It looks like the page is slashdotted now, but the bug is closed because it's been fixed in the latest internal revision (641C3 I believe). But the text at the bottom explicitly says that the current public release has yet to contain the fix. I haven't downloaded OO recently, so perhaps the 641C available for download now is different from the 641C I downloaded a couple of months ago. In any case, I checked the release notes for 641C that Timothy linked to and bug #2311 doesn't appear there.
I may be wrong. It may be fixed. If so, I'd be happy to hear it.
As near as I can tell, the latest public build of OpenOffice still doesn't have
this bug fixed. Since I need to be able to edit MSWord files fairly often, this makes it more or less unusable for me.
So, for the time being, I'm using MSWord2k in VMware. If SO/OO can reproduce most of the functionality I need (which, for the most part, it does... I was using SO6b happily until I discovered articles going to print with typos because Word's spellchecker ignored them) then I'll happily switch.
For me, the only substantial difference between SO6 and OO641C (last time I checked) was fonts... SO6 came bundled with a few extra fonts that made it easier to interact with MSWord users. If that's the only major difference, I'm happy to use OO and rip my own fonts...
But I wonder how long it will be before we who live in the middle of nowhere will get it.
A few months ago, I bought a Palm VII... only to find that the PalmNet service, provided Cingular, wouldn't work anywhere around my area (a not-so-terribly remote part of Northern California). Their coverage chart said that coverage was "partial" or something like that, but I was unable to get a strong enough signal anywhere to even complete the sign up process.
Oh well, I ended up taking the Palm VII back and exchanging it for an m125, which has worked fairly well. Because of a promotional deal, I got a free games card, so instead of wasting time surfing the net on my Palm, I waste time playing Chess and SimCity. Hmm...
To everyone who posted that Nautilus actually is actively maintained: My bad. Sorry.
Anyhow, in reply to tempest303: Yeah, I heard that Nautilus would be getting faster with the Gnome 2 libraries... of course, since this box is running Ximian, I won't have Gnome 2 until it's finalized. (Or sometime afterward, when Ximian starts distributing it with Red Carpet.) But I'm really looking forward to seeing stuff like Nautilus run fast.
the "user experience" is very smooth. I wouldn't want to use anything else
Agreed. Ximian does a really good job of making it slick and easy to use. Mandrake + Ximian is the only combination I could consider getting my parents to use.
(Although, for the record, I found installing Ximian to a Mandrake 8.0 system kinda messy... I eventually reinstalled Mandrake without any Gnome packages, and then installed Ximian over that. It's worked fine ever since.)
Galeon simply has a smaller resource footprint and a better user interface
Also agreed. Galeon was the only browser I used for practically everything for quite a long time. However, I've since dropped it in favor of Opera, which is also very slick. Opera's MDI is, to me, a bit nicer than Galeon's tabbed mode, although either is far better than the resource-hog style of other browsers when opening new windows.
In short, Galeon is good, but Opera is better. But either one is far better than Netscape (although Mozilla is finally getting good) or MSIE (although I still keep a copy under VMware because some websites (like my bank) still won't work well with anything else. Hmmm... maybe it's time to get a better bank...
This is my biggest gripe about Ximian Gnome: it's slow. Even on my 1.4Ghz Athlon system, the system is not quite as fast as I'd expect.
Of course, a large part of the problem lies with Nautilus, which is (if this is in fact possible) slightly slower than Mozilla on my system. Seeing as Mozilla is constantly getting faster and Nautilus is no longer actively maintained, I see this as a potential problem.
I will say, though, that I don't mind the menubar at the top of the screen. I've populated it with the things I need, and it rarely gets in my way.
Of course, I have a large screen and frequently use five or six virtual desktops to hold all my windows, so a few pixels of the top is not nearly as important as pager problems would be. On that front, I have always preferred Gnome's paging model to KDE's; I use a setup with four viewports per workspace, with a 1000-ms delay to swap viewports by moving the pointer to the edge of the screen.
In any case, the point of this long-winded comment is that Ximian Gnome is a neat package, but the overall speed is not nearly as nice as I'd like it to be. (And, before I get flamed, the reason I haven't yet turned off all the bits of chrome that Ximian installs, like Nautilus, is that I actually like chrome. I just wish I could have a schweet-looking system that's fast too.)
Ah well... Everything works for the time being, so I'm unlikely to change anything on this system anytime soon (I actually have to do real work on this computer). On my other machine, I use KDE whenever I start X -- which isn't often.
That's what I love about Linux... you get choices. If I want Gnome, I've got Gnome. If I want super-fast, geekoid-to-the-max sysadmin functionality, I've got bash. I'm happy.
I believe it was the 4k model. My uncle gave it to me sometime in the mid eighties, and I mostly just did stupid things with it until it broke. I didn't really learn to code in BASIC until I got my 32k PET a couple of years later.
Agreed. And, as I pointed out in my comment below, a well-built encryption system could make it enough of a hassle that people would just buy the content.
Example: the other day I paid $1.00 in a vending machine for 20oz of water. As I did it, I thought to myself, "what a ripoff this is." And then I pushed the button and bought the bottle. Why? Because it would take me 15 minutes to drive home and get a drink, and I was thirsty and didn't have 15 minutes.
The bottom line: this IS a viable revenue model. No need to force people to buy bottled water... my kitchen tap is not going to put Evian out of business. Even my Brita filter doesn't seem to be putting Evian out of business. Go figure.
If implemented correctly, we could have something akin to IPsec -- a virtual, encrypted layer where copy-protected information is transmitted. PGP has had an option for a while for encrypting a text document with a flag set that prevents the recipient from saving it as a file. In theory, something like this could be implemented and actually work.
In reality, it would probably be nothing of the kind... because of the DMCA, you could have an entire movie encoded ROT-1, and breaking that encryption (or even describing, in an educational setting, how to break that encryption) would be a felony. This strikes me as just absurd.
If it was set up like net service, though, with a network-wide DES encryption layer, the content creators could retain some degree of control, and the actual implementation code would not reveal the secret. Thus the implementation code could be opensourced under an artistic license of some sort. In that case, I couldn't see any reason why it couldn't be incorporated into Linux, BSD, etc.
My point is, copy protection would have to be enabled by a techological protection with a degree of cracking difficulty greater than the cost of purchasing the content legally. I am certain that, technically, this can be done.
Unfortunately, I am nearly certain that, from a political standpoint, this cannot be done.
Yeah, a friend of mine was using a similar system, and it worked quite well for him. That is, until the day his boss sent him a message with the subject line "URGENT!!! THIS IS VERY IMPORTANT!!!" or something like that. He never saw the message.
So, the boss realizes that perhaps my friend didn't get the message, and so the boss forwards the message to him, with a note attached, so now it reads "FW: URGENT!!! THIS IS VERY IMPORTANT!!!"
This happens two or three times before he finally figured out what was going on.
Moral of the story: quarantine spam, but don't automagically send it to a black hole. Only the addressee can truly differentiate legitimate mail from spam.
Ugh. I absolutely cannot stand the use of a period between "dot" and "com" (or, in this case, "con"). Even an idiot can see that that makes it "dot dot com".
Yeah, as another poster pointed out, the con here is in actually convincing people to look at such a book.
On the bright side, since publishing a book is apparently so easy, I ought to write a revised edition of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, constructed entirely from memory. I expect it to be a bestseller.
LOL! That is absolutely, unequivocally, the funniest thing I've read all day! (Okay, except for the quote at the back of the latest PC Magazine about a digital camera featuring "a high-quality 3X optical zoom lens designed for digital pornography".)
But I digress.
The text of the review in question, for you AC's who only read the part of the website above the fold:
Ping! I love that duck!, January 25, 2000
Reviewer: A reader from El Segundo
PING! The magic duck!
Using deft allegory, the authors have provided an insightful and intuitive explanation of one of Unix's most venerable networking utilities. Even more stunning is that they were clearly working with a very early beta of the program, as their book first appeared in 1933, years (decades!) before the operating system and network infrastructure were finalized.
The book describes networking in terms even a child could understand, choosing to anthropomorphize the underlying packet structure. The ping packet is described as a duck, who, with other packets (more ducks), spends a certain period of time on the host machine (the wise-eyed boat). At the same time each day (I suspect this is scheduled under cron), the little packets (ducks) exit the host (boat) by way of a bridge (a bridge). From the bridge, the packets travel onto the internet (here embodied by the Yangtze River).
The title character -- er, packet, is called Ping. Ping meanders around the river before being received by another host (another boat). He spends a brief time on the other boat, but eventually returns to his original host machine (the wise-eyed boat) somewhat the worse for wear.
If you need a good, high-level overview of the ping utility, this is the book. I can't recommend it for most managers, as the technical aspects may be too overwhelming and the basic concepts too daunting.
Problems With This Book
As good as it is, The Story About Ping is not without its faults. There is no index, and though the ping(8) man pages cover the command line options well enough, some review of them seems to be in order. Likewise, in a book solely about Ping, I would have expected a more detailed overview of the ICMP packet structure.
But even with these problems, The Story About Ping has earned a place on my bookshelf, right between Stevens' Advanced Programming in the Unix Environment, and my dog-eared copy of Dante's seminal work on MS Windows, Inferno. Who can read that passage on the Windows API ("Obscure, profound it was, and nebulous, So that by fixing on its depths my sight -- Nothing whatever I discerned therein."), without shaking their head with deep understanding. But I digress. --This text refers to the School & Library Binding edition.
Re:Multimedia support is not linux's weakness
on
Wired Talks Wine
·
· Score: 1
The AC had it right... VMWare's multimedia support sucks. Linux is fine. Unfortuntately, that means I pretty much can't run any Windows multimedia software without rebooting into Windows.
As an example (albeit maybe not the best one), I have a Johnson J-Station digital preamp. I can download additional patches from Johnson's website, but I have yet to find a way to install them under Linux. (The interface software is a Windows proprietary executable.) And since it uses MIDI, I can't do it under VMWmare, as VMWare's MIDI support is essentially nil, and ditto for USB support (so no USB->MIDI solutions either).
Native Linux multimedia is awesome. That wasn't what I was talking about.
*This* is the migration path that Lindows is trying to be. I'd give Lindows a try if I wasn't convinced that Linux Mandrake + Ximian Desktop + free Wine would do as good a job or better. (Substitute your favorite disty if you prefer. And please don't flame me about GNOME vs. KDE. I don't care.)
Why pay $99 for a package that you can get for free? Especially when Red Carpet will install Wine seamlessly and painlessly, with just three clicks.
Myself, I'm in the process of moving from a Linux-only system to a dual-boot Linux/Windows system, only because there are a few apps I still can't get to work in VMWare. (Specifically, I have no way of installing software on my Palm, and anything multimedia works poorly if at all.) If Wine can get these to work, and possibly IE and Word, for the few times when Opera and OpenOffice don't quite do the trick, I'm all for it.
Wine has (or potentially will have) all the advantages of Lindows, with none of the disadvantages. I'd rather just spend the $99 on another monitor so I can have a setup like Jon from ThinkGeek's happy family.
WINE will make Linux competitive
on
Wired Talks Wine
·
· Score: 1
From the article: "We don't think Linux is compatible with the level of service, product consistency and vendor relationships that customers expect when they interact with a product," [Microsoft's Linux Competitive Manager] Wasko said.
Isn't that exactly what WINE intends to provide?
Perhaps "competitive" is the wrong word -- the idea is to make it intercompatible. Of course, anything that has the same function as a Microsoft product is, by definition, competing with Microsoft!
As István Lebor said: "I also find it intriguing that Microsoft has a Linux Competitive Manager if they don't see Linux as competition."
From the article: "Deep ultraviolet lithography uses a wavelength of 240 nanometers. EUV uses a much shorter wavelength."
I think by "much shorter" they're probably referring to 193nm ArF eximer laser photolithography or, more likely, 157nm F2 photolithography. The International Semiconductor Technology Roadmap pegs 157nm lithography as the likely candidate for the 70nm feature node.
Actually, the biggest problem facing 157nm litho right now is optics. Fused silica works well for 100+nm wavelengths, but its transmission drops off significantly below that, so that by the time we reach 157nm, silica is practically opaque, useless as a lens material.
Most of the industry has been looking at Calcium Fluoride (CaF2) as the next optical material for photolithography; unfortunately, researchers at NIST revealed last May that CaF2 has a high level of intrinsic birefringence. This means that a CaF2 lens would only refract light correctly if it is polarized along the <111> or <001> directions. So a stepper system would require a substantial increase in the number of lenses to keep correcting the light path.
This runs into the other problem with CaF2: current processes for manufacture of optical-grade CaF2 crystals result in low yields, and the growth system may create additional, stress-induced birefringence effects. Without a sufficient supply of high-purity CaF2, the industry may have to shelve this whole technology in favor of one of the NGL techniques, like the electron beam technology described in the article. On the other hand, none of the NGL technologies are as yet mature enough to make them feasible.
Of course, Moore's Law keeps pushing the semiconductor industry ahead. One way or another, they'll figure out a solution.
As a disclaimer: I am not a semiconductor scientist/PhD/expert/pundit/etc. -- just someone who likes to follow the field. The above may or may not be accurate, and you are welcome to say so.
I use Word attachments every day. I couldn't do my job without them.
Is Word the best thing since sliced bread? No.
Is Word worth using? Yes.
The main thing I use Word for, besides all the fancy formatting stuff which is not even strictly necessary, is collaboration/reviewing. I write professionally, and I need to be able to track changes through several review cycles (editors, client, legal, publication). To my knowledge, no other widely-available word processing solution supports these features, at least not the extent the.doc format does.
But it's still not enough to make me use MSWord for all my editing (although I keep a copy in my VMware Win98 just in case). I use StarOffice 6 and love it. I really only have two qualms about it:
SO's "notes" aren't quite as useful as MSWord's "comments", since you can't highlight the text you're discussing. But it works well enough.
And then there's this bug which thankfully has a fairly simple workaround and looks like it will be fixed in the next version.
When I first switched to using Linux full-time for work, nobody at the office noticed. (I telecommute, so no one could actually see my desktop.) At the time, I was using Mandrake + KMail + StarOffice 5.2 -- the only one who knew about it was the editor directly above me, and he's cool with Linux. (Even he wouldn't have known if I hadn't told him.)
What I mean to say is: the Word.doc format has a number of very useful features I couldn't live without. But that doesn't mean I have to use Word. In Evolution, I can open Word attachments in StarOffice seamlessly -- and since StarOffice doesn't quite support VB, I've yet to find a document which could cause damage to my system.
I do agree, however, that you shouldn't use.doc files when something simpler or lighter (like plain text) would do the job as well. I'm involved with PR, and I've seen embarrassing things happen to clients when someone stupid converts a Word doc to HTML and posts it on their site. One page had internal tracking info in the title which actually referred to a different project which had been used as source material. On the website, this information was paraded across the title bar.
Tangent: why does Word include a "title" field in the document properties which it never displays to the user? Word's titlebar just shows the filename without path -- for me, a completely useless piece of informaiton, since I often have identically-named but very different files in separate sections of my file tree. StarOffice's title bar (which displays the contents of the "title" field) is much, much better... yet another reason to use.doc, and just not use M$Word.
Hey, sorry to ramble on like this.... just my two and a half cents.
This is too trippy. I just put on Pink Floyd: Dark Side of the Moon only seconds before sitting down at my computer and surfing on over to slashdot. And I see this. Crazy...
And, sitting next to my stereo on my bookshelf is The Police: Synchonicity. Hmmm.... what does it all mean?:-)
An analogy that would hold IF there were a shelf at the local computer store marked FREE and another marked $9.95
No... the analogy is more akin to: you can download this product for free, or you can buy it on a CD for $9.95. Which actually happens to be a highly common business model for open source software.
Sure, it's not an exact analogy... but as Mark Twain said, "All generalizations are false. Including this one."
Red Hat already offers a more compelling product - they'll update your entire OS, not just the UI.
Uh... so does Red Carpet. The system updates a lot more than the Ximian UI... it'll patch your OS, with packages from your distribution vendor, and also install stuff like StarOffice (although only 5.2... I use SO6b and it's not in Red Carpet yet...), Loki demos, CodeWeavers Wine and even a trial version of VMware.
I won't be paying the fee for faster service (as someone pointed out, just run the updates overnight and you haven't really lost out on anything), but I will continue using Red Carpet. At least until something better comes along.
The best advice I could give them at this point is to develop some truly useful and unique linux apps and sell them.
Ever heard of Evolution?... Though I certainly hope it doesn't come to that...
To take it a step further: why not just take the existing repository of practically every decent opensource software project in the universe, and add this type of auto-update functionality? IIRC, SourceForge already differentiates between "stable" and "development" releases, and is certainly already organized into "channels"!
(I mean, I know some people think VA is evil, but they're not that evil.)
I, for one, would pay $10 or more per month for automatic updates of EVERY SourceForge project. If, like Red Carpet, they could link into the distribution servers for distribution-specific updates (RedHat, Debian, Mandrake, etc.), I could even be persudaded to pay bit more.
For that matter, they could use the Napster-style pseudo-P2P arrangement described in the parent for any off-server content... distributions, independent projects, even commercial updates (a la CodeWeavers, Loki, VMware in Red Carpet). Here we have the best of both worlds, and with only a minimal increase in SourceForge's bandwidth costs (presuming that the majority of people downloading through the updater would otherwise find and download the updates themselves manually -- which may actually not be true).
For that matter, since the Ximian updates are still available, just slower to download, a central server could regularly initate sync jobs to high-speed mirrors and then provide Ximian updates as part of the service, still for one flat fee. Sounds worth it to me!
SourceForge/OSDN/VAlinux^H ^H^H^H^Hsoftware, are you listening?
Slashdot Mirror
I may be wrong. It may be fixed. If so, I'd be happy to hear it.
So, for the time being, I'm using MSWord2k in VMware. If SO/OO can reproduce most of the functionality I need (which, for the most part, it does... I was using SO6b happily until I discovered articles going to print with typos because Word's spellchecker ignored them) then I'll happily switch.
For me, the only substantial difference between SO6 and OO641C (last time I checked) was fonts... SO6 came bundled with a few extra fonts that made it easier to interact with MSWord users. If that's the only major difference, I'm happy to use OO and rip my own fonts...
A few months ago, I bought a Palm VII... only to find that the PalmNet service, provided Cingular, wouldn't work anywhere around my area (a not-so-terribly remote part of Northern California). Their coverage chart said that coverage was "partial" or something like that, but I was unable to get a strong enough signal anywhere to even complete the sign up process.
Oh well, I ended up taking the Palm VII back and exchanging it for an m125, which has worked fairly well. Because of a promotional deal, I got a free games card, so instead of wasting time surfing the net on my Palm, I waste time playing Chess and SimCity. Hmm...
See: http://www.usps.com/postalinspectors/fraud/MailFra udComplaint.htm
As for unsolicited postal mail, this search at Google will get you started.
(My apologies also to everyone else who essentially posted the same thing.)
Anyhow, in reply to tempest303: Yeah, I heard that Nautilus would be getting faster with the Gnome 2 libraries... of course, since this box is running Ximian, I won't have Gnome 2 until it's finalized. (Or sometime afterward, when Ximian starts distributing it with Red Carpet.) But I'm really looking forward to seeing stuff like Nautilus run fast.
My apologies for the misunderstanding...
(Although, for the record, I found installing Ximian to a Mandrake 8.0 system kinda messy... I eventually reinstalled Mandrake without any Gnome packages, and then installed Ximian over that. It's worked fine ever since.)
Also agreed. Galeon was the only browser I used for practically everything for quite a long time. However, I've since dropped it in favor of Opera, which is also very slick. Opera's MDI is, to me, a bit nicer than Galeon's tabbed mode, although either is far better than the resource-hog style of other browsers when opening new windows.In short, Galeon is good, but Opera is better. But either one is far better than Netscape (although Mozilla is finally getting good) or MSIE (although I still keep a copy under VMware because some websites (like my bank) still won't work well with anything else. Hmmm... maybe it's time to get a better bank...
Of course, a large part of the problem lies with Nautilus, which is (if this is in fact possible) slightly slower than Mozilla on my system. Seeing as Mozilla is constantly getting faster and Nautilus is no longer actively maintained, I see this as a potential problem.
I will say, though, that I don't mind the menubar at the top of the screen. I've populated it with the things I need, and it rarely gets in my way.
Of course, I have a large screen and frequently use five or six virtual desktops to hold all my windows, so a few pixels of the top is not nearly as important as pager problems would be. On that front, I have always preferred Gnome's paging model to KDE's; I use a setup with four viewports per workspace, with a 1000-ms delay to swap viewports by moving the pointer to the edge of the screen.
In any case, the point of this long-winded comment is that Ximian Gnome is a neat package, but the overall speed is not nearly as nice as I'd like it to be. (And, before I get flamed, the reason I haven't yet turned off all the bits of chrome that Ximian installs, like Nautilus, is that I actually like chrome. I just wish I could have a schweet-looking system that's fast too.)
Ah well... Everything works for the time being, so I'm unlikely to change anything on this system anytime soon (I actually have to do real work on this computer). On my other machine, I use KDE whenever I start X -- which isn't often.
That's what I love about Linux... you get choices. If I want Gnome, I've got Gnome. If I want super-fast, geekoid-to-the-max sysadmin functionality, I've got bash. I'm happy.
I believe it was the 4k model. My uncle gave it to me sometime in the mid eighties, and I mostly just did stupid things with it until it broke. I didn't really learn to code in BASIC until I got my 32k PET a couple of years later.
Hey, I was born in 1983. Do the math.
Example: the other day I paid $1.00 in a vending machine for 20oz of water. As I did it, I thought to myself, "what a ripoff this is." And then I pushed the button and bought the bottle. Why? Because it would take me 15 minutes to drive home and get a drink, and I was thirsty and didn't have 15 minutes.
The bottom line: this IS a viable revenue model. No need to force people to buy bottled water... my kitchen tap is not going to put Evian out of business. Even my Brita filter doesn't seem to be putting Evian out of business. Go figure.
If implemented correctly, we could have something akin to IPsec -- a virtual, encrypted layer where copy-protected information is transmitted. PGP has had an option for a while for encrypting a text document with a flag set that prevents the recipient from saving it as a file. In theory, something like this could be implemented and actually work.
In reality, it would probably be nothing of the kind... because of the DMCA, you could have an entire movie encoded ROT-1, and breaking that encryption (or even describing, in an educational setting, how to break that encryption) would be a felony. This strikes me as just absurd.
If it was set up like net service, though, with a network-wide DES encryption layer, the content creators could retain some degree of control, and the actual implementation code would not reveal the secret. Thus the implementation code could be opensourced under an artistic license of some sort. In that case, I couldn't see any reason why it couldn't be incorporated into Linux, BSD, etc.
My point is, copy protection would have to be enabled by a techological protection with a degree of cracking difficulty greater than the cost of purchasing the content legally. I am certain that, technically, this can be done.
Unfortunately, I am nearly certain that, from a political standpoint, this cannot be done.
So, the boss realizes that perhaps my friend didn't get the message, and so the boss forwards the message to him, with a note attached, so now it reads "FW: URGENT!!! THIS IS VERY IMPORTANT!!!"
This happens two or three times before he finally figured out what was going on.
Moral of the story: quarantine spam, but don't automagically send it to a black hole. Only the addressee can truly differentiate legitimate mail from spam.
Ugh. I absolutely cannot stand the use of a period between "dot" and "com" (or, in this case, "con"). Even an idiot can see that that makes it "dot dot com".
Yeah, as another poster pointed out, the con here is in actually convincing people to look at such a book.
On the bright side, since publishing a book is apparently so easy, I ought to write a revised edition of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, constructed entirely from memory. I expect it to be a bestseller.
But I digress.
The text of the review in question, for you AC's who only read the part of the website above the fold:
As an example (albeit maybe not the best one), I have a Johnson J-Station digital preamp. I can download additional patches from Johnson's website, but I have yet to find a way to install them under Linux. (The interface software is a Windows proprietary executable.) And since it uses MIDI, I can't do it under VMWmare, as VMWare's MIDI support is essentially nil, and ditto for USB support (so no USB->MIDI solutions either).
Native Linux multimedia is awesome. That wasn't what I was talking about.
Why pay $99 for a package that you can get for free? Especially when Red Carpet will install Wine seamlessly and painlessly, with just three clicks.
Myself, I'm in the process of moving from a Linux-only system to a dual-boot Linux/Windows system, only because there are a few apps I still can't get to work in VMWare. (Specifically, I have no way of installing software on my Palm, and anything multimedia works poorly if at all.) If Wine can get these to work, and possibly IE and Word, for the few times when Opera and OpenOffice don't quite do the trick, I'm all for it.
Wine has (or potentially will have) all the advantages of Lindows, with none of the disadvantages. I'd rather just spend the $99 on another monitor so I can have a setup like Jon from ThinkGeek's happy family.
Isn't that exactly what WINE intends to provide?
Perhaps "competitive" is the wrong word -- the idea is to make it intercompatible. Of course, anything that has the same function as a Microsoft product is, by definition, competing with Microsoft!
As István Lebor said: "I also find it intriguing that Microsoft has a Linux Competitive Manager if they don't see Linux as competition."
Heh.
Am I the only one who thinks it's funny that MCP also stands for Microsoft Certified Professional?
I think by "much shorter" they're probably referring to 193nm ArF eximer laser photolithography or, more likely, 157nm F2 photolithography. The International Semiconductor Technology Roadmap pegs 157nm lithography as the likely candidate for the 70nm feature node.
Actually, the biggest problem facing 157nm litho right now is optics. Fused silica works well for 100+nm wavelengths, but its transmission drops off significantly below that, so that by the time we reach 157nm, silica is practically opaque, useless as a lens material.
Most of the industry has been looking at Calcium Fluoride (CaF2) as the next optical material for photolithography; unfortunately, researchers at NIST revealed last May that CaF2 has a high level of intrinsic birefringence. This means that a CaF2 lens would only refract light correctly if it is polarized along the <111> or <001> directions. So a stepper system would require a substantial increase in the number of lenses to keep correcting the light path.
This runs into the other problem with CaF2: current processes for manufacture of optical-grade CaF2 crystals result in low yields, and the growth system may create additional, stress-induced birefringence effects. Without a sufficient supply of high-purity CaF2, the industry may have to shelve this whole technology in favor of one of the NGL techniques, like the electron beam technology described in the article. On the other hand, none of the NGL technologies are as yet mature enough to make them feasible.
Of course, Moore's Law keeps pushing the semiconductor industry ahead. One way or another, they'll figure out a solution.
As a disclaimer: I am not a semiconductor scientist/PhD/expert/pundit/etc. -- just someone who likes to follow the field. The above may or may not be accurate, and you are welcome to say so.
I use Word attachments every day. I couldn't do my job without them.
Is Word the best thing since sliced bread? No.
Is Word worth using? Yes.
The main thing I use Word for, besides all the fancy formatting stuff which is not even strictly necessary, is collaboration/reviewing. I write professionally, and I need to be able to track changes through several review cycles (editors, client, legal, publication). To my knowledge, no other widely-available word processing solution supports these features, at least not the extent the .doc format does.
But it's still not enough to make me use MSWord for all my editing (although I keep a copy in my VMware Win98 just in case). I use StarOffice 6 and love it. I really only have two qualms about it:
When I first switched to using Linux full-time for work, nobody at the office noticed. (I telecommute, so no one could actually see my desktop.) At the time, I was using Mandrake + KMail + StarOffice 5.2 -- the only one who knew about it was the editor directly above me, and he's cool with Linux. (Even he wouldn't have known if I hadn't told him.)
What I mean to say is: the Word .doc format has a number of very useful features I couldn't live without. But that doesn't mean I have to use Word. In Evolution, I can open Word attachments in StarOffice seamlessly -- and since StarOffice doesn't quite support VB, I've yet to find a document which could cause damage to my system.
I do agree, however, that you shouldn't use .doc files when something simpler or lighter (like plain text) would do the job as well. I'm involved with PR, and I've seen embarrassing things happen to clients when someone stupid converts a Word doc to HTML and posts it on their site. One page had internal tracking info in the title which actually referred to a different project which had been used as source material. On the website, this information was paraded across the title bar.
Tangent: why does Word include a "title" field in the document properties which it never displays to the user? Word's titlebar just shows the filename without path -- for me, a completely useless piece of informaiton, since I often have identically-named but very different files in separate sections of my file tree. StarOffice's title bar (which displays the contents of the "title" field) is much, much better... yet another reason to use .doc, and just not use M$Word.
Hey, sorry to ramble on like this.... just my two and a half cents.
This is too trippy. I just put on Pink Floyd: Dark Side of the Moon only seconds before sitting down at my computer and surfing on over to slashdot. And I see this. Crazy...
And, sitting next to my stereo on my bookshelf is The Police: Synchonicity. Hmmm.... what does it all mean? :-)
I know, I know, it's slightly offtopic... sorry 'bout that.
No... the analogy is more akin to: you can download this product for free, or you can buy it on a CD for $9.95. Which actually happens to be a highly common business model for open source software.
Sure, it's not an exact analogy... but as Mark Twain said, "All generalizations are false. Including this one."
Uh... so does Red Carpet. The system updates a lot more than the Ximian UI... it'll patch your OS, with packages from your distribution vendor, and also install stuff like StarOffice (although only 5.2... I use SO6b and it's not in Red Carpet yet...), Loki demos, CodeWeavers Wine and even a trial version of VMware.
I won't be paying the fee for faster service (as someone pointed out, just run the updates overnight and you haven't really lost out on anything), but I will continue using Red Carpet. At least until something better comes along.
Ever heard of Evolution? ... Though I certainly hope it doesn't come to that...
To take it a step further: why not just take the existing repository of practically every decent opensource software project in the universe, and add this type of auto-update functionality? IIRC, SourceForge already differentiates between "stable" and "development" releases, and is certainly already organized into "channels"!
(I mean, I know some people think VA is evil, but they're not that evil.)
I, for one, would pay $10 or more per month for automatic updates of EVERY SourceForge project. If, like Red Carpet, they could link into the distribution servers for distribution-specific updates (RedHat, Debian, Mandrake, etc.), I could even be persudaded to pay bit more.
For that matter, they could use the Napster-style pseudo-P2P arrangement described in the parent for any off-server content... distributions, independent projects, even commercial updates (a la CodeWeavers, Loki, VMware in Red Carpet). Here we have the best of both worlds, and with only a minimal increase in SourceForge's bandwidth costs (presuming that the majority of people downloading through the updater would otherwise find and download the updates themselves manually -- which may actually not be true).
For that matter, since the Ximian updates are still available, just slower to download, a central server could regularly initate sync jobs to high-speed mirrors and then provide Ximian updates as part of the service, still for one flat fee. Sounds worth it to me!
SourceForge/OSDN/VAlinux^H ^H^H^H^Hsoftware, are you listening?