Non-free software or no software. What would you rather have?
Free software wins for me, hands down. I still use some closed source and some non-free, but couldn't have gotten anything done at work the last 10 years without the free software.
Pleople get paid plenty to write Free Software. I know some that have made their millions from it and are still going. I know others that, though not dollar-millionaires, still make a mighty handsome salary writing free software.
Only astroturfers and people really, really in the dark about ICT still think that people don't make money from Free Software. There's just too many big and small companies doing it for that line to work anywhere except in Redmond anymore.
Some parts of the Scandinavian peninsula are rising at a rate of an inch per year. That doesn't sound like much, but it means that you have to dredge your harbors and or move your docks every decade or so. But you gain quite a bit of land.
Going the other way, going down an inch doesn't mean losing an inch off the shoreline, it means losing several yards depending on the grade of the slope. Shallower grade means more land is lost. Do the trig and see how much land is lost from a 1 m rise in sea level on a 2% slope.
The University of Michigan has had single sign-on w/Kerberos + LDAP since the early 1990's. I've seen a few other institutions which have a similar set up, but will let them speak for themselves.
C) It's not normal to have to upgrade to the latest version of the OS just for the machine to behave normally (Note: though this isn't true if you want the latest security patches).
Half right. Having the latest security patches does not mean changing versions of a program. Patch the problem no more, no less. Most distros of Linux allow that. Some focus on that, like Debian does.
Changing versions, e.g. moving from Version 1.0 to Version 1.1, changes things like features, APIs, internal workings, etc. It does not actually have anything to do with security. These change the behavior at best and at worst require adjustment or even patching.
D) If you use an OS other than windows, all the previous problems disappear.
That's what Chairman Bill is really afraid people will (re-)discover.
I cannot believe there were so many errors in an article which is only 358 words long. What a bad piece of journalism. Only 81 words are devoted to the China new item, the rest ss background on IPv6. The IPv6 information is riddled with errors
Probably some crap article from a few years back got stuck in the vertical file and keeps getting resurrected every time some journalist wants some background information on IPv6. I'd rather think that than say there is some agenda to keep people in the dark.
This and other articles neglect the main reasons to go with IPv6:
+ better security
+ simplified headers
+ quality of service
+ multi-casting
+ improved routing
+ geographically mobile IP numbers
+ autoconfiguration
Firewalls can be done with either IPv4 or IPv6, no big deal there.
Oh, and NAT != firewall. It can't be that after all this time the so-called journalists can't get their teeny minds around all the above.
China's on a roll. This is good.
But the article sucks, she can write better.
Like HTML, which surprised people in the 1990's, the OASIS OpenOffice.org file format is indeed vendor independent, though, it is now called Open Document. Anyone can use it or develop tools for it without restriction. Even Microsoft is part of the team at OASIS, at least on paper. And, even if MS doesn't get out of the way, interesting things will happen with Open Doument.
So far OASIS Open Document being used by at least the following:
... the adoption of an OASIS Open Office Standard should be welcomed, and industry actors not currently involved with the OASIS Open Document Format should consider participating in the standardisation process in order to encourage a wider consensus around the format.
--EU Telematics between Administrations Committee, May 24, 2004
Note that the only industry actor not currently involved in the OASIS Open Document Format has been and still is MS. MS is still trying to shoehorn old MS-Office 97 customers into DRM'd MS-Office 2003, which functions in effect like a roach motel for your data. So far the worst insult that Balmer and Gates can cough up is that OpenOffice.org (OOo) is like MS-Office 97. However, I think even those two can see that OOo meets this groups functional requirements quite well, and is free and multiplatform. OOo is also available in more languages than MS-Office, handles long documents better, and does better with styles and stylesheets.
Currently, there are many governments moving up to StarOffice or OpenOffice.org for the sake of these formats. Singapore comes to mind first, but there are many, many others that don't necessarily make the mainstream press like Sarpsborg. Likewise, there are many small, medium and large businesses moving along. Some with an axe to grind (with good reason ) speak up. However, most are silent until the move is being implemented to keep the goon squad from Redmond from getting in the way.
The current choice:
OASIS Open Document --
be able to access your own data indefinitely as XML
and change productivity tools, operating systems and hardware only if and when it suites you
MS-WordML --
pay that Redmond tithe indefinitely
and buy new productivity tools, operating systems and hardware when Chairman Bill tells you to
Easy choice. You don't need to be a wizard to see which direction things are going to head.
If Ford had just stolen his idea then what could he have done? How much would it have cost him to take any action?
Apparently defending a patent costs somewhere over $4 million on average. You can hear a discussion of problems like that at the program page from the
Software patent conference Nov 9-10, 2004 in Brussels.
Go back and re-read US DOJ vs Microsoft: MSIE killed Netscape not by being a better browser, but by being bundled with every copy of MS-Windows. A lot of MS apologists would really like to edit or forget that piece of history.
MSIE was a big piece of crap too back then, more so than now. It and Netscape were what turned me on to Opera. The resume-where-you-left-off" feature of Opera combined with MS Windows inability to go more than an hour or two between blue screens kept me from ever looking back. Though fortunately, I've never had been stuck with MS junk on any of my main work computers.
Following precedents is rather like walking backwards. i would rather there have been a mandate that audio and video codecs be open.
However, the remedies being upheld is a good thing. This may put a bigger wrench in M$ plans by not only preventing the desktop audio / video market from closing up, but also HDTV and DVDs. M$ has had its eye on all three and the desktop monopoly could have done much more harm if HDTV over IP were to become available only via WMP.
Let's hope this support of the March decision gives open codecs like Vorbis and Dirac a boost all around.
Probably do not even remember when people used to put words like "bomb" and "whitehouse" in their.sigs in a protest to the governemnt's automated filtering of electronic communications which is a direct violation of Amendment IV of the Bill of Rights of the Constitution of the United States of America
There are also vendors *cough*M$*cough* with executives who have stated that it would be their patriotic duty to put back doors and monitoring capabilities into their software if so requested.
OpenOffice.org is still missing a replacement for Microsoft Access, a graphical database design program. Novice or casual users do not want to learn PHP.
Wrong on both counts. OpenOffice.org 1.x will connect to any ODBC database, and PHP is not a database or even a database management system.
I imagine the average user's behavior to be something like this:...
That's just another variation on MS' tactic of blaming the user. Patching has nothing to do with it. There are plenty of exploits that affect even machines with the latest patches, this is simply due to faulty design.
Pintos exploded when rammed by another car from behind. The courts forced the manufacturer to recall the defective models fix the faulty design. Or should the courts just have told Pinto owners not to let people tailgate on them?
AC, please re-read my post. I'm not sure where the idea of eco-refugees was conjured, because I sure didn't mention it. What I did mention was that prices of property has been driven up to the point that local people can no longer afford it, especially in the south and along the coasts. In some areas natives are now the ethnic minority. Some, Germans specifically, are infamous for this and also for ignoring zoning regulations and for poaching. What's better for the region, a family that lives on and maintains the property and work in the community, or people from far away that show up twice a year and don't purchase so much as a cup of coffee locally?
As far as empty buildings in the north go, I say again look to the policies and ideologies that emptied those buildings. Quite often thriving or sustainable industries were closed down so that the population can be moved to ghettos in the largest cities.
To ignore several old cultures living dozens of centuries in the regions they steward and turn around and market that same region as "wilderness" or worse "Europe's last wilderness" is racist or just ignorant.
XML munches up bandwidth like a lardy butter lover.
A fat UDP or TCP packet could probably hold enough info to do the job. There are several questions about how to do it, but the one I can think of first would be whether the client polls the server in a ping-like manner or if the client subscribes to a server and then waits for an event notice. Either way there are safety issues and error handling to figure out.
The second option seems safer for the server. At an interval of hours or days, the server could check to verify the existence of the client.
Forget the "voting" machines and any numbers they generate. Recounts can't be done without ballots.
Discussions about paper trails, auditing and such are for future elections.
Only votes
(not necessarily ballots) which have an origin which can be proven should
be accepted. All others should be discarded. Without being able to prove
the provenance of the "votes" it cannot proven that there was no monkey
business. That's a lot of what having an open and fair election is about -
proving there was no monkey business.
There are visible discrepancies between exit polls and poll results indicate that something is amiss and should be investigated.
Among several probelms, there seems to be a correlation between use of voting machines and skewed
poll results as show by several investigations, including the Berkeley report. (Of interest for future reference, other analysis suggests a correlation between red counties and ClearChannel market dominance).
Furthermore, the last few years of use have shown that the technology and methods used
by the electronic voting machine companies that this little or no chance of preventing tampering nor of directly detecting tampering due to
inherently badly designed systems. This was known prior to the election.
Such serious things should not be given the benefit of the doubt. The electoral college should overturn these irreproducable results and hold a second, paper-only election. It would have been both faster and cheaper to count them by hand like in Canada. Don't let it get so bad that it gets resolved by another civil war.
Euros, definitely. Though I notice that the site being plugged focuses on precious metals.
I was under the impression that not only are most nations already off of the gold reserve, but have been quietly off loading what they do have before it drops to a value more appropriate for its industrial qualities.
As far as currencies go, unless the electoral college rises to the occasion and takes the voter suppression, election fraud and questions about the reliability of the current voting system into account, I can't see any way to avoid the dollar from tanking completely. So it would be unwise to keep all of it in US dollars.
Whatever. The Mozilla foundation does have to do something wise with that money, regardless.
What with fossil fuels not going to last forever something like this really could be great for all of us, hell Bush wouldn't even have to keep killing soldiers to boot.
What makes you think that's all about oil?;) You're taking people (i.e. military) that meet the following criteria relative to the general population :
literate
healthy
good eyesight
average or better intelligence
honest
civically responsible
volunteers
not wealthy
not drug users
not pervs
and getting them out of circulation. Delay in reproduction reduces the fitness and delay can be achieved by circumstance (in a combat zone) or stress, injury, induced psychological disorders, chemical contamination or plain old death.
So what you have, whether intentional or not, is in effect a eugenics program to shape the US population to be more like Bush.
Not only did Clinton's administration leave them with a detailed plan to remove Osama bin Laden, some where in the US administration action (or inaction) was taken to prevent the hightened levels of security seen at the same time in European airports. So in those regards, yes, Bush was accountable for 9/11 attack.
Why is a shoplifter giving more punishment than either a CEO who's actions kill 15000 people or one that bilks millions of people out of their life savings?
All the e-books you want ... for free
on
Upbeat on E-books
·
· Score: 1
Not only is there Project Gutenberg, but also a good number of other projects. Project Runeberg is one of the older projects and has classic nordic literature and art.
The Internet Public Library has a catalog of over 20 000 online, publicly available books and has cataloged a comparable number of online, publicly available magazines and newspapers. Unfortunately, that part of the database is down for a time while the back-end is moved to a new provider. (The old provider stopped on too short notice.)
If you feel you must spend money on e-books, then at least make that a good investment in the form of a donation to Gutenberg, Runeberg, etc. or to EFF or another group to make copyright laws more reasonable once again.
Already starting to happen, U.S. based real estate companies are popping up like mushrooms there in Norway. Unfortunately, the temperature changes will likely kill off what's left of the fish, which isn't much these days.
In Sweden and Finland, and, to a lesser extent, Norway policy changes to industry, agriculture and the market in general are optimized to force the population into concentrated areas leaving these evacuated, desirable properties undervalued.
Norway has been more stubborn or wiser about this. Sweden and Finland are currently getting hit harder. Not just in ghettoization of the population, but also in doleing out properties to foreign owners.
The price in some areas has doubled in the last 5 years as Germans become the majority. (e.g. a run down farm a day's drive from Germany underneath a noisy windmill and down wind from a pig farm went for 15 times what it would have 10 years ago) Denmark will get hit, too, once it becomes forced to allow desirable property.
The earth will lose it's ability to sustain our population long before all other earth life is extinguished. Civilization is still more fragile. We can still adapt, but better urban planning needs to take precidence over short term greed.
ability to search by date has been eliminated, as has the ability to deep link to a single post.
What the hell? That was probably two of the most useful features.
Other search services are downgrading, too.
Search services (AltaVista, Yahoo, Google, AllTheWeb, in fact all that I can think of) have dropped the ability to make truncated searches. For English that's only a minor inconvenience. For languages with many tenses or cases (e.g. Russian, Spanish, or Finnish), lack of truncation can make the search service darn near useless.
I'd sure love to hear the rational for all these downgrades. Or, better yet, have the funtions restored.
Well since they're running what looks like an IBM server on what looks like Solaris, I'd write this off as an unintentional bug. What did their support staff say about driving customers away? Is it an oversight? A prioritization of ideology before profit?
If they lack the technical expertise, perhaps their vendor can help them as a partner in the offeneren welt and actually hook them up with an "opener" web site.
On the contrary. Many banks require that their customers use Internet Exploder, and flat out refuse all other browsers (using a javascript browsercheck or other equally silly techniques).
That goes against my recent experiences with banks the last 3 years. And that of my friends and relatives. During that time I've only run across one that was stuck on MSIE. Can you give any examples or support for your statement?
I couldn't agree with you more. I spend all day having to fix broken computers, troubleshoot the network, listen to arrogant bitchy lusers, etc. When I am not at work and someone asks me to take a look at their computer I reach for my gun.
So what's holding you back from setting up your parents with an iMac or upgrading to Linux? Voila, no more house calls. You look good for doing it and they get a working computer. Any subsequent changes can be done remotely... and you're not working for free for ol' Chairman Bill.
That was my motivation for wiping MS off the last machine at home some years ago. One evening as I was getting ready to clean up another MS mess, I though "why can't this be as easy and reliable as at work with Linux?"
Since then I've also become a fan of OS X. I still do occasional support, just not for any MS product. That way I know there is very little chance of having to solve the same problem twice for that person.
Don't work for free for Chairman Bill this holiday season. It just encourages him to put out more broken, poorly interoperable products.
Slashdot Mirror
Pleople get paid plenty to write Free Software. I know some that have made their millions from it and are still going. I know others that, though not dollar-millionaires, still make a mighty handsome salary writing free software.
Only astroturfers and people really, really in the dark about ICT still think that people don't make money from Free Software. There's just too many big and small companies doing it for that line to work anywhere except in Redmond anymore.
Going the other way, going down an inch doesn't mean losing an inch off the shoreline, it means losing several yards depending on the grade of the slope. Shallower grade means more land is lost. Do the trig and see how much land is lost from a 1 m rise in sea level on a 2% slope.
Changing versions, e.g. moving from Version 1.0 to Version 1.1, changes things like features, APIs, internal workings, etc. It does not actually have anything to do with security. These change the behavior at best and at worst require adjustment or even patching.
That's what Chairman Bill is really afraid people will (re-)discover.This and other articles neglect the main reasons to go with IPv6:
+ better security + simplified headers + quality of service + multi-casting + improved routing + geographically mobile IP numbers + autoconfiguration Firewalls can be done with either IPv4 or IPv6, no big deal there. Oh, and NAT != firewall. It can't be that after all this time the so-called journalists can't get their teeny minds around all the above.China's on a roll. This is good. But the article sucks, she can write better.
Like HTML, which surprised people in the 1990's, the OASIS OpenOffice.org file format is indeed vendor independent, though, it is now called Open Document. Anyone can use it or develop tools for it without restriction. Even Microsoft is part of the team at OASIS, at least on paper. And, even if MS doesn't get out of the way, interesting things will happen with Open Doument.
So far OASIS Open Document being used by at least the following:
- StarOffice
- OpenOffice.org
- AbiWord
- kWord
Unlike MS-WordML, which is encumbered by patents, trade secrets, and difficult licensing issues, OpenDocument is free to use. It also meets the requirements specified in European Interoperability Framework for Pan-European eGovernment Services. It's getting increasing attention: Note that the only industry actor not currently involved in the OASIS Open Document Format has been and still is MS. MS is still trying to shoehorn old MS-Office 97 customers into DRM'd MS-Office 2003, which functions in effect like a roach motel for your data. So far the worst insult that Balmer and Gates can cough up is that OpenOffice.org (OOo) is like MS-Office 97. However, I think even those two can see that OOo meets this groups functional requirements quite well, and is free and multiplatform. OOo is also available in more languages than MS-Office, handles long documents better, and does better with styles and stylesheets.Currently, there are many governments moving up to StarOffice or OpenOffice.org for the sake of these formats. Singapore comes to mind first, but there are many, many others that don't necessarily make the mainstream press like Sarpsborg. Likewise, there are many small, medium and large businesses moving along. Some with an axe to grind (with good reason ) speak up. However, most are silent until the move is being implemented to keep the goon squad from Redmond from getting in the way.
The current choice:
- OASIS Open Document --
- be able to access your own data indefinitely as XML
- and change productivity tools, operating systems and hardware only if and when it suites you
- MS-WordML --
- pay that Redmond tithe indefinitely
- and buy new productivity tools, operating systems and hardware when Chairman Bill tells you to
Easy choice. You don't need to be a wizard to see which direction things are going to head.MSIE was a big piece of crap too back then, more so than now. It and Netscape were what turned me on to Opera. The resume-where-you-left-off" feature of Opera combined with MS Windows inability to go more than an hour or two between blue screens kept me from ever looking back. Though fortunately, I've never had been stuck with MS junk on any of my main work computers.
However, the remedies being upheld is a good thing. This may put a bigger wrench in M$ plans by not only preventing the desktop audio / video market from closing up, but also HDTV and DVDs. M$ has had its eye on all three and the desktop monopoly could have done much more harm if HDTV over IP were to become available only via WMP.
Let's hope this support of the March decision gives open codecs like Vorbis and Dirac a boost all around.
The way out is to avoid these vendors and use only Free or Open Source Software. Check the code yourself or hire someone you can rely on to do so. See points 29 - 32 in the European Parliament resolution on the existence of a global system for the interception of private and commercial communications.
That applies to all software, not just mail.
If you want to mod an existing setup, then there are several places to get wooden veneer on your case, keyboard or mouse. Exotic Wood Crafts is one.
Look at the "Database User Tools" or the "OpenOffice.org 1.0, ODBC, and MySQL 'How-to'" for an overview of how it works. This is much improved in OOo 2.x, which will be out early next year. Snapshots of OOo 2.0 are available for download and testing.
Pintos exploded when rammed by another car from behind. The courts forced the manufacturer to recall the defective models fix the faulty design. Or should the courts just have told Pinto owners not to let people tailgate on them?
As far as empty buildings in the north go, I say again look to the policies and ideologies that emptied those buildings. Quite often thriving or sustainable industries were closed down so that the population can be moved to ghettos in the largest cities.
To ignore several old cultures living dozens of centuries in the regions they steward and turn around and market that same region as "wilderness" or worse "Europe's last wilderness" is racist or just ignorant.
The second option seems safer for the server. At an interval of hours or days, the server could check to verify the existence of the client.
Discussions about paper trails, auditing and such are for future elections. Only votes (not necessarily ballots) which have an origin which can be proven should be accepted. All others should be discarded. Without being able to prove the provenance of the "votes" it cannot proven that there was no monkey business. That's a lot of what having an open and fair election is about - proving there was no monkey business.
There are visible discrepancies between exit polls and poll results indicate that something is amiss and should be investigated.
Among several probelms, there seems to be a correlation between use of voting machines and skewed poll results as show by several investigations, including the Berkeley report. (Of interest for future reference, other analysis suggests a correlation between red counties and ClearChannel market dominance). Furthermore, the last few years of use have shown that the technology and methods used by the electronic voting machine companies that this little or no chance of preventing tampering nor of directly detecting tampering due to inherently badly designed systems. This was known prior to the election.
Such serious things should not be given the benefit of the doubt. The electoral college should overturn these irreproducable results and hold a second, paper-only election. It would have been both faster and cheaper to count them by hand like in Canada. Don't let it get so bad that it gets resolved by another civil war.
I was under the impression that not only are most nations already off of the gold reserve, but have been quietly off loading what they do have before it drops to a value more appropriate for its industrial qualities.
As far as currencies go, unless the electoral college rises to the occasion and takes the voter suppression, election fraud and questions about the reliability of the current voting system into account, I can't see any way to avoid the dollar from tanking completely. So it would be unwise to keep all of it in US dollars.
Whatever. The Mozilla foundation does have to do something wise with that money, regardless.
- literate
- healthy
- good eyesight
- average or better intelligence
- honest
- civically responsible
- volunteers
- not wealthy
- not drug users
- not pervs
and getting them out of circulation. Delay in reproduction reduces the fitness and delay can be achieved by circumstance (in a combat zone) or stress, injury, induced psychological disorders, chemical contamination or plain old death.So what you have, whether intentional or not, is in effect a eugenics program to shape the US population to be more like Bush.
Why is a shoplifter giving more punishment than either a CEO who's actions kill 15000 people or one that bilks millions of people out of their life savings?
The Internet Public Library has a catalog of over 20 000 online, publicly available books and has cataloged a comparable number of online, publicly available magazines and newspapers. Unfortunately, that part of the database is down for a time while the back-end is moved to a new provider. (The old provider stopped on too short notice.)
If you feel you must spend money on e-books, then at least make that a good investment in the form of a donation to Gutenberg, Runeberg, etc. or to EFF or another group to make copyright laws more reasonable once again.
In Sweden and Finland, and, to a lesser extent, Norway policy changes to industry, agriculture and the market in general are optimized to force the population into concentrated areas leaving these evacuated, desirable properties undervalued. Norway has been more stubborn or wiser about this. Sweden and Finland are currently getting hit harder. Not just in ghettoization of the population, but also in doleing out properties to foreign owners.
The price in some areas has doubled in the last 5 years as Germans become the majority. (e.g. a run down farm a day's drive from Germany underneath a noisy windmill and down wind from a pig farm went for 15 times what it would have 10 years ago) Denmark will get hit, too, once it becomes forced to allow desirable property.
The earth will lose it's ability to sustain our population long before all other earth life is extinguished. Civilization is still more fragile. We can still adapt, but better urban planning needs to take precidence over short term greed.
Search services (AltaVista, Yahoo, Google, AllTheWeb, in fact all that I can think of) have dropped the ability to make truncated searches. For English that's only a minor inconvenience. For languages with many tenses or cases (e.g. Russian, Spanish, or Finnish), lack of truncation can make the search service darn near useless.
I'd sure love to hear the rational for all these downgrades. Or, better yet, have the funtions restored.
If they lack the technical expertise, perhaps their vendor can help them as a partner in the offeneren welt and actually hook them up with an "opener" web site.
That was my motivation for wiping MS off the last machine at home some years ago. One evening as I was getting ready to clean up another MS mess, I though "why can't this be as easy and reliable as at work with Linux?" Since then I've also become a fan of OS X. I still do occasional support, just not for any MS product. That way I know there is very little chance of having to solve the same problem twice for that person.
Don't work for free for Chairman Bill this holiday season. It just encourages him to put out more broken, poorly interoperable products.