That's right M$. They have academic licensing programs that, provided your school has subscribed, allow students to by M$ products for next to nothing. Windows XP for $15 is a damn big student discount.
Law.com was surprised that their website had a policy that they and their lawyers had ccoked up restricting linking? Why were they surprised? Did this policy get published by little policy fairies in the middle of the night without law.com's knowledge or consent.
Let's here what the complaints are with this now. You've all complained that there weren't any games, certainly no decent ones. Then there were complaints about availability and distribution. Then, of course, there were the complaints about price.
Well, now they're offering great games, the best distribution channel and a really fair price.
So, what's the bitch about this now? I can't see any.
Will Linux users buy these games and support the company? Will there be a ground swell of interest/sales for these games, causing other companies to look more seriously at games for Linux? Or, will Linux users bitch and moan about some petty detail, not buy the games, cause the company to abandon Linux games completely and doom the entire Linux gaming industry forever.
I feel much better now. There I was thinking the DMCA was bad and now I realize it's all good.
Not!
I find it interesting that the article spends a long time "bebunking" the myths of the DMCA, yet the author devotes a paragraph to deriding the DMCA. Unfortunately, he does not expound on why he feels that the DMCA is so villainous, which makes the article rather contradictory considering the amount of bits he wastes saying that the issues that people have with the DMCA are myths.
It ain't no myth, Baby. The DMCA is yet another chip missing from your block of freedom.
The home user market is really quite small by comparison to the corporate market. Think about it, how many AOL users have a clue what PGP is, much less a desire to use it.
Since this is a small market anyway, they lose little or nothing by giving it away to this market segment. But, by giving it away, they have a greater potential to increase their mind share and their installed base. They also increase compatibility in the sense that corporations can communicate with private citizens via PGP, something that can not happen if the general public doesn't have a means of decrypting the communications.
The model is similar to many others who have been highly successful with it. Think about Real Networks, Adobe, Macromedia and even the venerable web browser Netscape and IE. They give the client away and sell the server.
Now, later on after they have established themselves as the monopoly for the communications encryption market, they can start charging the small users too because at that point those users will have to have it.
You do have some valid points that should be addressed and probably will be over time. But, lest we forget, this bug was reported to Microsoft a very long time ago. Furthermore, MS has not been trying to fix the bug. Instead they chose to try to place the blame on Verisign.
Regardless, of whether Verisign should shoulder some of the blame or not, Microsoft simply dismissed a potentially serious problem. A week later, we find out that, not only is it Microsoft's problem, but it is in the OS itself not just the browser like we had thought. Conversly, KDE was able to identify the problem and produce a fix in 90 minutes.
Now, to your point about the availability of the patch to everyone, as I said you have point. But, if you check out KDE's site you will find that they clearly state that they do NOT distribute binaries. KDE distributes source code only and that patched source code is, and has been, available. KDE leaves binary distribution up to the distros to handle. So, Suse and Red Hat et al need to step it up a bit but, KDE did a great job!
90 minutes????? What are the KDE boys doing, sleeping???
This is just unacceptable. I cannot believe and refuse to accept that it could take 90 minutes to get a major security fix out for a browser. This is completely unacceptable. It's no wonder everyone uses IE.
I guess the Microsofties were right after all. Support for open source software is nearly impossible to find.
But his philosiphy depends on the particular goal that you set. I think that a better approach is to set a general goal for not just 50 but, also for 60 or even 70. This goal should be realistic, as in possible to achieve but, at the same time lofty, as in requiring hard work.
Having determined how you would like things to be in your silver years, you should then set shorter term goals that can be used as milestones toward your final goal. You should have a very specific 5 year plan and a slightly more nebulous 10 year plan. These plans should have specific goals and the necessary courses of action that you need to take in order to accomplish them.
Every couple of years, or when there are any major changes in your life, you should then re-examine your goals and courses of action, making whatever changes are desirable or necessary. This will help to keep you on course toward your ultimate goal.
Remember to keep your goals achievable but, not easily so. Your goals should always be a challenge requiring hard work to accomplish them. This will keep you interested, willing to strive to achieve the final goal and healthy. If you miss a short term goal, determine if you need to work harder or if you need to set your sights a little lower. If you acheive your goal, raise the bar slightly on the next goal that you set. For me the best goals are always JUST out of reach. This doesn't work for everyone as some people become overly frustrated but, knowing the kind of person you are you should be able to figure out what's best for you.
The most important thing is to stick to the plan. Too many people are too easily distracted and when you lose focus you just lose.
As you can see from this long list of postings, you are not running your business correctly. Your apparent success is obviously just an illusion. Since you are an engineer we can certainly understand that you may have mis-interpreted your success as being success. After all, you cannot be expected to be both an engineer and a shrewd business man.
We strongly recommend that you abandon your present business practices and adopt one of these recommendations. The most prevalent recommendation is that you stop charging for your work and give it away. At the very least you should discount the price of your work so that it is in no way profitable. Since this is supposed to be a majority rule society, it is obvious that you must adopt this strategy.
This recommjendation is in spite of the fact that the majority of the recommendations come from people that have no record of success to demonstrate the validity of their recommendations. Indeed, most of these recommendations come from people who have no business experience beyond a high school business class and certainly have never been in the position of running a successful company.
None the less, it must be painfully obvious to a person of your intelligence that you must change your business policy immediately. To continue with your present practice is obviously folly.
I, very much agree with your comments. But, you don't have to restrict the designers to text only.
The fact is, most web pages can have very nice designs, including graphics and such without the use of Flash or 3D whatever. The catch is to keep the page sizes small.
I feel that web designers should be forced to access and manipulate their pages via a 14.4 connection. This will make page bloat and poor design obvious and miserable, even to the designers.
But, this is not the case. They design on highend systems with fat pipes. They use tools that add superfluous bloat and make adding extra goodies so easy that they can't resist. Most designers are all too eager to throw in the latest useless "applets" or widgets to try to distinguish themselves and their sites. It's inconvenient for them to work through slow connections and apparently too hard(or are they lazy) to manually strip out the bloat. This results in massive page bloat for pages that provide little or no content. Frankly, many of them also just look awful but, I suppose they could argue that this is subjective.
My point is that contrary to the status quo, 99% of the pages that are on the web, would be far better if the designers would just KISS. Keep It Simple Stupid.
The Rome that you linked to is seems better in that, you can FF/RW from the tape deck's controls. You also can have an LCD display. Finally, the review complained about the buttons being flush mounted, the Rome offering overcomes this issue.
The only thing missing from the Rome offering is the abillity to record which will be important to some and not to others.
I can understand that MySQL and Portgres don't cut it for your particular need but, damn, what about SAP. Surely a repository for Free as in beer and Free as in speech software deserves to remain free.
From a purely business standpoint I don't get it either. Source Forge isn't making a whole lot of money, if any, as it is. Can VA really afford to spend the money on DB2, or are they simply aligning themselves for the future? I can tell you now, if VA has any fantasy of turning Source Forge into a paid service, they'll be more than a bit suprised by the backlash/bitch slapping that they will receive from the community that they claim to hold so dearly.
They couldn't really be stupid enough to think that? Could they?
Please forgive me for making such broad statements. They are rarely accurate. I should have been more specific by targeting the specific programmers of Yet Another Office Apps that, rather than build on the existing work and bring the.doc file format compatibilty closer to reality, insist on starting over again.
Yes, I know that oeone is using an Abiword plugin but, unfortunately even Abiword is lacking in the compatibility areana. Perhaps not as much as KWord or whoever else you might choose but, lacking none the less. New users drop Abiword as soon as they open a.doc that they have already seen in MS Word. With the formatting messed up, images that aren't displayed and headers/footers trashed they go back to MS. Hopefullly they will give Star Office a try but, as close as it is, it's still not perfect.
What's the point of having a word processing application when , all it can do is act like a viewer? While being able to read a.doc file is important, it is equally if not more important to be able to write.doc files and have the written files work correctly across platforms.
Usually, my word processing involves creating documents that must be read by people with MS Word. This is simple enough, provided I don't care about formatting. My next major use of a word processor involves making minor edits to existing Word docs and sending them back to the original user. Won't they be thrilled to find that I corrected their spelling and as an added bonus, stripped out all of the formatting.
As I stated in the original post,.doc is the standard, whether we like it or not. And, until we *fully* support both reading and writing in that format these other office suites are almost unusable in the real world. That's going to be a major turn-off to any would be converts.
Their wordprocessor does support the most rudimentary.doc files but, like most it is severly lacking and results in a bad user experience. Even Abiword an excellent WP suffers from this. Star Office 6.0 is the best supporting suite yet.
The site does work with moz, assuming you have the flash plugin, but it is specifically targeted at IE and Netscape. Have a look at the source for the demo page. It's a browser identification script and it offers three choices, IE, Netscape and screwed.
While this "desktop" does look rather elegant and has a pleasing appearance it has some rather significant issues that may not be immediately apparent.
First there is the question of speed. Layering browser type apps on top of Mozilla, on top of Red Hat is surely going to mean a performance hit.
Then of course is the age-old problem of application compatibility. Or, more specifically, file format compatibility. Here we have yet another office suite with the most important file format glaringly absent. How long will it take developers to realize that.doc *is* the standard, regardless of whether we like it or not. Without support for this file format and the other MS Office formats these Yet Another Office Apps(YAOA) don't have a chance.
There is also the question, a *major* one in my mind, of why a Linux based company builds their website targeting IE and Netscape base browsers. I take major issue with this, regarless of the fact that IE is the dominant browser. If you are going to use, sell or advocate open source and open standards then your web site should too. But oeone gives us Yet Another IE Site(YAIS), and one that requires Flash to view the screen shots. At least they, thankfully, didn't host the site with IIS.
The questions and particularly the assumptions are gross over simplifications.
Try this. The power to your neural net fails. The result is a very predictable and massive change in entropy. But, there is absolutely positively no intelligence involved.
My answer is also a ridiculous over simplification but, that's the point.
It's been 20 minutes now and KDE doesn't have the fix up yet.
This is just rediculous. Why are they taking so long? I don't have all day.;)
Seriously though, with a long list of IE bugs still outstanding and Microsoft blaming Verisign, rather than fixing their software, I'll bet that KDE has a fix a month or more before MS.
Slashdot Mirror
Microsoft.
That's right M$. They have academic licensing programs that, provided your school has subscribed, allow students to by M$ products for next to nothing. Windows XP for $15 is a damn big student discount.
Did I just plug Microsoft? Jesus Christ!
Now that's what I call eCommerce!
Law.com was surprised that their website had a policy that they and their lawyers had ccoked up restricting linking? Why were they surprised? Did this policy get published by little policy fairies in the middle of the night without law.com's knowledge or consent.
Puhlease!
Let's here what the complaints are with this now. You've all complained that there weren't any games, certainly no decent ones. Then there were complaints about availability and distribution. Then, of course, there were the complaints about price.
Well, now they're offering great games, the best distribution channel and a really fair price.
So, what's the bitch about this now? I can't see any.
Will Linux users buy these games and support the company? Will there be a ground swell of interest/sales for these games, causing other companies to look more seriously at games for Linux? Or, will Linux users bitch and moan about some petty detail, not buy the games, cause the company to abandon Linux games completely and doom the entire Linux gaming industry forever.
Only time will tell but, I'm doing my part.
I feel much better now. There I was thinking the DMCA was bad and now I realize it's all good.
Not!
I find it interesting that the article spends a long time "bebunking" the myths of the DMCA, yet the author devotes a paragraph to deriding the DMCA. Unfortunately, he does not expound on why he feels that the DMCA is so villainous, which makes the article rather contradictory considering the amount of bits he wastes saying that the issues that people have with the DMCA are myths.
It ain't no myth, Baby. The DMCA is yet another chip missing from your block of freedom.
The home user market is really quite small by comparison to the corporate market. Think about it, how many AOL users have a clue what PGP is, much less a desire to use it.
Since this is a small market anyway, they lose little or nothing by giving it away to this market segment. But, by giving it away, they have a greater potential to increase their mind share and their installed base. They also increase compatibility in the sense that corporations can communicate with private citizens via PGP, something that can not happen if the general public doesn't have a means of decrypting the communications.
The model is similar to many others who have been highly successful with it. Think about Real Networks, Adobe, Macromedia and even the venerable web browser Netscape and IE. They give the client away and sell the server.
Now, later on after they have established themselves as the monopoly for the communications encryption market, they can start charging the small users too because at that point those users will have to have it.
In the end, very profitable indeed.
Hello? Ever heard of AOL?
Guaranteed that most of them haven't heard of Google.
You do have some valid points that should be addressed and probably will be over time. But, lest we forget, this bug was reported to Microsoft a very long time ago. Furthermore, MS has not been trying to fix the bug. Instead they chose to try to place the blame on Verisign.
Regardless, of whether Verisign should shoulder some of the blame or not, Microsoft simply dismissed a potentially serious problem. A week later, we find out that, not only is it Microsoft's problem, but it is in the OS itself not just the browser like we had thought. Conversly, KDE was able to identify the problem and produce a fix in 90 minutes.
Now, to your point about the availability of the patch to everyone, as I said you have point. But, if you check out KDE's site you will find that they clearly state that they do NOT distribute binaries. KDE distributes source code only and that patched source code is, and has been, available. KDE leaves binary distribution up to the distros to handle. So, Suse and Red Hat et al need to step it up a bit but, KDE did a great job!
90 minutes????? What are the KDE boys doing, sleeping???
This is just unacceptable. I cannot believe and refuse to accept that it could take 90 minutes to get a major security fix out for a browser. This is completely unacceptable. It's no wonder everyone uses IE.
I guess the Microsofties were right after all. Support for open source software is nearly impossible to find.
-- Before you post, are you sure you got it?
But his philosiphy depends on the particular goal that you set. I think that a better approach is to set a general goal for not just 50 but, also for 60 or even 70. This goal should be realistic, as in possible to achieve but, at the same time lofty, as in requiring hard work.
Having determined how you would like things to be in your silver years, you should then set shorter term goals that can be used as milestones toward your final goal. You should have a very specific 5 year plan and a slightly more nebulous 10 year plan. These plans should have specific goals and the necessary courses of action that you need to take in order to accomplish them.
Every couple of years, or when there are any major changes in your life, you should then re-examine your goals and courses of action, making whatever changes are desirable or necessary. This will help to keep you on course toward your ultimate goal.
Remember to keep your goals achievable but, not easily so. Your goals should always be a challenge requiring hard work to accomplish them. This will keep you interested, willing to strive to achieve the final goal and healthy. If you miss a short term goal, determine if you need to work harder or if you need to set your sights a little lower. If you acheive your goal, raise the bar slightly on the next goal that you set. For me the best goals are always JUST out of reach. This doesn't work for everyone as some people become overly frustrated but, knowing the kind of person you are you should be able to figure out what's best for you.
The most important thing is to stick to the plan. Too many people are too easily distracted and when you lose focus you just lose.
As you can see from this long list of postings, you are not running your business correctly. Your apparent success is obviously just an illusion. Since you are an engineer we can certainly understand that you may have mis-interpreted your success as being success. After all, you cannot be expected to be both an engineer and a shrewd business man.
We strongly recommend that you abandon your present business practices and adopt one of these recommendations. The most prevalent recommendation is that you stop charging for your work and give it away. At the very least you should discount the price of your work so that it is in no way profitable. Since this is supposed to be a majority rule society, it is obvious that you must adopt this strategy.
This recommjendation is in spite of the fact that the majority of the recommendations come from people that have no record of success to demonstrate the validity of their recommendations. Indeed, most of these recommendations come from people who have no business experience beyond a high school business class and certainly have never been in the position of running a successful company.
None the less, it must be painfully obvious to a person of your intelligence that you must change your business policy immediately. To continue with your present practice is obviously folly.
Sincerely,
The community.
I, very much agree with your comments. But, you don't have to restrict the designers to text only.
The fact is, most web pages can have very nice designs, including graphics and such without the use of Flash or 3D whatever. The catch is to keep the page sizes small.
I feel that web designers should be forced to access and manipulate their pages via a 14.4 connection. This will make page bloat and poor design obvious and miserable, even to the designers.
But, this is not the case. They design on highend systems with fat pipes. They use tools that add superfluous bloat and make adding extra goodies so easy that they can't resist. Most designers are all too eager to throw in the latest useless "applets" or widgets to try to distinguish themselves and their sites. It's inconvenient for them to work through slow connections and apparently too hard(or are they lazy) to manually strip out the bloat. This results in massive page bloat for pages that provide little or no content. Frankly, many of them also just look awful but, I suppose they could argue that this is subjective.
My point is that contrary to the status quo, 99% of the pages that are on the web, would be far better if the designers would just KISS. Keep It Simple Stupid.
Misreporters should all be forced to shower on regualr basis.
It's Fried Rice. You irriot!
The Rome that you linked to is seems better in that, you can FF/RW from the tape deck's controls. You also can have an LCD display. Finally, the review complained about the buttons being flush mounted, the Rome offering overcomes this issue.
The only thing missing from the Rome offering is the abillity to record which will be important to some and not to others.
That the irrational exuberance or the dot com era is indeed, not dead. Like a dormant virus it occasionally rares its ugly head.
It also proves, yet again, that investment analysts are complete morons. No wonder the economy is in such a shambles.
I can understand that MySQL and Portgres don't cut it for your particular need but, damn, what about SAP. Surely a repository for Free as in beer and Free as in speech software deserves to remain free.
From a purely business standpoint I don't get it either. Source Forge isn't making a whole lot of money, if any, as it is. Can VA really afford to spend the money on DB2, or are they simply aligning themselves for the future? I can tell you now, if VA has any fantasy of turning Source Forge into a paid service, they'll be more than a bit suprised by the backlash/bitch slapping that they will receive from the community that they claim to hold so dearly.
They couldn't really be stupid enough to think that? Could they?
Submission rejected, so read it for yourself.
http://zdnet.com.com/2100-1104-949505.html
Please forgive me for making such broad statements. They are rarely accurate. I should have been more specific by targeting the specific programmers of Yet Another Office Apps that, rather than build on the existing work and bring the .doc file format compatibilty closer to reality, insist on starting over again.
.doc that they have already seen in MS Word. With the formatting messed up, images that aren't displayed and headers/footers trashed they go back to MS. Hopefullly they will give Star Office a try but, as close as it is, it's still not perfect.
Yes, I know that oeone is using an Abiword plugin but, unfortunately even Abiword is lacking in the compatibility areana. Perhaps not as much as KWord or whoever else you might choose but, lacking none the less. New users drop Abiword as soon as they open a
What's the point of having a word processing application when , all it can do is act like a viewer? While being able to read a .doc file is important, it is equally if not more important to be able to write .doc files and have the written files work correctly across platforms.
.doc is the standard, whether we like it or not. And, until we *fully* support both reading and writing in that format these other office suites are almost unusable in the real world. That's going to be a major turn-off to any would be converts.
Usually, my word processing involves creating documents that must be read by people with MS Word. This is simple enough, provided I don't care about formatting. My next major use of a word processor involves making minor edits to existing Word docs and sending them back to the original user. Won't they be thrilled to find that I corrected their spelling and as an added bonus, stripped out all of the formatting.
As I stated in the original post,
Their wordprocessor does support the most rudimentary .doc files but, like most it is severly lacking and results in a bad user experience. Even Abiword an excellent WP suffers from this. Star Office 6.0 is the best supporting suite yet.
The site does work with moz, assuming you have the flash plugin, but it is specifically targeted at IE and Netscape. Have a look at the source for the demo page. It's a browser identification script and it offers three choices, IE, Netscape and screwed.
While this "desktop" does look rather elegant and has a pleasing appearance it has some rather significant issues that may not be immediately apparent.
.doc *is* the standard, regardless of whether we like it or not. Without support for this file format and the other MS Office formats these Yet Another Office Apps(YAOA) don't have a chance.
First there is the question of speed. Layering browser type apps on top of Mozilla, on top of Red Hat is surely going to mean a performance hit.
Then of course is the age-old problem of application compatibility. Or, more specifically, file format compatibility. Here we have yet another office suite with the most important file format glaringly absent. How long will it take developers to realize that
There is also the question, a *major* one in my mind, of why a Linux based company builds their website targeting IE and Netscape base browsers. I take major issue with this, regarless of the fact that IE is the dominant browser. If you are going to use, sell or advocate open source and open standards then your web site should too. But oeone gives us Yet Another IE Site(YAIS), and one that requires Flash to view the screen shots. At least they, thankfully, didn't host the site with IIS.
Sorry oeone, I've already lost all interest.
The questions and particularly the assumptions are gross over simplifications.
Try this. The power to your neural net fails. The result is a very predictable and massive change in entropy. But, there is absolutely positively no intelligence involved.
My answer is also a ridiculous over simplification but, that's the point.
It's been 20 minutes now and KDE doesn't have the fix up yet.
;)
This is just rediculous. Why are they taking so long? I don't have all day.
Seriously though, with a long list of IE bugs still outstanding and Microsoft blaming Verisign, rather than fixing their software, I'll bet that KDE has a fix a month or more before MS.
All that money. All that research. All those lasers.
And yet the one thing I ask for is still missing. That's right. I want some sharks with frickin lasers attached to their heads.
Throw me a bone here, people.