It's popular to hate Microsoft but in all honesty MS Word is excellent software. It really always has been. The price is a bargain. If you're a professional writer nothing else even comes close to the sophisticated features it offers.... The thing to complain about Word is the exclusion of other formats to maintain their monopoly (this is being fixed) and their attempt to force their convoluted XML format on the world over all other formats.
You say it's excellent, then go on to say MS has a monopoly. This therefore begs the question: excellent compared to what, exactly - pen and parchment?
Microsoft's monopoly with MS Office invalidates any effective discussion of its quality because 99.9% of people have no choice which software they use for things like word processing or spreadsheeting, nor do they have any concept of what an alternative to MSO might be like. Word may be the best possible word processor, it may be the worst - but we'll never know because there is no alternative, and apart from the brief existence of WordPerfect and AmiPro, has been no alternative for well over 10 years.
Here's an anecdote for you: my father was invited to visit East Germany during the cold war. His guide let him speak to a few people there, one of whom he talked to about cars. The person had recently been allowed to by a Trabant and was very excited to own a car. He cheerfully informed my father that Trabants were the best cars in the world - and he meant it. The fact that he could not name, much less have even driven, any other car completely eluded him, as did the idiocy of his opinion.
I think in the light of this Skype business, the Ekiga home page needs to raise its game considerably in terms of the information it provides. Looking at ekiga.org you can't immediately tell what it does, or even if there's a Windows version (which there is). I think it must get the prize for an Open Source project hiding the most light under a bushel.
Didn't we just have this a few years ago... oh no, that was SCO forgetting to actually buy UNIX from Novell. I wonder how many other companies will turn out not to own the software they think they own?
Does not work in case of skype you always can use google voice talk (which works better btw. skype is inferior) or directly SIP!
One of Skype's big advantages is conference calling (and now, desktop sharing as well). I don't think either Google Talk nor any SIP providers I know do that. Ekiga would seem to be the nearest open alternative to Skype.
Odd how the "downloads" page on ekiga.org makes no mention of their Windows version, which according to their wiki (where a Win32 download link appears), appears to be released almost in parallel to the Linux versions. Oh well, I'll mail them about that.
I know there are lots of ways for the Dutch to circumvent this (if it actually happens), but does anyone here remember Distributed BoingBoing? Seemed to me to be a really rather cool way of doing this kind of thing. Of course, it would need to be modified to handle connections to the tracker, so maybe it wouldn't be so easy compared to a straight http site.
Certainly more good stuff than any other phone platform.
You win this week's Damning With Feint Praise award!
It's not as if we're talking about even a remotely mature market place here. Bought a commodity phone recently?
For such a piece of shit company, they sure do have a lot more marketshare than the computing godOS known as Linux.
Microsoft's current market share has nothing to do with quality, and everything to do with monopoly. It doesn't matter whether their product is any good or not, because not only do the vast majority of computer users not even know what Windows is, they wouldn't have the first clue what an alternative to Windows or MS Office would be like.
I know this isn't really on topic, but it may interest some of you that I was told by a security consultant that in 2002 British Telecom (BT) had a call centre of 200 (two hundred) people doing one thing and one thing only: re-setting forgotten passwords for BT employees worldwide.
This call centre had grown from 4 people in 1996. In the end, it was the accountants that persuaded the IT department to do something about it. Part of the solution was to install something called an "LDAP server" on the network which in effect meant that various applications could use a centralised authentication system. That managed to keep the call centre rising above the 500 people in 2007 that had been projected by 2002 trends. It now stands at about 350 operators, 24 hours a day, 365 days a week. A cost that BT has to accept as "reasonable."
My company was hit pretty hard by the conficker virus. It took a lot of users offline for days. The cleanup effort included bringing in a small army of consultants to help fix the issue. After everything was cleaned up and ready to go, IT's response to the outbreak was to kick our Virus Scanner into some crazy ultra cautious mode. The end result of that is 50% of my cpu is being used up by my virus scanner constantly and opening an app or compiling something in eclipse takes substantially longer than it used to.
The fact that virus scanning software decreases worker productivity by tying up substantial system resources should be part of the TCO as well.
OT, but don't forget that if anti-virus scanning software actually worked, you wouldn't have the damn virus in the first place!
I'm going to get modded to troll hell for this, but really: anti-virus software is about as close to a total con-job as it's possible to be without actually going to jail.
Youtube isn't about piracy, the initial purpose of it was social networking and it continues to try to strive for that.
Er, it may not have been about piracy initially, but anyone other than a casual observer today will see that YouTube hosts a lot of illegal (as in not copyright cleared) material. In fact I'd estimate that perhaps half the content is pirated in some form (either video or audio).
My prediction is that while the UK is probably the worst English-speaking country in the world in terms of civil liberties and privacy right now, it will be one of the first to get a cluestick.
Unlike India, Fiji(!), and various other place that you might consider moving to, Britain has a long history of what I would call "bedrock freedom" and (despite recent expense claim scandals) a pretty healthy democracy with it. This isn't based on religion, or guns, or the death sentence like the US and other countries so it tends to have a more laid back characteristic that *can* go a bit awry at times (like now). Basically though, if enough people get pissed off at the idiocy of things like ID cards, they will vote for a party that will end that idiocy. Indeed, the Conservatives have said if elected they will scrap the proposed ID card system, for example. There is also civil protest and riot. Britain has a long and healthy tradition of rioting in the streets, much like France, and far more frequent than the US or Canada. It tends also to work as a last-ditch tactic (cf. Poll Tax Riots).
In short, British society has shallow moods - right now we're in a mood to sleepwalk into a surveillance society, but I think we'll soon wake up and turn the other way.
Fahrenheit is a wonderfully human temperature scale. Over 100 is Way Too Damn Hot, and under 0 is Way Too Damn Cold. I like that.
This is actually a very important point. The main rational objection that many British (and some other European) people have to the metric system is that it does not allow for context. In the past, some trades had their own systems of weights and measures: goldsmiths and jewellers still have carets, for example, but fruit farmers had bushels, brewers had hogs heads and bakers had bakers' dozens. These measures were appropriate to the context of the objects they were measuring. The metric system, in it's one-fits-all philosophy is often seen as being inappropriate for the tasks at hand. It is of course in the name of standardisation that the metric system has happened, but there's a lot to be said for context.
"To hell with you. To hell with you and to hell with the Internet.' It's distracting. It's meaningless; it's not real. It's in the air somewhere."
He doesn't explain why he doesn't like the Internet, but I think I can make a good guess based on the "it's in the air somewhere" remark.
Whenever anyone discusses the merits of books over digital literature, somebody always saying something like "Nothing can beat the feeling of a nice book: the paper, the ink, the smell of it, the weight of it, the warm, friendly..." blah blah blah. Indeed, that usually seems to be the ONLY argument presented in favour. This is basically just re-hashing the same idea: that books and paper are emotionally better because they're tactile and look nicer than [insert technology under discussion]. Bradbury's attitude seems to be no exception.
While I don't dismiss emotional attachment as being insignificant, it would be useful to list something else about books or paper that give them an advantage over digital media. Here are a few I can think of:
1. Paper (and to a lesser extent books) fit a particular mode of use that digital media cannot yet fulfil: I can jot something down on paper, hand it to somebody who can then adjust that jotting if need be, and we can use it for high-level, fast communication. The recipient can then carry it around for a short while until its purpose is served, and then dispose of it. Similar use cases can be played out on walls with chalk or charred sticks, on sand, or on steamy windows.
2. Books and paper are robust within specific common parameters and don't need a power source. Properly stored, a book can last thousands of years. I can also abuse a book in a variety of ways and it will still be fit for purpose. Burn it, however, or tear it into tiny pieces, and I better have another copy or all the information in it is lost forever.
3. Properly produced, books and paper can be far more environmentally friendly than digital media, or at least the hardware that delivers that media.
4. Er, that's it. Every other property of books or paper I can think of are either disadvantages, or are matched by current digital media.
Any other suggestions for the objective advantages of books over digital media?
Nope. It's called "a prediction based on current evidence." By your measure, all scientific theories until proven would be arguments to the future. If I were making an argument to the future I would be saying that X is not happening now, and you can't see any evidence of it happening yet, but it will happen in the future because I believe it should do because I think that's the right way it should happen.
There is, I hope you will see, rather a large difference.
People like you constantly try to come up with reasons and justifications for breaking the law rather than attempting to sway the minds of people to get the law changed. Civil disobedience only works when there's an audience. Frankly your audience is just yourselves and individuals who you aren't going to sway.
Oh, but the MPAA and RIAA don't pay the artists crap for producing their crap so I'm just going to pirate the movie and music. Oh, the software has a demo, but I don't want to bother with that, I'm just going to pirate the full version. Oh, the computer game has a demo and tons of review, but I don't want to spend time reading the reviews or trying the demo, so I'm just going to pirate the full game instead.
Let me guess, you agree that I should be able to take your money and distribute it however I please because I know how to better spend your money than you?
That doesn't make any sense. The whole point here is that there IS an audience - it's the *AA. If they weren't feeling the pain, they wouldn't be doing what they're doing. The "Oh, but..." stuff you list is EXACTLY how the law will get changed eventually, because that's how modern democratic societies work. Sure the *AA will kick and scream, but once the tide has turned, it's over.
By 2100, copyright as we know it will have been abolished. That sounds impossible, but it's going to happen.
you can't know what the net effect is of non-paid non-authorized downloads
Here's a true story:
When my son was 6, his friends showed him an Indiana Jones Lego kit and he really liked it. After a while I realised he'd never seen the films and without much thought I downloaded one and showed it to him just to see what he thought (he's fickle). He loved it. So much so that we've probably spend about $200 on Indie merchandising of various kinds in the last 18 months, and still buying. He may never had got to that level had he not seen the film, and I may well not have been bothered to buy/rent it for him.
Of course, the marketing behemoth of Indian Jones Inc, may well have hoovered him up eventually, but who's to say he might not have gone for something else, something smaller - Japanimation or whatever?
Slashdot Mirror
What did you think it might be a typo for? "Birth bang"? "birth bong?"
The mind boggles!
It's popular to hate Microsoft but in all honesty MS Word is excellent software. It really always has been. The price is a bargain. If you're a professional writer nothing else even comes close to the sophisticated features it offers. ... The thing to complain about Word is the exclusion of other formats to maintain their monopoly (this is being fixed) and their attempt to force their convoluted XML format on the world over all other formats.
You say it's excellent, then go on to say MS has a monopoly. This therefore begs the question: excellent compared to what, exactly - pen and parchment?
Microsoft's monopoly with MS Office invalidates any effective discussion of its quality because 99.9% of people have no choice which software they use for things like word processing or spreadsheeting, nor do they have any concept of what an alternative to MSO might be like. Word may be the best possible word processor, it may be the worst - but we'll never know because there is no alternative, and apart from the brief existence of WordPerfect and AmiPro, has been no alternative for well over 10 years.
Here's an anecdote for you: my father was invited to visit East Germany during the cold war. His guide let him speak to a few people there, one of whom he talked to about cars. The person had recently been allowed to by a Trabant and was very excited to own a car. He cheerfully informed my father that Trabants were the best cars in the world - and he meant it. The fact that he could not name, much less have even driven, any other car completely eluded him, as did the idiocy of his opinion.
Really - what is a browser?
This is a complete debacle for CentOS.
Amen to that. I now feel have no choice but to spurn CentOS as I would spurn a rabid dog.
not trolling here... can you make calls to landlines or cell phones from within Ekiga?
I'll just google that one for you:
https://answers.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/ekiga/+question/71276
I think in the light of this Skype business, the Ekiga home page needs to raise its game considerably in terms of the information it provides. Looking at ekiga.org you can't immediately tell what it does, or even if there's a Windows version (which there is). I think it must get the prize for an Open Source project hiding the most light under a bushel.
Didn't we just have this a few years ago... oh no, that was SCO forgetting to actually buy UNIX from Novell. I wonder how many other companies will turn out not to own the software they think they own?
Also, don't forget that RIM were nearly at the point of having to close down Blackberry wireless operations in the US a couple of years go for very similar reasons.
Does not work in case of skype you always can use google voice talk (which works better btw. skype is inferior) or directly SIP!
One of Skype's big advantages is conference calling (and now, desktop sharing as well). I don't think either Google Talk nor any SIP providers I know do that. Ekiga would seem to be the nearest open alternative to Skype. Odd how the "downloads" page on ekiga.org makes no mention of their Windows version, which according to their wiki (where a Win32 download link appears), appears to be released almost in parallel to the Linux versions. Oh well, I'll mail them about that.
I know there are lots of ways for the Dutch to circumvent this (if it actually happens), but does anyone here remember Distributed BoingBoing? Seemed to me to be a really rather cool way of doing this kind of thing. Of course, it would need to be modified to handle connections to the tracker, so maybe it wouldn't be so easy compared to a straight http site.
>Actually what would be nice to see would be that the copyright stays with the creator in all cases.
Creative Commons BY-SA?
"Darknet" is the term for a general concept, coined by Microsoft researchers in 2002.
Unlimited voice from TMobile is $99, same for att. No way in hell they'd manage to come out in the black with the plan they had laid out.
What?? Here in the UK, I get 500 voice minutes and 200 texts for about $US17 per month - and that's without trying to haggle a deal.
Certainly more good stuff than any other phone platform.
You win this week's Damning With Feint Praise award! It's not as if we're talking about even a remotely mature market place here. Bought a commodity phone recently?
For such a piece of shit company, they sure do have a lot more marketshare than the computing godOS known as Linux.
Microsoft's current market share has nothing to do with quality, and everything to do with monopoly. It doesn't matter whether their product is any good or not, because not only do the vast majority of computer users not even know what Windows is, they wouldn't have the first clue what an alternative to Windows or MS Office would be like.
Time to learn about basic economic theory I think.
If this had been Windows, the article would have been tagged defectivebydesign.
What are you talking about? How is a Linux kernel exploit related to the architecture of DRM??
The market share for IE6 is now well down in the single digits.
According to whom? Even on w3schools.com, which is visited almost exclusively by web developers, more than 14% of people are still using IE6.
Quoting w3schools on anything - in particular browser stats - marks you out as an imbecile. Please, for you own good, refrain.
I know this isn't really on topic, but it may interest some of you that I was told by a security consultant that in 2002 British Telecom (BT) had a call centre of 200 (two hundred) people doing one thing and one thing only: re-setting forgotten passwords for BT employees worldwide. This call centre had grown from 4 people in 1996. In the end, it was the accountants that persuaded the IT department to do something about it. Part of the solution was to install something called an "LDAP server" on the network which in effect meant that various applications could use a centralised authentication system. That managed to keep the call centre rising above the 500 people in 2007 that had been projected by 2002 trends. It now stands at about 350 operators, 24 hours a day, 365 days a week. A cost that BT has to accept as "reasonable."
My company was hit pretty hard by the conficker virus. It took a lot of users offline for days. The cleanup effort included bringing in a small army of consultants to help fix the issue. After everything was cleaned up and ready to go, IT's response to the outbreak was to kick our Virus Scanner into some crazy ultra cautious mode. The end result of that is 50% of my cpu is being used up by my virus scanner constantly and opening an app or compiling something in eclipse takes substantially longer than it used to. The fact that virus scanning software decreases worker productivity by tying up substantial system resources should be part of the TCO as well.
OT, but don't forget that if anti-virus scanning software actually worked, you wouldn't have the damn virus in the first place! I'm going to get modded to troll hell for this, but really: anti-virus software is about as close to a total con-job as it's possible to be without actually going to jail.
Youtube isn't about piracy, the initial purpose of it was social networking and it continues to try to strive for that.
Er, it may not have been about piracy initially, but anyone other than a casual observer today will see that YouTube hosts a lot of illegal (as in not copyright cleared) material. In fact I'd estimate that perhaps half the content is pirated in some form (either video or audio).
My prediction is that while the UK is probably the worst English-speaking country in the world in terms of civil liberties and privacy right now, it will be one of the first to get a cluestick. Unlike India, Fiji(!), and various other place that you might consider moving to, Britain has a long history of what I would call "bedrock freedom" and (despite recent expense claim scandals) a pretty healthy democracy with it. This isn't based on religion, or guns, or the death sentence like the US and other countries so it tends to have a more laid back characteristic that *can* go a bit awry at times (like now). Basically though, if enough people get pissed off at the idiocy of things like ID cards, they will vote for a party that will end that idiocy. Indeed, the Conservatives have said if elected they will scrap the proposed ID card system, for example. There is also civil protest and riot. Britain has a long and healthy tradition of rioting in the streets, much like France, and far more frequent than the US or Canada. It tends also to work as a last-ditch tactic (cf. Poll Tax Riots). In short, British society has shallow moods - right now we're in a mood to sleepwalk into a surveillance society, but I think we'll soon wake up and turn the other way.
Fahrenheit is a wonderfully human temperature scale. Over 100 is Way Too Damn Hot, and under 0 is Way Too Damn Cold. I like that.
This is actually a very important point. The main rational objection that many British (and some other European) people have to the metric system is that it does not allow for context. In the past, some trades had their own systems of weights and measures: goldsmiths and jewellers still have carets, for example, but fruit farmers had bushels, brewers had hogs heads and bakers had bakers' dozens. These measures were appropriate to the context of the objects they were measuring. The metric system, in it's one-fits-all philosophy is often seen as being inappropriate for the tasks at hand. It is of course in the name of standardisation that the metric system has happened, but there's a lot to be said for context.
I think the UK is busy converting mostly to metric system, so maybe some UKians can chime in with their experience?
Nah - we got special treatment in the end
He doesn't explain why he doesn't like the Internet, but I think I can make a good guess based on the "it's in the air somewhere" remark.
Whenever anyone discusses the merits of books over digital literature, somebody always saying something like "Nothing can beat the feeling of a nice book: the paper, the ink, the smell of it, the weight of it, the warm, friendly..." blah blah blah. Indeed, that usually seems to be the ONLY argument presented in favour. This is basically just re-hashing the same idea: that books and paper are emotionally better because they're tactile and look nicer than [insert technology under discussion]. Bradbury's attitude seems to be no exception.
While I don't dismiss emotional attachment as being insignificant, it would be useful to list something else about books or paper that give them an advantage over digital media. Here are a few I can think of:
1. Paper (and to a lesser extent books) fit a particular mode of use that digital media cannot yet fulfil: I can jot something down on paper, hand it to somebody who can then adjust that jotting if need be, and we can use it for high-level, fast communication. The recipient can then carry it around for a short while until its purpose is served, and then dispose of it. Similar use cases can be played out on walls with chalk or charred sticks, on sand, or on steamy windows.
2. Books and paper are robust within specific common parameters and don't need a power source. Properly stored, a book can last thousands of years. I can also abuse a book in a variety of ways and it will still be fit for purpose. Burn it, however, or tear it into tiny pieces, and I better have another copy or all the information in it is lost forever.
3. Properly produced, books and paper can be far more environmentally friendly than digital media, or at least the hardware that delivers that media.
4. Er, that's it. Every other property of books or paper I can think of are either disadvantages, or are matched by current digital media.
Any other suggestions for the objective advantages of books over digital media?
By 2100, copyright as we know it will have been abolished. That sounds impossible, but it's going to happen.
This statement can best be summed up as an Argument to the Future http://www.don-lindsay-archive.org/skeptic/arguments.html#future
Nope. It's called "a prediction based on current evidence." By your measure, all scientific theories until proven would be arguments to the future. If I were making an argument to the future I would be saying that X is not happening now, and you can't see any evidence of it happening yet, but it will happen in the future because I believe it should do because I think that's the right way it should happen.
There is, I hope you will see, rather a large difference.
People like you constantly try to come up with reasons and justifications for breaking the law rather than attempting to sway the minds of people to get the law changed. Civil disobedience only works when there's an audience. Frankly your audience is just yourselves and individuals who you aren't going to sway.
Oh, but the MPAA and RIAA don't pay the artists crap for producing their crap so I'm just going to pirate the movie and music.
Oh, the software has a demo, but I don't want to bother with that, I'm just going to pirate the full version.
Oh, the computer game has a demo and tons of review, but I don't want to spend time reading the reviews or trying the demo, so I'm just going to pirate the full game instead.
Let me guess, you agree that I should be able to take your money and distribute it however I please because I know how to better spend your money than you?
That doesn't make any sense. The whole point here is that there IS an audience - it's the *AA. If they weren't feeling the pain, they wouldn't be doing what they're doing. The "Oh, but..." stuff you list is EXACTLY how the law will get changed eventually, because that's how modern democratic societies work. Sure the *AA will kick and scream, but once the tide has turned, it's over.
By 2100, copyright as we know it will have been abolished. That sounds impossible, but it's going to happen.
you can't know what the net effect is of non-paid non-authorized downloads
Here's a true story:
When my son was 6, his friends showed him an Indiana Jones Lego kit and he really liked it. After a while I realised he'd never seen the films and without much thought I downloaded one and showed it to him just to see what he thought (he's fickle). He loved it. So much so that we've probably spend about $200 on Indie merchandising of various kinds in the last 18 months, and still buying. He may never had got to that level had he not seen the film, and I may well not have been bothered to buy/rent it for him.
Of course, the marketing behemoth of Indian Jones Inc, may well have hoovered him up eventually, but who's to say he might not have gone for something else, something smaller - Japanimation or whatever?