Right, and that's what AbiWord is trying to do, write an XML converter. However, the problem has been (if I remember right from stalking AbiWord-dev) that in order to use the format of a Word document, you not only have to have similar features to Word, but you've got to have the same problems as Word. So, it would seem, in order to use Word format correctly, you need to be Word.
Well, first of all, it was posted by an Anonymous Coward.
Second of all, it explained somthing which is common knowledge, how to make an install bootdisk.
Thirdly, for anyone that this was news to, RTFM. In *every* install help file, this is mentioned. I personally don't know how anyone can get through their first Linux install (by themselves) without those install docs for precicly this reason.
Holy cow. I can't even start to imagine what kind of precautions we're going to need to use to prevent electro-static discharge on these things. That small of a track is going to be real easy to fry.
The problem I see with the multiple Windows breakup scheme is that it isn't a very long-term solution. Buisness tends to have a momentum to it, and once they have it in their collective heads that something is good, they stick with it. This can obviously be seen with Windows, they love it for whatever reasons. Eventually one of these competing Windows products will be considered the one that's worth buying, and that will become the new standard. I'll grant that in the time from the splitup to the time of the new "winner" being crowned, there's bound to be quite a bit of advancement, but once that new "winner" is born, we're back into the same situation.
It just isn't as permanent as cutting along product lines.
BluePoint Linux Software Corp. is someone I've never heard about, hence I can only speculate. But the speculation is that it's either a distribution maker or a company that writes software to run on the Linux operating system.
Note that BluePoint Linux Software Corp. is no more the maker of Linux then VA Linux Systems or RedHat Linux. The point is that there is a qualification on the Linux, it's not the Linux. The Linux is not controlled by a company.
So it would have been better to just let the bug exist? I suppose that's the Microsoft security model. Let bugs we *know* about to just go on until the next service pack and just hope that other people don't know about it. Bull. By the time that the power that be (Microsoft in the Windows world) know about a bug in the wild, people who look to exploit these things know and probably use it. Hence, the faster it is fixed, the better, even if it's done in public, since the people who would use it for harm probably already know about it.
A good example:
Back in January or so, a bug was known in Microsoft's Internet Exporer software that would cause a very hard computer crash. (If you must know, it involves following a link to "c:\con\con" or "c:\nul\nul" or "c:\aux\aux") It was patched about a month ago (May, I believe). If this had been Linux, I could have personally fixed it, the fix is so very easy (the hackish way would be to disallow those specific strings mentioned, the more complete would be to restrict links to old DOS functionality)
Okay, you really don't know how this is done, do you? "Linux" isn't an organization that has a bunch of IPO money and is responsible for the operating system called Linux. "Linux" is not a company (hence no stock ticker). "Linux" is just a kernel that a whole bunch of people have helped to create, inluding the people over at Sendmail. Suing "Linux" would be very, very difficult, since it's very difficult who/what to actually name in the suit. What is more likely the outcome you're looking for is a bit more complicated and actually involves a company. When a new kernel is released, noone's required to download it and use it. I should hope that most companies *don't*, simply because of the possibility of problems, they're better off sticking to a tried-and-true kernel version. What companies *should* do to upgrade is to upgrade their Linux distribution (RedHat, SuSE, etc...). Distributions (should) test the versions of software that they ship out. They use the tried-and-true versions of the kernel and other software. They're suable.
So, in summary, "Linux" is not suable, "Linux" isn't even an organization. When the OS known as Linux is used by a distribution, they open themselves to possible law suits, and that's why they don't use the bleeding edge kernels.
When will the code-heads join the real world, huh?
The ones that do open source generally don't want to. The open source world is a great excape to the corprate/law/marketing world. So those distribution companies sort of form a buffer layer between us and the real world. They do the marketing; they have the lawyers.
"They have to do this sort of thing as part of maintaining their copyright."
I feel compelled to mention that you don't have to maintain a copyright. You have to maintain a trademark, but a copyright you can let one group go and enforce on another group, ie even though the warez d00d might say that they let people on eBay go, that bears nothing in court. They could probably come back asking the d00d for specific auctions which were illegal and see what happens. Moral: No, they don't *have* to do this sort of thing to maintain their copyright.
Hint #1: Whenever you ask for help like that, at least say what kind of computer you have.
Hint #2: Whenever you say something didn't work for you, say why. If you don't know why, either speculate or explain what happened.
Hint #3: When you ask for help, don't post anonymously. It prevents people like me from getting in touch with you personally, instead of throwing something out in a public forum.
#1: If you mean "Why would you run Linux instead of MacOS?" Well, a myriad of reasons actually. MacOS is rather nice in many respects, but programing on it ain't the best experience in the world. (Yes, I've done it.) Also, it plays very well with MacOS (as in can be put on any partition regardless of position and won't (read: won't unless you screw it up) ruin your HFS/HFS+ partitions, so there's no need to ditch MacOS.
#2: If you mean "Why would you run Linux on PPC instead of Linux on Intel?" Well, besides the hardware being more expencive... Linux on PPC is the easiest install/maintain that *I've* ever done. I was shocked at how much of a pain in the arse it was to install on an x86 compared to the absolute breese on PPC. Some of this is starting to go away though, ie LILO cylender restriction gone by-by, so this might not be the case in another year or so. But anyway, that's a good reason.
Yes, it is preferable to not have these server services running (or even installed) by default for a desktop user. A "typical" desktop user doesn't even know what the heck telnet is, let alone find it a useful tool. If, however, they do find such services helpful, they can get them for the Mac. And if they like them too much, they can get OSX, or for that matter, LinuxPPC, Yellow Dog, whatever.
Um, yea, they can make a die at.18 microns. That doesn't mean they can make a slab of aluminum that's flat to.18 microns. To do so requires automotive style sanding processes, which would be another step for these processors to go through. For most customers though, a not-so-flat processesor is just peachy, 'cause they're not going to overclock it. So they just make the aluminum plate and let it cool, introducing a little bit of unflatness. As for the heatsink, same thing goes, most people just don't care.
As for a case example of how Joe overclocker and insanely high grit sand paper can really help things by lapping both processor and heatsink (Well, my name's not Joe, but you get the point): I did the process to two of my celerons. Now, the celeron's little bump map picture was similar to what the heatsinks probably was, depressed in the center and raised on the edge, leaving a nice little valley of one of the world's best insulators, air. Sandin' down that guy took my tempurature readings (as measured by the thermistors on my BP6) from 45C to 36C.
I should note for completeness that I did sand down to copper, not just go for flat.
Eh, just go back a few days and look at the code for ILOVEYOU. That'd give you a good way to know what button they pressed too. And you could tell all of their closest friends.
AltiVec vector processing is absolutly killer. Anything dealing with graphics manipulation or signal processesing (amungst others) runs insanely well on a G4 when it uses AltiVec.
I heard that they would multitask much better in OS X, yet... that is being delayed..
Um, do you think BSD multitasks well? If the answer is 'yes' then, the answer to whether OS X will multitask well is also 'yes'.
And no, other MacOS versions didn't multitask 'well'. They multitasked differently, using a model called cooperative multitasking. Instead of the OS dolling out CPU time, the currently running process gets all the stuff the system doesn't use and it's up to that process to tell the OS that it's done with what it wanted to do. In the hands of good programmers, I find this vastly superior to pre-emptive (OS controled) multitasking, the program the user is running responds very nicely. In the hands of Microsoft, this is hell. They don't like to give up CPU time at *all*.
Okay, I propose a test. Let's post these Microsoft copywrited materials to some discussion group on MSN. If it's gone within a certain amount of time, then Slashdot should remove their copy. Else, Microsoft is being horribly hypocritical, and I'm sure that can't look good in court. But then again, I don't think there's a provision in the DMCA for hypocracy.
Read the site silly. The COMMERCIAL version won't work on your Visor right now (estimated time to fix: 6 hours) because the Visor doesn't have a hardware identification number. The shareware version never claimed not to work.
Slashdot Mirror
Right, and that's what AbiWord is trying to do, write an XML converter. However, the problem has been (if I remember right from stalking AbiWord-dev) that in order to use the format of a Word document, you not only have to have similar features to Word, but you've got to have the same problems as Word. So, it would seem, in order to use Word format correctly, you need to be Word.
Well, first of all, it was posted by an Anonymous Coward.
Second of all, it explained somthing which is common knowledge, how to make an install bootdisk.
Thirdly, for anyone that this was news to, RTFM. In *every* install help file, this is mentioned. I personally don't know how anyone can get through their first Linux install (by themselves) without those install docs for precicly this reason.
Holy cow. I can't even start to imagine what kind of precautions we're going to need to use to prevent electro-static discharge on these things. That small of a track is going to be real easy to fry.
The problem I see with the multiple Windows breakup scheme is that it isn't a very long-term solution. Buisness tends to have a momentum to it, and once they have it in their collective heads that something is good, they stick with it. This can obviously be seen with Windows, they love it for whatever reasons. Eventually one of these competing Windows products will be considered the one that's worth buying, and that will become the new standard. I'll grant that in the time from the splitup to the time of the new "winner" being crowned, there's bound to be quite a bit of advancement, but once that new "winner" is born, we're back into the same situation.
It just isn't as permanent as cutting along product lines.
BluePoint Linux Software Corp. is someone I've never heard about, hence I can only speculate. But the speculation is that it's either a distribution maker or a company that writes software to run on the Linux operating system.
Note that BluePoint Linux Software Corp. is no more the maker of Linux then VA Linux Systems or RedHat Linux. The point is that there is a qualification on the Linux, it's not the Linux. The Linux is not controlled by a company.
Sendmail are hardly helping
So it would have been better to just let the bug exist?
I suppose that's the Microsoft security model. Let bugs we *know* about to just go on until the next service pack and just hope that other people don't know about it. Bull. By the time that the power that be (Microsoft in the Windows world) know about a bug in the wild, people who look to exploit these things know and probably use it. Hence, the faster it is fixed, the better, even if it's done in public, since the people who would use it for harm probably already know about it.
A good example:
Back in January or so, a bug was known in Microsoft's Internet Exporer software that would cause a very hard computer crash. (If you must know, it involves following a link to "c:\con\con" or "c:\nul\nul" or "c:\aux\aux") It was patched about a month ago (May, I believe). If this had been Linux, I could have personally fixed it, the fix is so very easy (the hackish way would be to disallow those specific strings mentioned, the more complete would be to restrict links to old DOS functionality)
Okay, you really don't know how this is done, do you? "Linux" isn't an organization that has a bunch of IPO money and is responsible for the operating system called Linux. "Linux" is not a company (hence no stock ticker). "Linux" is just a kernel that a whole bunch of people have helped to create, inluding the people over at Sendmail. Suing "Linux" would be very, very difficult, since it's very difficult who/what to actually name in the suit. What is more likely the outcome you're looking for is a bit more complicated and actually involves a company. When a new kernel is released, noone's required to download it and use it. I should hope that most companies *don't*, simply because of the possibility of problems, they're better off sticking to a tried-and-true kernel version. What companies *should* do to upgrade is to upgrade their Linux distribution (RedHat, SuSE, etc...). Distributions (should) test the versions of software that they ship out. They use the tried-and-true versions of the kernel and other software. They're suable.
So, in summary, "Linux" is not suable, "Linux" isn't even an organization. When the OS known as Linux is used by a distribution, they open themselves to possible law suits, and that's why they don't use the bleeding edge kernels.
When will the code-heads join the real world, huh?
The ones that do open source generally don't want to. The open source world is a great excape to the corprate/law/marketing world. So those distribution companies sort of form a buffer layer between us and the real world. They do the marketing; they have the lawyers.
Just taking a stab here, but consider farms. That's a very large amount of land for a very few amount of people.
Teach.
Now *that's* recursion!
"They have to do this sort of thing as part of maintaining their copyright."
I feel compelled to mention that you don't have to maintain a copyright. You have to maintain a trademark, but a copyright you can let one group go and enforce on another group, ie even though the warez d00d might say that they let people on eBay go, that bears nothing in court. They could probably come back asking the d00d for specific auctions which were illegal and see what happens. Moral: No, they don't *have* to do this sort of thing to maintain their copyright.
Of course, IANAL.
Not only is Dialpad Windows only, it can only call computer-phone (its main advantage) in the US only.
"I'm looking for some Voice over IP solution for Unix (Linux, and Solaris in particular)."
Dialpad requires Windows, BTW. Oh, and it only works computer-phone in the US. "anywhare" hardly applies.
Um, yea.
Hint #1: Whenever you ask for help like that, at least say what kind of computer you have.
Hint #2: Whenever you say something didn't work for you, say why. If you don't know why, either speculate or explain what happened.
Hint #3: When you ask for help, don't post anonymously. It prevents people like me from getting in touch with you personally, instead of throwing something out in a public forum.
Two answers to your delema:
#1: If you mean "Why would you run Linux instead of MacOS?" Well, a myriad of reasons actually. MacOS is rather nice in many respects, but programing on it ain't the best experience in the world. (Yes, I've done it.) Also, it plays very well with MacOS (as in can be put on any partition regardless of position and won't (read: won't unless you screw it up) ruin your HFS/HFS+ partitions, so there's no need to ditch MacOS.
#2: If you mean "Why would you run Linux on PPC instead of Linux on Intel?" Well, besides the hardware being more expencive... Linux on PPC is the easiest install/maintain that *I've* ever done. I was shocked at how much of a pain in the arse it was to install on an x86 compared to the absolute breese on PPC. Some of this is starting to go away though, ie LILO cylender restriction gone by-by, so this might not be the case in another year or so. But anyway, that's a good reason.
Yummy, pancakes.
That has got to be one of the worst jobs ever, reading a very long string of numbers... I can only assume they recorded 'em though,
"One Five Seven...no Two...sorry. Eight"
Yea, kinda like that Netscape company.
Yes, it is preferable to not have these server services running (or even installed) by default for a desktop user. A "typical" desktop user doesn't even know what the heck telnet is, let alone find it a useful tool. If, however, they do find such services helpful, they can get them for the Mac. And if they like them too much, they can get OSX, or for that matter, LinuxPPC, Yellow Dog, whatever.
Um, yea, they can make a die at .18 microns. That doesn't mean they can make a slab of aluminum that's flat to .18 microns. To do so requires automotive style sanding processes, which would be another step for these processors to go through. For most customers though, a not-so-flat processesor is just peachy, 'cause they're not going to overclock it. So they just make the aluminum plate and let it cool, introducing a little bit of unflatness. As for the heatsink, same thing goes, most people just don't care.
As for a case example of how Joe overclocker and insanely high grit sand paper can really help things by lapping both processor and heatsink (Well, my name's not Joe, but you get the point): I did the process to two of my celerons. Now, the celeron's little bump map picture was similar to what the heatsinks probably was, depressed in the center and raised on the edge, leaving a nice little valley of one of the world's best insulators, air. Sandin' down that guy took my tempurature readings (as measured by the thermistors on my BP6) from 45C to 36C.
I should note for completeness that I did sand down to copper, not just go for flat.
Eh, just go back a few days and look at the code for ILOVEYOU. That'd give you a good way to know what button they pressed too. And you could tell all of their closest friends.
#include < disclamer.h>
AltiVec vector processing is absolutly killer. Anything dealing with graphics manipulation or signal processesing (amungst others) runs insanely well on a G4 when it uses AltiVec.
I heard that they would multitask much better in OS X, yet... that is being delayed..
Um, do you think BSD multitasks well? If the answer is 'yes' then, the answer to whether OS X will multitask well is also 'yes'.
And no, other MacOS versions didn't multitask 'well'. They multitasked differently, using a model called cooperative multitasking. Instead of the OS dolling out CPU time, the currently running process gets all the stuff the system doesn't use and it's up to that process to tell the OS that it's done with what it wanted to do. In the hands of good programmers, I find this vastly superior to pre-emptive (OS controled) multitasking, the program the user is running responds very nicely. In the hands of Microsoft, this is hell. They don't like to give up CPU time at *all*.
Okay, I propose a test. Let's post these Microsoft copywrited materials to some discussion group on MSN. If it's gone within a certain amount of time, then Slashdot should remove their copy. Else, Microsoft is being horribly hypocritical, and I'm sure that can't look good in court. But then again, I don't think there's a provision in the DMCA for hypocracy.
Man, go away. Posting the results here is just not right. I could see it being helpful if, say, the site was ./'ed, but it isn't.
Read the site silly. The COMMERCIAL version won't work on your Visor right now (estimated time to fix: 6 hours) because the Visor doesn't have a hardware identification number. The shareware version never claimed not to work.