Premiers (these are the people who "represent" the constituents of individual provinces) can do a lot of damage...
For example, in B.C. everything has been going downhill since the last guy was elected. What a huge mistake electing him was. What did he do?
cut university funding
closed hospitals
raised taxes
created a 4 month long bus strike, which required taxpayers to use alternative (less efficient) transportation, costing each one 1000's of dollars. The net result was a system that was no better than before.
It seems like the appointed judiciary is doing better than the elected "representative", at least so far as British Columbia is concerned.
Hopefully people in the US will send the letters and make the calls to let the government know that whenever a microsoft solution is even _mentioned_ to "solve" the problem of secure national identification, people go crazy and things become genuinely unpleasant.
Microsoft cannot be trusted with our information. That is the greatest reason not to use their operating system, even greater than cost or lack of source code. They have abused their trust in the past, continue to do it even now, and will do it again. That's just the way things are.
The moment the people who care, for instance slashdotters, seem to be looking away and not paying attention anymore, will be the moment that scary legistlation like this will pass. That is why the DMCA passed.
Nobody knows about, or understands this stuff other than techies, so techies MUST send correspondence to protest whenever comments are made or legislation is presented which will harm society.
Re:Support the community
on
WineX 2.0
·
· Score: 1
Did it ever occur to you that maybe we don't want to follow the lame example of MS Office?
Exactly. May I add that MS Office's integration, flexibility, and compatibility are no longer as legendary as they used to be.
Unless I am mistaken, OpenOffice can read and write Office format, but Office has no idea what to do with.sxw files. Lack of file format compatibility was what got WordPerfect in trouble in the good ol' days.
The user interface of OpenOffice is pretty intuitive. You have all the old, worn out icons at the top of the screen, same as all those boring Office programs, but more interesting is the document context menu, which allows you to quickly format things in very powerful ways without moving your mouse all over the place. (Of course keyboard shortcuts work too.)
So in my opinion is OpenOffice better than MS Office? No. But is MS Office worth the trouble to install if I already have OpenOffice running fine? No, MS Office is not worth the trouble any more.
Re:Support the community
on
WineX 2.0
·
· Score: 1
Of course businesses may have already deployed it, and they might feel the need to purchase a license for people to use at home.
Personally, I feel comfortable using whatever is in front of me, whether it is Microsoft Word, OpenOffice, Lyx, or anything else, as long as I can make the document look good, and get the information (complete with diagrams) down as quickly as the prof can write on the blackboard. Finally, my ideal word processor has to make the document look good when it prints. That's all I ever need from Word or Excel whenever I use them at home, or at work, and they deliver that beautifully. The point is that now installed on my computer are alternatives which perform just as beautifully, so why pay for Office if I have those?
Granted that most computer users fit the profile of using windows and already having a copy of Office. It already works fine, so there is no good justification to plunk down another $200 to upgrade.
The "real world" that people keep talking about is the one I'm already living in. It is a world where people cannot afford to take on unnecessary expenses if they can help it. It is a world where GOOD ENOUGH has to be GOOD ENOUGH FOR YOU, at least if you care about advancing to the next level of
a) eliminating debt
b) starting your own business
Rather than toiling as an employee to pay down interest on unnecessary debt.
no, psychiatrist wannabe, there is no anger, no sadness, and only pure seething fury and hatr... can't you tell I'm just flaming you for fun? don't take it personally, since i don't even know who you are.
but it's still pretty pathetic that you use hotmail.. i mean, c'mon! only, what, 2 megabytes of storage? if apple offered 3 MB you _should_ make friends with an apple person and the two of you will be happy together with your free email account, emailing each other joyfully with not a trace of sadness or of anger in your well-wiped love-prose...
or maybe, since you're so concerned about my welfare, you should be email buddies with me too, and you can provide much needed counselling to a disturbed and unhappy soulmate... but please, don't smile too much at me, you hot male you.. i don't think i can take it anymore!!
it is just that you are a fool, and that makes you irritating. now go wilt, you pathetic flower child, in a pile of the warmest hotmail you can find.. may your obituary be written in pretty, bold, well formatted smiley faces after maggots digest your liver and smear their hotmail-colored entrails all over your intestines...
Re:Support the community
on
WineX 2.0
·
· Score: 1
Linux Office apps, while good, are pretty crappy compared to Microsoft's version.
So what? OpenOffice works fine for me and probably most users. It does a great job printing, which is one of the most important issues for the pragmatic, and one of the reasons I originally liked Word 5 better than wordperfect back when people felt they had a choice. OpenOffice goes way beyond Microsoft in this regard. It's *easy* to print to pdf, which can cost $100's in Microsoft land, and great for students who want to print at school from public terminals or companies that want to send a pre-formatted but not easily editable document (and this happens a lot). It's *easy* to print to ps format, which can be converted to just about anything and manipulated in any which way.
I have been using OpenOffice to take notes on my laptop in several of my courses, and can honestly state from experience that it is GOOD ENOUGH. Word processing works fine. Spreadsheet works fine. Presentation software works fine. Draw package works fine. I can make pretty UML diagrams with Dia and whatever whizbang image processing I want with the Gimp.
So what if MS Office is better? If someone puts it on my desk I'll use it, but if I buy a computer that comes pre-loaded with OpenOffice, then I would see absolutely no reason to spend half a month's rent on a replacement. Heck, I have more than one licensed copy of Office 2000 and Windows 2000, and I don't even see any point in keeping a windows partition on either of my computers for the purpose of using MS Office.
In my life, and I would imagine the lives of many other people, MS Office is really not that big a deal. It's a good product, but I wouldn't go out and buy it now that I have OpenOffice installed.
Re:Linux gaming still sucks
on
WineX 2.0
·
· Score: 1
Because a PC has a longer useable life span.
Now out with you, damn troll!
not for games. he's actually right, because dedicated game machines...
1. have better games: most of the serious gaming money is made from games written for dedicated game machines, so the games are naturally better.
2. are a better lifestyle fit: usually they are located in your living room or entertainment area, which is much more conducive to relaxation, as opposed to hunching over a CRT.
3. are easier for vendors to support: since the hardware is all the same, game companies do not have to deal with issues such as the differences between 3 to 30 different graphics cards and tweaking to get optimal performance from each one, or supporting varying CPU speeds, or levels of RAM.
Very little money is made from PC games, compared to the vast sums of money made from selling games for Sony Playstation or Nintendo Game Cube.
With GPL there is no "while it last" (sic). As long as we have a civil society that respects licenses, the software is protected and will remain free. The day that we no longer have civil society, well, we can still use and support the product since we have the source.
That is the major difference between open source and closed source. If a closed source software company dies, your software is no longer supported. If an open source software company dies, your software investment is protected.
What do you mean, coward? That the free software foundation does not provide software for free?
"Many organizations distribute whatever free software happens to be available. In contrast, the Free Software Foundation concentrates on development of new free software---and on making that software into a coherent system which can eliminate the need to use proprietary software."
no, cowardly idiot. use hotmail if you don't value your privacy but absolutely love the pretty pansy-assed formatting options. if all those cute smiley icons and the squishy soft interface tickle your fancy and make you feel all bubbly inside, then please use your hotmail address. you are yet another _great_ reason for people like me to filter anything from hotmail.com to/dev/null.
but if you use linux or *bsd, then you can set up your own, truly private, email service, and make it as secure as you want with
1. open source operating system
2. apache
3. ssl module
4. php module
5. squirrel mail
6. a free dns server (and there are plenty of these)
7. an always on internet connection such as adsl
or a friend with all of the above...;-)
case
Re:Support the community
on
WineX 2.0
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
I disagree with the premise that one can make a difference by not buying PC games, because I don't think Microsoft or game companies would really feel the difference. on the other hand, by supporting transgaming, codeweavers, and other contributers to the wine project (or by contributing your time to the wine project directly), then it will soon be irrelevant to open source people that some companies choose to write their software for windows. we will be able to offer compatibility at an API level, combined with a vastly superior price and support model.
Companies write software for windows because people who own windows tend to _purchase_ their software (because they don't know about the free alternatives). Windows users are used to shelling out money for software, even "free" shareware.
Linux and BSD, however, now have several good office products, excellent networking support including email, web browsers, and server software, and user-friendly distributions. when it becomes possible to play windows games and use legacy windows software, computer distributers will find competitive advantage in selling Linux or BSD pre-installed computers for $500 with hundreds of whizbang features which would cost several $1000's to provide under windows.
Linux & BSD distributions offer far better value for the money than windows already.. the only advantage windows has now is a commercial software base, and it would be a tremendous boon for open source operating system users to have access to all of that old legacy software.
Companies who develop X-Windows native software will continue to enjoy a vastly superior user interface over old, worn out windows software running under wine, so I really don't think it will be a problem to find companies willing to develop cross-platform or Linux native software using any number of convenient libraries which are already available. (Eg. Java, Qt, wx-windows, modular development best practices, etc.)
The thing is that, while the examiners might be the most competent people in the world, the patent office is not able to serve the software industry correctly.
It has no purpose in software, since innovation is not the work of solitary companies or people, but the product of entire communities. In fact, I would say that most of the value of "key" technologies or standards, is that a large number of people or companies have agreed (or been forced) to use them.
Thus to software people, the patent office looks like a bunch of idiots whenever they issue a software patent, since hardly any "patentable" concept in this industry is really new to everybody.
As a non-goofy example, think about the compression used in GIF images, which was deployed while the patent was pending, and then when the patent was granted, everyone was screwed because they had built the format into browsers and content generation software thinking that they would be able to use it for free. A much more flexible image format (.png) was created as an unencumbered replacement, but has been difficult to deploy now that the internet has so many subscribers. This shows that, while the compression used in gif images might have been "unobvious", it was obviously possible for a qualified technician to create a replacement, and the early adoption of a thought-to-be-free-but-subsequently-patented technology was really an industry setback which has yet to be overcome.
Slashdot Mirror
For example, in B.C. everything has been going downhill since the last guy was elected. What a huge mistake electing him was. What did he do?
It seems like the appointed judiciary is doing better than the elected "representative", at least so far as British Columbia is concerned.
in Canada (and maybe other states)
Canada is not a state. Just so that you know.
It's a totally separate country, with its own currency, its own central bank, its own federal government, etc.
And Canada's provinces are not states either. A lot of people don't seem to know this, if we are to judge from web submission forms...
Hopefully people in the US will send the letters and make the calls to let the government know that whenever a microsoft solution is even _mentioned_ to "solve" the problem of secure national identification, people go crazy and things become genuinely unpleasant.
Microsoft cannot be trusted with our information. That is the greatest reason not to use their operating system, even greater than cost or lack of source code. They have abused their trust in the past, continue to do it even now, and will do it again. That's just the way things are.
The moment the people who care, for instance slashdotters, seem to be looking away and not paying attention anymore, will be the moment that scary legistlation like this will pass. That is why the DMCA passed.
Nobody knows about, or understands this stuff other than techies, so techies MUST send correspondence to protest whenever comments are made or legislation is presented which will harm society.
Did it ever occur to you that maybe we don't want to follow the lame example of MS Office?
.sxw files. Lack of file format compatibility was what got WordPerfect in trouble in the good ol' days.
Exactly. May I add that MS Office's integration, flexibility, and compatibility are no longer as legendary as they used to be.
Unless I am mistaken, OpenOffice can read and write Office format, but Office has no idea what to do with
The user interface of OpenOffice is pretty intuitive. You have all the old, worn out icons at the top of the screen, same as all those boring Office programs, but more interesting is the document context menu, which allows you to quickly format things in very powerful ways without moving your mouse all over the place. (Of course keyboard shortcuts work too.)
So in my opinion is OpenOffice better than MS Office? No. But is MS Office worth the trouble to install if I already have OpenOffice running fine? No, MS Office is not worth the trouble any more.
Of course businesses may have already deployed it, and they might feel the need to purchase a license for people to use at home.
Personally, I feel comfortable using whatever is in front of me, whether it is Microsoft Word, OpenOffice, Lyx, or anything else, as long as I can make the document look good, and get the information (complete with diagrams) down as quickly as the prof can write on the blackboard. Finally, my ideal word processor has to make the document look good when it prints. That's all I ever need from Word or Excel whenever I use them at home, or at work, and they deliver that beautifully. The point is that now installed on my computer are alternatives which perform just as beautifully, so why pay for Office if I have those?
Granted that most computer users fit the profile of using windows and already having a copy of Office. It already works fine, so there is no good justification to plunk down another $200 to upgrade.
The "real world" that people keep talking about is the one I'm already living in. It is a world where people cannot afford to take on unnecessary expenses if they can help it. It is a world where GOOD ENOUGH has to be GOOD ENOUGH FOR YOU, at least if you care about advancing to the next level of
a) eliminating debt
b) starting your own business
Rather than toiling as an employee to pay down interest on unnecessary debt.
Your flames are pitiful.
;-)
;-P
That's 'cause I'm from the North, where it's cold.
They don't inspire ire or contempt
Except in you, since you keep replying so kindly... thank you.
You are a sad, pathetic person.
Shivering in the cold, all alone, dreaming of how much less pathetic I would be if only I could troll as well as you, or as often...
no, psychiatrist wannabe, there is no anger, no sadness, and only pure seething fury and hatr... can't you tell I'm just flaming you for fun? don't take it personally, since i don't even know who you are.
but it's still pretty pathetic that you use hotmail.. i mean, c'mon! only, what, 2 megabytes of storage? if apple offered 3 MB you _should_ make friends with an apple person and the two of you will be happy together with your free email account, emailing each other joyfully with not a trace of sadness or of anger in your well-wiped love-prose...
or maybe, since you're so concerned about my welfare, you should be email buddies with me too, and you can provide much needed counselling to a disturbed and unhappy soulmate... but please, don't smile too much at me, you hot male you.. i don't think i can take it anymore!!
it is just that you are a fool, and that makes you irritating. now go wilt, you pathetic flower child, in a pile of the warmest hotmail you can find.. may your obituary be written in pretty, bold, well formatted smiley faces after maggots digest your liver and smear their hotmail-colored entrails all over your intestines...
Linux Office apps, while good, are pretty crappy compared to Microsoft's version.
So what? OpenOffice works fine for me and probably most users. It does a great job printing, which is one of the most important issues for the pragmatic, and one of the reasons I originally liked Word 5 better than wordperfect back when people felt they had a choice. OpenOffice goes way beyond Microsoft in this regard. It's *easy* to print to pdf, which can cost $100's in Microsoft land, and great for students who want to print at school from public terminals or companies that want to send a pre-formatted but not easily editable document (and this happens a lot). It's *easy* to print to ps format, which can be converted to just about anything and manipulated in any which way.
I have been using OpenOffice to take notes on my laptop in several of my courses, and can honestly state from experience that it is GOOD ENOUGH. Word processing works fine. Spreadsheet works fine. Presentation software works fine. Draw package works fine. I can make pretty UML diagrams with Dia and whatever whizbang image processing I want with the Gimp.
So what if MS Office is better? If someone puts it on my desk I'll use it, but if I buy a computer that comes pre-loaded with OpenOffice, then I would see absolutely no reason to spend half a month's rent on a replacement. Heck, I have more than one licensed copy of Office 2000 and Windows 2000, and I don't even see any point in keeping a windows partition on either of my computers for the purpose of using MS Office.
In my life, and I would imagine the lives of many other people, MS Office is really not that big a deal. It's a good product, but I wouldn't go out and buy it now that I have OpenOffice installed.
Because a PC has a longer useable life span.
Now out with you, damn troll!
not for games. he's actually right, because dedicated game machines...
1. have better games: most of the serious gaming money is made from games written for dedicated game machines, so the games are naturally better.
2. are a better lifestyle fit: usually they are located in your living room or entertainment area, which is much more conducive to relaxation, as opposed to hunching over a CRT.
3. are easier for vendors to support: since the hardware is all the same, game companies do not have to deal with issues such as the differences between 3 to 30 different graphics cards and tweaking to get optimal performance from each one, or supporting varying CPU speeds, or levels of RAM.
Very little money is made from PC games, compared to the vast sums of money made from selling games for Sony Playstation or Nintendo Game Cube.
Score: 5 Informative
With GPL there is no "while it last" (sic). As long as we have a civil society that respects licenses, the software is protected and will remain free. The day that we no longer have civil society, well, we can still use and support the product since we have the source.
That is the major difference between open source and closed source. If a closed source software company dies, your software is no longer supported. If an open source software company dies, your software investment is protected.
Get with the program, coward.
errmm.. i think that they made agreements with the relevant companies and pay royalties for the privilege... correct me if i'm wrong.
It's like the FSF calling itself the FSF.
What do you mean, coward? That the free software foundation does not provide software for free?
"Many organizations distribute whatever free software happens to be available. In contrast, the Free Software Foundation concentrates on development of new free software---and on making that software into a coherent system which can eliminate the need to use proprietary software."
Here is how to get the software for free.
no, cowardly idiot. use hotmail if you don't value your privacy but absolutely love the pretty pansy-assed formatting options. if all those cute smiley icons and the squishy soft interface tickle your fancy and make you feel all bubbly inside, then please use your hotmail address. you are yet another _great_ reason for people like me to filter anything from hotmail.com to /dev/null.
Hear hear,
;-)
but if you use linux or *bsd, then you can set up your own, truly private, email service, and make it as secure as you want with
1. open source operating system
2. apache
3. ssl module
4. php module
5. squirrel mail
6. a free dns server (and there are plenty of these)
7. an always on internet connection such as adsl
or a friend with all of the above...
case
I disagree with the premise that one can make a difference by not buying PC games, because I don't think Microsoft or game companies would really feel the difference. on the other hand, by supporting transgaming, codeweavers, and other contributers to the wine project (or by contributing your time to the wine project directly), then it will soon be irrelevant to open source people that some companies choose to write their software for windows. we will be able to offer compatibility at an API level, combined with a vastly superior price and support model.
Companies write software for windows because people who own windows tend to _purchase_ their software (because they don't know about the free alternatives). Windows users are used to shelling out money for software, even "free" shareware.
Linux and BSD, however, now have several good office products, excellent networking support including email, web browsers, and server software, and user-friendly distributions. when it becomes possible to play windows games and use legacy windows software, computer distributers will find competitive advantage in selling Linux or BSD pre-installed computers for $500 with hundreds of whizbang features which would cost several $1000's to provide under windows.
Linux & BSD distributions offer far better value for the money than windows already.. the only advantage windows has now is a commercial software base, and it would be a tremendous boon for open source operating system users to have access to all of that old legacy software.
Companies who develop X-Windows native software will continue to enjoy a vastly superior user interface over old, worn out windows software running under wine, so I really don't think it will be a problem to find companies willing to develop cross-platform or Linux native software using any number of convenient libraries which are already available. (Eg. Java, Qt, wx-windows, modular development best practices, etc.)
The thing is that, while the examiners might be the most competent people in the world, the patent office is not able to serve the software industry correctly.
It has no purpose in software, since innovation is not the work of solitary companies or people, but the product of entire communities. In fact, I would say that most of the value of "key" technologies or standards, is that a large number of people or companies have agreed (or been forced) to use them.
Thus to software people, the patent office looks like a bunch of idiots whenever they issue a software patent, since hardly any "patentable" concept in this industry is really new to everybody.
As a non-goofy example, think about the compression used in GIF images, which was deployed while the patent was pending, and then when the patent was granted, everyone was screwed because they had built the format into browsers and content generation software thinking that they would be able to use it for free. A much more flexible image format (.png) was created as an unencumbered replacement, but has been difficult to deploy now that the internet has so many subscribers. This shows that, while the compression used in gif images might have been "unobvious", it was obviously possible for a qualified technician to create a replacement, and the early adoption of a thought-to-be-free-but-subsequently-patented technology was really an industry setback which has yet to be overcome.