I see how this greatly benefits IT departments, but it sounds like an early death knell for any Brazilian software companies
Not necessarily. It means that software development becomes a more distributed affair and software businesses stop being sales mediums but instead consultation and support mediums. It's to the greater benefit of software which no longer becomes an issue of propietry lock-in (closed formats etc) but an issue of support and usability and end benefits for the consumer - individual and business alike.
Yet more big advantages to iSCSI are the ability to keep the large, noisy, power-hungry, heat-generating, unsecure disks out of workstations in workers' offices and down the hall in a sound-proof, secure, air-conditioned, UPS'd server room with mirrored images, archival backups
Why is this moderated as Interesting? Is that double-barrelled humour from those moderating it? It should obviously be marked Funny.
Oh, didn't you know? We've had the ability to have servers in server rooms do all the storage for 20+ years. It's nothing new.
Heh, even Windows machines have been able to do it for the last 10 years since NT's inception.
Is it me or do we have some uninformed (or slightly-slow-today)/. readers moderating?
Even if it costs them twice as much to switch to free software they still come out ahead in the end because the money spent can be spent paying people who are far more likely than Microsoft to buy other Brazillian products and services.
Moreso than that, they are investing in the education and development of the IT staff, who are part of Brazil's evolving economy.
They will most likely be boosting the local IT development by educating people to use and to contribute to the free software projects that benefit them. In the long run they will be saving millions of US dollars which can be better spent on Brazil. From a software perspective, the only money they'll be spending will be an investment on their staff and software that they have control over.
All the high TCO crap that comes out of bogus reports (slightly trollish, but true) has been seen through by the Brazilian politicians, who see this as an opportunity to invest Government money in Brazillian people and hence keep it in Brazil. No more upgrade fees. No more expensive support contracts but instead real computer admins and programmers on site who are part of Brazil's evolving economy.
Most of us here have long known the realities of TCO and Microsoft. The only big cost with free software is in retraining staff. And retraining can be done for free - give a hungry man a can of food and he'll find a way to open it.
I guess with all the economic trouble in South America of late, governments such as that of Brazil are being forced to recognise that reality. Microsoft can probably no longer buy their way into Government contracts with 'discounts' and whatever other tactics they might use.
When you're poor you gotta stop paying for convenience and doing things for yourself. Why have an automatic dishwasher when you can wash your dishes by hand.
On the subject of liability, I wonder why Microsoft is never held liabel for the billions of dollars that these incidents cost the world's economies. A little forethought this would never have happened.
Imagine if Ford were to sell a car with a fundamental problem. One that potentially cost lives. They did and they had to recall it.
Now these virus epidemics probably bring down some rather critical computers and potentially cost lives. (Yeah, yeah, mission critical machines should be kept uber patched...)
It won't come from any one politician......but one great man. And that man is Arnold Schwarzennegar.
*wipes tear from eye* I wish I was one of the lucky few who live in California and get to be a part of this great day, the day Arnie first got into office.
I wish I could say, and proudly say it I would, "I voted Schwarzennegar!"
Why don't we have GnuCash selling licenses to those who actually need and are willing to pay for it? This way the company can hire more people if the project turns out to be interesting and needed by many people.
1) GNUcash is not a company and 2) er... it's not a company.
Ok, I haven't slept for 24 hours. That's partly the reason I missed the 'tongue-in-cheek'iness of the developer comment and the reason my language skills are diving into the realms of Engrish.
I only quoted the guy, there was no intention to start a flame war.
It wasn't obvious that it was tongue-in-cheek. A smiley... that could mean a hundred different things.
Perhaps the developer who made the comment should have been a little more careful about making comments that could be construed as flames on the tone-deaf medium such as the internet.
Hell, it's not like I could hear the sarcasm in his voice.
The parent is an absolute troll... but ok, I'll bite.
7) The half assed way of changing screen resolutions. The Xrandr hack is useless if you want to change colour depth.
This is an XFree86 issue, no?
5) Nautilus, half asssed file management with no "real" features. Guess whos using konqueror.
Have you bothered to actually use Nautilus? If anything, it has more features than Konqueror. It's incredibly pluggable, with hundreds of enhancement pluggins. It's now fairly efficient and usable even on my lowly 700mhz celeron.
Personally, I was quite impressed by Nautilus of late. I guess you last used one of the 1.0.x series of Nautilus.
4) Its word processor (Abi word office) has no table support
You obviously haven't used AbiWord 1.99.3 (2.0 beta3). All recent work (the last year or so) on AbiWord has gone into version 2 - which is due to be released at the end of August. AbiWord 2 has many amazing features, tables included. Other such cool features are the Open Text Summariser and Enchant. Check them both out on the AbiWord homepage.
3) The clock, in its asswipe MM/DD format (again W!=USA)
You can change that, you're trolling with that one.
2) The file dialog (no further comment)
Being fixed in Gtk 2.4. Possibly your only valid complaint.
1) HAVOC PENNINGTON
The consensus among the majority of Gnome users and developers are that the HIG is a great thing which you obviously don't understand. It's not 'remove features', it's 'be sensible about them'.
Havoc is a dedicated and decent member of the Gnome community and Gnome - and open source in general - would be much worse off without him.
This is a tried and true method in the corporate community: if there is strong competition in the market place, you can always sponsor a ttuday to call it "flawed". That way, you never have to pay attention to the flaws in your own software that you refuse to believe.
I'm sure this study, if impartial, would be by-enlarge accepted and address the flaws highlighted by said study.
But how come the _majority_ of "studies" that debunk Microsoft's competitors are usually sponsored by the software giant?
As sarcastic as the parent is, there is a point. It's not new, nor is it useful otherwise it would have been adopted by now.
I've found a moderate use of the scroll wheel on my mouse to give me severe aching in those particular fingers. I've used mice and keyboards fairly heavily for years and suffered very little RSI. Yet as shortly after adopting a scroll wheel to scroll rather than using scroll bars - and more out of laziness than practicality since a scroll bar gives you more control over the scroll - I've found the pain so bad in my right index and middle fingers (I switched to my middle finger after it became too painful using my index finger) I've had to stop using the scroll wheel altogether.
With the world's dominant technology force behind it, this kind of trackball-on-mouse will probably become ubiquitos. But probably not widely used.
I suspect I'm not unique with my aversion to using the scroll wheel, given the speed with which RSI set in on my fingers. (And I'm a lad, for those of you with dirty minds - so, no, 'that' is not the cause!)
Back to the nice scroll bars for me - which I now prefer for usability reasons since I can easily control the scrolling of a page rather than the guess work that came with using a scroll wheel.
The HavenCo employees all went to and from the platfom through Heathrow airport. They could have been arrested by the UK authorities any time they wanted to. Lackey was working in the UK without a work permit.
You're giving the our government way too much credit by implying a lack of action due to apathy.
The reality is that they probably haven't got a clue who Robert Lackey is. He flashed his US passport at customs. The only record of who he is and how long he's been here will be in his passport.
I think much of British prosperity comes down to the incompetence of our politicians allowing business to go on relatively unencumbered.
I mean, really, where else is it written in law that there's fine of a loaf of bread if you throw your faeces out of your balcony window and hit a passer-by in the street.
An analogy, if you like. If you were to own a car showroom and buying cars from a certain source then reselling those cars, and it turns out those cars are not decent and actually have stolen parts in them.
Who is liable? You for not properly checking the cars as you acquire them. If a consumer has to return their car in order to have the stolen parts removed, you have to handle the expense.
If SCO distributed Linux code as GPL, and it indeed contained _copied_ code from their own products, it is their fault for not auditing Linux originally. Hell, it's not like they couldn't look at the source code. They have _no_ excuse for not doing so and reporting whatever findings they had then.
It's called the right of the consumer. The reseller assumes responsibility for the goods they sell. Just as I can return a faulty item to a store on the premise that it's _their_ fault for selling me defective goods, SCO can not legally claim that unwittingly distributing code as GPL gives them a right to take it back. It's their fault for not being thorough.
It also has something innovative I've yet to find in another browser: the homepage - 'myprofile:' - which is basically a html version of your bookmarks. It's ingenius!
You have all your bookmarks well laid out and all visible at once. Since it's your home page, you just pop up a new tab and then you can find and load your intended bookmarks without the fuss of navigating through a menu.
If only all areas of the OSS world were endowed with such excellent choices - there's many very decent browsers out there.
He wasn't disagreeing that people want things incompatable with the law, he was saying that just because you want something illegal or not legally recognised, doesn't mean you should take it.
If everybody who shared files was to get together in an (even slightly) organised manner, you could force the relevant laws to be seriously reconsidered.
But people like convenience; the convenience to share files illegally rather than the inconvenience of formally confronting the law. It seems the majority of 'file traders' only actually care that the law may not be in the public interest when they are brought to 'justice' for breaching that very law. But getting it changed is too much of an effort, so they share and do nothing.
You might complain that 'big business' controls the law. The reality is that 'big business' just cares more, because of the potential loss of money and loss of control of sales (who controls the internet?), to heavily involve themselves.
If the millions of file traders banded together, they would be a force to be reckoned with. However most don't care enough to do something constructive. Only the minority care and most of those because they were targeted by the law.
The law can only change if you address it's defficiencies. The true tragedy here is the apathetic public nature; most people only care about what lands on their doorsteps.
Half of me thinks, "they deserve it" when people complain, "this is not constitutional" as they face severe punishment for piracy. "The law is wrong" is no excuse when you do nothing to improve it - move to somewhere lawless if that's the way you feel.
Just to elaborate, I knew somebody who advocated the 'hot piss' diet.
The basic premise is to keep a glass of water by you at all times, effectively drinking constantly.
The constant drinking of water stops you feeling hungry and prevents you from snacking (major cause of weight gain).
It also means you aren't feeling empty come dinner time, so you eat smaller meals - 5 small meals a day is better for your metabolism than 3 big ones.
Finally (the answer to the 'hot piss') all that water that you consume goes in cool(ish) and comes out at body temperature. That's right, energy loss... you're heating the water and pissing it out, burning calories in order to maintain your body temperature.
The shakey science sounds right, but the proof was in the pudding - the guy lost 2 stone in a month!
Then he quit it and put that 2 stone back on in the following 2 months, just going to show that no diet is a decent substitute for regular exercise.
Yeah, I can't believe my post didn't get modded up. I guess that shows how many Slashdot readers watch the news on TV. It was quite amazing watching Berlusconi make the comment in Italian, then listening to the translator rather uncomfortably repeat it in English. The German MEP in question even repeated it saying, "if I undestand correctly..." so an accidental insult would have been forgotten.
However, this could split the Europe Union and undo a decade of diplomacy.
Slashdot Mirror
I see how this greatly benefits IT departments, but it sounds like an early death knell for any Brazilian software companies
Not necessarily. It means that software development becomes a more distributed affair and software businesses stop being sales mediums but instead consultation and support mediums. It's to the greater benefit of software which no longer becomes an issue of propietry lock-in (closed formats etc) but an issue of support and usability and end benefits for the consumer - individual and business alike.
"Shoot 'em Up Games"? What are they?
I'm new to the gaming... I thought there was only 'games' and that they were all the same. A bit like wallpaper really!
(I once heard the term 'FPS' but somebody explained to me it was 'Frames Per Second' simply used out of context.)
No wonder people still play sport!
Yet more big advantages to iSCSI are the ability to keep the large, noisy, power-hungry, heat-generating, unsecure disks out of workstations in workers' offices and down the hall in a sound-proof, secure, air-conditioned, UPS'd server room with mirrored images, archival backups
/. readers moderating?
Why is this moderated as Interesting? Is that double-barrelled humour from those moderating it? It should obviously be marked Funny.
Oh, didn't you know? We've had the ability to have servers in server rooms do all the storage for 20+ years. It's nothing new.
Heh, even Windows machines have been able to do it for the last 10 years since NT's inception.
Is it me or do we have some uninformed (or slightly-slow-today)
Even if it costs them twice as much to switch to free software they still come out ahead in the end because the money spent can be spent paying people who are far more likely than Microsoft to buy other Brazillian products and services.
Moreso than that, they are investing in the education and development of the IT staff, who are part of Brazil's evolving economy.
They will most likely be boosting the local IT development by educating people to use and to contribute to the free software projects that benefit them. In the long run they will be saving millions of US dollars which can be better spent on Brazil. From a software perspective, the only money they'll be spending will be an investment on their staff and software that they have control over.
All the high TCO crap that comes out of bogus reports (slightly trollish, but true) has been seen through by the Brazilian politicians, who see this as an opportunity to invest Government money in Brazillian people and hence keep it in Brazil. No more upgrade fees. No more expensive support contracts but instead real computer admins and programmers on site who are part of Brazil's evolving economy.
Most of us here have long known the realities of TCO and Microsoft. The only big cost with free software is in retraining staff. And retraining can be done for free - give a hungry man a can of food and he'll find a way to open it.
I guess with all the economic trouble in South America of late, governments such as that of Brazil are being forced to recognise that reality. Microsoft can probably no longer buy their way into Government contracts with 'discounts' and whatever other tactics they might use.
When you're poor you gotta stop paying for convenience and doing things for yourself. Why have an automatic dishwasher when you can wash your dishes by hand.
On the subject of liability, I wonder why Microsoft is never held liabel for the billions of dollars that these incidents cost the world's economies. A little forethought this would never have happened.
Imagine if Ford were to sell a car with a fundamental problem. One that potentially cost lives. They did and they had to recall it.
Now these virus epidemics probably bring down some rather critical computers and potentially cost lives. (Yeah, yeah, mission critical machines should be kept uber patched...)
Microsoft really comes across as untouchable.
"They hope to reduce the risk to XFree86 of incorporating new drivers and features" ????
Idea dislexia? Are they really trying prevent new drivers and features?
Heh, if that were the case, I suppose they could stop at their name change and say they're done:)
The only one with dyslexia here is you.
"to reduce the risk"... let's put it in baby english for you... "to make it easier"...
Rewritten: "They hope to make it easier for XFree86 to incorporate new drivers and features"
You quote something reasonable and pretend it's something else. That's not even trolling, that's just plain stupid.
It won't come from any one politician... ...but one great man. And that man is Arnold Schwarzennegar.
*wipes tear from eye* I wish I was one of the lucky few who live in California and get to be a part of this great day, the day Arnie first got into office.
I wish I could say, and proudly say it I would, "I voted Schwarzennegar!"
Why don't we have GnuCash selling licenses to those who actually need and are willing to pay for it? This way the company can hire more people if the project turns out to be interesting and needed by many people.
1) GNUcash is not a company and
2) er... it's not a company.
the tone-deaf medium such as the internet.
Ok, I haven't slept for 24 hours. That's partly the reason I missed the 'tongue-in-cheek'iness of the developer comment and the reason my language skills are diving into the realms of Engrish.
I only quoted the guy, there was no intention to start a flame war.
It wasn't obvious that it was tongue-in-cheek. A smiley... that could mean a hundred different things.
Perhaps the developer who made the comment should have been a little more careful about making comments that could be construed as flames on the tone-deaf medium such as the internet.
Hell, it's not like I could hear the sarcasm in his voice.
The parent is an absolute troll... but ok, I'll bite.
7) The half assed way of changing screen resolutions. The Xrandr hack is useless if you want to change colour depth.
This is an XFree86 issue, no?
5) Nautilus, half asssed file management with no "real" features. Guess whos using konqueror.
Have you bothered to actually use Nautilus? If anything, it has more features than Konqueror. It's incredibly pluggable, with hundreds of enhancement pluggins. It's now fairly efficient and usable even on my lowly 700mhz celeron.
Personally, I was quite impressed by Nautilus of late. I guess you last used one of the 1.0.x series of Nautilus.
4) Its word processor (Abi word office) has no table support
You obviously haven't used AbiWord 1.99.3 (2.0 beta3). All recent work (the last year or so) on AbiWord has gone into version 2 - which is due to be released at the end of August. AbiWord 2 has many amazing features, tables included. Other such cool features are the Open Text Summariser and Enchant. Check them both out on the AbiWord homepage.
3) The clock, in its asswipe MM/DD format (again W!=USA)
You can change that, you're trolling with that one.
2) The file dialog (no further comment)
Being fixed in Gtk 2.4. Possibly your only valid complaint.
1) HAVOC PENNINGTON
The consensus among the majority of Gnome users and developers are that the HIG is a great thing which you obviously don't understand. It's not 'remove features', it's 'be sensible about them'.
Havoc is a dedicated and decent member of the Gnome community and Gnome - and open source in general - would be much worse off without him.
This is a tried and true method in the corporate community: if there is strong competition in the market place, you can always sponsor a ttuday to call it "flawed". That way, you never have to pay attention to the flaws in your own software that you refuse to believe.
I'm sure this study, if impartial, would be by-enlarge accepted and address the flaws highlighted by said study.
But how come the _majority_ of "studies" that debunk Microsoft's competitors are usually sponsored by the software giant?
As sarcastic as the parent is, there is a point. It's not new, nor is it useful otherwise it would have been adopted by now.
I've found a moderate use of the scroll wheel on my mouse to give me severe aching in those particular fingers. I've used mice and keyboards fairly heavily for years and suffered very little RSI. Yet as shortly after adopting a scroll wheel to scroll rather than using scroll bars - and more out of laziness than practicality since a scroll bar gives you more control over the scroll - I've found the pain so bad in my right index and middle fingers (I switched to my middle finger after it became too painful using my index finger) I've had to stop using the scroll wheel altogether.
With the world's dominant technology force behind it, this kind of trackball-on-mouse will probably become ubiquitos. But probably not widely used.
I suspect I'm not unique with my aversion to using the scroll wheel, given the speed with which RSI set in on my fingers. (And I'm a lad, for those of you with dirty minds - so, no, 'that' is not the cause!)
Back to the nice scroll bars for me - which I now prefer for usability reasons since I can easily control the scrolling of a page rather than the guess work that came with using a scroll wheel.
The HavenCo employees all went to and from the platfom through Heathrow airport. They could have been arrested by the UK authorities any time they wanted to. Lackey was working in the UK without a work permit.
You're giving the our government way too much credit by implying a lack of action due to apathy.
The reality is that they probably haven't got a clue who Robert Lackey is. He flashed his US passport at customs. The only record of who he is and how long he's been here will be in his passport.
I think much of British prosperity comes down to the incompetence of our politicians allowing business to go on relatively unencumbered.
I mean, really, where else is it written in law that there's fine of a loaf of bread if you throw your faeces out of your balcony window and hit a passer-by in the street.
It's not even that.
An analogy, if you like. If you were to own a car showroom and buying cars from a certain source then reselling those cars, and it turns out those cars are not decent and actually have stolen parts in them.
Who is liable? You for not properly checking the cars as you acquire them. If a consumer has to return their car in order to have the stolen parts removed, you have to handle the expense.
If SCO distributed Linux code as GPL, and it indeed contained _copied_ code from their own products, it is their fault for not auditing Linux originally. Hell, it's not like they couldn't look at the source code. They have _no_ excuse for not doing so and reporting whatever findings they had then.
It's called the right of the consumer. The reseller assumes responsibility for the goods they sell. Just as I can return a faulty item to a store on the premise that it's _their_ fault for selling me defective goods, SCO can not legally claim that unwittingly distributing code as GPL gives them a right to take it back. It's their fault for not being thorough.
I think the parent's parent should rephrase:
For the Bush administration, it's backhanders and business as usual, despite the best efforts of those lower down in the pecking order.
Investigatories: "We'll persecute MCI unless you make them let us in on the action."
Bush Adm: "No way, we're making a packet regardless AND you just indighted yourself for blackmail and attempted fraud. Mess with the best..."
Investigatories: "Damn. Was worth a try."
I second this, Galeon is an excellent browser.
It also has something innovative I've yet to find in another browser: the homepage - 'myprofile:' - which is basically a html version of your bookmarks. It's ingenius!
You have all your bookmarks well laid out and all visible at once. Since it's your home page, you just pop up a new tab and then you can find and load your intended bookmarks without the fuss of navigating through a menu.
If only all areas of the OSS world were endowed with such excellent choices - there's many very decent browsers out there.
once again the open source community releases an exchange killer, and once again it is missing the most important component...
native integration with outlook.
What is it with these people?
"Either I'm having it for free or I'll pay lots of money to Microsoft for Exchange."
What's wrong with the middle ground? The various connector's you can buy are not expensive. Not in comparison to further Exchange licensing.
If you're so bothered about things being free, remove that OS that runs Outlook, and run one that has a free alternative - Evolution !
Expecting free connectors to propietry apps smacks of hypocracy.
In all seriousness (in relation to the above comments) how does Kolab actually perform?
How well are it's various features implemented?
He wasn't disagreeing that people want things incompatable with the law, he was saying that just because you want something illegal or not legally recognised, doesn't mean you should take it.
If everybody who shared files was to get together in an (even slightly) organised manner, you could force the relevant laws to be seriously reconsidered.
But people like convenience; the convenience to share files illegally rather than the inconvenience of formally confronting the law. It seems the majority of 'file traders' only actually care that the law may not be in the public interest when they are brought to 'justice' for breaching that very law. But getting it changed is too much of an effort, so they share and do nothing.
You might complain that 'big business' controls the law. The reality is that 'big business' just cares more, because of the potential loss of money and loss of control of sales (who controls the internet?), to heavily involve themselves.
If the millions of file traders banded together, they would be a force to be reckoned with. However most don't care enough to do something constructive. Only the minority care and most of those because they were targeted by the law.
The law can only change if you address it's defficiencies. The true tragedy here is the apathetic public nature; most people only care about what lands on their doorsteps.
Half of me thinks, "they deserve it" when people complain, "this is not constitutional" as they face severe punishment for piracy. "The law is wrong" is no excuse when you do nothing to improve it - move to somewhere lawless if that's the way you feel.
Why do that when there is a perfectly good open source flight simulator available in the guise of FlightGear?
If these people contributed that passionately to FlightGear then it would be awesome.
Just to elaborate, I knew somebody who advocated the 'hot piss' diet.
The basic premise is to keep a glass of water by you at all times, effectively drinking constantly.
The constant drinking of water stops you feeling hungry and prevents you from snacking (major cause of weight gain).
It also means you aren't feeling empty come dinner time, so you eat smaller meals - 5 small meals a day is better for your metabolism than 3 big ones.
Finally (the answer to the 'hot piss') all that water that you consume goes in cool(ish) and comes out at body temperature. That's right, energy loss... you're heating the water and pissing it out, burning calories in order to maintain your body temperature.
The shakey science sounds right, but the proof was in the pudding - the guy lost 2 stone in a month!
Then he quit it and put that 2 stone back on in the following 2 months, just going to show that no diet is a decent substitute for regular exercise.
192 pages!? Somebody needs to introduce you to LaTeX.
Right tool for the right job, yadda yadda.
I mean, yeah, look at all those other operating systems that are shipped with so many insecurities out of the box.
The number of vulnerabilities that come with a preinstalled Microsoftized machine is horrendous.
At least us [Linux|*BSD|Mac] users aren't forced to install hacker gateways such as IE and Outlook (Express inc.).
Yeah, I can't believe my post didn't get modded up. I guess that shows how many Slashdot readers watch the news on TV. It was quite amazing watching Berlusconi make the comment in Italian, then listening to the translator rather uncomfortably repeat it in English. The German MEP in question even repeated it saying, "if I undestand correctly..." so an accidental insult would have been forgotten.
However, this could split the Europe Union and undo a decade of diplomacy.