Things like mediawiki are very good for online collaboration..
Anyway, since msoffice has reached it's peak in terms of features then it's only a matter of time before openoffice catches up, once it does they will gradually iron out the bugs which ms isn't likely to do.. The result will be 2 office suites with virtually identical features, only one of them is free and less buggy.. People will always migrate to a cheaper and more open solution in the end, look at the popularity of x86 systems compared to other architectures, despite the massive superiority of all the other platforms at the start.
Well getting stuck with unsupported applications is one of the biggest dangers of using propriatory software. You also can't guarantee that these apps will continue working on newer versions of windows nor can you guarantee that older versions of windows will run on newer hardware, meaning you'l need to continue using old versions on old hardware which will become increasingly dangerous (no security patches) and difficult (no support for new protocols such as ipv6) to use in a networked environment.
Dumping is when you're selling something for less than cost... Software has no physical cost, only whatever the developers decide to charge for their time, and that is only a one-time cost which is not replicated for each unit (i can make a million copies of a piece of software for free, but if i want to make a million cars the process of copying is far more difficult and i need to obtain the raw materials for each and every car i make) If a developer chooses to make his time available for free, then that software has zero cost.. therefore giving it away for free is merely charging "cost price" which is perfectly reasonable.. It could only be considered dumping or price fixing if people were paying you to use it. The article here assumes that the industry around selling shrink-wrap software has a right to exist in the first place, which is arguable.. Personally i consider the selling of shrink-wrap software to be fraudulent, the price charged is disproportionately high compared to the production cost, and the production cost scales to zero with sufficient sales. It is the propriatory software vendors who are guilty of price fixing, and yet this article seems to think they have a right to continue gouging people in this way.
My opinion is that people should only be allowed to charge a reasonable premium above the production cost of an item, selling a piece of software for $600 after it has already sold so many copies that the development costs have been recouped 1000 times over is just fraud, plain and simple. Although if you decreased the price to almost nothing once after the first 10,000 sales or so people may feel even more cheated than they do now.. Free software redresses the balance by assigning zero value to the component that causes nothing to reproduce, that way people who want the convenience of a printed manual, a box and a set of media can pay for it, the boxed-set will always cost around the same to produce and should be priced accordingly.. If you want the software only, you can download it for free.. No more selling single-sheet or even email "licenses", that's an even bigger fraud since you don't even get any physical goods to hold in your hand, nothing to show for it.. And you often have to buy it all again if your "license" data gets destroyed (deleted, lost, burned etc)
So in short, it is the propriatory vendors who are guilty of price fixing, and now they're screaming because people have come along to undercut their fraud.
Well, "solutions" are often built of lots of modules (functions) chained together... with a wrapper app that makes them appear to be one cohesive lump.. It does make far more sense to have the functions available outside of the larger solution, so they can be adapted to service other solutions aswell. But that's not to say you can't have large monolithic-looking apps that internally use the same smaller components to get their work done.
Which means you have to waste your diskspace and ram having all the backwards compatibility libs there, not to mention the reduction in performance from using 32bit libs.. Closed source crap is massively holding back the progression of hardware, and something should be done about it! I miss the days when everything came with source.. Theres no reason why you can't sell commercial software WITH sourcecode under a restrictive license, something like saying any patches to the code belong to the company who sold it in the first place, and cannot be distributed except to registered users of the original. That way we could have "unsupported" ports to other platforms available, a good source of addons/patches and bugfixes etc, and anything they dont want to support they dont have to, but those of us who want to could port to new platforms etc.. If the original company wants to port their app to a new platform, chances are a lot of the work will already be done and all they need to do is start supporting it. And finally, if a company decides to stop selling a product, it could become community supported and gather a lot of goodwill aswell as a guaranteed continuing support path for users.
A new.net framework, a new java runtime or a new compiler, all will benefit from the new architecture. Also, most opensource software does not make assumptions about int size, opensource software has been running on 64bit architectures for many years, i find very few apps nowadays that fail to compile and run on my old alphastations.
People queued up to get the new version because the existing versions were horrendously unstable, and they hoped for something remotely useable.. Since 2000 it's become stable enough that it's actually useable, unlike the previous versions which were totally unfit for anything.
Yes but a lot of code will use long integers (and some code uses regular ints and has to be patched to work on 64bit unixes) to store pointers, i encounter these problems often when porting apps from x86/linux to alpha/linux or amd64/linux.. Sure you can manually specify the size with uint_64_t but that only works if you already know the size of a pointer, some code actually copies pointers into uint_32_t size integers and consequently crashes on 64bit platforms, that's why the unix standard of a long always being the same size as a pointer is very usefull.
It may be too large, but every word document i've converted to pdf has actually been smaller as a pdf.. PDF isn't an especially inefficient format, it supports lossless and lossy compression if you want to reduce the filesize, and you can lower the resolution of bitmaps in the file for instance, it all depends how the original document was created... Some pdf writers basically use pdf as a bitmap format (wastefull) while others encode the text as text and let the pdf viewer render the fonts..
But windows costs money and only runs on a limited selection of hardware, whereas there are many free pdf readers/writers for multiple platforms.. That's not a very valid comparison atall. PDF may not be the best format in the world, and it may be controlled by adobe, but the format is open and anyone is free to produce a reader or writer for it whenever they want.
Firstly i agree, photoshop is a professional app and one of the few commercial pieces of software that is genuinely worth paying for over a free alternative.. However, gimp DOES have CMYK.. atleast version 2.2 which i have installed on this laptop.. Me, i'm not a graphics professional and the limited graphics manipulation work i do doesn't justify spending any money, so gimp suits me just fine.
I hate artificially inferior devices, such behavior should not be permitted.. If you buy a device you should be able to use it to the full capacity that the hardware is capable of, and beyond (overclocking etc, but you lose your warranty) i completely disagree with artificially limiting devices.. it's just a way for companies to rip off people who buy the proper version, since as you said, it often costs more money to actually disable these features. Cheaper products should truly be inferior, that is they cost less to produce (components NOT present, lower quality components etc)
No, not on a 64bit architecture.. long is 64-bits on 64bit unixes, but only when you compile 64bit binaries, most os's like solaris default to 32bit binaries (because theres no performance loss, and you can save some memory) and you can manually build 64bit binaries if you do need the extra memory space.. long long is still 64bit on solaris running in 32bit mode, and i believe the processor still processes it as a single 64bit rather than 2 32bit
Well, it's in microsoft's interest to make sure that your NOT developing for other platforms.. If they make it more difficult to do so that will discourage people from doing so because of the additional work involved.
Exactly, and it is normal to copy a pointer into a long (which would result in an overflow here) not into a long long (which is wastefull on a 32bit arch)... This will break compatibility with other 64bit platforms, and result in lots of code that breaks when trying to copy a pointer into a long..
Actually, most opensource linux drivers are written in C and are architecture independant... A lot of older devices don't have drivers for the 64bit windows atall, while the existing architecture-neutral drivers for linux are supported just fine, infact many of these devices were already supported by 64bit linux on alpha, ppc and sparc for many years, many linux drivers already existed and worked perfectly on 64bit architectures before amd64 even existed.
And the lack of 64bit applications is the fault of the closed source development model, opensource apps can easily be recompiled for 64bit architectures and instantly benefit from the additional registers etc, and often benefit from the increased address space quite easily.
If it takes 5 hours to download then it must be 5 hours long or more, if its any less then you wont be able to stream it anyway.. you cant stream faster than you can download. Atleast if it lasts 5 minutes but takes 5 hours to download, you can watch it eventually, you couldnt stream it for sure at that rate
But it's a zip file, there are zipfile recovery tools out there and there have been for years, it's a well understood and documented format so you actually have a better chance of recovering data.
Windows ran on the alpha, but it wasn't a true 64bit os, just like osx 10.3 isnt (not sure about tiger), it simply had *some* minimal support to make it actually run on 64bit hardware, it doesn't take full advantage of it.. Windows 2000 was going to be the first full 64bit version for alpha, but that got canned.. later they finally came up with a full 64bit version for itanium, but does anyone even use that?
However in the future it will be difficult to find licenses for these old versions, and they may stop working on newer machines.. then you have the problem of incompatibilities between versions. If you stick to openoffice, once you have a version that works well you can stick with it across all your machines, or you can upgrade incrementally (since its free) rather than taking a big jump and getting a nasty shock.
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Things like mediawiki are very good for online collaboration..
Anyway, since msoffice has reached it's peak in terms of features then it's only a matter of time before openoffice catches up, once it does they will gradually iron out the bugs which ms isn't likely to do.. The result will be 2 office suites with virtually identical features, only one of them is free and less buggy.. People will always migrate to a cheaper and more open solution in the end, look at the popularity of x86 systems compared to other architectures, despite the massive superiority of all the other platforms at the start.
File a bug report for it on the openoffice.org bugzilla and see what they do about it..
Well getting stuck with unsupported applications is one of the biggest dangers of using propriatory software.
You also can't guarantee that these apps will continue working on newer versions of windows nor can you guarantee that older versions of windows will run on newer hardware, meaning you'l need to continue using old versions on old hardware which will become increasingly dangerous (no security patches) and difficult (no support for new protocols such as ipv6) to use in a networked environment.
Well perhaps by rushing and releasing beta quality code, they hope to emulate windows more accurately.
Dumping is when you're selling something for less than cost...
Software has no physical cost, only whatever the developers decide to charge for their time, and that is only a one-time cost which is not replicated for each unit (i can make a million copies of a piece of software for free, but if i want to make a million cars the process of copying is far more difficult and i need to obtain the raw materials for each and every car i make)
If a developer chooses to make his time available for free, then that software has zero cost.. therefore giving it away for free is merely charging "cost price" which is perfectly reasonable.. It could only be considered dumping or price fixing if people were paying you to use it.
The article here assumes that the industry around selling shrink-wrap software has a right to exist in the first place, which is arguable..
Personally i consider the selling of shrink-wrap software to be fraudulent, the price charged is disproportionately high compared to the production cost, and the production cost scales to zero with sufficient sales.
It is the propriatory software vendors who are guilty of price fixing, and yet this article seems to think they have a right to continue gouging people in this way.
My opinion is that people should only be allowed to charge a reasonable premium above the production cost of an item, selling a piece of software for $600 after it has already sold so many copies that the development costs have been recouped 1000 times over is just fraud, plain and simple.
Although if you decreased the price to almost nothing once after the first 10,000 sales or so people may feel even more cheated than they do now..
Free software redresses the balance by assigning zero value to the component that causes nothing to reproduce, that way people who want the convenience of a printed manual, a box and a set of media can pay for it, the boxed-set will always cost around the same to produce and should be priced accordingly..
If you want the software only, you can download it for free.. No more selling single-sheet or even email "licenses", that's an even bigger fraud since you don't even get any physical goods to hold in your hand, nothing to show for it.. And you often have to buy it all again if your "license" data gets destroyed (deleted, lost, burned etc)
So in short, it is the propriatory vendors who are guilty of price fixing, and now they're screaming because people have come along to undercut their fraud.
But if you use bitmaps, then it will look shit when zoomed in or printed at high resolution
Whatever you set them to using sysctl (on linux and bsd) and in solaris using ndd or /etc/system i think.
Well, "solutions" are often built of lots of modules (functions) chained together... with a wrapper app that makes them appear to be one cohesive lump..
It does make far more sense to have the functions available outside of the larger solution, so they can be adapted to service other solutions aswell. But that's not to say you can't have large monolithic-looking apps that internally use the same smaller components to get their work done.
Which means you have to waste your diskspace and ram having all the backwards compatibility libs there, not to mention the reduction in performance from using 32bit libs.. Closed source crap is massively holding back the progression of hardware, and something should be done about it! I miss the days when everything came with source..
Theres no reason why you can't sell commercial software WITH sourcecode under a restrictive license, something like saying any patches to the code belong to the company who sold it in the first place, and cannot be distributed except to registered users of the original. That way we could have "unsupported" ports to other platforms available, a good source of addons/patches and bugfixes etc, and anything they dont want to support they dont have to, but those of us who want to could port to new platforms etc..
If the original company wants to port their app to a new platform, chances are a lot of the work will already be done and all they need to do is start supporting it.
And finally, if a company decides to stop selling a product, it could become community supported and gather a lot of goodwill aswell as a guaranteed continuing support path for users.
A new .net framework, a new java runtime or a new compiler, all will benefit from the new architecture.
Also, most opensource software does not make assumptions about int size, opensource software has been running on 64bit architectures for many years, i find very few apps nowadays that fail to compile and run on my old alphastations.
People queued up to get the new version because the existing versions were horrendously unstable, and they hoped for something remotely useable.. Since 2000 it's become stable enough that it's actually useable, unlike the previous versions which were totally unfit for anything.
Yes but a lot of code will use long integers (and some code uses regular ints and has to be patched to work on 64bit unixes) to store pointers, i encounter these problems often when porting apps from x86/linux to alpha/linux or amd64/linux.. Sure you can manually specify the size with uint_64_t but that only works if you already know the size of a pointer, some code actually copies pointers into uint_32_t size integers and consequently crashes on 64bit platforms, that's why the unix standard of a long always being the same size as a pointer is very usefull.
It may be too large, but every word document i've converted to pdf has actually been smaller as a pdf.. PDF isn't an especially inefficient format, it supports lossless and lossy compression if you want to reduce the filesize, and you can lower the resolution of bitmaps in the file for instance, it all depends how the original document was created... Some pdf writers basically use pdf as a bitmap format (wastefull) while others encode the text as text and let the pdf viewer render the fonts..
But windows costs money and only runs on a limited selection of hardware, whereas there are many free pdf readers/writers for multiple platforms.. That's not a very valid comparison atall.
PDF may not be the best format in the world, and it may be controlled by adobe, but the format is open and anyone is free to produce a reader or writer for it whenever they want.
Firstly i agree, photoshop is a professional app and one of the few commercial pieces of software that is genuinely worth paying for over a free alternative..
However, gimp DOES have CMYK.. atleast version 2.2 which i have installed on this laptop..
Me, i'm not a graphics professional and the limited graphics manipulation work i do doesn't justify spending any money, so gimp suits me just fine.
I hate artificially inferior devices, such behavior should not be permitted.. If you buy a device you should be able to use it to the full capacity that the hardware is capable of, and beyond (overclocking etc, but you lose your warranty) i completely disagree with artificially limiting devices.. it's just a way for companies to rip off people who buy the proper version, since as you said, it often costs more money to actually disable these features.
Cheaper products should truly be inferior, that is they cost less to produce (components NOT present, lower quality components etc)
No, not on a 64bit architecture.. long is 64-bits on 64bit unixes, but only when you compile 64bit binaries, most os's like solaris default to 32bit binaries (because theres no performance loss, and you can save some memory) and you can manually build 64bit binaries if you do need the extra memory space.. long long is still 64bit on solaris running in 32bit mode, and i believe the processor still processes it as a single 64bit rather than 2 32bit
Well, it's in microsoft's interest to make sure that your NOT developing for other platforms.. If they make it more difficult to do so that will discourage people from doing so because of the additional work involved.
Exactly, and it is normal to copy a pointer into a long (which would result in an overflow here) not into a long long (which is wastefull on a 32bit arch)...
This will break compatibility with other 64bit platforms, and result in lots of code that breaks when trying to copy a pointer into a long..
Actually, most opensource linux drivers are written in C and are architecture independant... A lot of older devices don't have drivers for the 64bit windows atall, while the existing architecture-neutral drivers for linux are supported just fine, infact many of these devices were already supported by 64bit linux on alpha, ppc and sparc for many years, many linux drivers already existed and worked perfectly on 64bit architectures before amd64 even existed.
And the lack of 64bit applications is the fault of the closed source development model, opensource apps can easily be recompiled for 64bit architectures and instantly benefit from the additional registers etc, and often benefit from the increased address space quite easily.
If it takes 5 hours to download then it must be 5 hours long or more, if its any less then you wont be able to stream it anyway.. you cant stream faster than you can download. Atleast if it lasts 5 minutes but takes 5 hours to download, you can watch it eventually, you couldnt stream it for sure at that rate
But it's a zip file, there are zipfile recovery tools out there and there have been for years, it's a well understood and documented format so you actually have a better chance of recovering data.
Windows ran on the alpha, but it wasn't a true 64bit os, just like osx 10.3 isnt (not sure about tiger), it simply had *some* minimal support to make it actually run on 64bit hardware, it doesn't take full advantage of it..
Windows 2000 was going to be the first full 64bit version for alpha, but that got canned.. later they finally came up with a full 64bit version for itanium, but does anyone even use that?
However in the future it will be difficult to find licenses for these old versions, and they may stop working on newer machines.. then you have the problem of incompatibilities between versions.
If you stick to openoffice, once you have a version that works well you can stick with it across all your machines, or you can upgrade incrementally (since its free) rather than taking a big jump and getting a nasty shock.