be said about George W Bush.
first, the article is wrong, its 2M/day, not 200M. But as this has been going on for over 100 days, the total fine is over 200M .
What if they said "screw you, I'm going home" and stopped officially selling product in the EU?
The EU would instantly stop using all computers, and everyone will die. No, stop, wait, that's not what would happen. In the beginning nothing would happen, all those computers running MS would continue to work just fine. But new computers will not be running Windows. They will run something else, probably Linux or Mac OS. As soon as the EU starts using anything else, a lot of companies will start writing software for the new platform. This would instantly solve the (perceived) problems with the availability of applications and support. Retreating from Europe (or any other big market) would be the best gift Microsoft could give there competitors.
Besides, MS would still be required to support there older products. Contract is contract. If they didn't the EU would sue them again, and the US would probably agree that MS has to stick to there contract, and help the EU to punish MS. This way the EU would become a pure money sink, without any rewards whatsoever.
Some people don't like Michael Robertson, but I do. He's not your typical open source hero, but in a way he is one of the pioneers. Free and Open Source software needs all kinds of people. Besides programmers you need documentation writers, artists, interface designers, lawyers, activists, and marketeers. Michael Robertson is good at marketing. He is good at promoting software solutions. He uses a lot of open source software for that, including some rebranded and extended applications. Some people claims he steals and abuses that software, without giving back. I do not agree with that, his companies play by the rules and release source when necessary. But sourcecode is not his important contribution, marketing is. Allthough you might not like his products, the bottomline is that he is promoting free/open software, and people are using it who might not have done so otherwise.
I recently spent quite a bit of time researching the Swedes, and I'm very surprised at the amounts of freedoms they had in a country that has typically been considered socialist.
Maybe I'm just biting your bait, but it seems your still stuck in the cold war. Socialism is not communism. Socialism is an ideology, communism is a political system, which implies a certain economic system. Communism is rooted in socialism, but it's not representive of socialism as a whole. The essential idea behind socialism is the protection of the common people. Therefore it feels logical that a socialist system has a lot of freedom.
Likewise, capitalism and socialism are not opposites! Capitalism is an economic system. The ideas behind capitalism and socialism are not opposed, although there are some conflicts. This conflict can be seen in the view of the government. A typical capitalist view on the government would be that the government exists to protect and provide for businesses. If companies can work and compete freely, they will generate wealth, which will indirectly benefit all of the country. A socialist view would be that the government should care about people, not companies. Companies will always find ways to compete and make a profit. The government shouldn't get involved, unless the people are being hurt. For example they should provide protection against price-fixing.
Offcourse there is always going to be some conflict between those views. Companies are owned by people, and without people to run them there are no companies.
You mention that mail is now being stored in.pst files. In my opinion that's a horrible solution. The nice thing about Exchange (I'll burn for using those five words in sequence) is that all your information is stored in one place. You can search and manage it from 1 interface and backups/full disks/etc are being dealt with by the system administrators.
By using.pst files you basically hand over the archival of mail to the users. In a business where e-mail is an essential tool this seems unacceptable. All mail should stay on there corporate mail server. The size of the mailbox reveals the problem. It's not being used for mail, but for file storage. The only real solution to this is the education of you users. I know, dealing with users is one of the hardest parts of being a system administrator, but no technical solution will help you here (except for completly blocking attachments).
Unfortunately training will only go so far. Nowadays it's normal to send 5mb Word documents around. Expecting users to choose a sensible fileformat, and reducing images to realistic resolutions is one bridge to far. So you'll still have to deal with many multi-megabyte mails.
This is where the Exchange sucks parts comes into play. Exchange just isn't very good at dealing with huge mailboxes. When discussing mailbox limits the usual response seems to be "Yeah, we could add a few more disks, but we also need a much bigger server. The current machine can barely keep up with the load as it is".
LAMP "showed significantly better software quality" above the report's baseline with an average of.32 defects per 1,000 lines of code, according to Coverity. The average for open source projects analyzed is.42 per 1,000 lines.
Does anyone have any factual data on what is "normal" (accepting all the problems of counting lines and bugs in the first place). I've seen estimates range from 2 to a 100 per 1000 lines.
Slashdot Mirror
Photoshop uses Qt, so porting it to Gtk doesn't make a whole lot of sense. If it is possible (and it probably is) to use the native Qt libraries for all the Qt stuff, and only use Wine for Windows specific things, it seems like a reasonably manageable job.
Getting all the plugins to work might be an entirely different story though.
As pointed out above, most people are pragmatic, they don't care about freedom, nor do they care about price (they download the software anyway). They just want the best tool for the job.
I've long given up on arguing about price or freedom, my single argument is very simple: "Use X, it is better."
There is no need to argue why product X is better, most people will just believe it. Afterall, they don't know a lot about computers, and if a professional/geek says so, it's probably true.
But please don't use this argument unless you believe the software really is better. In many cases that is true. We don't want to scare anybody away.
The reverse is ofcourse more accurate, but just doesn't sound as good:
If you don't refrain from torture, there is "no way" to protect the troops.
I assume you are talking about the Gumball.
You might have heard that someone was killed during that event earlier this year.
That was done by this guys team, Team Polizei. Look them up on youtube or something. They made a few hilarious videos, but in the end they are just very stupid and very irresponsible.
Let's compare it to an all time favorite: Guns.
You don't have to break a law to get a gun. But as soon as you start using it you'd better be very carefull. Except for a few very well defined cases (sport, hunting, self-defense), using your gun is illegal.
Even in the cases named above, using your gun in the wrong way will send you to jail.
One of the disadvantages of camera systems is that they create a false sense of security, that actually decreases security. Some people think they are safe because of the camera's, and therefore don't use their common sense and start playing hero (eg fight with a thug holding a knife, instead of just handing over your wallet) under the assumption that the police will arive shortly.
Other people will use the cameras as an excuse for not doing anything themselves. Instead of helping the victim of a robbery, or trying to memorise the face of the robber, they assume that the cameras will take care of it.
A third disadvantage is that cameras only provide evidence of crimes allready committed. They will not step forward to stop a crime, like a real cop would do. They can only help in catching the criminal, if you are lucky. The story above shows that actually getting any evidence from the cameras is not a given fact either.
Finally, if the government turns mad, or we get some kind of dictator, I don't want them to learn that I protested for freedom in the past. They might hold it against me.
Both the Dutch and the Belgiums understand that fries should be dipped in mayonaise, nothing else. Ofcourse you need real mayonaise, instead of the slimey grease that is sold as mayonaise in some less enlightened parts of the world.
For the record, proper mayonaise is slightly sour.
This software will not give a guaranteed Real/Fake judgement about paintings. Instead it will give an opinion, that can help a human expert in deriving an answer. Such an opinion could be "This picture matches a Van Gogh picture from his late period." It's up to a human to determine if that supports or refutes the claims made about a picture.
This does not differ from what human experts do in their head. The big advantage is that this piece of software makes that information measurable. An expert does not have to depend only on his gut feeling, but he can also use objective evidence from this software.
Please don't do this, or explaining my nickname will take even longer.
Some customer called me while doing tech support for a large cable ISP. He started by complementing us for the good reliability. In the past he had lots of trouble with our service, but the last few months had been great.
Everything was still working fine, but he noticed that his neighbor (who was also a customer) had a much faster connection. After going through his connection settings I learned that he was not using his cable modem at all. Instead he was using his telephone modem to connect to some provider in the US (from Europe)!
I can't recall if I dared to tell him what was going on.
One day, doing tech support for a large ISP, some fuckwit called to complain that his Internet didn't work on thursday evenings.
Standard procedure was to check the LEDS on the customers modem. This guy couldn't locate them, because it was to dark in the basement. He couldn't get any light in there, because there was only one socket in the basement, and his wife was using it the vacuum clean the hallway.
I asked him to ask his wife to unplug the vacuum cleaner, and put the plug to his cable modem back in, and everything worked again...
This is a big step forward.
The Belgium federal government might not be the biggest government in the world, it's still a big (read rich) government.
You can bet your ass that many sotware companies are allready thinking of how they can make money out of this.
This will increase the amount of secondary support and software available for OpenOffice.
Also, if your biggest customer is the government (which is true for many companies), it would be logical to use the same file format. Especially if you can use it for free.
Thirdly, if the government publishes documents on it's website, they will now do it in ODF, instead of MS-Office. Which means that many civilians will install ODF compatible software, just to read them.
Money can buy you smart people. But it can't buy you the guarantee that they will have good ideas, nor that their managers prevent them from doing the right thing.
Microsoft has a long tradition of screwing up good idea's and wasting the efforts of smart people.
In many ways the Reiser team is at an advantage because they are small, and do not have to deal with five layers of management with personal agenda's.
Steve tried to fix the PC, and he failed.
Microsoft Engineers tried it, and they also failed to solve the problem.
Now you can buy the same service from Microsoft.
The service _not_ to get your pc fixed?
I'd like to remark that most of the Dutch think that our marihuana policy is essentialy correct. Ofcourse we have many different views, but the general opinion is that marihuana itself is not a real problem.
It's not entirely without issues, but in general alcohol and tabbacco cause more problems. Most of the marihuana related problems are legal problems (you can get a license to sell marihuana, but not to grow it. Growing is still done in a criminal setting).
We have far less problems with marihuana users then the countries that surround us. I have never seen any form of violence in a coffeeshop, while pub fights are almost normal.
What I'm trying to say is, look at the facts. Don't believe what some company with a big stake in the outcome tells you.
The most horrible thing about this is that they can actually pull this off. There are many ways of getting web pages from blocked site A, past the censor, into my own system.
It's much harder with e-mail.
SMTP always uses port 25 . While it has become normal for many protocols to specify a port (http://www.example.com:12345) that's not possible with e-mail.
Anyone with an ISP that blocks port 25 knows that it's near impossible to do anything about it. Your only option is to host your SMTP server at another ISP.
If the EU declares that all ISP's should block port 25, except for their own (taxed) mail servers, there is not a lot one can do about it.
Some individual nerds will start using tunnels to remote systems, but for 99% of the population this is impossible. Any tool that would automatically circumvent the firewall would instantly be taken over by spammers.
survive a slashdotting
Your forget that Germany already was a democracy. After the war the Germans did not have to be convinced of democracy, only to have a new round of elections.
FYI Hitler himself was elected. One might argue that Hitler manipulated the elections, but the same can be said about George W Bush.
first, the article is wrong, its 2M/day, not 200M. But as this has been going on for over 100 days, the total fine is over 200M .
What if they said "screw you, I'm going home" and stopped officially selling product in the EU?
The EU would instantly stop using all computers, and everyone will die.
No, stop, wait, that's not what would happen. In the beginning nothing would happen, all those computers running MS would continue to work just fine.
But new computers will not be running Windows. They will run something else, probably Linux or Mac OS. As soon as the EU starts using anything else, a lot of companies will start writing software for the new platform. This would instantly solve the (perceived) problems with the availability of applications and support.
Retreating from Europe (or any other big market) would be the best gift Microsoft could give there competitors.
Besides, MS would still be required to support there older products. Contract is contract. If they didn't the EU would sue them again, and the US would probably agree that MS has to stick to there contract, and help the EU to punish MS.
This way the EU would become a pure money sink, without any rewards whatsoever.
Some people don't like Michael Robertson, but I do. He's not your typical open source hero, but in a way he is one of the pioneers.
Free and Open Source software needs all kinds of people. Besides programmers you need documentation writers, artists, interface designers, lawyers, activists, and marketeers. Michael Robertson is good at marketing. He is good at promoting software solutions. He uses a lot of open source software for that, including some rebranded and extended applications.
Some people claims he steals and abuses that software, without giving back. I do not agree with that, his companies play by the rules and release source when necessary.
But sourcecode is not his important contribution, marketing is. Allthough you might not like his products, the bottomline is that he is promoting free/open software, and people are using it who might not have done so otherwise.
Do what most people do, got to bed.
Maybe I'm just biting your bait, but it seems your still stuck in the cold war.
Socialism is not communism. Socialism is an ideology, communism is a political system, which implies a certain economic system.
Communism is rooted in socialism, but it's not representive of socialism as a whole.
The essential idea behind socialism is the protection of the common people. Therefore it feels logical that a socialist system has a lot of freedom.
Likewise, capitalism and socialism are not opposites! Capitalism is an economic system. The ideas behind capitalism and socialism are not opposed, although there are some conflicts. This conflict can be seen in the view of the government.
A typical capitalist view on the government would be that the government exists to protect and provide for businesses. If companies can work and compete freely, they will generate wealth, which will indirectly benefit all of the country.
A socialist view would be that the government should care about people, not companies. Companies will always find ways to compete and make a profit. The government shouldn't get involved, unless the people are being hurt. For example they should provide protection against price-fixing.
Offcourse there is always going to be some conflict between those views. Companies are owned by people, and without people to run them there are no companies.
You mention that mail is now being stored in .pst files. In my opinion that's a horrible solution.
.pst files you basically hand over the archival of mail to the users. In a business where e-mail is an essential tool this seems unacceptable. All mail should stay on there corporate mail server.
The nice thing about Exchange (I'll burn for using those five words in sequence) is that all your information is stored in one place. You can search and manage it from 1 interface and backups/full disks/etc are being dealt with by the system administrators.
By using
The size of the mailbox reveals the problem. It's not being used for mail, but for file storage. The only real solution to this is the education of you users. I know, dealing with users is one of the hardest parts of being a system administrator, but no technical solution will help you here (except for completly blocking attachments).
Unfortunately training will only go so far. Nowadays it's normal to send 5mb Word documents around. Expecting users to choose a sensible fileformat, and reducing images to realistic resolutions is one bridge to far. So you'll still have to deal with many multi-megabyte mails.
This is where the Exchange sucks parts comes into play. Exchange just isn't very good at dealing with huge mailboxes. When discussing mailbox limits the usual response seems to be "Yeah, we could add a few more disks, but we also need a much bigger server. The current machine can barely keep up with the load as it is".
Does anyone have any factual data on what is "normal" (accepting all the problems of counting lines and bugs in the first place). I've seen estimates range from 2 to a 100 per 1000 lines.
More like a restaurant where "Hygiene" is listed on the menu as a very expensive side-dish.