It does work. The problem is that right now, Microsoft does not license you to distribute all of the necessary.dlls. obviously, as you have pointed out, it takes more that one.
Try doing an MS Office install sometime - you'll notice it basically does an under-the-hood OS upgrade for you, first.
The problems he had with closed source were that, since the source was closed, the public could not know what was happening to their data (they might know what the format said, but they wouldn't know how it was processing it). In addition, if they wanted to switch vendors, even using open formats, it takes quite a bit to actually do the switch. With open software, you can switch vendors without immediately switching the software itself.
that the purpose of the Bill was to promote the use of software that adhered to open, freely adoptable, standards for the storage of the data (and that open/free software had a better record of meeting that goal of the Bill). He made, as I recall, a couple of mentions that proprietary software being perfectly OK as long as it met the goal of making the data available in an open format.
***
Although open data formats is an important part of the bill, it also forces free (as in speech) software as well. It does NOT allow proprietary software in government. The arguments he uses in favor of that is that they can switch vendors without doing major surgery on their systems, and have the freedom to do so. His references to proprietary software was only for the private sector, not the public sector. He wouldn't use MS Office unless MS Office was open-source.
Read the letter again - it does not allow for proprietary software within the government.
However, this becomes a standard to itself. It's not like someone could legitamately go "I have no idea how to implement that". GPL allows you to learn from reading the code even if you implement proprietary versions. So it is really impossible for GPL software to be proprietary, simply because you can always use their implementation.
I couldn't agree more! In fact next week I'm having my Uncle Leroy take out my spleen instead of some "doctor" who thinks he knows what he's doing just because he went to "medical school" and then trained for a dozen years.
***
Actually, even with doctors, the analogy still stands. Obviously not for surgery, but for other things. One doctor almost killed my son because he wouldn't listen to my wife and I. My mom would be dead by now if she did tell doctors to blow it out their you-know-wheres. And (in addition to doctor's _trying to kill him) my son probably would have died of his illness years ago had we listened and followed the advice of doctors.
Why was our way better than the doctor's way? Because we cared more. We paid more attention. I know my son's signals inside and out (he can't talk yet). My mom knows her health status better than any doctor. As amateurs we learn everything there is, and constantly think about how it does and doesn't apply to our situation, and are aware of every last thing that happens to ourselves.
And almost every time, my wife and I are better doctors for our son than the doctors, and my mom is a better doctor for herself than her doctors. Why do we go to doctors? Because insurance won't sign off on our own treatments:) Also, some of them listen and have insightful thoughts, but they are a minority.
Not using techies for design does not mean that they aren't doing what is basically a techie-friendly design. Yahoo!'s and Google's designs are among the best of the internet, because they allow you to do what you want without getting in the way. The design is flexible and easy to configure, and is nice-looking. I'm sure they used designers - just clueful ones.
Now, suddenly, Apache 2 for Windows is beating/matching IIS? That would effectively place it in the lead of every other web server on the market, free and commercial.
******
The problem, originally, was that Apache's design was entirely process-based. That means that every request needed it's own process. On Windows, this is very, very, slow, as it has trouble switching between proceses quickly, but is very fast at switching between threads. Apache redesigned it to be threads-based (actually, you can choose threads, processes, or hybrid), and thus the performance bottleneck went away. Process-switching and thread switching are about the same amount of time on Linux boxes, so that's why the performance didn't change much.
If you sell a product that's worth buying, it's not an issue. Being a cheap bastard doesn't mean that I don't buy anything, it's that I refuse to be cought in a useless continuous upgrade cycle that in the end gives me no real benefits, other than I can run bloated, worthless applications.
Only if you parents knew how to map host fonts to HTML virtual fonts. That's the sort of "configuring" that techies assume everyone does. To quote you, that's a common misconception.
*****
Not quite. Parents have children, or they can ask around. No, I don't expect my parents to know how to do such a thing. However, they do often ask me, "how do I get these fonts bigger" when they are looking at a JPEG rendering of fonts, done so that everyone's fonts look the same.
So no, I don't expect them to do everything themselves, but for the option to be available when they ask for help.
Also, as users get more power (which they would if people followed standards closer), they start to become more self-sufficient and knowledgeable.
The concepts behind the web and HTML aren't tricky or hard to grasp. The problem is that they are geared toward giving power to the end-user. Most corporations don't like that, and so they benefit more by simply covering up the fact that the users have power, and try to take it away for themselves.
I don't think they do this with a bad intention, it's just their nature, and the nature of many people, especially marketing people. Designers always seem to want people to experience things in the way that they have mapped out for them, instead of whatever way the user wants to experience them. Where I have worked, the designers, even when they have a design that will work in variable-width tables, insist on it being fixed-width so everything is exactly the same. Nevermind that users with big screens like to make use of them, or people with small screens don't like to scroll - they just want control of the experience. And the experience suffers because of that.
Standards committees, forums like/., and other gaggles of techies are famously out of touch with the preferences of "normal" people. They are then morally outraged by technologies that "corrupt" the purity of their systems -- by making them more the way normal people would like them to be.
***
This is a common misconception. The reason that "normal" users and techies differ is not necessarily that they want different things from their computers, it's that the techies know the consequences of various design decisions. For example:
1) Normal people like web pages that are done by graphic designers because they look nice even though they violate every know web design rule. Oh wait, except for my parents, because they can't read the font that the page author picked. Had it been done by a techie, they would have let the user's pick the fonts, and thus my parents could read it easily.
2) Normal people like flashy pages that are all interactive and move around on the screen. Oh wait, my parents don't because they are on a 100Mhz computer. Oh yeah, and it's bad for the company because although their information changes daily, it's so hard to change the custom-designed web page that it becomes useless in a matter of weeks because it's outdated. My church website is like that.
3) Normal people like GUI tools to build their web pages. Oh wait, unless they want it to look good on more than the browser the tool was built for. GUI tools tend to try to hide the nature of HTML, and thus, even though they will be displayable on other browsers (or even other browser versions), they won't look anything like the user intended. Because the user isn't aware of how HTML works, they will have no idea why this happens.
So, you can see, even though a lot of people would like to think "oh, those are just silly techies talking", the truth is that they usually have the same goals, but are just more realistic and knowledgeable on how they can be achieved.
I also like to be able to run my queries, and it gives me a nice big table that shows where it is spending its time, were there any row scans, and please, sir, can you suggest any indices I'm missing?
***
I believe PostgreSQL has this.
One of the big problems with MS SQL Server is that there aren't any production-quality JDBC drivers for it, period. Microsoft only has a beta-quality one that kills over ever once in a while. So, if you are running any sort of server-side Java apps, MS SQL Server just isn't a choice.
Clearly, there are more browsers now than before. So showing harm would be entirely speculative at this point.
****
# of browsers is not the point. Choice is. If there were infinite # of browsers available, but the regular consumer could only find 1, the fact that the others exist is quite moot. But again, it's hard to put a price tag on it.
AOL coming out with Netscape won't hurt the case, either, because if it requires shipping a competitor's product for free to the entire country to grab back a fraction of what was lost, then it kind of proves the monopoly position rather than hinder it.
Yes, I am talking about downloads. And this is important. Consumers could still choose.
***
No. If they "chose" netscape they were on their own. Users and companies rely on OEMs for support. If something doesn't work, it is the OEMs responsibility to fix it. That is, unless they downloaded it. Consumers were unable to get the full package anymore with netscape included.
Is this quantifiable? Maybe there is a way to quantify it, but I can't think of it at the moment.
The DOJ was REQUIRED to prove substantial harm to consumers because of the co-mingling, which it now turns out is very popular (look at KDE or Nautilius for proof of how popular).
***
It wasn't the co-mingling as much as the restrictions on the OEMs.
Slashdot Mirror
Open-Office does not include a database tool like Access. StarOffice does.
The question was on designing, not building. And yes, the design is the same question as building Linux.
It does work. The problem is that right now, Microsoft does not license you to distribute all of the necessary .dlls. obviously, as you have pointed out, it takes more that one.
Try doing an MS Office install sometime - you'll notice it basically does an under-the-hood OS upgrade for you, first.
Actually, what they usually do now for stuff like this is just include the .dll's in their application install, and it installs them if it isn't there.
Is stoichiometry? Literary plot analysis? Iambic Pentameter?
What about Maxima? Very nice program. Can find it in Freshmeat.
The problems he had with closed source were that, since the source was closed, the public could not know what was happening to their data (they might know what the format said, but they wouldn't know how it was processing it). In addition, if they wanted to switch vendors, even using open formats, it takes quite a bit to actually do the switch. With open software, you can switch vendors without immediately switching the software itself.
Simple - it's not backward-compatible. In order for backward-incompatible changes to go in, they need to release a new major number (i.e., 8.0).
rnturn:
that the purpose of the Bill was to promote the use of software that adhered to open, freely adoptable, standards for the storage of the data (and that open/free software had a better record of meeting that goal of the Bill). He made, as I recall, a couple of mentions that proprietary software being perfectly OK as long as it met the goal of making the data available in an open format.
***
Although open data formats is an important part of the bill, it also forces free (as in speech) software as well. It does NOT allow proprietary software in government. The arguments he uses in favor of that is that they can switch vendors without doing major surgery on their systems, and have the freedom to do so. His references to proprietary software was only for the private sector, not the public sector. He wouldn't use MS Office unless MS Office was open-source.
Read the letter again - it does not allow for proprietary software within the government.
Actually, his arguments are mostly RMS-ish ones - we use free software for the freedom it provides.
Actually, I believe that the "biggie" is that SO comes with a full-featured desktop database package.
Open-source really helps this issue, because all you applications are just a recompile a way, or asking your vendor to do a recompile.
However, this becomes a standard to itself. It's not like someone could legitamately go "I have no idea how to implement that". GPL allows you to learn from reading the code even if you implement proprietary versions. So it is really impossible for GPL software to be proprietary, simply because you can always use their implementation.
I couldn't agree more! In fact next week I'm having my Uncle Leroy take out my spleen instead of some "doctor" who thinks he knows what he's doing just because he went to "medical school" and then trained for a dozen years.
:) Also, some of them listen and have insightful thoughts, but they are a minority.
***
Actually, even with doctors, the analogy still stands. Obviously not for surgery, but for other things. One doctor almost killed my son because he wouldn't listen to my wife and I. My mom would be dead by now if she did tell doctors to blow it out their you-know-wheres. And (in addition to doctor's _trying to kill him) my son probably would have died of his illness years ago had we listened and followed the advice of doctors.
Why was our way better than the doctor's way? Because we cared more. We paid more attention. I know my son's signals inside and out (he can't talk yet). My mom knows her health status better than any doctor. As amateurs we learn everything there is, and constantly think about how it does and doesn't apply to our situation, and are aware of every last thing that happens to ourselves.
And almost every time, my wife and I are better doctors for our son than the doctors, and my mom is a better doctor for herself than her doctors. Why do we go to doctors? Because insurance won't sign off on our own treatments
GPL'ing that code makes it unusable by Microsoft, yes.
***
Actually, Microsoft sells GPL software. Look at Interix.
Not using techies for design does not mean that they aren't doing what is basically a techie-friendly design. Yahoo!'s and Google's designs are among the best of the internet, because they allow you to do what you want without getting in the way. The design is flexible and easy to configure, and is nice-looking. I'm sure they used designers - just clueful ones.
Now, suddenly, Apache 2 for Windows is beating/matching IIS? That would effectively place it in the lead of every other web server on the market, free and commercial.
******
The problem, originally, was that Apache's design was entirely process-based. That means that every request needed it's own process. On Windows, this is very, very, slow, as it has trouble switching between proceses quickly, but is very fast at switching between threads. Apache redesigned it to be threads-based (actually, you can choose threads, processes, or hybrid), and thus the performance bottleneck went away. Process-switching and thread switching are about the same amount of time on Linux boxes, so that's why the performance didn't change much.
If you sell a product that's worth buying, it's not an issue. Being a cheap bastard doesn't mean that I don't buy anything, it's that I refuse to be cought in a useless continuous upgrade cycle that in the end gives me no real benefits, other than I can run bloated, worthless applications.
Only if you parents knew how to map host fonts to HTML virtual fonts. That's the sort of "configuring" that techies assume everyone does. To quote you, that's a common misconception.
*****
Not quite. Parents have children, or they can ask around. No, I don't expect my parents to know how to do such a thing. However, they do often ask me, "how do I get these fonts bigger" when they are looking at a JPEG rendering of fonts, done so that everyone's fonts look the same.
So no, I don't expect them to do everything themselves, but for the option to be available when they ask for help.
Also, as users get more power (which they would if people followed standards closer), they start to become more self-sufficient and knowledgeable.
The concepts behind the web and HTML aren't tricky or hard to grasp. The problem is that they are geared toward giving power to the end-user. Most corporations don't like that, and so they benefit more by simply covering up the fact that the users have power, and try to take it away for themselves.
I don't think they do this with a bad intention, it's just their nature, and the nature of many people, especially marketing people. Designers always seem to want people to experience things in the way that they have mapped out for them, instead of whatever way the user wants to experience them. Where I have worked, the designers, even when they have a design that will work in variable-width tables, insist on it being fixed-width so everything is exactly the same. Nevermind that users with big screens like to make use of them, or people with small screens don't like to scroll - they just want control of the experience. And the experience suffers because of that.
I'm still running a 200Mhz computer. I'm a cheap bastard.
Standards committees, forums like /., and other gaggles of techies are famously out of touch with the preferences of "normal" people. They are then morally outraged by technologies that "corrupt" the purity of their systems -- by making them more the way normal people would like them to be.
***
This is a common misconception. The reason that "normal" users and techies differ is not necessarily that they want different things from their computers, it's that the techies know the consequences of various design decisions. For example:
1) Normal people like web pages that are done by graphic designers because they look nice even though they violate every know web design rule. Oh wait, except for my parents, because they can't read the font that the page author picked. Had it been done by a techie, they would have let the user's pick the fonts, and thus my parents could read it easily.
2) Normal people like flashy pages that are all interactive and move around on the screen. Oh wait, my parents don't because they are on a 100Mhz computer. Oh yeah, and it's bad for the company because although their information changes daily, it's so hard to change the custom-designed web page that it becomes useless in a matter of weeks because it's outdated. My church website is like that.
3) Normal people like GUI tools to build their web pages. Oh wait, unless they want it to look good on more than the browser the tool was built for. GUI tools tend to try to hide the nature of HTML, and thus, even though they will be displayable on other browsers (or even other browser versions), they won't look anything like the user intended. Because the user isn't aware of how HTML works, they will have no idea why this happens.
So, you can see, even though a lot of people would like to think "oh, those are just silly techies talking", the truth is that they usually have the same goals, but are just more realistic and knowledgeable on how they can be achieved.
I also like to be able to run my queries, and it gives me a nice big table that shows where it is spending its time, were there any row scans, and please, sir, can you suggest any indices I'm missing?
***
I believe PostgreSQL has this.
One of the big problems with MS SQL Server is that there aren't any production-quality JDBC drivers for it, period. Microsoft only has a beta-quality one that kills over ever once in a while. So, if you are running any sort of server-side Java apps, MS SQL Server just isn't a choice.
Clearly, there are more browsers now than before. So showing harm would be entirely speculative at this point.
****
# of browsers is not the point. Choice is. If there were infinite # of browsers available, but the regular consumer could only find 1, the fact that the others exist is quite moot. But again, it's hard to put a price tag on it.
AOL coming out with Netscape won't hurt the case, either, because if it requires shipping a competitor's product for free to the entire country to grab back a fraction of what was lost, then it kind of proves the monopoly position rather than hinder it.
Yes, I am talking about downloads. And this is important. Consumers could still choose.
***
No. If they "chose" netscape they were on their own. Users and companies rely on OEMs for support. If something doesn't work, it is the OEMs responsibility to fix it. That is, unless they downloaded it. Consumers were unable to get the full package anymore with netscape included.
Is this quantifiable? Maybe there is a way to quantify it, but I can't think of it at the moment.
The DOJ was REQUIRED to prove substantial harm to consumers because of the co-mingling, which it now turns out is very popular (look at KDE or Nautilius for proof of how popular).
***
It wasn't the co-mingling as much as the restrictions on the OEMs.