This is not a "loophole in the GPL". It is exactly how the GPL, and similar OSS licenses are intended to work. If you don't want other people freely using, modifying, and even selling your software, then do not open source it.
Also, it seems rather rich that they are selling a product that depends on a number of other OSS projects (expat, gettext, gmake, libiconv, libtool) and complaining about people making money off their code.
There is a lot of noise floating around the net about the trustworthiness of electronic voting. After the last election, i was getting about 5 links a day to stories about voting irregularities around the country. Some are dubious. Some are tinfoil-hat nutjobs. Some are very disturbing. Computer security experts tend to be very skeptical of electronic voting. A lot of them are demanding paper trails accompany e-votes. A lot of them demand that the the software that runs these machines should be open source, and available for peer review. I think all of that is reasonable, but still misses the point. Those measures can make elections harder to rig, but not impossible. Maybe still not even all THAT hard. Elections on paper ballots can be rigged too, after all.
In my opinion, the ONLY way elections can be trusted is by closing the loop, and allowing voters to verify their vote after the count. I would like to see a system where electronic voting machines issue receipts with a large, anonymous, random key. After the election, voters could consult the election results for their precinct, and verify that the vote matching their key in fact has their voting preferences in it.
The only major security risk I can think of in such a system would be issuing duplicate keys to duplicate voters. Say you and I voted for all of the same people. A compromised machine could issue us receipts with duplicate keys, and just record one vote. This is easily fixed. After the votes have been counted, I go to the GOP web site and look up my vote using my key. If it is recorded correctly, I click on the "confirm" button there. To be safe, I do this all again on the DNC web site. Later, when you check your vote, with your duplicate key, you see that someone else already confirmed it. You alert election officials to the problem.
I can not think of a way to rig such an election. Can you? Is this just naive? I would love to hear comments.
There is a lot of noise here about "RBLs are good" or "RBLs are bad" and it totally misses the point about MAPS. MAPs is the grandaddy RBL, and I used it myself back in the day, before they started charging for it. When Vixie was running it, sure he was a crazy bastard, and sure he would occasionally block for what were arguably net.political reasons, but it was professionally run. It was obvious how you got on, and there was an open, obvious process for getting off. Anyway, at some point they got sick of running MAPS (who could blame them) and sold it off.
MAPS is now completely broken. It is a janky half-assed operation, run by half-assed cluebies. It is no longer professionally run, in any sense. True story:
We see in our mail log that mail from us is being rejected by certain servers because it is in MAPS. Of course we jump on this. We move a lot of mail. We run an honest shop, and don't send spam. We don't want to be on any RBLs. And if there is any spam sneaking through our network, we want to stop on it.
At the new MAPS web site we can look up our listing (good!) and see that it has been listed with a lot of other IPs at our hosting facility. They have an example spam, but it is clearly not from us. Ok...
We find their delisting page. It reads something like, "If you want to be delisted, give us a call, or email us or y'know, something, and we'll see what we can do..." Ok, that is a paraphrase, but there are no rules posted, no automated submission, no automated retesting, just "give us a call." Huh?
We we dash off some emails, "why are we listed and how do we get delisted?" and the boss calls them on the phone. After a couple calls, and much haranguing, they say they have an email from our particular IP in one of their spam trap addresses. Well this worries me, is there spam getting through somewhere?
My boss convinced the guy at MAPS to send him a copy of the email from the spam trap. Obviously this sets off alarms for me. Divulging a message caught in a spam trap is crazy. A spammer could easily sneak tell-tales in there that would reveal the trap address. It is unprofessional and demonstrates a lack of understanding of what a spam trap is. But this was just the tip of the iceberg. These jokers would prove themselves even less professional shortly.
We get the message and they have "sanitized" the To address in the headers and body. Or they attempted to, anyway. In fact we use VERP on the many mailing lists that we manage, so the To address is encoded in the envelope-from. So if we send from me@here.com to you@there.com, the envelope-from is set to:
me+you=there.com@here.com
That way if we get a bounce or a complaint, we can quickly determine the real address, and skip trying to figure out any alias chains or forwarding out at the destination.
But anyway, there is the real To address, plain as day. So unprofessional. The email *did* come from our mail server. We sent it on behalf of a customer who's web site we host. They have a busy ecom site, and they occasionally send emails to their customers. It's commercial email to be sure, but hardly unsolicited. You can opt in or out when you buy stuff, or any time thereafter. But wait, what's this customer up to, I wonder? Have they snuck some questionable email addresses into their list?
No, the email address had actually been used to buy something(!!) from our customer in the past. Aahhh! What? Clearly MAPS' new owners have no idea what spam trap addresses are, or how to handle them. Oh, it gets better.
The boss whois-es the domain, gets the contact info, and picks up the phone. He gets ahold of the owner and asks him if he had use that email address in the past (yes!), if he'd made a purchase from our customer (yes!). Then this guy starts slagging on us, talking about spam like he's an expert, even mentions MAPS. Turns out, in fact, he owns MAPS.
It's just a shame that there isn't a large body of software available, free from restrictive licenses, so that thousands of programers could review and enhance, until it reached a point where it was dependable, and largely free of bugs. Companies could use these software componants to build systems that would start their service life already well tested.
A well managed software system CAN be more reliable than a hardware system. It can coordinate self-checks, manage redundant systems, fix small problems, and ask for help with big problems. It is a sorry state of affairs that we expect the opposite fom our software.
You *get* that Free Software has little to do with the price, right?
Why are you kids laboring under the delusion that the web server OS - as reported by Netcraft - has any bearing on what the mail server OS might have been?
This is retarded. What is worse, that a geek blog picked up something this dumb, or a "real" news site? This idea is old, and long discredited.
The greeks started using the technique described, but not for many years after the Pyramids were built.
It is worth noting that there are pictures surviving from the period that show large teams of men, pulling big stone bocks or statues, on sledges. Maybe you can dream up some other way to do it, but if there's real evidence that they did it differently, you are just daydreaming.
There are certain things you CAN NOT contract to do. For instance, you can not sell yourself into slavery. So why are we willing (or for that matter, able) to piss away our other basic human rights for a job?
This is what 20 years of ubiquitous employee piss testing has done to the American sense of civil liberties.
Has anyone ever tried to create a real computer assisted curriculum? Or are schools just bolting computers on to the same old, badly broken system?
Imagine this scenario:
You come to school in the morning, and after show & tell you log in to your computer. It knows that you left off in your math lesson with, say, factoring polynomials, so that is where it picks up. Once you finish all of the lessons, it gives you a test. If you miss any questions, it reviews them. If the questions you missed fall into a particular category, it covers that section again, or better yet, covers that section using an alternate teaching approach. When you have it, you take a new test on that section. Repeat until you have it, or need to call in the teacher for 1 on 1 help.
Maybe you like math and you are getting pretty far ahead, so the learning system recommends that you work on some social studies. You slog through, say, state capitals, but let it know that you find that boring. So the system tries other social studies topics, maybe world religions or famous explorers, and when it finds something you like, it gives you the option of perusing a couple different lines of research. Once you achieve a certain proficiency in a subject, you can get some sort of fat reward for giving a presentation to the class on it.
Meanwhile, the school's server tabulates performance for each section, and notes that students are scoring worse than their usual on, say, the factoring polynomials section. That sends up a flag that that module needs to be improved.
What about teachers? Well they are still important as always. Group projects, art projects, hands on experiments, socially oriented activities, personal counseling, discipline and so on all need to be directed by a human.
But could we stop reinventing lesson plans? Couldn't we just get it right once, and then stick with that, making little changes as we find deficiencies? Could we stop teaching in herds, and leaving half the class behind, while boring the other half? Could we stop failing kids, and just work on the skills they need until they master them? Am I the only one that's thought of this, or is someone working on it?
Yes, I think this is a reasonable start. You can suppliment it with mod_auth_mysql or mod_auth_pgsql to help tie things together as well. Still, it tends to be a lot of work.
Also, if you figure out the authentication and authorization, what about making web apps fit into the rest of the site? Not simply the "look" of things, but the navigational scheme, the general arangement of elements on your site that make things consistant and navigable.
It's an inordanent amount of work. Every try to fit someone else's forum app into your site? Oy veh. Faster to write your own.
Web apps are easy, cross-platform on the server (to an extent) and wonderfully cross platform on the client side. They have so much potential. But I think interoperability is the major failing right now.
My intranet hosts a number of web applications for internal use. Netsaint is one of those, and it has been a fantastic asset for us.
Other handy web apps we love include Mantis (bug tracker), CVSWeb and Chora, phpMyAdmin, phpPgAdmin, SquirrelMail and so on. There are lots of great web apps out there these days that can provide web based access to some cool functionality.
One major hassle, though, is that every one of them handles authentication and authorization differently. Setting up one login, or hacking them together into some sort of common framework is a giant hassle. Do you have any thoughts on how to get web applications to work well together?
First, I didn't suggest BBEdit be anything more than a text editor. Go read that again.
Second....the point is that business document creators should not be screwing with style issues in the first place. It's a stupid time sink for business documents. Does Word even support kerning anyway? This is not applicable to ad layouts, or grammy's one-off recipe. I am talking about the millions of hours info-workers spend creating unique, one-off, un-indexable, hard to archive, binary format memos, and such.
A designer in the ad department creates a style-sheet, memo titles are 18 point Arial Black. You don't tweak it, you don't check it with 24pt Verdana maybe, you don't twiddle the kerning in InDesign. You just fill in the Another Stupid Memo! and print.
Is design dead? No, it's still appropriate to a lotta stuff. Should your secretary play designer all day? Your office manager? Your CFO? No, it's a waste. It's overpriced in time and materials.
Separating content and layout is probably the most important point, but there are others:
- Interoperability of formats (forever)
- The ongoing costs of (re)buying word processors and (re)training people to use them.
- Searchable and Indexable meta-information.
It's funny you bring up BBEdit, because it is what has brought me to the conclusion that word processors are generally a bad idea. I haven't really created a Word document since college, and now when open Word, after years of coding, creating documents this way seems insane to me. Perhaps we can convince BareBones to make a decent XML editor. While BBEdit is a magical text editor, it is a text editor, and not intended to be a word processor replacement. It is missing some things that would be handy for escaping this dumb word processor paradigm.
A good word processor killing, semantic markup based, text editor might include stuff like an outline view, an output preview, "live" syntax checking, fill-in wizards for your various document types, etc. What is does not need - no, MUST NOT HAVE - is a WYSIWYG way to edit documents. That just gets you the sort of code that visual HTML editors puke out, and you might as well go back to Word.
This misses the point. We do not need a new WYSIWYG word processor that saves stuff in.xml instead of.doc. We need to stop using WYSIWYG editors for this sort of thing. Thinking in terms of presentation instead of structure is the problem.
It may not be appropriate for every environment, but certainly medium to large businesses would be better off "coding" their documents instead of, "painting" them.
Maybe I am missing something key here, but, why are businesses still using word processors? Wouldn't it make more sense and money to "code" business documents in a semantic language (SGML, XML, DocBook, whathaveya...), and then generate the final output with a filter?
It would make more sense. If you generate all of your documents in a semantic language, they are easy to sort, search and archive. Document management would be much simpler and more effective. No digging for text in binary documents, no need to read 10 versions each of 20 document formats. No need to chase new formats every year. Your marketing department can whip up the style-sheets for the 10 or 20 document types that people actually write (memos, reports, press releases, etc.) so they all look consistent. Documents from different OSs, coded by different editors would be 100% interoperable.
It would make more money. You wouldn't have to buy Word. You wouldn't have to buy Word again next year. You wouldn't have to train your employees to use Word, and then train them again for the next version. (You would have to train them once, to use DocBook, or whatever.) You wouldn't be stuck with one expensive operating system. Even if you used windows because you liked it, you wouldn't be STUCK with it.
Why are companies still wasting money on word processors?
More interesting than an 11MP camera that no one can afford was the bit at the end of that article about a "second new digital SLR known as the EOS 300V...at an astoundingly low $1000".
As far as I have seen, no one else offers reasonably priced digital SLRs that can use standard commodity camera accessories. I like my digital camera well enough, but this viewfinder, built-in-3X-zoom crap has got to go. It's cheap amateur snapshot quality technology. I would LOVE a digital camera that could use my pile of Cannon lenses, filters, flashes, cable release, etc...
I just got a cable modem after 2 years without a decent net connection, and one of the first things I did was snag a copy of Bolo, and look for a game:
http://bishop.mc.duke.edu/bolo/
Unfortunely, no one was playing...but I prolly stink at it now anyway.
Bolo Anecdote: The first time I heard about Netscape was during a little post-game chat between the players. One was from netscape.com (or was it still Mosaic Communications then?) and one from NCSA. A third party was dogging on the NCSA guy because his browser was about to get whooped by the newcomer.
Slashdot Mirror
This is not a "loophole in the GPL". It is exactly how the GPL, and similar OSS licenses are intended to work. If you don't want other people freely using, modifying, and even selling your software, then do not open source it.
Also, it seems rather rich that they are selling a product that depends on a number of other OSS projects (expat, gettext, gmake, libiconv, libtool) and complaining about people making money off their code.
- H
There is a lot of noise floating around the net about the trustworthiness of electronic voting. After the last election, i was getting about 5 links a day to stories about voting irregularities around the country. Some are dubious. Some are tinfoil-hat nutjobs. Some are very disturbing. Computer security experts tend to be very skeptical of electronic voting. A lot of them are demanding paper trails accompany e-votes. A lot of them demand that the the software that runs these machines should be open source, and available for peer review. I think all of that is reasonable, but still misses the point. Those measures can make elections harder to rig, but not impossible. Maybe still not even all THAT hard. Elections on paper ballots can be rigged too, after all.
In my opinion, the ONLY way elections can be trusted is by closing the loop, and allowing voters to verify their vote after the count. I would like to see a system where electronic voting machines issue receipts with a large, anonymous, random key. After the election, voters could consult the election results for their precinct, and verify that the vote matching their key in fact has their voting preferences in it.
The only major security risk I can think of in such a system would be issuing duplicate keys to duplicate voters. Say you and I voted for all of the same people. A compromised machine could issue us receipts with duplicate keys, and just record one vote. This is easily fixed. After the votes have been counted, I go to the GOP web site and look up my vote using my key. If it is recorded correctly, I click on the "confirm" button there. To be safe, I do this all again on the DNC web site. Later, when you check your vote, with your duplicate key, you see that someone else already confirmed it. You alert election officials to the problem.
I can not think of a way to rig such an election. Can you? Is this just naive? I would love to hear comments.
There is a lot of noise here about "RBLs are good" or "RBLs are bad" and it totally misses the point about MAPS. MAPs is the grandaddy RBL, and I used it myself back in the day, before they started charging for it. When Vixie was running it, sure he was a crazy bastard, and sure he would occasionally block for what were arguably net.political reasons, but it was professionally run. It was obvious how you got on, and there was an open, obvious process for getting off. Anyway, at some point they got sick of running MAPS (who could blame them) and sold it off.
MAPS is now completely broken. It is a janky half-assed operation, run by half-assed cluebies. It is no longer professionally run, in any sense. True story:
We see in our mail log that mail from us is being rejected by certain servers because it is in MAPS. Of course we jump on this. We move a lot of mail. We run an honest shop, and don't send spam. We don't want to be on any RBLs. And if there is any spam sneaking through our network, we want to stop on it.
At the new MAPS web site we can look up our listing (good!) and see that it has been listed with a lot of other IPs at our hosting facility. They have an example spam, but it is clearly not from us. Ok...
We find their delisting page. It reads something like, "If you want to be delisted, give us a call, or email us or y'know, something, and we'll see what we can do..." Ok, that is a paraphrase, but there are no rules posted, no automated submission, no automated retesting, just "give us a call." Huh?
We we dash off some emails, "why are we listed and how do we get delisted?" and the boss calls them on the phone. After a couple calls, and much haranguing, they say they have an email from our particular IP in one of their spam trap addresses. Well this worries me, is there spam getting through somewhere?
My boss convinced the guy at MAPS to send him a copy of the email from the spam trap. Obviously this sets off alarms for me. Divulging a message caught in a spam trap is crazy. A spammer could easily sneak tell-tales in there that would reveal the trap address. It is unprofessional and demonstrates a lack of understanding of what a spam trap is. But this was just the tip of the iceberg. These jokers would prove themselves even less professional shortly.
We get the message and they have "sanitized" the To address in the headers and body. Or they attempted to, anyway. In fact we use VERP on the many mailing lists that we manage, so the To address is encoded in the envelope-from. So if we send from me@here.com to you@there.com, the envelope-from is set to:
me+you=there.com@here.com
That way if we get a bounce or a complaint, we can quickly determine the real address, and skip trying to figure out any alias chains or forwarding out at the destination.
But anyway, there is the real To address, plain as day. So unprofessional. The email *did* come from our mail server. We sent it on behalf of a customer who's web site we host. They have a busy ecom site, and they occasionally send emails to their customers. It's commercial email to be sure, but hardly unsolicited. You can opt in or out when you buy stuff, or any time thereafter. But wait, what's this customer up to, I wonder? Have they snuck some questionable email addresses into their list?
No, the email address had actually been used to buy something(!!) from our customer in the past. Aahhh! What? Clearly MAPS' new owners have no idea what spam trap addresses are, or how to handle them. Oh, it gets better.
The boss whois-es the domain, gets the contact info, and picks up the phone. He gets ahold of the owner and asks him if he had use that email address in the past (yes!), if he'd made a purchase from our customer (yes!). Then this guy starts slagging on us, talking about spam like he's an expert, even mentions MAPS. Turns out, in fact, he owns MAPS.
Un-fucking-believable.
Anyway, we make a bunch more calls and d
It's just a shame that there isn't a large body of software available, free from restrictive licenses, so that thousands of programers could review and enhance, until it reached a point where it was dependable, and largely free of bugs. Companies could use these software componants to build systems that would start their service life already well tested.
A well managed software system CAN be more reliable than a hardware system. It can coordinate self-checks, manage redundant systems, fix small problems, and ask for help with big problems. It is a sorry state of affairs that we expect the opposite fom our software.
You *get* that Free Software has little to do with the price, right?
Why are you kids laboring under the delusion that the web server OS - as reported by Netcraft - has any bearing on what the mail server OS might have been?
They uh...needn't be the same machine.
If you'd like to see a little justice against these scammers, you must check out:
http://www.419fun.com/phillipepage1.htm
Warning: it's crap-your-pants funny
- H
Gee,
This is retarded. What is worse, that a geek blog picked up something this dumb, or a "real" news site? This idea is old, and long discredited.
The greeks started using the technique described, but not for many years after the Pyramids were built.
It is worth noting that there are pictures surviving from the period that show large teams of men, pulling big stone bocks or statues, on sledges. Maybe you can dream up some other way to do it, but if there's real evidence that they did it differently, you are just daydreaming.
No not the -whole- thing! Just after he's caught and tortured.
If you watch it enough times, you can almost pinpoint the moment his mind snaps! Or I could be wrong. Or it may be intentionally ambiguous.
- H
Did I suggest that employers were taking one's "right to credit" away? What ever that might mean...
You *are* loosing your rights. It has nothing to do with credit. See if you can figure out what it is on your own.
- H
There are certain things you CAN NOT contract to do. For instance, you can not sell yourself into slavery. So why are we willing (or for that matter, able) to piss away our other basic human rights for a job?
This is what 20 years of ubiquitous employee piss testing has done to the American sense of civil liberties.
This is what 20 years of ubiquitous employee piss testing has done to the American sense of civil liberties.
You don't have to have something to hide to refuse an unreasonable search.
Would be like a world without tigers. Safer, maybe, but less interesting.
Has anyone ever tried to create a real computer assisted curriculum? Or are schools just bolting computers on to the same old, badly broken system?
Imagine this scenario:
You come to school in the morning, and after show & tell you log in to your computer. It knows that you left off in your math lesson with, say, factoring polynomials, so that is where it picks up. Once you finish all of the lessons, it gives you a test. If you miss any questions, it reviews them. If the questions you missed fall into a particular category, it covers that section again, or better yet, covers that section using an alternate teaching approach. When you have it, you take a new test on that section. Repeat until you have it, or need to call in the teacher for 1 on 1 help.
Maybe you like math and you are getting pretty far ahead, so the learning system recommends that you work on some social studies. You slog through, say, state capitals, but let it know that you find that boring. So the system tries other social studies topics, maybe world religions or famous explorers, and when it finds something you like, it gives you the option of perusing a couple different lines of research. Once you achieve a certain proficiency in a subject, you can get some sort of fat reward for giving a presentation to the class on it.
Meanwhile, the school's server tabulates performance for each section, and notes that students are scoring worse than their usual on, say, the factoring polynomials section. That sends up a flag that that module needs to be improved.
What about teachers? Well they are still important as always. Group projects, art projects, hands on experiments, socially oriented activities, personal counseling, discipline and so on all need to be directed by a human.
But could we stop reinventing lesson plans? Couldn't we just get it right once, and then stick with that, making little changes as we find deficiencies? Could we stop teaching in herds, and leaving half the class behind, while boring the other half? Could we stop failing kids, and just work on the skills they need until they master them? Am I the only one that's thought of this, or is someone working on it?
- H
Yes, I think this is a reasonable start. You can suppliment it with mod_auth_mysql or mod_auth_pgsql to help tie things together as well. Still, it tends to be a lot of work.
Also, if you figure out the authentication and authorization, what about making web apps fit into the rest of the site? Not simply the "look" of things, but the navigational scheme, the general arangement of elements on your site that make things consistant and navigable.
It's an inordanent amount of work. Every try to fit someone else's forum app into your site? Oy veh. Faster to write your own.
Web apps are easy, cross-platform on the server (to an extent) and wonderfully cross platform on the client side. They have so much potential. But I think interoperability is the major failing right now.
- H
My intranet hosts a number of web applications for internal use. Netsaint is one of those, and it has been a fantastic asset for us.
Other handy web apps we love include Mantis (bug tracker), CVSWeb and Chora, phpMyAdmin, phpPgAdmin, SquirrelMail and so on. There are lots of great web apps out there these days that can provide web based access to some cool functionality.
One major hassle, though, is that every one of them handles authentication and authorization differently. Setting up one login, or hacking them together into some sort of common framework is a giant hassle. Do you have any thoughts on how to get web applications to work well together?
- H
And it STILL isn't enough, most of the time!
First, I didn't suggest BBEdit be anything more than a text editor. Go read that again.
Second....the point is that business document creators should not be screwing with style issues in the first place. It's a stupid time sink for business documents. Does Word even support kerning anyway? This is not applicable to ad layouts, or grammy's one-off recipe. I am talking about the millions of hours info-workers spend creating unique, one-off, un-indexable, hard to archive, binary format memos, and such.
A designer in the ad department creates a style-sheet, memo titles are 18 point Arial Black. You don't tweak it, you don't check it with 24pt Verdana maybe, you don't twiddle the kerning in InDesign. You just fill in the Another Stupid Memo! and print.
Is design dead? No, it's still appropriate to a lotta stuff. Should your secretary play designer all day? Your office manager? Your CFO? No, it's a waste. It's overpriced in time and materials.
- H
Separating content and layout is probably the most important point, but there are others:
- Interoperability of formats (forever)
- The ongoing costs of (re)buying word processors and (re)training people to use them.
- Searchable and Indexable meta-information.
It's funny you bring up BBEdit, because it is what has brought me to the conclusion that word processors are generally a bad idea. I haven't really created a Word document since college, and now when open Word, after years of coding, creating documents this way seems insane to me. Perhaps we can convince BareBones to make a decent XML editor. While BBEdit is a magical text editor, it is a text editor, and not intended to be a word processor replacement. It is missing some things that would be handy for escaping this dumb word processor paradigm.
A good word processor killing, semantic markup based, text editor might include stuff like an outline view, an output preview, "live" syntax checking, fill-in wizards for your various document types, etc. What is does not need - no, MUST NOT HAVE - is a WYSIWYG way to edit documents. That just gets you the sort of code that visual HTML editors puke out, and you might as well go back to Word.
This misses the point. We do not need a new WYSIWYG word processor that saves stuff in .xml instead of .doc. We need to stop using WYSIWYG editors for this sort of thing. Thinking in terms of presentation instead of structure is the problem.
It may not be appropriate for every environment, but certainly medium to large businesses would be better off "coding" their documents instead of, "painting" them.
Maybe I am missing something key here, but, why are businesses still using word processors? Wouldn't it make more sense and money to "code" business documents in a semantic language (SGML, XML, DocBook, whathaveya...), and then generate the final output with a filter?
It would make more sense. If you generate all of your documents in a semantic language, they are easy to sort, search and archive. Document management would be much simpler and more effective. No digging for text in binary documents, no need to read 10 versions each of 20 document formats. No need to chase new formats every year. Your marketing department can whip up the style-sheets for the 10 or 20 document types that people actually write (memos, reports, press releases, etc.) so they all look consistent. Documents from different OSs, coded by different editors would be 100% interoperable.
It would make more money. You wouldn't have to buy Word. You wouldn't have to buy Word again next year. You wouldn't have to train your employees to use Word, and then train them again for the next version. (You would have to train them once, to use DocBook, or whatever.) You wouldn't be stuck with one expensive operating system. Even if you used windows because you liked it, you wouldn't be STUCK with it.
Why are companies still wasting money on word processors?
More interesting than an 11MP camera that no one can afford was the bit at the end of that article about a "second new digital SLR known as the EOS 300V...at an astoundingly low $1000".
As far as I have seen, no one else offers reasonably priced digital SLRs that can use standard commodity camera accessories. I like my digital camera well enough, but this viewfinder, built-in-3X-zoom crap has got to go. It's cheap amateur snapshot quality technology. I would LOVE a digital camera that could use my pile of Cannon lenses, filters, flashes, cable release, etc...
Yeah, I spell for shit, and this still popped out at me. Would someone code a slashcode spell-checker, already?
Bolo *soo* rocked.
I just got a cable modem after 2 years without a decent net connection, and one of the first things I did was snag a copy of Bolo, and look for a game:
http://bishop.mc.duke.edu/bolo/
Unfortunely, no one was playing...but I prolly stink at it now anyway.
Bolo Anecdote: The first time I heard about Netscape was during a little post-game chat between the players. One was from netscape.com (or was it still Mosaic Communications then?) and one from NCSA. A third party was dogging on the NCSA guy because his browser was about to get whooped by the newcomer.
Ah, the nostalgia...
- H
- H
Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny, a True Communist State and you all arrive at a 4-way stop at the same time. Which one of you get's to go first? :)