Exactly, if people were willing to sue something different if it was better, they would be using Lyx (far more productive than a word processor), Gnumeric (fast start-up, built in Monte-Carlo analysis, no bugs in the stats functions) etc. They could even stop using spreadsheets as databases (a pet hate of mine) given the existence of desktop databases.
The last time I tried it I could go more than 30 minutes on Write without it freezing on me for some reason.
When was that. I use it (although not heavily) and I have not had those problems.
OO is fine if you want to write letters and do simple spreadsheets.
So it is fine for almost everything that MS Office is used for! A good chunk of the remaining (tiny) minority usage is stuff for which MS Office the the wrong solution anyway (e.g. writing what are essentially database apps in Excel).
The only things I have come across for which MS Office is better than open source solutions per se are: Excel for some (not all) complex financial modelling, and Word for documents that go back and forth (e.g. during contract negotiations) and which allow you to approve or undo changes. I have found that fact that I can see the other sides internal changes very interesting on occasion!
Even Excel, the gem of MS Office, has some shortcomings (no built in Mote Carlo modelling, which Gnumeric has, for example). Word sucks compared to Lyx for long documents (bibliography, typographically correct formatting, export to other formats, overall productivity and appearance of finished document).
The advisories are grouped by version no. IIS has been through more versions that IIS so the vulnerabilities are more spread out.
Given that Apache 1.x is still being developed (and is more widely used) I think we can regard that as a product in itself. Compare that against the IIS 4 through to 6 and you get 12 for Apache against 14 for IIS. Furthermore all the IIS ones are remotely exploitable.
So far in 2005 there has been one advisory each for Apache 1.3 and IIS 6. There have been 4 for Apache 2 (the least widely used of the three), which is presumably because it is less mature than the other two. Each of them has one unpatched vulnerability.
IIS did do better than Apache in 2003 to 2004 in terms of the number of vulnerabilities. However if you look at the criticality of vulnerabilities IIS 5 had two "highly critical" vulnerabilities and one "extremely critical", while Apache 1.3 and Apache 2.0 had one "highly critical" each.
Westerners may be able to pony up two times the price of the hardware just to get MS Windows and MS Office, but I can imagine Sri Lankans cannot
No, they can not, so they do not. Everyone here uses pirated software. It is openly on sale in every computer shop. MS do not seem to mind - it is sold openly, you can find 20 or 30 shops selling pirated copies of Windows and MS Office by strolling through a shopping mall, so if they wanted to stop it they could.
That said, in spite of this, Linux is making headway. People are becoming aware of it. When i say I use Linux people now ask about it. The Open Source Week has generated a lot of publicity and the Lanka Linux Users Group is very effective.
Either you are trolling, or you have tried soemthing like Red Hat 6 and nothing since. Every single problem and "hurdle" you come up with are things that have been dealt dealt with long ago.
But you can not get any of several Linux distro's to work for you on a single user machine?
I am not a software engineer, in fact I am not an IT professional of any kind, yet I have managed to get a small SOHO LAN + several stand alone PCs running linux, with all the applications I need, up and running with no real problems. You must be REALLY competent!
The Inquirer is a fairly busy site and widely enough read to be a reasonable sampling of tech-savvy readers.
Few visitors to my main sites (UK oriented, investment related, mostly read during working hours) using Firefox. I think it is fairly obvious why.
On the other hand only 14 of the last 70 visitors to my blog used IE: about equal to Safari + Konqueror! Most of them are looking for my Wordpress plugins, both of which are of niche interest.
I can see you have to accept Word. However, is there any way you can make contributors aware of alternatives? You would be doing everyone a favour if you could.
For example, if there is a contributors area on the web site you could put up a page there describing the advantages to both you and them of other formats. Tell them about easy to use software (i.e. NOT editing TeX in Vi!). My favourite is Lyx. It is hardly difficult to use, it can produce DocBook, LaTeX, HTML, PDF etc and it is easier to use than MS Word for any document longer than a letter.
What about XP?
If WINE can not pretend to be XP and download IE7, once IE 7 becomes the norm, there goes my reason for having WINE - to run IE to test sites for problems (the usual pattern is write HTML for Firefox, then test under other browsers, find it works fine with everything other then IE).
I no of no religion which promises that God will take care of your standard of living.
Jesus usually favoured ("blessed are the poor" etc) people having a low standard of living.
The usual Christian point of view on looking after the planet is that we should regard ourselves as stewards of it - it not our property, we have a duty to hand it on in good condition.
Here in Sri Lanka ADSL feels much slower than in the UK (I think because of the lack of upstream bandwidth). It is also not terribly reliable and there have been a number of interruptions to service over the last few months (for about an hour this morning, although most have been briefer than that). Service is also restricted to a few areas: Colombo (the capital) and some surrounding areas, and even in these areas there is a waiting list thanks to lack of capacity.
Connection speeds are also slow with the two options being 512kbps/128kbps (sold as a home user service) and 2mbps/512kbps sold as a business service.
Prices are not too bad: Rs 2,000 one off connection fee (Rs 100 approx = 1 USD) and monthly payments of Rs 2,250 and Rs 6,750 monthly, uncapped.
Are there any other developing countries failing to implement affordable broadband solutions to the masses?
There is no chance of broadband for the masses in developing countries for a long time. It is only recently that telephones became affordable to the masses (and not in the poorest countries yet), PCs still are definitely not affordable.
The dot com I worked certainly failed in part becuase the CEO had no ideas about technology.
We were essentially a content site (investment analysis and related stuff including quotes, summary company financials etc.).
A lot of money was spent with Icon Medialab who did a ludicrously fancy front (Java applets for menus so they looked right) and no working back end .
Ars Digita nearly saved us. We got most of site working very quickly. I was one of the main contacts with them and they were a real pleasure to work with - but then they ran into their own problems. The combination of the content my team wrote and the information available was better than that of any competitors I had seen at the time or since then.
By then someone decided the original business models was wrong and we needed to switch to 1) selling "white label" sites for others to own brand and 2) Investor relations micro-sites.
I could see things were falling apart and got another job.
A lot of time and money was wasted because the CEO thought that if a site was designed and we had good mockups of what it should look like, then it was as good as done. He employed five "web designers" (lead by an ex-interior designer) but no in house developers (in fact he outsourced all the IT at one point).
The company only survived as long as it did becuase the CEO would use mock-ups of the site that all those designers churned out to show people how good it would be when it was done and pretty much charmed money out of investors - I suppose his own delusions helped him be convincing and kept the money coming in.
Who did the physical server belong to? If it was Indymedia then Rackspace might be guilty of theft, or at least conversion.
Rackspace are certainly greatly in the wrong and morally guilty of theft, regardless of the legal position.
I, personally, oppose both, but not for the usual reasons.
What are the usual reasons? The intrinsic right to life?
I am a Christian and I do believe in a right to life but my reasoning on abortion is almost identical to yours (even if you accept the right to life, you still have the problem of deciding when it starts).
My reasoning on the both is basically your reasoning plus a belief in the right to life.
Incidentally I am not sure concious awareness starts after birth. Unborn children react to stimuli, they seem able to learn and remember. From personal experience the music my wife listened to when she was pregnant was very effective in putting my daughter to sleep in the first few months after birth. (and it was not all quiet and soothing music either).
Why bring abortion and the death penalty into it at all? Yes being against one and for the other is a peculiarity of the American right wing (you rarely come across that inconsistency elsewhere) but, why is it relevant.
Add an unnecessary quote at the top of the page, why?
AS for the intelligent and functional Slashdot crowd all three of us agree that the whole apparent opposition is a read herring. When people way information wants to be free the information they are talking about does not overlap much with the information that "wants to be free".
No one has a problem with personal information being kept secret (except perhaps in cases where there is a genuine public interest). What we do have a problem with are: 1) publicly distributing information with excessive restrictions on what you can do with it and 2) keeping information that ought to be public secret.
I can think of lots of ideas like this. For example fake DMCA complaint against a website belonging to a a member of a politicians family.
There is, however, a drawback. ANYTHING LIKE THIS IS A CRIMINAL OFFENCE. Jail sounds like a good reason not to do it.
Morally it is not dissimilar to beating up a politician to demonstrate the trauma of violent crime. Not acceptable, even if your motive is the "greater good".
Anyway, all you need to do is wait. Sooner or later the genuine bad guys will do it anyway.
The site does look a lot better in Firefox. The warning reads like it was written by someone who was sick of being flammed by IE users becuase it does not look good in IE.
Slashdot Mirror
Exactly, if people were willing to sue something different if it was better, they would be using Lyx (far more productive than a word processor), Gnumeric (fast start-up, built in Monte-Carlo analysis, no bugs in the stats functions) etc. They could even stop using spreadsheets as databases (a pet hate of mine) given the existence of desktop databases.
The choice is there, users choose not to take it.
4000 is a tiny number of what is supposed to be a major disaster.
How many people die from car accidents over the same period? How many from the polution from thermal power plant?
When was that. I use it (although not heavily) and I have not had those problems.
OO is fine if you want to write letters and do simple spreadsheets.
So it is fine for almost everything that MS Office is used for! A good chunk of the remaining (tiny) minority usage is stuff for which MS Office the the wrong solution anyway (e.g. writing what are essentially database apps in Excel).
The only things I have come across for which MS Office is better than open source solutions per se are: Excel for some (not all) complex financial modelling, and Word for documents that go back and forth (e.g. during contract negotiations) and which allow you to approve or undo changes. I have found that fact that I can see the other sides internal changes very interesting on occasion!
Even Excel, the gem of MS Office, has some shortcomings (no built in Mote Carlo modelling, which Gnumeric has, for example). Word sucks compared to Lyx for long documents (bibliography, typographically correct formatting, export to other formats, overall productivity and appearance of finished document).
The advisories are grouped by version no. IIS has been through more versions that IIS so the vulnerabilities are more spread out.
Given that Apache 1.x is still being developed (and is more widely used) I think we can regard that as a product in itself. Compare that against the IIS 4 through to 6 and you get 12 for Apache against 14 for IIS. Furthermore all the IIS ones are remotely exploitable.
So far in 2005 there has been one advisory each for Apache 1.3 and IIS 6. There have been 4 for Apache 2 (the least widely used of the three), which is presumably because it is less mature than the other two. Each of them has one unpatched vulnerability.
IIS did do better than Apache in 2003 to 2004 in terms of the number of vulnerabilities. However if you look at the criticality of vulnerabilities IIS 5 had two "highly critical" vulnerabilities and one "extremely critical", while Apache 1.3 and Apache 2.0 had one "highly critical" each.
No, they can not, so they do not. Everyone here uses pirated software. It is openly on sale in every computer shop. MS do not seem to mind - it is sold openly, you can find 20 or 30 shops selling pirated copies of Windows and MS Office by strolling through a shopping mall, so if they wanted to stop it they could.
That said, in spite of this, Linux is making headway. People are becoming aware of it. When i say I use Linux people now ask about it. The Open Source Week has generated a lot of publicity and the Lanka Linux Users Group is very effective.
Either you are trolling, or you have tried soemthing like Red Hat 6 and nothing since. Every single problem and "hurdle" you come up with are things that have been dealt dealt with long ago.
But you can not get any of several Linux distro's to work for you on a single user machine?
I am not a software engineer, in fact I am not an IT professional of any kind, yet I have managed to get a small SOHO LAN + several stand alone PCs running linux, with all the applications I need, up and running with no real problems. You must be REALLY competent!
http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=25161
The Inquirer is a fairly busy site and widely enough read to be a reasonable sampling of tech-savvy readers.
Few visitors to my main sites (UK oriented, investment related, mostly read during working hours) using Firefox. I think it is fairly obvious why.
On the other hand only 14 of the last 70 visitors to my blog used IE: about equal to Safari + Konqueror! Most of them are looking for my Wordpress plugins, both of which are of niche interest.
That has to be troll: it is certianly the first time I ever heard anyone suggest Opera was slow.
reengineering of IE7, it might actually be way ahead of the game in security along with being stable and fas
Have you got any sources apart from MS PR?
For example, if there is a contributors area on the web site you could put up a page there describing the advantages to both you and them of other formats. Tell them about easy to use software (i.e. NOT editing TeX in Vi!). My favourite is Lyx. It is hardly difficult to use, it can produce DocBook, LaTeX, HTML, PDF etc and it is easier to use than MS Word for any document longer than a letter.
What about XP? If WINE can not pretend to be XP and download IE7, once IE 7 becomes the norm, there goes my reason for having WINE - to run IE to test sites for problems (the usual pattern is write HTML for Firefox, then test under other browsers, find it works fine with everything other then IE).
I no of no religion which promises that God will take care of your standard of living.
Jesus usually favoured ("blessed are the poor" etc) people having a low standard of living.
The usual Christian point of view on looking after the planet is that we should regard ourselves as stewards of it - it not our property, we have a duty to hand it on in good condition.
That should, of course read: Developing country telecos may not be as reliable
Here in Sri Lanka ADSL feels much slower than in the UK (I think because of the lack of upstream bandwidth). It is also not terribly reliable and there have been a number of interruptions to service over the last few months (for about an hour this morning, although most have been briefer than that). Service is also restricted to a few areas: Colombo (the capital) and some surrounding areas, and even in these areas there is a waiting list thanks to lack of capacity.
Connection speeds are also slow with the two options being 512kbps/128kbps (sold as a home user service) and 2mbps/512kbps sold as a business service.
Prices are not too bad: Rs 2,000 one off connection fee (Rs 100 approx = 1 USD) and monthly payments of Rs 2,250 and Rs 6,750 monthly, uncapped.
Are there any other developing countries failing to implement affordable broadband solutions to the masses?
There is no chance of broadband for the masses in developing countries for a long time. It is only recently that telephones became affordable to the masses (and not in the poorest countries yet), PCs still are definitely not affordable.
The dot com I worked certainly failed in part becuase the CEO had no ideas about technology. We were essentially a content site (investment analysis and related stuff including quotes, summary company financials etc.). A lot of money was spent with Icon Medialab who did a ludicrously fancy front (Java applets for menus so they looked right) and no working back end . Ars Digita nearly saved us. We got most of site working very quickly. I was one of the main contacts with them and they were a real pleasure to work with - but then they ran into their own problems. The combination of the content my team wrote and the information available was better than that of any competitors I had seen at the time or since then. By then someone decided the original business models was wrong and we needed to switch to 1) selling "white label" sites for others to own brand and 2) Investor relations micro-sites. I could see things were falling apart and got another job. A lot of time and money was wasted because the CEO thought that if a site was designed and we had good mockups of what it should look like, then it was as good as done. He employed five "web designers" (lead by an ex-interior designer) but no in house developers (in fact he outsourced all the IT at one point). The company only survived as long as it did becuase the CEO would use mock-ups of the site that all those designers churned out to show people how good it would be when it was done and pretty much charmed money out of investors - I suppose his own delusions helped him be convincing and kept the money coming in.
Who did the physical server belong to? If it was Indymedia then Rackspace might be guilty of theft, or at least conversion. Rackspace are certainly greatly in the wrong and morally guilty of theft, regardless of the legal position.
What are the usual reasons? The intrinsic right to life?
I am a Christian and I do believe in a right to life but my reasoning on abortion is almost identical to yours (even if you accept the right to life, you still have the problem of deciding when it starts).
My reasoning on the both is basically your reasoning plus a belief in the right to life.
Incidentally I am not sure concious awareness starts after birth. Unborn children react to stimuli, they seem able to learn and remember. From personal experience the music my wife listened to when she was pregnant was very effective in putting my daughter to sleep in the first few months after birth. (and it was not all quiet and soothing music either).
Add an unnecessary quote at the top of the page, why?
AS for the intelligent and functional Slashdot crowd all three of us agree that the whole apparent opposition is a read herring. When people way information wants to be free the information they are talking about does not overlap much with the information that "wants to be free".
No one has a problem with personal information being kept secret (except perhaps in cases where there is a genuine public interest). What we do have a problem with are: 1) publicly distributing information with excessive restrictions on what you can do with it and 2) keeping information that ought to be public secret.
I do actually. I get opportunities to say "well what do you expect if you use Windows?" to people that way.
Of course, to be fair to MS, in this case the article is BS.
I can think of lots of ideas like this. For example fake DMCA complaint against a website belonging to a a member of a politicians family.
There is, however, a drawback. ANYTHING LIKE THIS IS A CRIMINAL OFFENCE. Jail sounds like a good reason not to do it.
Morally it is not dissimilar to beating up a politician to demonstrate the trauma of violent crime. Not acceptable, even if your motive is the "greater good".
Anyway, all you need to do is wait. Sooner or later the genuine bad guys will do it anyway.
Yes, quite right, they should never sell to governments that use torture and imprisionment without trial.
This is a lot better than sites that lock out browsers or OSes they do not like completely. Examples:
http://www.rank.com/ requires Windows or Mac OS+ IE or Netscape
http://hsbc.lk/lk/ will work with most browsers (although the error message says IE of Netscape 4.7!), but requires Windows.
From my experience of Kenya is probably means that someone somewhere is getting a kickback on the Pocket PCs'
Quite right, it would make terrorism a lot less attractive if the media could just report and then shut up. No chance of that of course.
The site does look a lot better in Firefox. The warning reads like it was written by someone who was sick of being flammed by IE users becuase it does not look good in IE.