It's localization and language problem, not a geolocation problem. Where you are or where they think you are has nothing to do with the problem. Quebec is officially bilingual English and French, so while you are correct in that the services like Yahoo! are wrong to serve you French ads, it's because they are ignoring your browser's language preference settings.
Many other countries and regions have more than one official language. It's pathetic to see the slow, steady evaporation of technical knowledge in the market. Ten years ago, anyone and everyone working with WWW services knew how to deal with user-specified language preferences and, where more than one language was required, used the HTTP content negotiation. It's very easy in Apache to support this HTTP function. For Lighttpd you need a lua script, but that too is easy. For Yahoo or Google, they have their own home grown HTTP servers, so have to file a bug report directly with them.
Wait until the eve of the super bowl. Secretly inform the proponents of the law in advance, and then on the eve of the super bowl: Call in congress for a debate and vote on the law by email with one hour's notice. You would be sure to have the majority.
This is what happened in Sweden. It wasn't the super bowl, but an important national soccer match. Soccer is the national sport in Sweden, just as football is in the US.
It's also gearing up for midsummer. In many ways, it's the largest and most important holiday of the year, if for no other reason than it is the epicenter of summer vacations. Nearly everyone, without exception winds down and does nothing serious starting a few weeks before and on until Autumn.
So many, if not most, are already gone for the holidays. Those that aren't are thinking about it and/or slacking. Those not in either of the preceding groups are watching the game. There's not a better date that could be chosen to avoid scrutiny and oversight. So much for democracy in Sweden. Next up, Finland, Denmark and Norway...
Sweden has one of the biggest watching Brothers in the world. We've been registered for hundreds of years - first by the church, then by the state, then by microsoft
I second this, only because outsiders are fairly immune to inner-office politics and squabbles, Which is usually why they are brought in.
so their recommendations are usually much more "pure" than from people already in the company that don't want to piss off certain people or don't want to anger others.
Wrong. Outsiders are an untouchable extension of the party or interest that called them in. They're more often than not used as a tool or weapon against opponents or to rent loyalty. As long as the outsider is fully dependent, they'll be loyal. So stocking a project or team with rented outsiders is a way of buying control.
Case in point: I've seen several occasions where teams spent a few months investigating and making detailed recommendations, only to be called on it and asked by those paying the bills to re-write from scratch and provide a 180-degree change in recommendations.
I've also seen occasions where the outsiders will play the different factions off against each other to generate more work for their firm: either the outsider is (wrongly) seen as neutral or the in-fighting uses too much time / mindshare to get real work done.
It doesn't, however, ensure that Qt remains compatible with the most current version of the GPL. That's something to be concerned about.
Good point. Nokia, on average, has a good record with open standards and, more recently, open source. However, that's only the average. Not all steps Nokia has taken lately have been ones going forwards.
Probably the single largest move that Nokia could make to assure the market that it is seriously committed to keeping Qt open would be to update the KDE Free Qt Foundation statement to specifically use GPLv3.
However, there is economy of scale and for the most part things go forward fastest with fewer forks. So it behooves us for a few vocal suits at Nokia to get treated for their apparent R-CIS before it gets worse and in case it is contagious. It can strike anybody, but suits seem more succeptible.
If Nokia screws up and stops releasing FOSS versions of Qt or otherwise messes with it, Qt's forcefully taken from them. The Foundation is there to ensure that Qt remains available. In a lot of ways, it would make more sense to do this now before Nokia starts using it as a hammer to pound DRM where it doesn't belong. Further, Nokia's competitors would be stupid to use it while Nokia controls it. Tools like Qt belong under an independent company or foundation. Jaaksi is just making that very clear.
What Jaaksi seems to be saying on behalf of his employer, Nokia, is that the company is unwilling to abide by the license (the GPL) under which their new business model is founded upon. That's not a way to appear clever. Though it's good of them to put the cards on the table so early after acquisition, it's still rather shameful of Nokia to try to bullshit us like that. Probably time to check the resume's of Nokia execs and dismiss any moles from Redmond.
I'm not planning on giving up on Qt anytime soon, but I do resent the increased level of alertness required by these probes.
I pine for the days when I used a mail reader called pine...
The new version is under the Apache License V2 and is called
Alpine. It was easier to start the new project with the new license with a name change. If you can get past any prejudices about text-based, menu-driven applications, it kicks butt.
The outage affected key standards sites covering the OOXML problem. The outage suddenly lifted hours after the OOXML vote.
The blockage was marketed as an attempt to break net neutrality. However, choosing a network hosting key information sites at a crucial period just prior to an important decision was a bit of cleverness.
Telia-Sonera could have easily routed around the outage, but chose not to. As a result, Telia-Sonera's customers (both business and private) were blocked by actions/inactions by Telia-Sonera from accessing sites which were hosted by or used DNS services on that other network.
we do know that they have the world's fifth most powerful computer, in competition mostly with nuclear physics labs.
"Customers" that will be able to place requests for searches include all authorities (all some 500 of them including Department of Transportation, Department of Agriculture, etc., but notably the police, secret service and customs)....
Interesting. So the PRNG flaws that get introduced every few years are, in effect, backdoors accessible to the FRA but probably out of reach of casual troublemakers.
Although that's the EU's position I don't think that you should take it as an endorsement of Open Source.
Oh, that one again? It's 2008 — time to re-tire that M$ talking point. I suppose that Ken Thompson's presentation from 24 years ago is also not an endorsement of Open Source? Re-read A5-0264/2001 and European Commission technology strategy They're quite clear and the 2001 resolution even pre-dates the main start of MS EU-level lobbying efforts.
Yes, but Telia-Sonera blocked many Open Standards sites (both pro- and neutral-) from their subscribers during the weeks leading up to the latest OOXML scandal at ISO. That was for all of Telia-Sonera, not just Sweden.
From what I gather there is a similar threat in Finland as well: the representatives of major and minor multinationals have been meeting with Finish legislators lately to work out laws granting private companies the authority to monitor *all* communications in any form. AFAIK more of their subversion will occur during coming weeks or months.
Welcome to your summer holidays. If this is surfacing now, what real nastiness is lurking for the deepest summer?
Without Microsoft the IT world would be a vastly different and better place.
There. Fixed that for you. Gates, via his company (now movement), have been running organized crime, pure and simple. He and his flunkies took a healthy, wealthy, competitive market that was good for everybody and crushed it with OEM agreements, giveaways and secret APIs. This is an established truth from the US trial statement of facts. Now we also have the EU's word on the audio/video vandalism from MS.
We saw productivity go up in the 80's because of prevalence of standalone computers. We saw productivity go up further in the 90's because of the prevalence of the Internet and the WWW. We've seen productivity plummet in the 00's because of the prevalence of Windows and it's payload of botnets, viruses, worms and general poor usability, incompatibilities and high maintenance. The clean up costs for the MS malware alone runs in the double digit billions per year, for just the U.S.
The damage caused by Osama bin Gates extends far beyond the IT sector. His move into politics just means more of the same, but on a larger scale.
Yes. Now that (effectively) no closed source player are left. Darwinian natural selection has left us the strongest, open source projects. Many precede MS attack on the Internet. Open source is now killing Microsoft. It's a one-two, knock-out. Even most of the yahoo bid was based on stock not cash, and even some of that which is actual cash looks like it would have to borrowed.
Further, there's no market for MS, not even public-sector corporate welfare. See the mandates:
So rather than listen to nerdy Bill, slobby Ballmer, or their media proxies whine, listen to others: go open source, open standards. You save work, you save time, you increase security and you recession-proof your company.
Bzzzt. Thanks for playing. That was in the early 80's
Since then they've moved to being an company which hires good marketing companies. Then a company which hires good lobbying firms. Then a full-blown political movement/sect.
Notice Ozzie's playing by the by the rules in the link above. No technical comparisons allowed, just FUD, disinformation, misinformation and name calling. That's so 1990's.
Also,.NET has really withered on the vine. Though you will always be able to find shops that use.NET, the general consensus that I've heard is that.NET is dying.
That's so so so not my experience in the market. I'd concur that it's dying on the vine. The 'increases' in demand I've seen have each been related to some pet project where some manager refuses to let go of the.NET pipe dream and still has money to burn. In contrast, Java works.
There's much more demand (as measured by people trying to hire me to use the appropriate technology) currently for my.NET skills than my Java skills. When they run out of money, they'll hire people Java skills, though probably ones with clean records instead.
In my home business, I'm down to ONE program that runs only on Windows (ebay Blackthorne). ONE. (Wine doesn't cut it)... and I find the Windows boxes need the most babysitting. Time killer = Money Wasted.
Out of curiosity have you tried asking for an OS X or Linux port of Blackthorne? If others have the same bottleneck for upgrading, it can be possible to show demand, or at worst pool resources and get WINE or Cedega to support it. Tools built with normal cross-platform languages like Java, C, C++ and so on can use cross-platform GUI toolkits like Qt and GTK+
Alternately, what is the one thing that Blackthorne does that similar tools don't? (Aside from you have it installed already and are presumably familiar with it.) Maybe there's a new tool or new version of an old tool that scratches that itch.
The summary is wrong about CSS. It is playback protection, not copy protection. Copies of DVDs can be made by dozens of tools without ever decrypting anything. DVDs are a standard format.
DeCSS is about playback.
So this is a 180-degree turn from the earlier court decisions. What are the next steps?
MS is a evil company, not like they can't code a TCP/IP stack. They didn't see TCP/IP and Internet coming though.
Given the quality the company's so-called products, it's rather apparent that they can't code, especially not a TCP/IP stack. There are numerous problems from the latest version.
W95 only shipped with TCP/IP over Bill's vociferous objection. Later he was still going on about the Internet being just a http://mcpmag.com/columns/article.asp?EditorialsID=443">passing fad. They've missed the boat with IPv6, but been able to compensate todate by encourging ill-informed articles that disparage or trivialize the technology and the security and networking problems it addresses.
A: No, because companies are already so deep with old.xls files and macros built for said files that they will still be unwilling to transition from Microsoft Office to StarOffice.
Actually StarOffice and OpenOffice have always had better support for legacy formats, including those legacy formats from MS. Now both have VBA support as mentioned in other posts here. And now that MS has dropped support from its old formats, it's not a question of if businesses are going to drop MS Office, but only a matter of when... unless they get the fishook called SharePoint in their gullet. If you have old MS documents, rely on those old MS documents and you can't keep old versions of MS Office or extend the 'rental period', then you have to switch suites to one that can read the old formats.
A further advantage of StarOffice/ OpenOffice is that macros can be written in python or javascript. That means you can have your macro programmers with a comp sci background. And you can have them participate in web development and other projects.
You are at the same time then less likely to hire MS boosters who will run their little MS anti-technology jihadz against you from inside your own office, work is so much easier without them around. You get programmers that can participate in more than one area.
So it kills two birds (or three) with one stone. Both javascript and python are used in web development and XML tools handle OpenOffice's main format, the OpenDocument Format, there is much less overhead in integrating document management and web apps and less need for disparate skill sets.
Win-win situation.
Further, in addition to all of the above advantages, you then gain a position where you can change platforms or maintenance contract at will.
Google bought Marratech, a company that's been specializing in videoconferencing for almost 10 years. But they don't seem to have any plans to do anything externally with it, so it's all lost in the stomach of the beast.
Send em to unemployment. Marratech was pretty crappy. Huge, slow, sluggish, with poor support for PDF and none for ODF. The audio and video was stored in some monstrously huge, proprietary format with no way to export except for the 'analog hole'. Further the support you paid for was money down the drain.
There is a need for a good multi-point video conferencing system. Marratech is not it.
There is a need for a FOSS multi-point video conferencing system. Marratech is not it.
There is a need for an open standards multi-point video conferencing system. Marratech is not it.
One of the best is pidgin, which runs a wide range of protocols. That's a step in the right direction and helps wean people off of MSN and into better services and more useful technologies.
However, from the article it looks like the problem is at the MS servers. So staying on MSN, even with a better client, is still helping feed money (via ads and such) into more anti-competitive behavior and barriers to interoperability.
What should also be mentions is that MSIE now gives 'security' warning messages when accessing Google's Gmail. No. I neither use nor condone use of MS in any way shape or form, but I do check up on those who claim they feel compelled to do so and use them to check periodically. Now that MS is going after Google, Gmail gets the errors. Now that MS is going after Youtube, it gets MS errors, too.
The courts don't won't can't keep up with all these illegal/unethical anti-competitive tactics. The only effective option is to just stop funding it. And that boils down to not using the products, formats, protocols or services tied to that company.
Slashdot Mirror
It's localization and language problem, not a geolocation problem. Where you are or where they think you are has nothing to do with the problem. Quebec is officially bilingual English and French, so while you are correct in that the services like Yahoo! are wrong to serve you French ads, it's because they are ignoring your browser's language preference settings.
Many other countries and regions have more than one official language. It's pathetic to see the slow, steady evaporation of technical knowledge in the market. Ten years ago, anyone and everyone working with WWW services knew how to deal with user-specified language preferences and, where more than one language was required, used the HTTP content negotiation. It's very easy in Apache to support this HTTP function. For Lighttpd you need a lua script, but that too is easy. For Yahoo or Google, they have their own home grown HTTP servers, so have to file a bug report directly with them.
...Wait until the eve of the super bowl. Secretly inform the proponents of the law in advance, and then on the eve of the super bowl: Call in congress for a debate and vote on the law by email with one hour's notice. You would be sure to have the majority.
This is what happened in Sweden. It wasn't the super bowl, but an important national soccer match. Soccer is the national sport in Sweden, just as football is in the US.
It's also gearing up for midsummer. In many ways, it's the largest and most important holiday of the year, if for no other reason than it is the epicenter of summer vacations. Nearly everyone, without exception winds down and does nothing serious starting a few weeks before and on until Autumn.
So many, if not most, are already gone for the holidays. Those that aren't are thinking about it and/or slacking. Those not in either of the preceding groups are watching the game. There's not a better date that could be chosen to avoid scrutiny and oversight. So much for democracy in Sweden. Next up, Finland, Denmark and Norway...
Sweden has one of the biggest watching Brothers in the world. We've been registered for hundreds of years - first by the church, then by the state, then by microsoft
There, fixed that for you.
Wrong. Outsiders are an untouchable extension of the party or interest that called them in. They're more often than not used as a tool or weapon against opponents or to rent loyalty. As long as the outsider is fully dependent, they'll be loyal. So stocking a project or team with rented outsiders is a way of buying control.
Case in point: I've seen several occasions where teams spent a few months investigating and making detailed recommendations, only to be called on it and asked by those paying the bills to re-write from scratch and provide a 180-degree change in recommendations.
I've also seen occasions where the outsiders will play the different factions off against each other to generate more work for their firm: either the outsider is (wrongly) seen as neutral or the in-fighting uses too much time / mindshare to get real work done.
It doesn't, however, ensure that Qt remains compatible with the most current version of the GPL. That's something to be concerned about.
Good point. Nokia, on average, has a good record with open standards and, more recently, open source. However, that's only the average. Not all steps Nokia has taken lately have been ones going forwards.
Probably the single largest move that Nokia could make to assure the market that it is seriously committed to keeping Qt open would be to update the KDE Free Qt Foundation statement to specifically use GPLv3.
Maybe some KDE developers can add their 2 c
... Presumably everyone already has the right to fork Qt.Everyone who wants to is explicitly granted that right.
However, there is economy of scale and for the most part things go forward fastest with fewer forks. So it behooves us for a few vocal suits at Nokia to get treated for their apparent R-CIS before it gets worse and in case it is contagious. It can strike anybody, but suits seem more succeptible.
Here it is: the KDE Free Qt Foundation.
If Nokia screws up and stops releasing FOSS versions of Qt or otherwise messes with it, Qt's forcefully taken from them. The Foundation is there to ensure that Qt remains available. In a lot of ways, it would make more sense to do this now before Nokia starts using it as a hammer to pound DRM where it doesn't belong. Further, Nokia's competitors would be stupid to use it while Nokia controls it. Tools like Qt belong under an independent company or foundation. Jaaksi is just making that very clear.
What Jaaksi seems to be saying on behalf of his employer, Nokia, is that the company is unwilling to abide by the license (the GPL) under which their new business model is founded upon. That's not a way to appear clever. Though it's good of them to put the cards on the table so early after acquisition, it's still rather shameful of Nokia to try to bullshit us like that. Probably time to check the resume's of Nokia execs and dismiss any moles from Redmond.
I'm not planning on giving up on Qt anytime soon, but I do resent the increased level of alertness required by these probes.
There are some nice graphics for the launch. Where can I get SVG versions for making my own fliers and posters? No. JPEG does not count.
Or else, where are some official A6, A4 or A3 sized posters?
The new version is under the Apache License V2 and is called Alpine. It was easier to start the new project with the new license with a name change. If you can get past any prejudices about text-based, menu-driven applications, it kicks butt.
The outage affected key standards sites covering the OOXML problem. The outage suddenly lifted hours after the OOXML vote.
The blockage was marketed as an attempt to break net neutrality. However, choosing a network hosting key information sites at a crucial period just prior to an important decision was a bit of cleverness.
Telia-Sonera could have easily routed around the outage, but chose not to. As a result, Telia-Sonera's customers (both business and private) were blocked by actions/inactions by Telia-Sonera from accessing sites which were hosted by or used DNS services on that other network.
- ...
- we do know that they have the world's fifth most powerful computer, in competition mostly with nuclear physics labs.
- "Customers" that will be able to place requests for searches include all authorities (all some 500 of them including Department of Transportation, Department of Agriculture, etc., but notably the police, secret service and customs)....
Interesting. So the PRNG flaws that get introduced every few years are, in effect, backdoors accessible to the FRA but probably out of reach of casual troublemakers.Oh, that one again? It's 2008 — time to re-tire that M$ talking point. I suppose that Ken Thompson's presentation from 24 years ago is also not an endorsement of Open Source? Re-read A5-0264/2001 and European Commission technology strategy They're quite clear and the 2001 resolution even pre-dates the main start of MS EU-level lobbying efforts.
If M$ wanted to play, it's executives could decide to release product code as open source, but the company hasn't. Further, it can't. M$ products just aren't engineered for security. In fact, M$ code is so bad that it threatens US national security. So, although ditching M$ products won't in and of itself make your site secure, it's a necessary first step.
It's about security and for that you need open source.
Read it again: Telia-Sonera's customers could not access those sites. Full Stop.
Yes, but Telia-Sonera blocked many Open Standards sites (both pro- and neutral-) from their subscribers during the weeks leading up to the latest OOXML scandal at ISO. That was for all of Telia-Sonera, not just Sweden.
From what I gather there is a similar threat in Finland as well: the representatives of major and minor multinationals have been meeting with Finish legislators lately to work out laws granting private companies the authority to monitor *all* communications in any form. AFAIK more of their subversion will occur during coming weeks or months.
Welcome to your summer holidays. If this is surfacing now, what real nastiness is lurking for the deepest summer?
There. Fixed that for you. Gates, via his company (now movement), have been running organized crime, pure and simple. He and his flunkies took a healthy, wealthy, competitive market that was good for everybody and crushed it with OEM agreements, giveaways and secret APIs. This is an established truth from the US trial statement of facts. Now we also have the EU's word on the audio/video vandalism from MS.
We saw productivity go up in the 80's because of prevalence of standalone computers. We saw productivity go up further in the 90's because of the prevalence of the Internet and the WWW. We've seen productivity plummet in the 00's because of the prevalence of Windows and it's payload of botnets, viruses, worms and general poor usability, incompatibilities and high maintenance. The clean up costs for the MS malware alone runs in the double digit billions per year, for just the U.S.
The damage caused by Osama bin Gates extends far beyond the IT sector. His move into politics just means more of the same, but on a larger scale.
... Open source is killing them.Yes. Now that (effectively) no closed source player are left. Darwinian natural selection has left us the strongest, open source projects. Many precede MS attack on the Internet. Open source is now killing Microsoft. It's a one-two, knock-out. Even most of the yahoo bid was based on stock not cash, and even some of that which is actual cash looks like it would have to borrowed.
Further, there's no market for MS, not even public-sector corporate welfare. See the mandates:
Source: A5-0264/2001
For all new European projects:
Source: European Commission technology strategy.
So rather than listen to nerdy Bill, slobby Ballmer, or their media proxies whine, listen to others: go open source, open standards. You save work, you save time, you increase security and you recession-proof your company.
Bzzzt. Thanks for playing. That was in the early 80's
Since then they've moved to being an company which hires good marketing companies. Then a company which hires good lobbying firms. Then a full-blown political movement/sect.
Notice Ozzie's playing by the by the rules in the link above. No technical comparisons allowed, just FUD, disinformation, misinformation and name calling. That's so 1990's.
Out of curiosity have you tried asking for an OS X or Linux port of Blackthorne? If others have the same bottleneck for upgrading, it can be possible to show demand, or at worst pool resources and get WINE or Cedega to support it. Tools built with normal cross-platform languages like Java, C, C++ and so on can use cross-platform GUI toolkits like Qt and GTK+
Alternately, what is the one thing that Blackthorne does that similar tools don't? (Aside from you have it installed already and are presumably familiar with it.) Maybe there's a new tool or new version of an old tool that scratches that itch.
The summary is wrong about CSS. It is playback protection, not copy protection. Copies of DVDs can be made by dozens of tools without ever decrypting anything. DVDs are a standard format.
DeCSS is about playback.
So this is a 180-degree turn from the earlier court decisions. What are the next steps?
Given the quality the company's so-called products, it's rather apparent that they can't code, especially not a TCP/IP stack. There are numerous problems from the latest version.
W95 only shipped with TCP/IP over Bill's vociferous objection. Later he was still going on about the Internet being just a http://mcpmag.com/columns/article.asp?EditorialsID=443">passing fad. They've missed the boat with IPv6, but been able to compensate todate by encourging ill-informed articles that disparage or trivialize the technology and the security and networking problems it addresses.
Actually StarOffice and OpenOffice have always had better support for legacy formats, including those legacy formats from MS. Now both have VBA support as mentioned in other posts here. And now that MS has dropped support from its old formats, it's not a question of if businesses are going to drop MS Office, but only a matter of when... unless they get the fishook called SharePoint in their gullet. If you have old MS documents, rely on those old MS documents and you can't keep old versions of MS Office or extend the 'rental period', then you have to switch suites to one that can read the old formats.
A further advantage of StarOffice/ OpenOffice is that macros can be written in python or javascript. That means you can have your macro programmers with a comp sci background. And you can have them participate in web development and other projects. You are at the same time then less likely to hire MS boosters who will run their little MS anti-technology jihadz against you from inside your own office, work is so much easier without them around. You get programmers that can participate in more than one area.
So it kills two birds (or three) with one stone. Both javascript and python are used in web development and XML tools handle OpenOffice's main format, the OpenDocument Format, there is much less overhead in integrating document management and web apps and less need for disparate skill sets. Win-win situation.
Further, in addition to all of the above advantages, you then gain a position where you can change platforms or maintenance contract at will.
There's no reason not to drop MS Office any more.Send em to unemployment. Marratech was pretty crappy. Huge, slow, sluggish, with poor support for PDF and none for ODF. The audio and video was stored in some monstrously huge, proprietary format with no way to export except for the 'analog hole'. Further the support you paid for was money down the drain.
There is a need for a good multi-point video conferencing system. Marratech is not it.
There is a need for a FOSS multi-point video conferencing system. Marratech is not it.
There is a need for an open standards multi-point video conferencing system. Marratech is not it.
... Use something else.One of the best is pidgin, which runs a wide range of protocols. That's a step in the right direction and helps wean people off of MSN and into better services and more useful technologies.
However, from the article it looks like the problem is at the MS servers. So staying on MSN, even with a better client, is still helping feed money (via ads and such) into more anti-competitive behavior and barriers to interoperability.
What should also be mentions is that MSIE now gives 'security' warning messages when accessing Google's Gmail. No. I neither use nor condone use of MS in any way shape or form, but I do check up on those who claim they feel compelled to do so and use them to check periodically. Now that MS is going after Google, Gmail gets the errors. Now that MS is going after Youtube, it gets MS errors, too.
The courts don't won't can't keep up with all these illegal/unethical anti-competitive tactics. The only effective option is to just stop funding it. And that boils down to not using the products, formats, protocols or services tied to that company.