If the cost of developing and maintaining proprietary software can be made *significantly* higher than deploying and/or contributing to a free software project with similar functionality, then companies will switch.
At the moment, micros~1 has the dominance in the office suite, and charges accordingly.
Even if they release a linux version (almost certainly a binary only distribution, targeting a few distros, perhaps even only their own *shudder*), this does not stop the need or the utility of a free office suite.
Even if micros~1 gave it away for free like IE, a truly free version with source would still make a lot more sense to many (especially if the user/developer base was significant).
It is interesting to see large companies, usually competitors, collaborating in their own ways with linux. Many of them are hacking the kernel, or hacking at apps, often at levels below managament. They are doing this BECAUSE THEY CAN, ie, because the source is available.
A truly free/open source office suite should attract similar collaboration if the functionality is there.
In the long run, micros~1 is doomed "In the long run, we are all dead" - John Maynard Keynes
encryption is prolly high on the list, but the paranoia(justified? maybe . ..) is for nuclear simulations. I am not qualified to pass judgement, but I would assume this sort of calc parallellises (is that a word?) well for beowulf
Does anyone have the spec? Is there any cryptanalysis?
In the absence of the spec, I make these comments:
What prevents spoofing the screen in either hardware or a low level device driver? How is the encryption handled? Does the screen have the key of the player, or does the player do some sort of key exchange with the screen? In either case, if I have physical access to the hardware, I should be able to extract the keys in one way or another.
I can't see it working, even with strong cryptography, basically variations on man-in-the-middle attacks or spoofing the identity of the screen should work.
Crikey's sister site shareowner.com.au is set to become a new force in corporate Australia and, to a lesser extent, in the UK. Australia has about 6 million small shareholders or about 40 per cent of the adult population which is second only to the US in terms of market penetration. We also have close to the highest number of houses on line. Given the rising tide of shareholder activism globally, surely there is a niche for a web-based shareholder activist site in Australia. The Australian Shareholders Association has about 5000 members paying $60 a year. However, being an association largely run by volunteers and retirees, they are naturally fairly cautious.
We already have a list of more than 20 corporate situations or practices that we will focus on involving some of the biggest companies and most powerful businessmen in Australia.
Basically, he gets proxies from ppl and also donated money to buy shares, and then turns up at the AGM and asks scary questions.
As a journo, he was disgusted at the lack of ethics, government collusion with business and media, and lack of real journalism that he took matters into his own hands, and told it like it was.
Jeffed.com got more hits that the Labor party site during the Victorian election, changed the coverage of the election and basically helped turn the tide against the sitting Liberal govt (read 'Republican' for our US cousins, Labor is liberal, Liberal is conservative).
I mean, the man has problems with some of the more interesting interpretations of QT and all.
also (is it just me?) but what is this bs about the big bang.
As a theory it is useless, it answers nothing. "So the universe started with a big bang? What came before that?"
Call me naive, but the universe had no beginning and has no end, it is infinite in all directions and contains an infinite amount of 'dimensions' (current theory has 11 I am told). To believe anything else is futile
Do you really think that one of the richest corporations in the world does not spend a lot of time and money finding out what each and everyone of their potential rivals are up to.
Transmeta are either incredible genius's or Intel's intel is completely useless if Intel did not have a pretty good idea of what was being planned.
For all of that, its probably to do with AMD who are getting all the press and quite a few of the sales lately.
Transmeta will get theirs later. I hope their tech is as good as it seems, and that they can continually improve it.
I DO like an ecology. Monoculture is just so boring and inefficient.
I expected this would happen but in the scheme of things it is trivial. An injunction occurs when there is a great disparity in the cost to one party than the other. The cost of removing a link from a website to a website operator is $0. The cost to the DVD industry each day software to defeat their encryption is freely available on the Internet is considerable.
The cost to a website owner is measured in $/hour. I charge out at $175/hour or part thereof.
The cost of the DVD industry is in total $0 if they do nothing at all about it, except let ppl play legitamitely purchased DVD's on their sytem using css-auth. In fact, they make a profit.
I read the threaded discussion in the addendum to 'open sources' from comp.os.minix (iirc).
Torvald's point seemed to be that a monolithic kernel could be portable if it was coded well and for that purpose. Most of his posts were defending that position, not attacking micro-kernels, I thought . ..
Praps we now *need* m$ as a counter to AOL/TimeWarner et al, and the other mega merger corps to come.
Is it indeed poss that they will see the light and embrace open standards (if not open source).
LDAP and XML are good starts, who knows.
In the coming era post AOL/TW m$ could the be a pyrric victory if it was indeed broken up, as some of the newer megacorps might just borg the pieces, and the situation could be possibly worse.
Ignore them, keep coding, and they just might go away!
There is plenty of evidence that 'famine' is a man made artifact of modern economics, most notably 'cash cropping', ie where local subsistence farming is displaced by crops with 'international' value and sold to genereate foreign income, often to repay debt to set up the 'infrastructure' (ie dams) used to produce the stuff in the first place.
Some orgainations (community aid abroad f'instnace) actually buy things like hoes and spades and teach permaculture, and actively take steps to produce long term infrastructural change to combat famine.
word on the street is that it would run faster than intel systems. Apparently it was very good in its later incarnations. Sort of dynamic re-compilation or something.
Of course, the alphas ran at much higher clockspeeds, but it was quite efficient . ..
Actually, I posit my self as a Crypto-Anarchist or Eco-Satanist.
What has any of this name-calling got to do with resisting the idea that somebody can take something that has been free for all of humanity since the beginning of time, and patent it, and thereby deny anyone else the right of using it without paying a fee. This is straight out theft, and has nothing to do with Capitalism, Communism or Anarchy.
Its worth pointing out again the similarities between the Free Software/Open Source ideas and those of the Seed Savers.
The Seed Savers have been warning about the problems of non-free genetic material (seeds) for a long time, and have been keeping Old Varieties and Non-Hybrid seeds viable for decades by instituting seed banks and Seed Savers networks.
Basically, the 'information' in the genetic code should not be the proprietary or 'closed' property of any individual or corporation, but is for everybody to profit from (ie, by eating and staying alive).
This is a very similar situation to software and many of the arguments for Free Software are near identical to those of the Seed savers, and are worth investigating. They are an old network, and natural allies of many of us preserving our freedoms in this day and age of the mega-corp (E-toys and the like) and things like WIPO and other plans to severly restrict our abilities to work, think, eat, and play.
One is supposed to never feed the trolls, but, on this occasion, your careful and thoughtful post accurately reflects, nay, pre-empts my thoughts so succinctly, so thoroughly, that I must congratulate you on your prose, and remain envious of your natural style and ability to elucidate a point forcefully, yet elegantly.
or seriously deluded if you think that I or any other free thinking adult will be intimidated by these tactics.
What you are suggesting is to play right into the hands of the Thought Police and self censor.
NOT WHILE THERE IS BREATH IN MY BODY!
The battle lines are being drawn for the last great struggle for freedom. The genie is out of the bottle, the internet has connected minds in a way that could not have happened previously in the history of humankind, and the Power is feeling very threatened indeed. They are attempting to put the genie back in the bottle, and kill the internet, kill the (dare I say it) freedom to inovate, the freedom to share and the freedom to think.
Use this freedom now to stop this madness from spreading, and start at home now, with your own thoughts.
This attempt, and a whole lot of WIPO must be resisted, and a large dose of Public Disobedience, coupled with strategic law suits, political lobbying and just plain old Writing Code is needed.
Slashdot Mirror
At the moment, micros~1 has the dominance in the office suite, and charges accordingly.
Even if they release a linux version (almost certainly a binary only distribution, targeting a few distros, perhaps even only their own *shudder*), this does not stop the need or the utility of a free office suite.
Even if micros~1 gave it away for free like IE, a truly free version with source would still make a lot more sense to many (especially if the user/developer base was significant).
It is interesting to see large companies, usually competitors, collaborating in their own ways with linux. Many of them are hacking the kernel, or hacking at apps, often at levels below managament. They are doing this BECAUSE THEY CAN, ie, because the source is available.
A truly free/open source office suite should attract similar collaboration if the functionality is there.
In the long run, micros~1 is doomed
"In the long run, we are all dead" - John Maynard Keynes
Well, first thought is "what the fuck is the coffee machine doing on the UPS"
Then I realized . . . what is the point of having the computers on, and no coffee!
But . . . shouldn't the coffee machine have its *own* UPS ?
encryption is prolly high on the list, but the paranoia(justified? maybe . . .) is for nuclear simulations. I am not qualified to pass judgement, but I would assume this sort of calc parallellises (is that a word?) well for beowulf
In the absence of the spec, I make these comments:
What prevents spoofing the screen in either hardware or a low level device driver?
How is the encryption handled?
Does the screen have the key of the player, or does the player do some sort of key exchange with the screen?
In either case, if I have physical access to the hardware, I should be able to extract the keys in one way or another.
I can't see it working, even with strong cryptography, basically variations on man-in-the-middle attacks or spoofing the identity of the screen should work.
this guys story is amazing, he changed a government with a website http://www.jeffed.com/
quoth:
Jeffed.com AGM Agitating Becomes Shareowner.com.au
Crikey's sister site shareowner.com.au is set to become a new force in corporate Australia and, to a lesser extent, in the UK. Australia has about 6 million small shareholders or about 40 per cent of the adult population which is second only to the US in terms of market penetration. We also have close to the highest number of houses on line. Given the rising tide of shareholder activism globally, surely there is a niche for a web-based shareholder activist site in Australia. The Australian Shareholders Association has about 5000 members paying $60 a year. However, being an association largely run by volunteers and retirees, they are naturally fairly cautious.
We already have a list of more than 20 corporate situations or practices that we will focus on involving some of the biggest companies and most powerful businessmen in Australia.
Basically, he gets proxies from ppl and also donated money to buy shares, and then turns up at the AGM and asks scary questions.
As a journo, he was disgusted at the lack of ethics, government collusion with business and media, and lack of real journalism that he took matters into his own hands, and told it like it was.
Jeffed.com got more hits that the Labor party site during the Victorian election, changed the coverage of the election and basically helped turn the tide against the sitting Liberal govt (read 'Republican' for our US cousins, Labor is liberal, Liberal is conservative).
I mean, the man has problems with some of the more interesting interpretations of QT and all.
also (is it just me?) but what is this bs about the big bang.
As a theory it is useless, it answers nothing. "So the universe started with a big bang? What came before that?"
Call me naive, but the universe had no beginning and has no end, it is infinite in all directions and contains an infinite amount of 'dimensions' (current theory has 11 I am told). To believe anything else is futile
It seems that there must be massive pre-fabbed components to be able to do your TextEditor in only 7 lines of code.
check you logs and tell me how many browsers that don't support frames hit your sites . . .
He set up and runs the w3c in order to maintain its sane development.
The man is a visionary and a genius.
If it is an important matter of National Security, then they are more likely to take the patent away, than allow a single entity to control it.
Why on earth would 'national security' (a bogus term usally interpreted as serving the needs of the power/wealth elite) rely on RSA owning the patent.
Do you really think that one of the richest corporations in the world does not spend a lot of time and money finding out what each and everyone of their potential rivals are up to.
Transmeta are either incredible genius's or Intel's intel is completely useless if Intel did not have a pretty good idea of what was being planned.
For all of that, its probably to do with AMD who are getting all the press and quite a few of the sales lately.
Transmeta will get theirs later. I hope their tech is as good as it seems, and that they can continually improve it.
I DO like an ecology. Monoculture is just so boring and inefficient.
The cost to a website owner is measured in $/hour. I charge out at $175/hour or part thereof.
The cost of the DVD industry is in total $0 if they do nothing at all about it, except let ppl play legitamitely purchased DVD's on their sytem using css-auth. In fact, they make a profit.
Your reasoning is absurd.
Torvald's point seemed to be that a monolithic kernel could be portable if it was coded well and for that purpose. Most of his posts were defending that position, not attacking micro-kernels, I thought . . .
Is it indeed poss that they will see the light and embrace open standards (if not open source).
LDAP and XML are good starts, who knows.
In the coming era post AOL/TW m$ could the be a pyrric victory if it was indeed broken up, as some of the newer megacorps might just borg the pieces, and the situation could be possibly worse.
Ignore them, keep coding, and they just might go away!
but I think he's lying.
of course is it caeser cypher for IBM
Some orgainations (community aid abroad f'instnace) actually buy things like hoes and spades and teach permaculture, and actively take steps to produce long term infrastructural change to combat famine.
Of course, the alphas ran at much higher clockspeeds, but it was quite efficient . . .
I always liked 'WOFTAM' - Waste Of Fucking Time And Money. ie, "This project is a total WOFTAM".
PS2 is close to 'bet the company'
the text is marked up regularly and systematically so this is theoretically easy.
What has any of this name-calling got to do with resisting the idea that somebody can take something that has been free for all of humanity since the beginning of time, and patent it, and thereby deny anyone else the right of using it without paying a fee. This is straight out theft, and has nothing to do with Capitalism, Communism or Anarchy.
The Seed Savers have been warning about the problems of non-free genetic material (seeds) for a long time, and have been keeping Old Varieties and Non-Hybrid seeds viable for decades by instituting seed banks and Seed Savers networks.
Basically, the 'information' in the genetic code should not be the proprietary or 'closed' property of any individual or corporation, but is for everybody to profit from (ie, by eating and staying alive).
This is a very similar situation to software and many of the arguments for Free Software are near identical to those of the Seed savers, and are worth investigating. They are an old network, and natural allies of many of us preserving our freedoms in this day and age of the mega-corp (E-toys and the like) and things like WIPO and other plans to severly restrict our abilities to work, think, eat, and play.
What you are suggesting is to play right into the hands of the Thought Police and self censor.
NOT WHILE THERE IS BREATH IN MY BODY!
The battle lines are being drawn for the last great struggle for freedom. The genie is out of the bottle, the internet has connected minds in a way that could not have happened previously in the history of humankind, and the Power is feeling very threatened indeed. They are attempting to put the genie back in the bottle, and kill the internet, kill the (dare I say it) freedom to inovate, the freedom to share and the freedom to think.
Use this freedom now to stop this madness from spreading, and start at home now, with your own thoughts.
This attempt, and a whole lot of WIPO must be resisted, and a large dose of Public Disobedience, coupled with strategic law suits, political lobbying and just plain old Writing Code is needed.
Stay strong.