That's all pretty much true, except that IE 6 is actually a very good web-browser.
It took 6 versions to get here, and Microsoft Messenger still sucks compared to AIM or ICQ, but that's not really the issue.
Good point - IE is a very good browser. And to date the only one (AFAIK) that does XSLT internally. And it only took 3 years to get there, but Mozilla's a pretty good browser now, too - it adopts a different feel that Microsoft.
And you're onto an important point here:
The SHARED components that Microsoft built into Windows and then designed the newest versions of explorer around also power the desktop and many other applications. That's the nature of shared components.
Having an embeddable HTML widget as part of the OS is indeed very useful. In an ideal world, this component would be totally modular, and you could plug in gecko or KHTML and everything would work fine. However, because actually making this work well enough to ship in a consumer product would require a kind of cooperation rarely found between tech companies, short of (aha!) legislative intervention. This is what makes Microsoft arguments so hard to dismiss - they push the limits of the argument, but there's usually a decent point somewhere in the core.
That said, the existence of an embedded widget is not the problem - it's the fact that it's a moving target. It's abundantly clear that Microsoft has used their control of the HTML widget to try to control larger aspects of how Web traffic moves, the latest version of this being XPassportMessengIEr.
Yes, it's a bit tricky to involve regulatory agencies in the design process of some product, but just imagine how people would feel if Microsoft was a grocery store. Sure, you can get Post cereals at the store controlling 88% of the market, but you'll have to go in the back and use the pallet loader to move some stuff and unwrap the box. Is that fair? To what extent do you tell MicroSafeway where to put stuff on it's shelves?
Good general summary, I thought I'd add the following: On both RedHat and Mandrake, KDE RPMS have to be installed in order: arts, then kdelibs, then the rest, with kdeaddons last. I found the Mandrake 8.1 packages for this release to be so buggy that I went back to building from source - worked MUCH better.
I agree with you that they really are trying a new business model, and in many ways, I think it's a very sane one for the software development community. The strength of a software platform depends on the community of its users and particularly developers, and Mandrake is clearly trying to combine some sort of revenues with a strong relationship with its user and developer base. Frankly, I think it's a great direction for business in general, and Mandrake didn't have to screw around with silly acronyms like CRM to figure out that good business is symbiotic.
In reading over the terms of the Club, I get the sense that their vision is somewhat vague. Not to throw rocks, but the combination of novel and vague methods makes it easy to make mistakes. Nonethless, they seem to have their heads on pretty straight. Perhaps Mandrake won't make it as Mandrake, but those folks will do good stuff, and I wish them the best.
It seems to me that a big part of the problem with the RIAA is that they have positioned themselves in the center of all these deals involving the exchange of rights, and to even figure out to whom you owe what, you involve yourself in their huge mess. In fact, that seems to be their business - broker contracts between as many parties as possible.
Since the kind of people who want to do small scale broadcasting will never have the business infrastructure to fight them directly, they might get more results by sic'ing the feds on em. With some decent investigation, and with the kind participation of artists, I'd guess (IANAL or a securities expert) that there's plenty of material for an SEC investigation, and the right public mood for this kind of thing. If the RIAA and media conglomerates are really on the level, this audit should go just fine, with a PR golden egg at the end.
What kind of info-gathering does it take to get an SEC investigation started?
XSLT is XML Stylesheet Transformation. It lets you send your web data in XML, and then apply a stylesheet (standard cascading style sheet that web pages use) to it based on matching patterns in the XML. An example of when it might be useful is when you want to make a small change in something that repeats over and over on a webpage.
If you really want to test undocumented API's, try this perl program.
Frankly, from me, the problems of documentation with OS-level API's are hearsay - I just haven't done Windows programming at that deep a level.
It has, however, been the standard complaint of WINE and SAMBA developers for years.
Really, if someone has trouble looking up documentation on MS APIs in MSDN, then they'd probably have trouble looking something up in Google, too. The problem is, more than likely, people completely unfamiliar with MS' APIs (Win32, COM,.NET, DirectX...), so they don't even know what they're looking for.
Your point that you have to know what you're looking for, no matter what toolkit you use a fair one, but I think you're overstating it.
I've used the MSDN library for reference on Access programming for 3 years, and I can't say I'm that impressed. Most of the documents on there are written in marketing style, rather than being direct technical information.
Reading "Did you know you can embed Excel documents into Access forms?" is not helpful when you want to know why something's not working.
What MS should do to work well with Open Source: a) Document API's thoroughly, and keep the docs up to date b) Standards: Microsoft is frequently the first one to implement a standard or to make it mainstream. As an example, XSLT comes to mind. AFAIK, IE was the first browser to support XSLT. As the first big boys there, they usually claim the right to make modifications to a standard or to fill in details in the standard. They could win a lot of goodwill merely by consult other companies and open source developers before as they implement the standard. This will greatly reduce (though probably not eliminate) the feeling of railroading that we all feel when MS' software doesn't follow standards, and we all have to deal with it. c) Document and admit mistakes and bugs. One of the most infuriating things about Microsoft software, is that it either doesn't do what it says, as in undocumented behavior and bugs, or cryptic error messages saying things don't work unless the OS is configured right (which is true ipso facto, but somewhat accusatory, and certainly not helpful). I think this happens mostly because they can get away with it, and writing thorough documentation for your programs is not nearly as satisfying or financially rewarding as designing and writing the code itself. They could again improve goodwill if they were responsive to outside developer's questions about these bugs and behaviors, rather than being dismissive.
I'm sure there are more, but these sure would make it easier for an outsider to like Microsoft.
Re:a little nonsense, but hey - it's near April Fo
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First of all, a citation showing where these statistics came from would make me a lot more likely to believe them. Even more informed would be a summary of who generated the statistics, and what point they were trying to prove with their statistics.
Second, this:
I don't look at the gun issue through clouded lenses of feelings, fears, and misconceptions. Guns are not evil, bad, etc...but some people, irrationaly, feel that way...and they are often portrayed that way.
is slander - you're accusing those who disagree with you of being "irrational" to get around the open-ended nature of the debate. The lens of feelings, fears, and misconceptions is a fundamental part of being human - in fact it's the part of being human that's both endlessly frustrating and totally liberating. This business that scientists and engineers have about applying the idea of objectivity drives me nuts - objectivity is an abstraction of the much cloudier notion of someone who already has a perspective trying to make a fair evaluation of something, and as an abstraction "objectivity" misses a lot of the subtlety of real life. Would you say you look at your girlfriend objectively? Doesn't she deserve better judgement than a reductionist cost-benefit analysis?
A more honest explanation would be to explain how you come to think we're better off with guns. Particularly since you seem to have had experiences that confirmed that point of view for you. As it is, I'm utterly unconvinced, because I've had experiences the other way.
In general, I can't help but agree that we're materially better off staying and pumping in some money than leaving a country choking on the dust of troop transport planes.
There's a big catch with Germany and Japan, though. They were already pretty well industrialized by the time WW2 ended. Afghanistan is much farther back - in this case they'd have to create an infrastructure, not just rebuild and modernize it.
I was just reading Bob Young's piece in Open Sources. While it's certainly flush with optimism that now seems naive, he's pretty convincing when he points out that Heinz sells a absolutely replicable product, and still controls 80% of the ketchup market. They've simply built such a strong brand that they define what ketchup should taste like.
I'd say that Microsoft has built one of the strongest brands in the world, mostly by applying clever and well-branded systems integration (a fact the head of Microsoft research makes no bones about in a recent article in the Economist.
Short of drastic legislation (which we just are not going to see under this administration), the only thing that would knock MS out of the catbird seat would be weakening of the brand. (one thing that would probably weaken the brand is interoperability and hence less distinguishability between Windows and Linux).
What's surprising is that people don't seem to care about brand when it comes to PDAs and embedded devices, but they sure do on the desktop (after all, people spend a lot of money to BUY new versions of Windows, over and over).
There's an object lesson to be learned about tech branding as attention shifts from the OS to the embedded devices and web services, and perhaps us Linux-zealots should be clever enough to try to learn from it.
Does anyone know if StarOffice on Windows can: a) Print to PDF? or b) edit PDF?
This is undoubtedly not a new, point, but worth repeating: printing to PDF is a really key capability for Star Office, in that it would provide users with an easy way to send documents they know most people can read (I'd love to say they could send it HTML, but we all know the perils of print-based formatting in HTML).
If StarOffice had something as simple as a little checkbox when you used File->Send to email the current document to someone that said "Also send a copy of this document in PDF, for maximum compatibility", StarOffice could make a the state of document formats. Even more so if users could then fire the PDF up in their word processor and change it back.
This tunneling is done automatically most SSH clients and X windows servers these days.
The above-mentioned setup works through a firewalling RH7.2 gateway, and I can use openssh under Linux, and TeraTerm or the SSH brand SSH with XWin/32 under Windows, and both of them setup X forwarding automatically. Tunneling not only secures the data coming across X, it frequently speeds it up by using SSH compression.
Of course it only took me 8 months to learn not to EXPORT DISPLAY=host:0.0....
I'm trying to restrain a rant, but this kind of pooh-pooh-ing is exactly why Linux continues to look like everyone's kid brother.
I am a student, with the opportunity of working at home. At school - fairly good T1. At home 256K DSL. Which means as connectivity goes, I'm actually quite well off. I run Mandrake and Windows on both ends. In this setup (note again that it is an above-average one), I can tell you that using X (over SSH with compression enabled), Matlab (java app) runs juuuuust barely fast enough to be usable. Any KDE/GNOME apps - forgetaboutit. I used VNC for about 20 minutes before getting tired of waiting for the pointer to catch up to my mouse. My then-roommate, who works for Microsoft, could easily use PPTP to connect to his TermServ machine over the same connection. Not at all sluggish. In fact, he could even do it over dialup (then it was sluggish).
X windows does what it was designed to do - let you redirect displays over the local network, but it's not a long-distance remote access answer.
If we Linuxites want remote connectivity for desktop apps, we'll need to figure out how to make higher-level RPC calls. Being a KDE user, I'd love to see this built into QT or KDE.
That's the desktop part. Now the data storage part: In our glorious remote computing future, your data is stored in the "network cloud". Microsoft will implement this by selling Cloud Server 1.0, which only works if you have Microsoft Synchronization Server running on Whistlerhorn XPDQ.
But rather than trying to do things exactly the MS does, we can do them the Linux way: make a "cloud" that you can tweak to your little heart's delight. Example: My cloud = my home box via DSL, an extra backup box at home, a work computer and a PDA. Mandrake could hypothetically build a nice installer that sets up a generic configuration for add storage to my cloud, and some preconfigurated synchronization settings. It won't snap into a network quite as smoothly as MS Cloud Server, but if I want to change the kernel latency for the cloud-synching process, I can just go ahead and do that. All on my own machines...
Entirely true. These days, however, the company likley has many customers who don't care about the blot on the skyline because they don't live there. That's not to accuse people of being morally negligent, they just have other priorities. So we need to look for more ways to link these costs to a person's process of deciding where to put their money.
BTW, these ideas are mostly a paraphrasing of Jeff Gates' book The Ownership Solution, which I highly recommend.
The irony is that what causes the info-tracking technology to cross the line between helpful and invasive is the efforts of clever software engineers in making information impossible easy to store and follow.
The crux of your analogy is following people around. But what if you could record every conversation within a mile as easily as overhearing it? Even people with the most innoccuous intentions could run roughshod over privacy. That seems to me to be exactly what this bar owner is saying: "Well, I bought this doodad to reduce the hassles that go along with checking IDs properly (or checking them improperly and get browbeaten by local liquor control boards), but as long as it says click here to build Customer-Experience Enhancement Profiles, I figure I'll give this a shot." And then, "Wow, this is really useful to me. I can make my bar do much better business."
Information seems more and more to want to be free. The problem is setting it free without letting run around without its pants on.
I'll bet that a term in a contract mandating you to give to your employer something you made during the term of your employment is patently illegal anywhere. Particularly if the worker can claim that they did not understand and would not have agreed to such terms.
Of course that advice is worth exactly what it costs, but I'd be awfully surprised (and dismayed) if these people actually could enforce that. However, what they could make plenty gravy out of, and what I'd guess they'll do, is try to show that this guy used resources that work supplied to come up with the ideas that he then open-sourced.
This does raise an interesting question about whether the redisseminated material can be recalled, given that all the people who used it used it legally and in good compliance with wishes of the author, as best they understood. How can those guys demand that people now start paying license fees without given them a chance to choose otherwise?
Right, but "free" markets show a remarkable inertia when it comes to adding costs for things people can otherwise keep off their balance sheets. Here the environmental costs are a public good, so their costs are sloughed off of balance sheets and onto the back of the public.
The only actor with the ability to put these costs back on balance sheets where they belong is the TV personality every American loves to hate - the government. But in the US we've come to think it's our right to have a society without taxes or rules, so we steadfastly resist this. I really think in this case, we need to look at stricter environmental laws as common sense economics - the public looking out for itself.
Well, first of all, taking RMS with a grain of salt is a pretty good idea. RMS is an academic.
Which means that he's very good at following an idea where it leads, but not very good at
understanding when the time comes to compromise on the philosophical to
achieve the practical. He's also clearly unwilling to admit to the world (and probably to himself) that
he really wants to be the Most Important and In-Charge Comrade Among Equals of the Soldiers
of Free Software. You could actually make a pretty good case that this has caused people
(in the US at least) to ignore some of the very good ideas at the root of socialism -
they have been articulated too ideologically by college professors, without the fleshing out
of practical life.
The GPL was good for giving momentum to the idea of Open Source Software by throwing the
doors open to hobbyists and smart, curious people, capitalizing on tremendous interest and enthusiasm by people who didn't already know they liked
this field to build intellectual excitement to a movement. For evidence of its power, just
compare Linux culture to *BSD culture.
But at this stage the GPL is starting feel restrictive. Yes, it protects your intellectual freedom
in the absolute (RMS' failure to include this adjective, which is totally obvious to him because
his life is lived intellectually, is the source of many flame wars), but it restricts your
practical options very severely. It's a bind, because the GPL builds intellectual excitement
into Open Source, and giving it the boot could cut the movement off from its fueling enthusiasm. But clinging tightly to the GPL is a pretty sure way of making sure OSS stays inside the academy and a few
l33t h4x0r circles. To see what OSS can be, you gotta give people who don't live by ideas a crack at
seeing what they can do, in the way that they do it.
So good for you, Shawn Gordon, you are reaching the inevitable phase where the student supersedes the teachings
of the instructors. So far you've kept the Open Source spirit of contribution to a community pretty well intact.
Perhaps you can take Open Source where many of use would like to see it go.
A while back, it occurred to me that QT ought to build shortcuts this into their architecture. I tried to email them and suggest it, but I don't think they understood that I was suggesting a TermServ type optimization. It'd be all kinds of cool though.
And with QT being cross-platform and all, you could really start to throw down some nice remote solutions....
I'm tempted to agree with you, having used VNC for remote application use, and found that it really didn't quite meet it as a remote desktop interface. I believe that it works for administration but for trying to USE my home then-Win98 box (DSL) from work (T1), the screen repaints were just too slow.
I guessed based on seeing Terminal Services run MUCH quicker than VNC over the same connection that Terminal Services is using higher-level RPCs to reduce the amount of data needing to be moved around. That would lead me to guess that non-MFC apps would run at the same speed over VNC as Terminal Services. Is this true?
Does anyone know more about the architecture of Terminal Services?
Yes, I am too lazy to research this in MS' site, and would much rather hear from a knowledgeable/.er.
What you say is totally true, and I should also volunteer that Jon writes much more than I could hope to, and in much more public places. And certainly the kind of feedback that people post here is much less focused than the writing they're complaining about, so posting here takes guts.
I pretty much agree with you, but I'd add a twist. It's funny, a few months ago, I was saying that open source would never have the polish of commerical OSes like OS X or Windows, because nobody's paid to do the dirty work of making sure that things work consistently across menus, then dialogs, then apps, then the entire package. My rationale was like yours, people who are in it for free want to do the interesting part, not sweating it out with a hex editor as the article mentions. Lately, though, I've been muddling on the kde-usability list, and am really quite surprised how much work people are willing to put in to polish up the desktop. Who knows how far the efforts will get, or if people will tire quickly, but at least for now, there seems to be a scratch for every itch. Maybe those open source avatars were right after all.
While I hesitate to jump on the bandwagon of people who like to abuse Jon Katz for sport, articles like this do make it seem like he's spinning his wheels.
I have not read through Katz's earlier work at Wired, when he might have been accountable to an editor, but certainly most of his essays here are the sort of vague, grandiose pontification that any proper college writing teacher should cull out of a student. I recall being endlessly frustrated in college by the idea of having to write 4 pages about 5 lines of some piece of literature, but upon leaving school, I discovered that people are much more interested in what you can say cogently about a small point than hearing you sketch sweeping paint-by-number landscapes you can't possibly hope to fill in.
In short, Katz, your ideas are moderately interesting but very overstated, and by focussing them into sharper points about tighter subjects, you'd make them interesting to read. I wish you luck tightening your writing.
We're benchmarking the progress of the browser by whether Mozilla will be able to render MathML within mangled HTML on 2 sites?
Sure it'd be nice to scream at other geeks in greek letters and such, but I think I'd put more stock in being able to publish math-intensive work directly to HTML, rather screwing around with LaTEX and pdf and whatnot.
You're on the right track, but I think it's even simpler than that.
'Roblimo' hung this weekend with some friends who are engineers at AOL. Some beer got drunk (this beer was not free as in beer). They got to talking about how much that haaaaate that bad ole Micros~1. The evening got later, some more beer got drunk, and someone mentioned having seen a Mozilla poster in the office of that VP he'd never talked to. "Yeah!" said Roblimo, "AOL's going Mozilla! I'll take your dazed and drunken smiles as a yes." he continued. So the well-intentioned Roblimo wrote diligently through the night to brings this news to the world:
"I'm just positive AOL's switching to Gecko, and right away"
Slashdot Mirror
Good point - IE is a very good browser. And to date the only one (AFAIK) that does XSLT internally. And it only took 3 years to get there, but Mozilla's a pretty good browser now, too - it adopts a different feel that Microsoft. And you're onto an important point here: The SHARED components that Microsoft built into Windows and then designed the newest versions of explorer around also power the desktop and many other applications. That's the nature of shared components.
Having an embeddable HTML widget as part of the OS is indeed very useful. In an ideal world, this component would be totally modular, and you could plug in gecko or KHTML and everything would work fine. However, because actually making this work well enough to ship in a consumer product would require a kind of cooperation rarely found between tech companies, short of (aha!) legislative intervention. This is what makes Microsoft arguments so hard to dismiss - they push the limits of the argument, but there's usually a decent point somewhere in the core.
That said, the existence of an embedded widget is not the problem - it's the fact that it's a moving target. It's abundantly clear that Microsoft has used their control of the HTML widget to try to control larger aspects of how Web traffic moves, the latest version of this being XPassportMessengIEr.
Yes, it's a bit tricky to involve regulatory agencies in the design process of some product, but just imagine how people would feel if Microsoft was a grocery store. Sure, you can get Post cereals at the store controlling 88% of the market, but you'll have to go in the back and use the pallet loader to move some stuff and unwrap the box. Is that fair? To what extent do you tell MicroSafeway where to put stuff on it's shelves?
Good general summary, I thought I'd add the following:
On both RedHat and Mandrake, KDE RPMS have to be installed in order:
arts, then kdelibs, then the rest, with kdeaddons last.
I found the Mandrake 8.1 packages for this release to be so buggy that I went back to building from source - worked MUCH better.
I agree with you that they really are trying a new business model, and in many ways, I think it's a very sane one for the software development community. The strength of a software platform depends on the community of its users and particularly developers, and Mandrake is clearly trying to combine some sort of revenues with a strong relationship with its user and developer base. Frankly, I think it's a great direction for business in general, and Mandrake didn't have to screw around with silly acronyms like CRM to figure out that good business is symbiotic.
In reading over the terms of the Club, I get the sense that their vision is somewhat vague. Not to throw rocks, but the combination of novel and vague methods makes it easy to make mistakes. Nonethless, they seem to have their heads on pretty straight. Perhaps Mandrake won't make it as Mandrake, but those folks will do good stuff, and I wish them the best.
Since the kind of people who want to do small scale broadcasting will never have the business infrastructure to fight them directly, they might get more results by sic'ing the feds on em. With some decent investigation, and with the kind participation of artists, I'd guess (IANAL or a securities expert) that there's plenty of material for an SEC investigation, and the right public mood for this kind of thing. If the RIAA and media conglomerates are really on the level, this audit should go just fine, with a PR golden egg at the end.
What kind of info-gathering does it take to get an SEC investigation started?
XSLT is XML Stylesheet Transformation. It lets you send your web data in XML, and then apply a stylesheet (standard cascading style sheet that web pages use) to it based on matching patterns in the XML. An example of when it might be useful is when you want to make a small change in something that repeats over and over on a webpage.
Hope that helps.
Frankly, from me, the problems of documentation with OS-level API's are hearsay - I just haven't done Windows programming at that deep a level. It has, however, been the standard complaint of WINE and SAMBA developers for years.
Really, if someone has trouble looking up documentation on MS APIs in MSDN, then they'd probably have trouble looking something up in Google, too. The problem is, more than likely, people completely unfamiliar with MS' APIs (Win32, COM, .NET, DirectX...), so they don't even know what they're looking for.
Your point that you have to know what you're looking for, no matter what toolkit you use a fair one, but I think you're overstating it. I've used the MSDN library for reference on Access programming for 3 years, and I can't say I'm that impressed. Most of the documents on there are written in marketing style, rather than being direct technical information. Reading "Did you know you can embed Excel documents into Access forms?" is not helpful when you want to know why something's not working.
What MS should do to work well with Open Source:
a) Document API's thoroughly, and keep the docs up to date
b) Standards: Microsoft is frequently the first one to implement a standard or to make it mainstream. As an example, XSLT comes to mind. AFAIK, IE was the first browser to support XSLT. As the first big boys there, they usually claim the right to make modifications to a standard or to fill in details in the standard. They could win a lot of goodwill merely by consult other companies and open source developers before as they implement the standard. This will greatly reduce (though probably not eliminate) the feeling of railroading that we all feel when MS' software doesn't follow standards, and we all have to deal with it.
c) Document and admit mistakes and bugs. One of the most infuriating things about Microsoft software, is that it either doesn't do what it says, as in undocumented behavior and bugs, or cryptic error messages saying things don't work unless the OS is configured right (which is true ipso facto, but somewhat accusatory, and certainly not helpful). I think this happens mostly because they can get away with it, and writing thorough documentation for your programs is not nearly as satisfying or financially rewarding as designing and writing the code itself. They could again improve goodwill if they were responsive to outside developer's questions about these bugs and behaviors, rather than being dismissive.
I'm sure there are more, but these sure would make it easier for an outsider to like Microsoft.
Second, this:
I don't look at the gun issue through clouded lenses of feelings, fears, and misconceptions. Guns are not evil, bad, etc...but some people, irrationaly, feel that way...and they are often portrayed that way.
is slander - you're accusing those who disagree with you of being "irrational" to get around the open-ended nature of the debate. The lens of feelings, fears, and misconceptions is a fundamental part of being human - in fact it's the part of being human that's both endlessly frustrating and totally liberating. This business that scientists and engineers have about applying the idea of objectivity drives me nuts - objectivity is an abstraction of the much cloudier notion of someone who already has a perspective trying to make a fair evaluation of something, and as an abstraction "objectivity" misses a lot of the subtlety of real life. Would you say you look at your girlfriend objectively? Doesn't she deserve better judgement than a reductionist cost-benefit analysis?
A more honest explanation would be to explain how you come to think we're better off with guns. Particularly since you seem to have had experiences that confirmed that point of view for you. As it is, I'm utterly unconvinced, because I've had experiences the other way.
In general, I can't help but agree that we're materially better off staying and pumping in some money than leaving a country choking on the dust of troop transport planes.
There's a big catch with Germany and Japan, though. They were already pretty well industrialized by the time WW2 ended. Afghanistan is much farther back - in this case they'd have to create an infrastructure, not just rebuild and modernize it.
I was just reading Bob Young's piece in Open Sources . While it's certainly flush with optimism that now seems naive, he's pretty convincing when he points out that Heinz sells a absolutely replicable product, and still controls 80% of the ketchup market. They've simply built such a strong brand that they define what ketchup should taste like.
I'd say that Microsoft has built one of the strongest brands in the world, mostly by applying clever and well-branded systems integration (a fact the head of Microsoft research makes no bones about in a recent article in the Economist. Short of drastic legislation (which we just are not going to see under this administration), the only thing that would knock MS out of the catbird seat would be weakening of the brand. (one thing that would probably weaken the brand is interoperability and hence less distinguishability between Windows and Linux). What's surprising is that people don't seem to care about brand when it comes to PDAs and embedded devices, but they sure do on the desktop (after all, people spend a lot of money to BUY new versions of Windows, over and over).
There's an object lesson to be learned about tech branding as attention shifts from the OS to the embedded devices and web services, and perhaps us Linux-zealots should be clever enough to try to learn from it.
Does anyone know if StarOffice on Windows can:
a) Print to PDF?
or
b) edit PDF?
This is undoubtedly not a new, point, but worth repeating: printing to PDF is a really key capability for Star Office, in that it would provide users with an easy way to send documents they know most people can read (I'd love to say they could send it HTML, but we all know the perils of print-based formatting in HTML).
If StarOffice had something as simple as a little checkbox when you used File->Send to email the current document to someone that said "Also send a copy of this document in PDF, for maximum compatibility", StarOffice could make a the state of document formats. Even more so if users could then fire the PDF up in their word processor and change it back.
Viva la PDF.
This tunneling is done automatically most SSH clients and X windows servers these days.
....
The above-mentioned setup works through a firewalling RH7.2 gateway, and I can use openssh under Linux, and TeraTerm or the SSH brand SSH with XWin/32 under Windows, and both of them setup X forwarding automatically. Tunneling not only secures the data coming across X, it frequently speeds it up by using SSH compression.
Of course it only took me 8 months to learn not to EXPORT DISPLAY=host:0.0
I'm trying to restrain a rant, but this kind of pooh-pooh-ing is exactly why Linux continues to look like everyone's kid brother.
I am a student, with the opportunity of working at home. At school - fairly good T1. At home 256K DSL. Which means as connectivity goes, I'm actually quite well off. I run Mandrake and Windows on both ends. In this setup (note again that it is an above-average one), I can tell you that using X (over SSH with compression enabled), Matlab (java app) runs juuuuust barely fast enough to be usable. Any KDE/GNOME apps - forgetaboutit. I used VNC for about 20 minutes before getting tired of waiting for the pointer to catch up to my mouse. My then-roommate, who works for Microsoft, could easily use PPTP to connect to his TermServ machine over the same connection. Not at all sluggish. In fact, he could even do it over dialup (then it was sluggish).
X windows does what it was designed to do - let you redirect displays over the local network, but it's not a long-distance remote access answer.
If we Linuxites want remote connectivity for desktop apps, we'll need to figure out how to make higher-level RPC calls. Being a KDE user, I'd love to see this built into QT or KDE.
That's the desktop part. Now the data storage part:
In our glorious remote computing future, your data is stored in the "network cloud". Microsoft will implement this by selling Cloud Server 1.0, which only works if you have Microsoft Synchronization Server running on Whistlerhorn XPDQ.
But rather than trying to do things exactly the MS does, we can do them the Linux way: make a "cloud" that you can tweak to your little heart's delight. Example: My cloud = my home box via DSL, an extra backup box at home, a work computer and a PDA. Mandrake could hypothetically build a nice installer that sets up a generic configuration for add storage to my cloud, and some preconfigurated synchronization settings. It won't snap into a network quite as smoothly as MS Cloud Server, but if I want to change the kernel latency for the cloud-synching process, I can just go ahead and do that. All on my own machines...
BTW, these ideas are mostly a paraphrasing of Jeff Gates' book The Ownership Solution, which I highly recommend.
Well put.
The irony is that what causes the info-tracking technology to cross the line between helpful and invasive is the efforts of clever software engineers in making information impossible easy to store and follow.
The crux of your analogy is following people around. But what if you could record every conversation within a mile as easily as overhearing it? Even people with the most innoccuous intentions could run roughshod over privacy. That seems to me to be exactly what this bar owner is saying: "Well, I bought this doodad to reduce the hassles that go along with checking IDs properly (or checking them improperly and get browbeaten by local liquor control boards), but as long as it says click here to build Customer-Experience Enhancement Profiles, I figure I'll give this a shot." And then, "Wow, this is really useful to me. I can make my bar do much better business."
Information seems more and more to want to be free. The problem is setting it free without letting run around without its pants on.
IANAL, but ich bin ein /.er, so I'll guess away:
I'll bet that a term in a contract mandating you to give to your employer something you made during the term of your employment is patently illegal anywhere. Particularly if the worker can claim that they did not understand and would not have agreed to such terms.
Of course that advice is worth exactly what it costs, but I'd be awfully surprised (and dismayed) if these people actually could enforce that. However, what they could make plenty gravy out of, and what I'd guess they'll do, is try to show that this guy used resources that work supplied to come up with the ideas that he then open-sourced.
This does raise an interesting question about whether the redisseminated material can be recalled, given that all the people who used it used it legally and in good compliance with wishes of the author, as best they understood. How can those guys demand that people now start paying license fees without given them a chance to choose otherwise?
Right, but "free" markets show a remarkable inertia when it comes to adding costs for things people can otherwise keep off their balance sheets. Here the environmental costs are a public good, so their costs are sloughed off of balance sheets and onto the back of the public.
The only actor with the ability to put these costs back on balance sheets where they belong is the TV personality every American loves to hate - the government. But in the US we've come to think it's our right to have a society without taxes or rules, so we steadfastly resist this. I really think in this case, we need to look at stricter environmental laws as common sense economics - the public looking out for itself.
The GPL was good for giving momentum to the idea of Open Source Software by throwing the doors open to hobbyists and smart, curious people, capitalizing on tremendous interest and enthusiasm by people who didn't already know they liked this field to build intellectual excitement to a movement. For evidence of its power, just compare Linux culture to *BSD culture.
But at this stage the GPL is starting feel restrictive. Yes, it protects your intellectual freedom in the absolute (RMS' failure to include this adjective, which is totally obvious to him because his life is lived intellectually, is the source of many flame wars), but it restricts your practical options very severely. It's a bind, because the GPL builds intellectual excitement into Open Source, and giving it the boot could cut the movement off from its fueling enthusiasm. But clinging tightly to the GPL is a pretty sure way of making sure OSS stays inside the academy and a few l33t h4x0r circles. To see what OSS can be, you gotta give people who don't live by ideas a crack at seeing what they can do, in the way that they do it.
So good for you, Shawn Gordon, you are reaching the inevitable phase where the student supersedes the teachings of the instructors. So far you've kept the Open Source spirit of contribution to a community pretty well intact. Perhaps you can take Open Source where many of use would like to see it go.
A while back, it occurred to me that QT ought to build shortcuts this into their architecture. I tried to email them and suggest it, but I don't think they understood that I was suggesting a TermServ type optimization. It'd be all kinds of cool though.
And with QT being cross-platform and all, you could really start to throw down some nice remote solutions....
I'm tempted to agree with you, having used VNC for remote application use, and found that it really didn't quite meet it as a remote desktop interface. I believe that it works for administration but for trying to USE my home then-Win98 box (DSL) from work (T1), the screen repaints were just too slow.
/.er.
I guessed based on seeing Terminal Services run MUCH quicker than VNC over the same connection that Terminal Services is using higher-level RPCs to reduce the amount of data needing to be moved around. That would lead me to guess that non-MFC apps would run at the same speed over VNC as Terminal Services. Is this true?
Does anyone know more about the architecture of Terminal Services?
Yes, I am too lazy to research this in MS' site, and would much rather hear from a knowledgeable
What you say is totally true, and I should also volunteer that Jon writes much more than I could hope to, and in much more public places.
And certainly the kind of feedback that people post here is much less focused than the writing they're complaining about, so posting here takes guts.
If you read this, best of luck, JonKatz.
I pretty much agree with you, but I'd add a twist.
It's funny, a few months ago, I was saying that open source would never have the polish of commerical OSes like OS X or Windows, because nobody's paid to do the dirty work of making sure that things work consistently across menus, then dialogs, then apps, then the entire package.
My rationale was like yours, people who are in it for free want to do the interesting part, not sweating it out with a hex editor as the article mentions.
Lately, though, I've been muddling on the kde-usability list, and am really quite surprised how much work people are willing to put in to polish up the desktop. Who knows how far the efforts will get, or if people will tire quickly, but at least for now, there seems to be a scratch for every itch. Maybe those open source avatars were right after all.
While I hesitate to jump on the bandwagon of people who like to abuse Jon Katz for sport, articles like this do make it seem like he's spinning his wheels.
I have not read through Katz's earlier work at Wired, when he might have been accountable to an editor, but certainly most of his essays here are the sort of vague, grandiose pontification that any proper college writing teacher should cull out of a student. I recall being endlessly frustrated in college by the idea of having to write 4 pages about 5 lines of some piece of literature, but upon leaving school, I discovered that people are much more interested in what you can say cogently about a small point
than hearing you sketch sweeping paint-by-number landscapes you can't possibly hope to fill in.
In short, Katz, your ideas are moderately interesting but very overstated, and by focussing them into sharper points about tighter subjects, you'd make them interesting to read. I wish you luck tightening your writing.
Gaw?
We're benchmarking the progress of the browser by whether Mozilla will be able to render MathML within mangled HTML on 2 sites?
Sure it'd be nice to scream at other geeks in greek letters and such, but I think I'd put more stock in being able to publish math-intensive work directly to HTML, rather screwing around with LaTEX and pdf and whatnot.
Give em some credit, man!
You're on the right track, but I think it's even simpler than that.
'Roblimo' hung this weekend with some friends who are engineers at AOL. Some beer got drunk (this beer was not free as in beer). They got to talking about how much that haaaaate that bad ole Micros~1. The evening got later, some more beer got drunk, and someone mentioned having seen a Mozilla poster in the office of that VP he'd never talked to.
"Yeah!" said Roblimo, "AOL's going Mozilla! I'll take your dazed and drunken smiles as a yes." he continued. So the well-intentioned Roblimo wrote diligently through the night to brings this news to the world:
"I'm just positive AOL's switching to Gecko, and right away"