Apparently Cornell doesn't realize C#/.Net is just Microsoft's implementation of a p-machine and framework, the same as Java.
What makes you think that realising that stands in the way of it becoming more popular?
How about the fact that the few developers that poked at it for a while are now abandoning.Net in droves ? Cornell's opinions are just that, opinions. And except in certain alternate universes data and facts tend to outweigh opinions.
From the link above:
Java now holds the top spot, with 45% of the polled developers saying they used Java during some part of the last six months. C/C++, meanwhile, was used by 40% of the coders,...
Seems to me like a pretty clear admission that the sample size is too small to be reliable. He took the data he had available, analyzed it, and presented the results while noting the deficiencies in the method. Doesn't sound much like fraud to me. That's just grade school reading by the way...
So in other words, he knew from the beginning that he was spewing out bullshit. The article never should have gotten past the editors. One can argue back and forth whether the journalist should be disciplined, I'd argue for it and for an investigation of possible conflict of interest, but there's no way the editors should have let the article through as it stood. They should have been canned.
... and give your workers all the money, reserving none of it for return on investment, equipment replacement, taxes, energy, buildings, marketing, etc.
We'll all be pleased to hear how that works out for you.
Not necessary. We can extrapolate from existing businesses where they give your executives all the money, reserving none of it for return on investment, equipment replacement, taxes, energy, buildings, marketing, etc.
Corporate bonuses need to be kept in escrow for two or three years just to be sure they are warranted. Having to plan more than 2 months into the future would likely force executives to start working for the best interests of the companies rather than their individual wallets.
Micro$oft hires (or tries to hire) as many top PhD, visionaries, mangers, etc. as they can for a very specific reason. To take them off the market and keep the competition from getting them....
Sort of the same strategy used against Borland or in Washington DC with lobbyists. Against the former, MS hired up Borland's better developers and sent them out on holiday. Against the latter, the lobbyists were put on retainer to keep them out of circulation. It's interesting how the core activities have shifted over time and are now starting to approach sum cult-like characteristics
1970's - software company
1980's - operating system company (inherits IBM monopoly)
... if there's a table it doesn't format right, the fonts are all screwed up and the list goes on....
Yes, I have both experienced first hand and observed it with many others those problems in MS Office. Odds of a perfect transfer are very high if you have the exact same hardware and same MS Office versions and operating system versions, but not close enough to 100%.
The probability goes way down between different versions of MS Office, or if you have radically different setups or configurations. It's so much so that the ability to properly render the old MS formats is one of the more popular advantages of OpenOffice.org. It does a very good job with the WordPerfect formats, but the real life saver is the ability to recover the files that MS Office corrupts. Having OpenOffice.org somewhere at work generally means that the corrupted document can be recovered.
As for macros, I haven't seen anyone use them in office documents years and years, probably pushing 12 years. However, they're there in OpenOffice.org and you're not limited to using VB, you have a choice including Python which you are probably already using in your work.
Yes like TCP/IP, ANSI/Unicode, HTML, CSS. You know those obsolete standards that nobody uses anymore.:P
Funny, MS does have difficulty with those standards and still implements them in varying degrees of brokeness. Look also at Kerberos and LDAP. Even HTTP is not quite right with MS. Not surprisingly the errors have been pointed out for years, but remain unfixed, and perhaps not so coincidentally hinder interoperability with competing products.
MS may well be funding a small PR campaign by throwing a few dollars towards an external project to create a plug-in to compete with the OpenDocument Foundation's plug-in which is being tested by governments right now. However, even just looking at the implementations of earlier standards not related to MS cash cow, MS Office, casts doubts about how well MS will let OpenDocument get implemented in MS Office.
... or your wife brings home a file that won't open correctly...
Which points out why so many have pointed out the need for document file formats for office software, such as the OpenDocument Format.
However, the specific scenario cited there, that of not being able to open a file, is more likely to happen using the officially annointed MS Office variants rather than more flexible tools like Koffice or OpenOffice.org. Why? Two reasons:
1) Even though the MS Office file formats are undocumented, despite court orders to do so, progress has been made in reverse engineering those format. It's to the point that you have a better chance of opening an old MS Office file with OpenOffice.org or Koffice than with MS Office. Also, it's becoming standard practice, even in MS only shops, to keep a copy of OpenOffice.org around to recover files when MS Office corrupts them and can't open them any more.
2) MS has used and still introduces minor incompatibilities into its undocumented file formats in order to leverage new sales. Just around 70% of MS Office sales come as the result of OEMs, which means that about 2/3 of new machines start spewing documents unreadable by everyone else. In the past, MS has been able to achieve a critical mass with the new formats. However, the latest round hasn't gotten more than 10% - 15% which is not enough, so the situation looks to be improving.
Actually, IIRC there were some hardware hacks that would give you mixed case. On some of the earlier models you even had to do some scraping and soldering to get one of the square brackets, [ or ] if forget which.
One of the nice things about those Apple IIs and Apple II+'s was that they came with circuit diagrams so that you could add external controllers or make your own peripheral cards or devices. It also came not only with detailed operating system documentation and BASIC programming instructions, but also system documentation and the 6502 instruction set. As a result it was even possible to change some of the system. I rewrote part of the monitor and had a friend burn it to eprom.
Kids can't really do that with hardware anymore, but it is still possible with software and systems -- provided they are using one of the open source or Free Software options. Those that are curious can dig as deep as they want and learn from the code and documentation as much as they can or want to.
Does anyon know if there's any such thing as a "corporate petition" that I could pesuade my company to join?
There was a petition, but it's largely over and the result of MS at least giving lip service to OpenDocument support has been achieved. It remains to be seen what really happens with the third party plug-ins for MS Office, which is what the support amounts to it may be unsupport. Though the MS sponsored plug-in is the only one that makes the news, the one that has actually entered testing is the OpenDocument Foundation's ODF Plugin for MS Office.
As far as petitions go, about the closest thing right now would be for your business to sign onto the OpenDocument Alliance.
So even though for the usage scenarios you are describing, it makes little difference whether it's OpenDocument or the Microsoft "Open" XML, this does not make them the same. They are not.
Actually the scenario described, parsing a document to extract data and insert into a database, is much more straight forward in OpenDocument Format (ODF) than in MS Office Open XML (MOOX). Take a look at the specs, even a quick look. ODF is much more oriented to structure, with straight forward labels and makes better re-use of existing standards. The MOOX spec is rather convoluted and focuses heavily on formatting and layout rather than stucture. There is a good Comparison of ODF v MOOX which goes into the details.
Maybe MS is somehow is benefiting from the endless cycles of MSIE-based spyware, viruses, and general security problems. If not, then it (and we) would be much better off if MS should drop MSIE completely. Where does MS come out ahead financially? MSIE is probably the largest single public relations problem as well as one of largest security and productivity problems that MS produces these days.
The Netscape/DOJ v MS has been over for years. MSIE wastes our time, it wastes MS time. There's simply no need for anyone, even MS, to be wasting resources with MSIE. The public certainly has no reason to let MS foist on them such low quality security hole masquerading as a useful application. Drop MSIE or let users uninstall it completely.
Firefox and Opera are what people are using anyway. Go with the flow and invest the resources that would have gone into trying to keep life in MSIE go somewhere they'll actually have a chance of doing good.
Joe and Jane Paycheck live in a relatively obscure hubspace in the The Microsoft Christian States Of America. Like other Americans, they work about 70 hours a week to pay for software leases and tithe taxes. Joe doesn't have to worry about shaving anymore, as the Levitican beard requirement was reintroduced in MS Bible v. 4.0 (Sunday Service Pack 4) and he's too broke from upgrading to afford a razor. Besides, since razors are now licensed and have to be renewed every day, he was halfway there already.
Jane has had 14 children by Joe, most since the 2038 repeal of abortion and contraceptive rights, but tithe taxes contribute to the development of their large family. Their children (all named after variants of "William") will each spend ten years in Approved Viewpoint Training, which is funded by Time/Warner/AOL/Disney/Duke Energy/Exxon (T.W.A.D.D.L.E.) which means that Joe and Jane pay nothing. "They are nice.." says Joe. "Nice. They teach kids good. Willy said first word yesterday: 'subscription'. Maybe he makes software someday."
Birmingham should look at Koha, since one of the problems listed was with the Galaxy library system.
I could go for pages about how library system vendors are generally pretty shady and do an awful lot to keep unwitting customers locked in. All kinds of song and dances come forth. However, it all comes down to the buyers (libraries) not wanting to take the time to find out 1) what they are paying for, 2) what they ought to buy and 3) what they are actually getting. Libraries often end up as a result in a position where the vendors dictate the terms conditions and pricing. Many don't even bother to fulfill the contract since rarely does anyone ever check up on them anyway. A little technobabble will dazzle the one or two brave souls that try.
If Birmingham wants to go whole hog, then they can move to Koha. The makers of Galaxy will be as uncooperative as they can get away with, but they would do that with any threat of migration to any other vendor anyway. There are many ways, few easy, but doable to extract the contents of a library system, even against the vendors will.
If nothing else, Birmingham can look at Koha and see how it meets their needs. Many use it not because it it open source, but because it has the funcitonality they need. All library systems suck, they just suck in different ways. And Koha has quite a few technical advantages over the closed source varieties. However, being open source is one of the stronger non-technical advantages. It means not only that small changes can be done in house, but that larger changes can be outsourced to those that have time, interest and experience. BTW simply threatening to evaluate Koha can bring significant consessions from their current vendor.
Individual users in this context mean not just your average slob at home but also businesses, organizations, school districts, local governments, and so on. Just knowing that they are using computers or using them for certain purposes (e.g. web shop, XML) indicates violation of certain patents. No need to go after all the home users, except to make an example of one or two now and then. There are plenty of small and medium size businesses, governments and agencies with deep pockets that can be spotted with a few minutes work. Many will simple assume the position and pay up when presented with a bill.
You just use OSS and the problem is up to your distro packager.
...
Actually it doesn't matter if it's OSS or closed source. Patents, even sw patents, apply to usage, so the problem is yours not the distro packager since you're the one using the software. If it were a question of copyright, like it is in the EU, then the distributor (aka distro packager) would then be the one affected. But it's not. The FUD is directed at users not distributors.
It's crap like that which has been slowing everybody down, including the technology sector. Let the US ditch software patents and let's move forward again.
Nokia Chair, Jorma Ollila, praises open standards
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Hit submit too soon. Here's a quote on open standards (bold emphasis mine) from the Chairman of Nokia's Board of Directors, Jorma Ollila, a dyed-in-the-wool capitalist:
"... The example of Internet today strengthens the belief that Nokia has held for a long time: Open standards and platforms create a foundation for success. They enable interoperability of technologies and encourage innovativeness and healthy competition, which in turn increases consumer choice and opens entirely new markets,"
From - http://biz.yahoo.com/prnews/061122/ukw015.html?.v= 70
Everyone benefits from Open Standards, even M$, but it would then lose it's monopoly, it would still be able to compete and, if the product is good, make money. The main reason that M$ fights, is probably that the number one rule when you have a monopoly is to preserve that monopoly at any cost. If you keep the monopoly, then those expenditures in capital or political capital can still be recovered. If you lose the monopoly then you have to work like every other company.
Maybe a little competition would be good. Look at the kick in the pants MS-DOS 4 got when DR-DOS started to eat its lunch. Or MSIE when Firefox showed up. The radical changes to MS Office 2007 suggest that OpenOffice.org is making its presence known. We'll see. But, again, for there to be competition there have to be open standards.
i say microsoft is in the position to dictate formats because they're the industry leader (regardless of how they got there)...microsoft is in the business to make money. don't fault them for doing that...
I was wondering when the shills would come back to fight against the free market.
No one is faulting M$ for "making money". The fault the public finds is the same thing the courts on both sides of the Altantic have found fault with: predatory marketing and abusing its monopoly positions in some markets to establish new monopolies in new markets. In short, M$ apparently cannot compete in a free market and appears to do everything within it's influence, legal or otherwise, to stifle or eradicate a free market economy (or any competition at all) in the markets it sells in.
That's been the business model since the 1980's: M$ has leveraged the desktop monopoly Bill's mom got him from IBM into one for web browsers, productivity software / formats, and online audiovideo software / formats. It's that middle one, productivity software/formats, that's relevant here. If M$ had even documented it's office formats, there would be no need for the establishing a universal office format like OpenDocument. Without documentation, competitors are easily marginalized or even run out of that market, and of course without documentation it is darn near impossible for new entrants.
It's not about open source. Closed source and open source can both be used in conjunction with open standards to make loads of money. Yes, the Internet and the web were invented using open source and run mostly on open source, but this is all about open standards, which is a different thing.
Without open standards you would not have e-mail (SMTP/ASCII), the WWW (HTTP/HTML) or the Internet (TCP/IP). Nor would you have single sign-on authentication (Kerberos/LDAP), nor even long distance telephone service - not even land line, let alone mobile service. Not even would you have iPods or other "mp3 players", all of which are dependent on different components of MPEG. The list goes one. And, without open standards for productivity software, you end up in a situation with no free market there.
Behind the 8-ball because of a data format
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· Score: 2, Insightful
... have you ever tried to generate an excel document with charts without using an office object? can't really be done in a secure (read: won't potentially crash your IIS box) manner due to needing office installed. in an environment where reports (excel, ppt, word) are generated by a site this is priceless.
You're stuck in that position because of the file format and wouldn't be in that position if
Third party tools had access to the complete file format specification so the actually could generate an 'excel document {sic}' with charts. That's not gonna happen with existing formats and the licensing questions about MOOX / DOCX suggest future replacement formats out of Redmond may not help out so much with that.
... or...
There was a universal format that included spreadsheets (aka 'excel documents') and charts, etc.
The solution's been visible for a long time. It's only lately that it's been within grasp.
"intuitive" is the word I hear MS fans spouting all the time, especially those acting in the role of software reviewer.
When it comes down to it nothing is intuitive except for a teat and there are even a few that need a bit of help figuring that one out.
However, some things are harder than others. Macintosh has always been faster and easier to learn. That's an option for the old people in question. Maintenance and remote administration is much easier and less often needed than what they currently have. That's a bonus for all involved.
Another option would be KDE on top of Linux, BSD or something else. It's slightly easier than MS-Windows for the end-user and because it's running on a decent kernel and operating system, it's much, much easier and less time demanding for the relative who will be doing the system administration.
KDE is flexible enough that the person setting up the system for these people can change both the appearance and behaviour , but I've seen people of all ages use KDE without problem even on the default settings. Actually with less problems than they had on XP: if you set up some public stations with MS Windows XP alongside KDE, you invariably get fewer questions about KDE and the apps it is running than you do for the XP stations, despite heavier use -- even counting only the time when the XP station is functioning. Usually the only question for KDE, besides more paper for the printer or batteries for the wireless mouse, is "where's the A: drive?" But even that one many figure out on their own, and it's generally younger people than those in the original post still using floppies. The retirees, mostly use only web-based banking but sometimes also web-based e-mail.
So, yeah, in principle nothing is "intuitive". However, the word is commonly used / abused in the context of user interfaces. The point is that some interfaces are easier, some are harder and unfortunately the one the old people were using is about the most difficult on the market today. Changing platforms would give both them and their support relative a break.
Actually to nitpick, India, IIRC is currently the largest democracy (jibes about the current US administration aside.)
But what's scary is that Microsoft may just be warming their FUD plumbing until the day they have infected the E.U. deeply enough that the E.U. won't bat an eye. Then they start suing, and they won't face obstacles there, or here in the U.S. either.
IMHO that's been the company plan for years. The tricks and underhanded maneuvers to try to get sw patents into Europe have been many. Eventually, MS via its proxy the US government may try to piggyback them to some future trade agreement like has been done for so many other regions and countries already. The European media has also been part of the problem by not covering the issue which basically affects anyone using a computer in their company or organization. One the rare occasions it is covered, the press has been wrongly playing the issue up as one that concerns developers only and open source developers in particular. That kind of portrayal gives the wrong picture of the threat.
Patents govern use. If sw patents somehow get into Europe then all the lame patents on RFCs, various computing science algorithms, formulas and even business methods then become valid there, too. In cases like that it doesn't matter how you got the software only what it does. And if what it does is patented, you or someone has to pay. e.g. if there is a patent on Quicksort (which there probably is), then it doesn't matter if you wrote it yourself in C, C++, Java, Perl, assembly, MUMPS, or Lisp, or if you downloaded it from an archive made in the 1980's or if you recently bought it as part of a library. What matters is that you are using a patent.
Copyright has done just fine for programs. Let's roll the US system back to something more sensible and harmonize US patent law with European, not European with the US.
In other words the only viable option is to go back to earlier patent law and drop sw patents. There are so many bad sw patents issued that there simply is not staff time, even if it could be funded, to go through and cull them from the patent register. Even culling is reactive and not proactive and would do nothing to stem the flow of sw patents on obvious, unoriginal and even widely used methods, algorithms, formula and business methods.
Have mercy, or at least pity, on them an shell out for a Macintosh. At least put Ubuntu or Kubuntu on the machine along with a few short cut icons and bookmarks. The MS Windows interface is overly complex and counter intuitive.
I see very old people do their banking without trouble all the time on the Fedora and Ubuntu machines set up as public stations at one site. That locale gets a lot of very old and very young visitors. Interestingly, there are several continuing students who are able to do their homework on OpenOffice.org for their classes on MS Office without trouble they only have to turn in a file or a print out, not the application they used.
Slashdot Mirror
I've seen people try to use MS Exchange in place of a mail server.
Hey, you did ask.
What makes you think that realising that stands in the way of it becoming more popular?
How about the fact that the few developers that poked at it for a while are now abandoning .Net in droves ? Cornell's opinions are just that, opinions. And except in certain alternate universes data and facts tend to outweigh opinions.
From the link above:
Seems to me like a pretty clear admission that the sample size is too small to be reliable. He took the data he had available, analyzed it, and presented the results while noting the deficiencies in the method. Doesn't sound much like fraud to me. That's just grade school reading by the way...
So in other words, he knew from the beginning that he was spewing out bullshit. The article never should have gotten past the editors. One can argue back and forth whether the journalist should be disciplined, I'd argue for it and for an investigation of possible conflict of interest, but there's no way the editors should have let the article through as it stood. They should have been canned.
... and give your workers all the money, reserving none of it for return on investment, equipment replacement, taxes, energy, buildings, marketing, etc.We'll all be pleased to hear how that works out for you.
Not necessary. We can extrapolate from existing businesses where they give your executives all the money, reserving none of it for return on investment, equipment replacement, taxes, energy, buildings, marketing, etc.
Corporate bonuses need to be kept in escrow for two or three years just to be sure they are warranted. Having to plan more than 2 months into the future would likely force executives to start working for the best interests of the companies rather than their individual wallets.
Sort of the same strategy used against Borland or in Washington DC with lobbyists. Against the former, MS hired up Borland's better developers and sent them out on holiday. Against the latter, the lobbyists were put on retainer to keep them out of circulation. It's interesting how the core activities have shifted over time and are now starting to approach sum cult-like characteristics
... if there's a table it doesn't format right, the fonts are all screwed up and the list goes on.Yes, I have both experienced first hand and observed it with many others those problems in MS Office. Odds of a perfect transfer are very high if you have the exact same hardware and same MS Office versions and operating system versions, but not close enough to 100%.
The probability goes way down between different versions of MS Office, or if you have radically different setups or configurations. It's so much so that the ability to properly render the old MS formats is one of the more popular advantages of OpenOffice.org. It does a very good job with the WordPerfect formats, but the real life saver is the ability to recover the files that MS Office corrupts. Having OpenOffice.org somewhere at work generally means that the corrupted document can be recovered.
As for macros, I haven't seen anyone use them in office documents years and years, probably pushing 12 years. However, they're there in OpenOffice.org and you're not limited to using VB, you have a choice including Python which you are probably already using in your work.
Yes like TCP/IP, ANSI/Unicode, HTML, CSS. You know those obsolete standards that nobody uses anymore. :P
Funny, MS does have difficulty with those standards and still implements them in varying degrees of brokeness. Look also at Kerberos and LDAP. Even HTTP is not quite right with MS. Not surprisingly the errors have been pointed out for years, but remain unfixed, and perhaps not so coincidentally hinder interoperability with competing products.
MS may well be funding a small PR campaign by throwing a few dollars towards an external project to create a plug-in to compete with the OpenDocument Foundation's plug-in which is being tested by governments right now. However, even just looking at the implementations of earlier standards not related to MS cash cow, MS Office, casts doubts about how well MS will let OpenDocument get implemented in MS Office.
... or your wife brings home a file that won't open correctlyWhich points out why so many have pointed out the need for document file formats for office software, such as the OpenDocument Format.
However, the specific scenario cited there, that of not being able to open a file, is more likely to happen using the officially annointed MS Office variants rather than more flexible tools like Koffice or OpenOffice.org. Why? Two reasons:
1) Even though the MS Office file formats are undocumented, despite court orders to do so, progress has been made in reverse engineering those format. It's to the point that you have a better chance of opening an old MS Office file with OpenOffice.org or Koffice than with MS Office. Also, it's becoming standard practice, even in MS only shops, to keep a copy of OpenOffice.org around to recover files when MS Office corrupts them and can't open them any more.
2) MS has used and still introduces minor incompatibilities into its undocumented file formats in order to leverage new sales. Just around 70% of MS Office sales come as the result of OEMs, which means that about 2/3 of new machines start spewing documents unreadable by everyone else. In the past, MS has been able to achieve a critical mass with the new formats. However, the latest round hasn't gotten more than 10% - 15% which is not enough, so the situation looks to be improving.
Use of open standards in office files is just a small part of the business case for open standards. It's your choice.
Actually, IIRC there were some hardware hacks that would give you mixed case. On some of the earlier models you even had to do some scraping and soldering to get one of the square brackets, [ or ] if forget which.
One of the nice things about those Apple IIs and Apple II+'s was that they came with circuit diagrams so that you could add external controllers or make your own peripheral cards or devices. It also came not only with detailed operating system documentation and BASIC programming instructions, but also system documentation and the 6502 instruction set. As a result it was even possible to change some of the system. I rewrote part of the monitor and had a friend burn it to eprom.
Kids can't really do that with hardware anymore, but it is still possible with software and systems -- provided they are using one of the open source or Free Software options. Those that are curious can dig as deep as they want and learn from the code and documentation as much as they can or want to.
... it's more secure? seriously?It depends on how you re-define secure. Even malware from 2004 will still run.
Does anyon know if there's any such thing as a "corporate petition" that I could pesuade my company to join?
There was a petition, but it's largely over and the result of MS at least giving lip service to OpenDocument support has been achieved. It remains to be seen what really happens with the third party plug-ins for MS Office, which is what the support amounts to it may be unsupport. Though the MS sponsored plug-in is the only one that makes the news, the one that has actually entered testing is the OpenDocument Foundation's ODF Plugin for MS Office.
As far as petitions go, about the closest thing right now would be for your business to sign onto the OpenDocument Alliance.
Maybe MS is somehow is benefiting from the endless cycles of MSIE-based spyware, viruses, and general security problems. If not, then it (and we) would be much better off if MS should drop MSIE completely. Where does MS come out ahead financially? MSIE is probably the largest single public relations problem as well as one of largest security and productivity problems that MS produces these days.
The Netscape/DOJ v MS has been over for years. MSIE wastes our time, it wastes MS time. There's simply no need for anyone, even MS, to be wasting resources with MSIE. The public certainly has no reason to let MS foist on them such low quality security hole masquerading as a useful application. Drop MSIE or let users uninstall it completely.
Firefox and Opera are what people are using anyway. Go with the flow and invest the resources that would have gone into trying to keep life in MSIE go somewhere they'll actually have a chance of doing good.
Also Kerberos, LDAP, HTTP, and TCP/IP
Time for a reprint from 2001.
Birmingham should look at Koha, since one of the problems listed was with the Galaxy library system.
I could go for pages about how library system vendors are generally pretty shady and do an awful lot to keep unwitting customers locked in. All kinds of song and dances come forth. However, it all comes down to the buyers (libraries) not wanting to take the time to find out 1) what they are paying for, 2) what they ought to buy and 3) what they are actually getting. Libraries often end up as a result in a position where the vendors dictate the terms conditions and pricing. Many don't even bother to fulfill the contract since rarely does anyone ever check up on them anyway. A little technobabble will dazzle the one or two brave souls that try.
If Birmingham wants to go whole hog, then they can move to Koha. The makers of Galaxy will be as uncooperative as they can get away with, but they would do that with any threat of migration to any other vendor anyway. There are many ways, few easy, but doable to extract the contents of a library system, even against the vendors will.
If nothing else, Birmingham can look at Koha and see how it meets their needs. Many use it not because it it open source, but because it has the funcitonality they need. All library systems suck, they just suck in different ways. And Koha has quite a few technical advantages over the closed source varieties. However, being open source is one of the stronger non-technical advantages. It means not only that small changes can be done in house, but that larger changes can be outsourced to those that have time, interest and experience. BTW simply threatening to evaluate Koha can bring significant consessions from their current vendor.
Or more accurately, to know that every RFID tag in the hold is matched to an RFID tag which has already boarded.
Individual users in this context mean not just your average slob at home but also businesses, organizations, school districts, local governments, and so on. Just knowing that they are using computers or using them for certain purposes (e.g. web shop, XML) indicates violation of certain patents. No need to go after all the home users, except to make an example of one or two now and then. There are plenty of small and medium size businesses, governments and agencies with deep pockets that can be spotted with a few minutes work. Many will simple assume the position and pay up when presented with a bill.
- You just use OSS and the problem is up to your distro packager.
...Actually it doesn't matter if it's OSS or closed source. Patents, even sw patents, apply to usage, so the problem is yours not the distro packager since you're the one using the software. If it were a question of copyright, like it is in the EU, then the distributor (aka distro packager) would then be the one affected. But it's not. The FUD is directed at users not distributors.
It's crap like that which has been slowing everybody down, including the technology sector. Let the US ditch software patents and let's move forward again.
Hit submit too soon. Here's a quote on open standards (bold emphasis mine) from the Chairman of Nokia's Board of Directors, Jorma Ollila, a dyed-in-the-wool capitalist:
Everyone benefits from Open Standards, even M$, but it would then lose it's monopoly, it would still be able to compete and, if the product is good, make money. The main reason that M$ fights, is probably that the number one rule when you have a monopoly is to preserve that monopoly at any cost. If you keep the monopoly, then those expenditures in capital or political capital can still be recovered. If you lose the monopoly then you have to work like every other company.
Maybe a little competition would be good. Look at the kick in the pants MS-DOS 4 got when DR-DOS started to eat its lunch. Or MSIE when Firefox showed up. The radical changes to MS Office 2007 suggest that OpenOffice.org is making its presence known. We'll see. But, again, for there to be competition there have to be open standards.
I was wondering when the shills would come back to fight against the free market.
No one is faulting M$ for "making money". The fault the public finds is the same thing the courts on both sides of the Altantic have found fault with: predatory marketing and abusing its monopoly positions in some markets to establish new monopolies in new markets. In short, M$ apparently cannot compete in a free market and appears to do everything within it's influence, legal or otherwise, to stifle or eradicate a free market economy (or any competition at all) in the markets it sells in.
That's been the business model since the 1980's: M$ has leveraged the desktop monopoly Bill's mom got him from IBM into one for web browsers, productivity software / formats, and online audiovideo software / formats. It's that middle one, productivity software/formats, that's relevant here. If M$ had even documented it's office formats, there would be no need for the establishing a universal office format like OpenDocument. Without documentation, competitors are easily marginalized or even run out of that market, and of course without documentation it is darn near impossible for new entrants.
It's not about open source. Closed source and open source can both be used in conjunction with open standards to make loads of money. Yes, the Internet and the web were invented using open source and run mostly on open source, but this is all about open standards, which is a different thing.
Without open standards you would not have e-mail (SMTP/ASCII), the WWW (HTTP/HTML) or the Internet (TCP/IP). Nor would you have single sign-on authentication (Kerberos/LDAP), nor even long distance telephone service - not even land line, let alone mobile service. Not even would you have iPods or other "mp3 players", all of which are dependent on different components of MPEG. The list goes one. And, without open standards for productivity software, you end up in a situation with no free market there.
You're stuck in that position because of the file format and wouldn't be in that position if
The solution's been visible for a long time. It's only lately that it's been within grasp.
"intuitive" is the word I hear MS fans spouting all the time, especially those acting in the role of software reviewer. When it comes down to it nothing is intuitive except for a teat and there are even a few that need a bit of help figuring that one out.
However, some things are harder than others. Macintosh has always been faster and easier to learn. That's an option for the old people in question. Maintenance and remote administration is much easier and less often needed than what they currently have. That's a bonus for all involved.
Another option would be KDE on top of Linux, BSD or something else. It's slightly easier than MS-Windows for the end-user and because it's running on a decent kernel and operating system, it's much, much easier and less time demanding for the relative who will be doing the system administration.
KDE is flexible enough that the person setting up the system for these people can change both the appearance and behaviour , but I've seen people of all ages use KDE without problem even on the default settings. Actually with less problems than they had on XP: if you set up some public stations with MS Windows XP alongside KDE, you invariably get fewer questions about KDE and the apps it is running than you do for the XP stations, despite heavier use -- even counting only the time when the XP station is functioning. Usually the only question for KDE, besides more paper for the printer or batteries for the wireless mouse, is "where's the A: drive?" But even that one many figure out on their own, and it's generally younger people than those in the original post still using floppies. The retirees, mostly use only web-based banking but sometimes also web-based e-mail.So, yeah, in principle nothing is "intuitive". However, the word is commonly used / abused in the context of user interfaces. The point is that some interfaces are easier, some are harder and unfortunately the one the old people were using is about the most difficult on the market today. Changing platforms would give both them and their support relative a break.
Actually to nitpick, India, IIRC is currently the largest democracy (jibes about the current US administration aside.)
IMHO that's been the company plan for years. The tricks and underhanded maneuvers to try to get sw patents into Europe have been many. Eventually, MS via its proxy the US government may try to piggyback them to some future trade agreement like has been done for so many other regions and countries already. The European media has also been part of the problem by not covering the issue which basically affects anyone using a computer in their company or organization. One the rare occasions it is covered, the press has been wrongly playing the issue up as one that concerns developers only and open source developers in particular. That kind of portrayal gives the wrong picture of the threat.
Patents govern use. If sw patents somehow get into Europe then all the lame patents on RFCs, various computing science algorithms, formulas and even business methods then become valid there, too. In cases like that it doesn't matter how you got the software only what it does. And if what it does is patented, you or someone has to pay. e.g. if there is a patent on Quicksort (which there probably is), then it doesn't matter if you wrote it yourself in C, C++, Java, Perl, assembly, MUMPS, or Lisp, or if you downloaded it from an archive made in the 1980's or if you recently bought it as part of a library. What matters is that you are using a patent.
Copyright has done just fine for programs. Let's roll the US system back to something more sensible and harmonize US patent law with European, not European with the US.
In other words the only viable option is to go back to earlier patent law and drop sw patents. There are so many bad sw patents issued that there simply is not staff time, even if it could be funded, to go through and cull them from the patent register. Even culling is reactive and not proactive and would do nothing to stem the flow of sw patents on obvious, unoriginal and even widely used methods, algorithms, formula and business methods.
Have mercy, or at least pity, on them an shell out for a Macintosh. At least put Ubuntu or Kubuntu on the machine along with a few short cut icons and bookmarks. The MS Windows interface is overly complex and counter intuitive.
I see very old people do their banking without trouble all the time on the Fedora and Ubuntu machines set up as public stations at one site. That locale gets a lot of very old and very young visitors. Interestingly, there are several continuing students who are able to do their homework on OpenOffice.org for their classes on MS Office without trouble they only have to turn in a file or a print out, not the application they used.