Aha. Thanks for the update. I didn't really follow the latest development in physics. And my 'latest' understanding of 25 years ago was that the ether theory had been rejected another 90 years before.
Sometimes I feel like many - if not most - weird and long discarded theories come back one day and prove to be true in the second or third go; generations later.
Maybe those chaps in Kansas and places are right, and over another few generations we will find a supernatural being having created our universe out of chaos (haha, we're getting closer; some generations back this was completely incomprehensible !) within 7 days (this still needs a time to go) ?
Ah, yeah ! The best comment in here I have seen so far.
Noticed the same. No Andrew T. in the references. If they did their job *somewhat* properly, they'd have to refer to Minix. And I am sure they did; they still have to be politically correct; just look at the common roots. Could Microsoft confess that they screwed up years back with their go-on-your-own DOS ? Not economically; that made kind of sense on an 8086; but from a visionary aspect ? Except of new blood from DEC they dug themselves into program loaders and their current architecture (I haven't seen the source code, sorry, based on hearsay) is only rudimentary more intelligent.
Thanks for pointing us to Minix and an evident omission in the MS report !
They call themselves the The Independent Software Architects Council of Malaysia.
You may as well consider this a first sign of despair. Microsoft sells itself as the great central and understanding force while bringing in their lackeys to do the dirty job.
How low is it that these people will sell their souls, hide behind a scene of fictitious 'independence', receiving a hand-out at the doors for a mediocre performance. May God have mercy with their souls.
On another tone: I dunno if Microsoft makes a great impression with this. Anything else has failed them unto here. We have the US$100 PCs rolling in
http://linux.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/09/29/ 129235&tid=98&tid=184&tid=106&tid=219&tid=137
They have no chance. It is over. Except, they catch the rest of the world with patents, DRM, and undue influencing governments. Probably the stuff you talk about was intended in the same direction. It is all but easy for a minister to not be seen with William III Gates any more. Not having His Highness gracing the event of the yearly meeting of the steering committee with His presence. And, unfortunately, this counts. Not only to the electorate, also to investors. And this is where we go.
And this is why Malaysia hasn't seen any advance in its public FOSS policy. Yes, it does require a serious amount of self-confidence to dare to stand on own feet. Does Malaysia have it in her ? It remains to be seen. Until then, the sycophants will have the field.
Thanks for the update. I just checked, and by now it does (toggle with Ins on numeric keypad) ! So, finally someone brought it into line with the rest of the world !
It is quite another discussion if it should toggle from the statusbar. To be discussed elsewhere.
See... ! This is what I call a decent lack on compatibility. It's the first wordprocessor I personally use where you have to go like this. Flame me for lack of exposure, if you like.
The carat was what I liked, by the way. And what I wrote in my post. I'd be all out for Abiword (and actually advocated for and use it for small tasks not involving WORD-import).
Your answer signals a clear weakness on UI. "insert and overwrite modes are present in most word processors". Fine. So to me. But don't make the user learn exotic keybindings if you want to make them converts. And will you please stick to the argument. At no point did I ask to do away with insert and overwrite.
I don't have the post here any more, but if I'm not mistaken, I also mentioned the lack to switch through usage of the menu. At least I didn't find that option then. In the end trial and error brought the solution: the 'Insert' key of the cursor-pad works as expected; without Shift +.
Shall everyone draw his / her own conclusion about the level of HCI involved here.
... At times, yes, I do like Abiword. But my impression of their support isn't as great. There was a situation one day when all chars were overwritten instead of inserted. Ah, yes, you'll tell me to change to Insert. But where ?? It took me a few minutes to find the switch. Very cumbersome. I'll tell you a secret: No, it is not the 0 [Ins] on the numeric keypad, like anywhere else. I thought it to be a bug and filed one. I was kind of pee-d at and told WONTFIX.
So far as usability and compatibility are taken serious.
I for one would have welcomed a really Free Solaris. I don't see the Linux kernel superior to Solaris kernel. And if there was full compatibility of Linux and Solaris - also licence-wise - I'd have been the first to switch to Solaris as basis for all my machines. Running mostly Linux apps on it, of course (availability !). With the new Solaris file system, compartments, everything. With the same hardware compatibility that the Linux kernel has. That's what I had called a Killer App !
Some pointed out rightly that then SUN would endanger the future of their emplyees, pension fonds. IMHO they also endanger the same by trying to stick to their own 'Third Path' to success. This is the real death knell to their future: Not becoming part of the big wave rolling; fully tapping Open Source.
I think I did mention that technically, KDE is better IMHO.
It is the first time OP made me aware, that, yes, there is something repellent about it. Surely not for everyone, but for quite a few; to my big surprise. And it made me think, could I lay a finger on it; why? No, just the panel is enough; though I have no explanation, I wouldn't want to work with it. Ever.
It's getting boring, but yes, maybe someone with a bit of brain in HCI or psychology can help out here. I wouldn't mind at all to like KDE (which I do technically), but I cannot help to find its icons ugly. So I thought and said (in here, to lower my karma, it seemed).
But actually, no, it has something in it; something highly unsympathetic. The panel could help: It already starts with the panel. I tried all my best to configure it so I wouldn't hate it, but I couldn't. And I'm no GNOME zealot, either. Especially since IMHO it is getting worse per stable version. KDE would be my desktop of dreams for a corporate deployment. Only, I would not want to force my users to this emotionally sucking UI; this UI with a high hate potential.
An amazing outcome: Let someone find out why it comes across with this load of aversion induction; finally correct this and we'd have a unified desktop.
(And me my good karma; as usual when I comment on patents !)
Get a life. And I'm getting tired of those 'wrong' messages. Not only that I have to endure them; worse, with those misleading 'news' we make ourselves / slashdot the laughing bunch of our 'ennemies'.
Do it again, Sam. Okay, I'll do it again:
Seen with professional eyes, this patent might have to be granted or not. It is surely no great invention. But once and for all: There is nothing in it that warrants the notion of 'Patent for double-click'. Over. Read the claims correctly, even in the light of the description as mandated by patent law. There is a lot of repetion and crap; but nowhere a patent for 'double-click'. It is ridiculous and childish (see above) to shorten the patent to *that*.
And 'we' do us and everyone else in the 'Anti-patent liga' a disservice by such false claims.
Bash that crap of patent application; but bash it correctly. *Then* you'll be taken serious. Not just with a foolish attitude and childish arguments.
Better: give me a decent income to comb all those half-brew emotional 'patent news' before ever they are accepted. (Anybody ??)
The patent - for those too lazy too read - is about one thing: selection through activation time of clickable widgets; nothing else. That is: *length* of continuously pressing it. Here on my Debian Sid I haven't found this feature, yet. The Double-Click only comes in in the Patent in combination and *added* to this checking of duration of uninterrupted 'pressing' the widget. Also this, I have never seen. Or read. But chances are, it *has* been published (or experienced, sold) before the *Filing Date*.
And I encourage everyone who is aware of such, to step forward and make herself known ! *This* would help 'our' course; contrary to those stupid remarks of where the Double-Click itself was noticed before that date. Lost time, wasted time. Simply because neither claimed nor granted !
One day I see such a crap submitted as story from RedMond; and some Cowboy might accept it; and they'll ROTFL; in RedMond. Would be a pity. Let's do much better !
They're patenting aspects of the iPod user interface.
Parent has read the claims. Most posters haven't, before they started bashing.
Parent has done a great job in pointing out the main weakness: Apple doesn't ask for technicalities, but design. Essentially.
Claim 26 is the most precise one:
They ask for protection for an Interface Design Aspect that automagically changes the underlying interfaces along with the user interaction.
This is a clear sign of a patent system flawed over time, since the idea is not basically a technical one. Imagine your mail-client (or just look at it) and imagine you click on the sender of a mail and the interfaces changes to display all mails of that sender. You click on a subject and all mails of this subject come up. Not a bad one, no. I'd even agree that it may be discussed if the author should get royalties. But a patent ? Only over my dead body. (I quit the Patent Office to have a life !)
This is the typical kind of software patentry where you describe a rather vague idea, ask for a patent and sue the implementer.
I can only call on everyone - in US and EU - to put all efforts into stopping this madness.
It is Roman Law, that 'not knowing' renders your action still punishable (Sorry for mistakes, English is not my mothertongue). Someone who is not aware of the law, or *thinks* he has the right to shoot down the power-line of his neighbour to stop the latter hammering the neighbourhood with bass sound at 3 AM, is still punishable.
IMHO you are correct w.r.t fraud, though. Nevertheless, one remains responsible for all the consequences of one's (wrong) assumptions: damages, etc. come in.
This is actually one of the best posts in here. It is not true that SMP was irrelevant for OpenBSD.
Agreed, 99% of the users wouldn't actually need it. But once you know and like an OS: What are you going to propose for the enterprise if ever the question came up ? I reluctantly consulted to FreeBSD. Reluctantly not because it was bad, but I prefer OpenBSD. Only the SMP issue... .
Printing is a bore. over. Usually I have to resort to lpd, because that's the only thing I get to work. Stop; there was some time in Lprng when it was quite useful.
Lately, it became impossible to use and counterintuitive. And why ? Like in the article: someone tried to find a perfect engineering solution and keeping the user out.
I did send a mail explaining everything and even got a positive answer.
Another sample - no rant here - just move over to http://www.linuxprinting.org/cups-doc.html. And actually, these guys do a good job. They are only so much taken in with their own, that they completely miss to perceive what a user wants to do: to print. Not: develop a universal printing system.
Want another example: mozilla-thunderbird. How to open an HTML-document ? Funny only: Firefox is just as bad in opening an e-mail client. You can't even type 'evolution'; you must use the absolute path.
To be honest: at times (often) I prefer console / tui for one main reason: it works and often enough is easier to handle than gui. What makes me sad is, that 'we' don't lack the ability to produce better; at times we somehow don't seem to *want* to do better.
I guarantee you 99% of the people posting on slashdot don't even look at a patent before crying foul. Of the 1% left, 99% of them only read the abstract and not the claims, the claims being what is considered enforceable/infringeable.
Thanks for pointing this out. Tried a few times before; but the message doesn't seem to get through. With respect to publishing after 18 months: the US (this time) followed worldwide tradition.
I might not be completely agreeable though with the stated competence of the USPTO. Having been an examiner until 7 years back, they had a tendency to be politically correct; more than legally correct. And how do you distinguish between incompetence and overworked ? When our car comes back from a shoddy repair I don't bother if the mechanic was incompetent or overworked. And I wouldn't know; badly repaired is badly repaired. A horribly granted patent remains a sore; for the industry and the consumer.
The independent claims will be discussed, eventually slightly modified and granted; I bet quite some money on this outcome. Patent business is a monkey business. Whatever they get - and they will get something - they can always use it to strangle the competitors: would you / Gnome / KDE / enlightenment have the funds to go to court against Microsoft ? So, there won't even be a need to make the patent stand in court; just a few letters and Longhorn will have workspaces and desktops while OSS won't (any more). Cease and desist: the honestly conducted business of the future.
Read that myself. If that (quality) was true (possible), I'd guess that they leaked the code intentionally.
The fifteen percent of the code that is presentable; to be stressed.
An ancient trick of military strategy. Sorry, a new one: Shock and Awe: "They actually *can* write clean code !!" Except of a few buffer overflows in IE5. Red Herring.
"US-based security firm mig2 has analyzed 17,074 successful car thefts. The results are a bit surprising. The expensive cars (including Porsche and Ferrari) proved to be the cars least likely to be successfully stolen, while those from Ford and GM were the most attractive to thieves. GM and Ford owners suffered 13,654 successful losses of ownership, or 80 percent of the survey total. High-end cars (> US$ 50.000) and imported sportscars like Porsche and Ferrari enjoyed a sharp decline in successful thefts, with only 2,005 cars lost."
A spokesperson for mig2: "It is at our big surprise to find expensive cars having lost attractivity with thieves and smuggling rings. We are surprised about the huge number and therefore the high attractivity of middle-class cars on thieves. Why would a Porsche be the last car to be removed illegally from a parking lot ? We can only assume that the superior technical quality of contemporary cars made by Ford and GM surpasses that of a Porsche by a factor of almost 10. Or is it rather the value on the black market that is about 10 times higher for a car of the trusted local manufacturers compared to a - at times even smaller - vehicles of dubious origin ? We do hope to answer this question in our next publication; available in Q3 this year for 29.38 (including taxes)."
A year ago we bought our first Digital Camera, 'Easy Share', sounds nice. Even *works* rudimentary on Linux.
The trouble is less that it is neither 'easy', nor very userfriendly. The trouble isn't that they use very specific batteries that are difficult to obtain; the rechargable ones don't go further than around 20 pictures.
The real trouble isn't even the bad quality of the pictures. The thingy that spells trouble for Kodak is the arrogance of their shoddy service. Called them about ten times to get things done; sent more than 5 mails. No solution in sight. I'm not talking about Linux; I'm talking about Windows as drain of the photos. After about two months I simply stopped talking to them after they had insisted for a few times we sent our PC to an accredited dealer and have the harddisk wiped and Windows re-installed from scratch. Even *after* it had been reinstalled their sh..... software wouldn't work and they still kept saying we should use another dealer, another re-install, another software. When I wanted to download the latest software I couldn't; not even with IE. If they could somehow give me access via ftp. They couldn't.
Not a single effort from their side to make us happy and satisfied customers. Only arrogance. *That's* what is going to spell trouble for them.
Mod me down as troll. Give me bad karma. But what I'm writing is true.
stop using 'buffer overflow' languages like C, C++. Anything else: perl, python, java, C# is more secure.
I simply disregard the last language, right ?;)
Your turn to draw rough concepts on how Byte-code and scripts can be used to write an operating system, device drivers, etc. How would you propose the runtime-environments to be written ?
With respect to the first, something similar exists.
May I question the 'insightfulness' of the moderators ? To me this is what moderation is about: distinguish the good from the good-looking. A naive contribution is welcome and refreshing, but not by default Insightful
Seriously, people have reported here on Slashdot that they use OO.o as a recovery tool for.doc files
True. We had a file once, created by M$-Office, which crashed any M$ system when you wanted to print it.
In OO I could open it, make minor changes, save it as.doc and it could be printed.
Since someone is going to mod this redundant, I might as well add another note: OpenOffice files are meanwhile usually smaller than their M$ counterparts.
Still redundant: I would like to find out why this IBM chap opinions that MS is a great packet. Used to find it not intuitive even before I was introduced to SO and later OO. Maybe he has never thought of some of its flaws ? As someone who was meant to support its users, Yes, at times it defies logic and common sense.
Now I'll get the thumbs down from zealots: The only good thing of M$ is, that it loads really fast. And I used to run it on different machines together with SO / OO.
Slashdot Mirror
Aha. Thanks for the update. I didn't really follow the latest development in physics. And my 'latest' understanding of 25 years ago was that the ether theory had been rejected another 90 years before.
Sometimes I feel like many - if not most - weird and long discarded theories come back one day and prove to be true in the second or third go; generations later.
Maybe those chaps in Kansas and places are right, and over another few generations we will find a supernatural being having created our universe out of chaos (haha, we're getting closer; some generations back this was completely incomprehensible !) within 7 days (this still needs a time to go) ?
Hmm. To me, electromagnetics propagates properly and without hesitation through vacuum.
What was it that you wanted to prove ?
Ah, yeah ! The best comment in here I have seen so far.
Noticed the same. No Andrew T. in the references.
If they did their job *somewhat* properly, they'd have to refer to Minix. And I am sure they did; they still have to be politically correct; just look at the common roots.
Could Microsoft confess that they screwed up years back with their go-on-your-own DOS ? Not economically; that made kind of sense on an 8086; but from a visionary aspect ? Except of new blood from DEC they dug themselves into program loaders and their current architecture (I haven't seen the source code, sorry, based on hearsay) is only rudimentary more intelligent.
Thanks for pointing us to Minix and an evident omission in the MS report !
You may as well consider this a first sign of despair. Microsoft sells itself as the great central and understanding force while bringing in their lackeys to do the dirty job.
How low is it that these people will sell their souls, hide behind a scene of fictitious 'independence', receiving a hand-out at the doors for a mediocre performance. May God have mercy with their souls./ 129235&tid=98&tid=184&tid=106&tid=219&tid=137
They have no chance. It is over. Except, they catch the rest of the world with patents, DRM, and undue influencing governments. Probably the stuff you talk about was intended in the same direction. It is all but easy for a minister to not be seen with William III Gates any more. Not having His Highness gracing the event of the yearly meeting of the steering committee with His presence. And, unfortunately, this counts. Not only to the electorate, also to investors. And this is where we go.
On another tone: I dunno if Microsoft makes a great impression with this. Anything else has failed them unto here. We have the US$100 PCs rolling in http://linux.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/09/29
And this is why Malaysia hasn't seen any advance in its public FOSS policy. Yes, it does require a serious amount of self-confidence to dare to stand on own feet.
Does Malaysia have it in her ? It remains to be seen. Until then, the sycophants will have the field.
004: SECURITY FIX: July 6, 2005
On OpenBSD
Thanks for the update. I just checked, and by now it does (toggle with Ins on numeric keypad) !
So, finally someone brought it into line with the rest of the world !
It is quite another discussion if it should toggle from the statusbar. To be discussed elsewhere.
Another plus and thumbs-up for Abiword !
See ... !
This is what I call a decent lack on compatibility. It's the first wordprocessor I personally use where you have to go like this. Flame me for lack of exposure, if you like.
The carat was what I liked, by the way. And what I wrote in my post. I'd be all out for Abiword (and actually advocated for and use it for small tasks not involving WORD-import).
Your answer signals a clear weakness on UI. "insert and overwrite modes are present in most word processors". Fine. So to me. But don't make the user learn exotic keybindings if you want to make them converts. And will you please stick to the argument. At no point did I ask to do away with insert and overwrite.
I don't have the post here any more, but if I'm not mistaken, I also mentioned the lack to switch through usage of the menu. At least I didn't find that option then. In the end trial and error brought the solution: the 'Insert' key of the cursor-pad works as expected; without Shift +.
Shall everyone draw his / her own conclusion about the level of HCI involved here.
... At times, yes, I do like Abiword.
But my impression of their support isn't as great.
There was a situation one day when all chars were overwritten instead of inserted.
Ah, yes, you'll tell me to change to Insert. But where ?? It took me a few minutes to find the switch. Very cumbersome.
I'll tell you a secret: No, it is not the 0 [Ins] on the numeric keypad, like anywhere else.
I thought it to be a bug and filed one. I was kind of pee-d at and told WONTFIX.
So far as usability and compatibility are taken serious.
I for one would have welcomed a really Free Solaris. I don't see the Linux kernel superior to Solaris kernel. And if there was full compatibility of Linux and Solaris - also licence-wise - I'd have been the first to switch to Solaris as basis for all my machines. Running mostly Linux apps on it, of course (availability !). With the new Solaris file system, compartments, everything. With the same hardware compatibility that the Linux kernel has.
That's what I had called a Killer App !
Some pointed out rightly that then SUN would endanger the future of their emplyees, pension fonds.
IMHO they also endanger the same by trying to stick to their own 'Third Path' to success. This is the real death knell to their future: Not becoming part of the big wave rolling; fully tapping Open Source.
Good Night, SUN; very sorry to see you go !
I think I did mention that technically, KDE is better IMHO.
It is the first time OP made me aware, that, yes, there is something repellent about it. Surely not for everyone, but for quite a few; to my big surprise.
And it made me think, could I lay a finger on it; why? No, just the panel is enough; though I have no explanation, I wouldn't want to work with it. Ever.
It's getting boring, but yes, maybe someone with a bit of brain in HCI or psychology can help out here. I wouldn't mind at all to like KDE (which I do technically), but I cannot help to find its icons ugly. So I thought and said (in here, to lower my karma, it seemed).
But actually, no, it has something in it; something highly unsympathetic. The panel could help: It already starts with the panel. I tried all my best to configure it so I wouldn't hate it, but I couldn't. And I'm no GNOME zealot, either. Especially since IMHO it is getting worse per stable version. KDE would be my desktop of dreams for a corporate deployment. Only, I would not want to force my users to this emotionally sucking UI; this UI with a high hate potential.
An amazing outcome: Let someone find out why it comes across with this load of aversion induction; finally correct this and we'd have a unified desktop.
No kidding.
(And me my good karma; as usual when I comment on patents !)
Get a life. And I'm getting tired of those 'wrong' messages. Not only that I have to endure them; worse, with those misleading 'news' we make ourselves / slashdot the laughing bunch of our 'ennemies'.
Do it again, Sam. Okay, I'll do it again:
Seen with professional eyes, this patent might have to be granted or not. It is surely no great invention.
But once and for all: There is nothing in it that warrants the notion of 'Patent for double-click'. Over. Read the claims correctly, even in the light of the description as mandated by patent law. There is a lot of repetion and crap; but nowhere a patent for 'double-click'. It is ridiculous and childish (see above) to shorten the patent to *that*.
And 'we' do us and everyone else in the 'Anti-patent liga' a disservice by such false claims.
Bash that crap of patent application; but bash it correctly. *Then* you'll be taken serious. Not just with a foolish attitude and childish arguments.
Better: give me a decent income to comb all those half-brew emotional 'patent news' before ever they are accepted. (Anybody ??)
The patent - for those too lazy too read - is about one thing: selection through activation time of clickable widgets; nothing else. That is: *length* of continuously pressing it. Here on my Debian Sid I haven't found this feature, yet. The Double-Click only comes in in the Patent in combination and *added* to this checking of duration of uninterrupted 'pressing' the widget. Also this, I have never seen. Or read. But chances are, it *has* been published (or experienced, sold) before the *Filing Date*.
And I encourage everyone who is aware of such, to step forward and make herself known ! *This* would help 'our' course; contrary to those stupid remarks of where the Double-Click itself was noticed before that date. Lost time, wasted time. Simply because neither claimed nor granted !
One day I see such a crap submitted as story from RedMond; and some Cowboy might accept it; and they'll ROTFL; in RedMond. Would be a pity. Let's do much better !
Thanks !
Parent has read the claims. Most posters haven't, before they started bashing.
Parent has done a great job in pointing out the main weakness: Apple doesn't ask for technicalities, but design. Essentially.
Claim 26 is the most precise one: They ask for protection for an Interface Design Aspect that automagically changes the underlying interfaces along with the user interaction.
This is a clear sign of a patent system flawed over time, since the idea is not basically a technical one. Imagine your mail-client (or just look at it) and imagine you click on the sender of a mail and the interfaces changes to display all mails of that sender. You click on a subject and all mails of this subject come up. Not a bad one, no. I'd even agree that it may be discussed if the author should get royalties. But a patent ? Only over my dead body. (I quit the Patent Office to have a life !)
This is the typical kind of software patentry where you describe a rather vague idea, ask for a patent and sue the implementer.
I can only call on everyone - in US and EU - to put all efforts into stopping this madness.
May I doubt this 'Insightful'ness ?
It is Roman Law, that 'not knowing' renders your action still punishable (Sorry for mistakes, English is not my mothertongue).
Someone who is not aware of the law, or *thinks* he has the right to shoot down the power-line of his neighbour to stop the latter hammering the neighbourhood with bass sound at 3 AM, is still punishable.
IMHO you are correct w.r.t fraud, though. Nevertheless, one remains responsible for all the consequences of one's (wrong) assumptions: damages, etc. come in.
Don't trust 'justice'.
...
With their so wide open mouth they *must* feel backing of the kind only B&B could give.
'B' could stand for Bill, Bush,
Don't forget CKK. She didn't have the guts to do what she wanted to do and ought to have done.
This is actually one of the best posts in here. It is not true that SMP was irrelevant for OpenBSD. Agreed, 99% of the users wouldn't actually need it. But once you know and like an OS: What are you going to propose for the enterprise if ever the question came up ? I reluctantly consulted to FreeBSD. Reluctantly not because it was bad, but I prefer OpenBSD. Only the SMP issue ... .
And ? As sysadmin this is exactly what makes me sleep well. When OpenBSD is our link to the wild world web.
Let's be honest. Here there is (Sun Feb 29 02:09:23 MYT 2004) in line 3.
But the link (http://nvu.com/landing_page.html) is dead as of now (404).
Lately, it became impossible to use and counterintuitive. And why ? Like in the article: someone tried to find a perfect engineering solution and keeping the user out. I did send a mail explaining everything and even got a positive answer.
Another sample - no rant here - just move over to http://www.linuxprinting.org/cups-doc.html. And actually, these guys do a good job. They are only so much taken in with their own, that they completely miss to perceive what a user wants to do: to print. Not: develop a universal printing system.
Want another example: mozilla-thunderbird. How to open an HTML-document ? Funny only: Firefox is just as bad in opening an e-mail client. You can't even type 'evolution'; you must use the absolute path.
To be honest: at times (often) I prefer console / tui for one main reason: it works and often enough is easier to handle than gui. What makes me sad is, that 'we' don't lack the ability to produce better; at times we somehow don't seem to *want* to do better.
Thanks for pointing this out. Tried a few times before; but the message doesn't seem to get through. With respect to publishing after 18 months: the US (this time) followed worldwide tradition.
I might not be completely agreeable though with the stated competence of the USPTO. Having been an examiner until 7 years back, they had a tendency to be politically correct; more than legally correct. And how do you distinguish between incompetence and overworked ? When our car comes back from a shoddy repair I don't bother if the mechanic was incompetent or overworked. And I wouldn't know; badly repaired is badly repaired. A horribly granted patent remains a sore; for the industry and the consumer.
The independent claims will be discussed, eventually slightly modified and granted; I bet quite some money on this outcome. Patent business is a monkey business. Whatever they get - and they will get something - they can always use it to strangle the competitors: would you / Gnome / KDE / enlightenment have the funds to go to court against Microsoft ? So, there won't even be a need to make the patent stand in court; just a few letters and Longhorn will have workspaces and desktops while OSS won't (any more). Cease and desist: the honestly conducted business of the future.
The fifteen percent of the code that is presentable; to be stressed.
An ancient trick of military strategy. Sorry, a new one: Shock and Awe: "They actually *can* write clean code !!" Except of a few buffer overflows in IE5. Red Herring.
A spokesperson for mig2: "It is at our big surprise to find expensive cars having lost attractivity with thieves and smuggling rings. We are surprised about the huge number and therefore the high attractivity of middle-class cars on thieves. Why would a Porsche be the last car to be removed illegally from a parking lot ? We can only assume that the superior technical quality of contemporary cars made by Ford and GM surpasses that of a Porsche by a factor of almost 10. Or is it rather the value on the black market that is about 10 times higher for a car of the trusted local manufacturers compared to a - at times even smaller - vehicles of dubious origin ? We do hope to answer this question in our next publication; available in Q3 this year for 29.38 (including taxes)."
The real trouble isn't even the bad quality of the pictures. The thingy that spells trouble for Kodak is the arrogance of their shoddy service. Called them about ten times to get things done; sent more than 5 mails. No solution in sight. I'm not talking about Linux; I'm talking about Windows as drain of the photos. After about two months I simply stopped talking to them after they had insisted for a few times we sent our PC to an accredited dealer and have the harddisk wiped and Windows re-installed from scratch. Even *after* it had been reinstalled their sh..... software wouldn't work and they still kept saying we should use another dealer, another re-install, another software. When I wanted to download the latest software I couldn't; not even with IE. If they could somehow give me access via ftp. They couldn't.
Not a single effort from their side to make us happy and satisfied customers. Only arrogance. *That's* what is going to spell trouble for them.
Mod me down as troll. Give me bad karma. But what I'm writing is true.
I simply disregard the last language, right ? ;)
Your turn to draw rough concepts on how Byte-code and scripts can be used to write an operating system, device drivers, etc. How would you propose the runtime-environments to be written ?
With respect to the first, something similar exists.
May I question the 'insightfulness' of the moderators ? To me this is what moderation is about: distinguish the good from the good-looking. A naive contribution is welcome and refreshing, but not by default Insightful
True. We had a file once, created by M$-Office, which crashed any M$ system when you wanted to print it.
In OO I could open it, make minor changes, save it as .doc and it could be printed.
Since someone is going to mod this redundant, I might as well add another note: OpenOffice files are meanwhile usually smaller than their M$ counterparts.
Still redundant: I would like to find out why this IBM chap opinions that MS is a great packet. Used to find it not intuitive even before I was introduced to SO and later OO. Maybe he has never thought of some of its flaws ? As someone who was meant to support its users, Yes, at times it defies logic and common sense.
Now I'll get the thumbs down from zealots: The only good thing of M$ is, that it loads really fast. And I used to run it on different machines together with SO / OO.