Linux support for Unicode is/will be a major factor in any progress in the Asian market. Windows supports Unicode but it is (frankly) so painful to make work in applications that decent Linux support would be a major selling point.
Ask any map maker. You cannot tile a surface of arbitrary shapes with three colours. You need four colors. Since a WiFi channel acts as a map-filling color, the ability to use four channels gives real advantages.
Well, it made sense when I thought of it.:-)
Actually, LindowsOS is a very nice packaging layer built on top of Debian. It is most certainly Linux. It is not closed source, you can download everything after you've purchased it. And it runs installs and extremely well: around 7 minutes for a full format & install, perfect hardware detection, only two questions ('whole disk?' and 'password'), automatic network configuration, automatic OS update after restart.
Highly recommended to those who need a simple install for basic browsing/email workstations.
Bundling LindowsOS is a very smart move for prospective hardware manufacturers. It is not Windows. It is Linux, looking good.
Microsoft is actually trying quite hard to make more secure products.
This sounds funny, but it's the real 'bet the business' project going on at MSFT.
It means going through all the code looking for buffer vulnerabilities, etc.
Microsoft want to be more secure than OpenBSD.
Besides, which, today's market is kinda tired of new gadgets.
I'm just wondering what this will do to MSFT's business model. Where will their new sales come from?
Or are they going to live off their cash pile for a while?
Will be a punative fine set high enough to hurt Microsoft.
The US response will be very significant. If the US government complains and retaliates, its intentions WRT Microsoft will be clear.
If OTOH the US government keeps quiet, as it did with the Honeywell case, MS is in for a beating in Europe.
It cannot afford to stop trading in Europe. It cannot escape a fine, since it has a financial presence in Europe.
The EU may choose to combine this with other moves, such as a well-timed announcement that Windows will be phased out in favor of Linux, Sun, and IBM products in the EU itself.
Microsoft only really has one card to play, and that is bribery and corruption.
(Although this is a bit off-topic).
In Japan there is a telemarketing craze: call someone once on their mobile, then wait for them to call back. The client pays for the (overpriced) call.
So phone manufacturers provide an option to disable the first ring.:-) Now the beepers ring twice and then hang-up.
The EU (rightly) seeks to punish vendors that (a) charge different prices in different markets, and (b) restrict imports from other EU countries. (a) is legal, but (b) is very much illegal. Free trade means if your console is cheaper elsewhere, you can buy it there.
Imagine if consoles were cheaper in Utah, but any Utah resellers were forbidden to ship them out of state.
The EU suffers from too much of this kind of stuff.
The 'just download package X' syndrome is one of the main barriers for simple folk using Linux.
Actually, even for experienced users, it's a relief when we get something like Debian's apt.
What SuSE are doing here is to provide a distro that will run MS-Office with no tuning or tweaking or HOWTOs.
This is at once banal, and important. Seamless compatability with Microsoft products is a key tool in the fight to move users off Windows.
And this news is a sign that SuSE have understood this. That's worth saying.
(Just to give another example, we spent several days trying to make Oracle 9i work with Debian, and RedHat, and finally tried SuSE... it came with the necessary (trivial) user accounts preconfigured, and Oracle 9i installed and ran almost at once.
And you say that 'speculation is not accurate enough' . Sorry, but putting responsibility for intelligence onto a 'deity' does not satisfy me.
Intelligence is no more a consequence of evolution than is an elephant's trunk. Both are tools designed to crack particular problems, only we know and appreciate our tool better than everyone elses.
Let's start a "Search for Extraterrestrial Trunks" and see if other species our there have evolved long, useful noses. After all, evolution shows that this is the inevitable pinacle of all trunk-bearing species!
Humanity should get off its self-errected pedestal and realize that (a) it is not particularly special, (b) all its vaunted special features are just projections of that really special thing, 'life', and (c) the meaning, logic, and chance of finding other 'intelligent' (where this term is really hopelessly subjective) life out there is so close to zero that it'd make more sense to try to write by pressing random buttons.
Water, electricity, and roads would be great.
But these do not just get installed by gnomes.
They require a functioning goverment and decent civil institutions.
These do not survive in countries where power and politics are aligned with tribal sympathies.
The best way to get around that is to create middle classes who do not care what tribe you are from.
But middle classes need access to information and markets, and email is one of the best tools for this in West Africa.
So this kind of infrastructure is not redundant - it is very important and possibly one of the keys to creating better-functioning societies in much of Africa.
Such as that implemented by Libero.
State machines are very good at handling large numbers of events and treating them in context.
The biggest different over classic event-driven GUIs is that the UI states - being your different views, perhaps - are well-defined and seperated, unlike a classic CUI in which there is just one big event loop.
In my experience, using FSM models to define the UI logic (and then turn this into code automatically, like Libero does) makes it easy to build very complex UIs.
Lastly, I think the problem is the same as faced in many situations, namely that of dominating a complex problem.
The key technique is to turn the problem into a hierarchy of solutions rather than to handle it as a single large flat issue.
Abstraction is your friend.
Yes, it's available for browsing online,
but not in a single downloadable package.
It's published under the Open Documentation License.
I'm going to have to create a single.tgz for the book.
I have to take issue with this. Piracy does not cause high prices. Monopoly control of the market causes high prices. Microsoft has carefully seeded the globe with Windows and Office and has even accepted piracy as one of the many ways its culture gets distributed and engrained.
Like any business, Microsoft raise their prices when they think they can.
Most users are used to getting fat packets of software for very little. What is happening now is that (a) there are more choices because Microsoft has not been able to extend its products infinitely, and (b) Microsoft has started to tighten the noose around its customers.
Frankly, having learnt one WP or spreadhseet or presentation tool, anyone with modest smarts can learn another.
I have used WP8 for Linux for years. I can't open any of these documents in OO. What good does this LINUX WordProcessor do me when I can't open LINUX documents?
OOo is not a LINUX word processor. Export your WP8 documents to something resembling an industry standard - RTF or MSOffice - and you'll find that OOo handles them just fine.
As for OOo's functionality, apart from the obvious pain of changing habits, the suite works significantly better than anything else I've used, in the last 20 years.
It crashes perhaps once every week. But it always saves everything first, and I've never lost an hour of work.
It integrates graphics, presentations, and text in a simple and effective way.
It is well organised, I can find the functions I want, and (unlike MS Office), they actually work. Like outline numbering.
It uses compressed XML for its documents, which means they are small, take less disk space, are easier to backup, and faster to send by email.
Its XML file format is easy to understand and produce mechanically for more advanced uses.
It is free.
It runs on both Linux and Windows, very nicely.
I don't have to kill the paper clip.
I can exchange documents with revisions with people using MS Office.
In short, OOo is functionally less rich than MSOffice, but it lacks exactly that functionality I never wanted, and which made the whole package slow and unstable.
After using OOo for a year or so, I'd not switch back.
Yes, this is a valid point. I'm very grateful that you took the time to consider my posting, and to correct the essential mistake I made.
Furthermore, I've removed my little finger as a sign of humble contrition.
Jeez... what is it with some people. You never make a typo when slashdotting before you got your coffee fix?
Even on our own planet, we have a hard time mapping our concept of 'intelligence' onto other animals.
Our brains have a very 'human' view of the world, and it's this view that we call 'intelligence'.
Our minds are only general in the sense that they can solve the range of problems we face.
An 'intelligent' alien species would have to have gone through a similar evolutionary path as us,
to develop something we would recognise as 'intelligence'.
It's not pessimistic to estimate this probability as extremely low.
We have one planet, and one chance, and there is no universe teeming with little green men who will help us fix out future.
This is not a new concept.
IBM have a long history of building super-CISC processors.
The S/38 - AS/400 was one good example. The CPU had instructions like 'Create Database'.
But appearances deceive. Such instructions are implemented in software / microcode.
And they are designed to form part of the noose that keeps customers roped in.
It is difficult to write portable software when you have this kind of dirty separation between hardware, OS, and application.
The hint that Websphere and DB2 might use such functions should give room for pause.
Moving OS functions into the CPU is unnecessary, designed to kill portability, and create lock-in.
On my webgear tablet, Mozilla takes ~30 seconds to load and start.
The current alternative - Netscape 4.7 - is to ugly to work with.
I'm very eager to try Phoenix.
Perhaps I'll try to build an OpenOffice/Lite.
Just for text documents.
Basically, we're always in a funding crisis.
When a crisis lasts for more than a few months, it becomes a "state of emergency".
When a state of emergency lasts for more than a year, it becomes a "economic reality".
When an economic reality passes unnoticed by Slashdot for over six years, it becomes a "crisis".
One piece of advice to Seti@home: do not take Slashdot too seriously. We're just bored and enjoying the scenery.
Thanks for a great concept. Even if the actual chance of finding extraterrestrial intelligence is 0%.
I'm sorry, but what we call "intelligence" is simply our definition of humanity, and this is unlikely to be found anywhere in the universe except HERE.
Slashdot included
Some observations:
Cheap, multiformat DVD players now abound. These are replacing VCD players.
Most new (especially low end) DVD players support MP3, so people are getting used to one disk = 10 hours of music.
The logical next step is DVD audio, with 10 hours of high-quality music.
We're not talking about any revolution here, it is a series of gradual steps.
I'd be happy to buy new material on DVD audio. Yes, give me a 10-hour trance session. Or Wagner, which simply does not work on CD.
Windows is remarkable because it consists of many fat vertical applications running on a relatively thin OS.
Security has to be implemented in each application at many levels.
Linux (and Unix) have a much more robust underlying OS and applications are relatively thinner.
So Unix applications are vulnerable when they (e.g.) chroot to access system resources.
But Windows applications remain vulnerable all the time.
There is really no argument about which approach will work better in the long run.
Time will tell, of course.
But I believe that the GPL and the principles it stands for
will be seen as revolutionary, in times to come.
It is no coincidence, I believe, that GPL'd software
is more successful and widespread
than software issued under more liberal licenses, such as the OpenBSD license.
I don't see how you can dismiss as an 'eccentric notion' a thesis that has changed the face of our business.
For saying what has to be said.
While every business must make a profit to survive,
the argument that 'we must close and control this software
for everyone's good' has been discredited long ago.
Free software is not about compromise. That simply does not work in this context.
Stallman is a visionary and a prophet. He has seen a fundamental truth and we hate him for it.
BitKeeper is obviously a good product. But like all closed-source work, it can only survive at the expense of the community's well being.
Free software is not an eccentric notion, it is as fundamentally important as free speech and human rights.
This is not yet obvious today but it will become so, in years to come.
Slashdot Mirror
Linux support for Unicode is/will be a major factor in any progress in the Asian market. Windows supports Unicode but it is (frankly) so painful to make work in applications that decent Linux support would be a major selling point.
Ask any map maker. You cannot tile a surface of arbitrary shapes with three colours. You need four colors. Since a WiFi channel acts as a map-filling color, the ability to use four channels gives real advantages. :-)
Well, it made sense when I thought of it.
Actually, LindowsOS is a very nice packaging layer built on top of Debian. It is most certainly Linux. It is not closed source, you can download everything after you've purchased it. And it runs installs and extremely well: around 7 minutes for a full format & install, perfect hardware detection, only two questions ('whole disk?' and 'password'), automatic network configuration, automatic OS update after restart.
Highly recommended to those who need a simple install for basic browsing/email workstations.
Bundling LindowsOS is a very smart move for prospective hardware manufacturers. It is not Windows. It is Linux, looking good.
Microsoft is actually trying quite hard to make more secure products.
This sounds funny, but it's the real 'bet the business' project going on at MSFT.
It means going through all the code looking for buffer vulnerabilities, etc.
Microsoft want to be more secure than OpenBSD.
Besides, which, today's market is kinda tired of new gadgets.
I'm just wondering what this will do to MSFT's business model. Where will their new sales come from?
Or are they going to live off their cash pile for a while?
Will be a punative fine set high enough to hurt Microsoft.
The US response will be very significant. If the US government complains and retaliates, its intentions WRT Microsoft will be clear.
If OTOH the US government keeps quiet, as it did with the Honeywell case, MS is in for a beating in Europe.
It cannot afford to stop trading in Europe. It cannot escape a fine, since it has a financial presence in Europe.
The EU may choose to combine this with other moves, such as a well-timed announcement that Windows will be phased out in favor of Linux, Sun, and IBM products in the EU itself.
Microsoft only really has one card to play, and that is bribery and corruption.
(Although this is a bit off-topic). In Japan there is a telemarketing craze: call someone once on their mobile, then wait for them to call back. The client pays for the (overpriced) call. So phone manufacturers provide an option to disable the first ring. :-) Now the beepers ring twice and then hang-up.
The EU (rightly) seeks to punish vendors that (a) charge different prices in different markets, and (b) restrict imports from other EU countries. (a) is legal, but (b) is very much illegal. Free trade means if your console is cheaper elsewhere, you can buy it there.
Imagine if consoles were cheaper in Utah, but any Utah resellers were forbidden to ship them out of state.
The EU suffers from too much of this kind of stuff.
Yeah, that was a great book. I tried the motor rev mod on one of my 752i, but the example in the book had a bug in it, and my car exploded.
The 'just download package X' syndrome is one of the main barriers for simple folk using Linux.
Actually, even for experienced users, it's a relief when we get something like Debian's apt.
What SuSE are doing here is to provide a distro that will run MS-Office with no tuning or tweaking or HOWTOs.
This is at once banal, and important. Seamless compatability with Microsoft products is a key tool in the fight to move users off Windows.
And this news is a sign that SuSE have understood this. That's worth saying.
(Just to give another example, we spent several days trying to make Oracle 9i work with Debian, and RedHat, and finally tried SuSE... it came with the necessary (trivial) user accounts preconfigured, and Oracle 9i installed and ran almost at once.
Intelligence is no more a consequence of evolution than is an elephant's trunk. Both are tools designed to crack particular problems, only we know and appreciate our tool better than everyone elses.
Let's start a "Search for Extraterrestrial Trunks" and see if other species our there have evolved long, useful noses. After all, evolution shows that this is the inevitable pinacle of all trunk-bearing species!
Humanity should get off its self-errected pedestal and realize that (a) it is not particularly special, (b) all its vaunted special features are just projections of that really special thing, 'life', and (c) the meaning, logic, and chance of finding other 'intelligent' (where this term is really hopelessly subjective) life out there is so close to zero that it'd make more sense to try to write by pressing random buttons.
Water, electricity, and roads would be great.
But these do not just get installed by gnomes.
They require a functioning goverment and decent civil institutions.
These do not survive in countries where power and politics are aligned with tribal sympathies.
The best way to get around that is to create middle classes who do not care what tribe you are from.
But middle classes need access to information and markets, and email is one of the best tools for this in West Africa.
So this kind of infrastructure is not redundant - it is very important and possibly one of the keys to creating better-functioning societies in much of Africa.
Such as that implemented by Libero.
State machines are very good at handling large numbers of events and treating them in context.
The biggest different over classic event-driven GUIs is that the UI states - being your different views, perhaps - are well-defined and seperated, unlike a classic CUI in which there is just one big event loop.
In my experience, using FSM models to define the UI logic (and then turn this into code automatically, like Libero does) makes it easy to build very complex UIs.
Lastly, I think the problem is the same as faced in many situations, namely that of dominating a complex problem.
The key technique is to turn the problem into a hierarchy of solutions rather than to handle it as a single large flat issue.
Abstraction is your friend.
Yes, it's available for browsing online, .tgz for the book.
but not in a single downloadable package.
It's published under the Open Documentation License.
I'm going to have to create a single
Like any business, Microsoft raise their prices when they think they can.
Most users are used to getting fat packets of software for very little. What is happening now is that (a) there are more choices because Microsoft has not been able to extend its products infinitely, and (b) Microsoft has started to tighten the noose around its customers.
Frankly, having learnt one WP or spreadhseet or presentation tool, anyone with modest smarts can learn another.
I have used WP8 for Linux for years. I can't open any of these documents in OO. What good does this LINUX WordProcessor do me when I can't open LINUX documents? OOo is not a LINUX word processor. Export your WP8 documents to something resembling an industry standard - RTF or MSOffice - and you'll find that OOo handles them just fine.
As for OOo's functionality, apart from the obvious pain of changing habits, the suite works significantly better than anything else I've used, in the last 20 years.
It crashes perhaps once every week. But it always saves everything first, and I've never lost an hour of work.
It integrates graphics, presentations, and text in a simple and effective way.
It is well organised, I can find the functions I want, and (unlike MS Office), they actually work. Like outline numbering.
It uses compressed XML for its documents, which means they are small, take less disk space, are easier to backup, and faster to send by email.
Its XML file format is easy to understand and produce mechanically for more advanced uses.
It is free.
It runs on both Linux and Windows, very nicely.
I don't have to kill the paper clip.
I can exchange documents with revisions with people using MS Office.
In short, OOo is functionally less rich than MSOffice, but it lacks exactly that functionality I never wanted, and which made the whole package slow and unstable.
After using OOo for a year or so, I'd not switch back.
Yes, this is a valid point. I'm very grateful that you took the time to consider my posting, and to correct the essential mistake I made.
Furthermore, I've removed my little finger as a sign of humble contrition.
Jeez... what is it with some people. You never make a typo when slashdotting before you got your coffee fix?
Even on our own planet, we have a hard time mapping our concept of 'intelligence' onto other animals.
Our brains have a very 'human' view of the world, and it's this view that we call 'intelligence'.
Our minds are only general in the sense that they can solve the range of problems we face.
An 'intelligent' alien species would have to have gone through a similar evolutionary path as us,
to develop something we would recognise as 'intelligence'.
It's not pessimistic to estimate this probability as extremely low.
We have one planet, and one chance, and there is no universe teeming with little green men who will help us fix out future.
This is not a new concept.
IBM have a long history of building super-CISC processors.
The S/38 - AS/400 was one good example. The CPU had instructions like 'Create Database'.
But appearances deceive. Such instructions are implemented in software / microcode.
And they are designed to form part of the noose that keeps customers roped in.
It is difficult to write portable software when you have this kind of dirty separation between hardware, OS, and application.
The hint that Websphere and DB2 might use such functions should give room for pause.
Moving OS functions into the CPU is unnecessary, designed to kill portability, and create lock-in.
On my webgear tablet, Mozilla takes ~30 seconds to load and start.
The current alternative - Netscape 4.7 - is to ugly to work with.
I'm very eager to try Phoenix.
Perhaps I'll try to build an OpenOffice/Lite.
Just for text documents.
Basically, we're always in a funding crisis.
When a crisis lasts for more than a few months, it becomes a "state of emergency".
When a state of emergency lasts for more than a year, it becomes a "economic reality".
When an economic reality passes unnoticed by Slashdot for over six years, it becomes a "crisis".
One piece of advice to Seti@home: do not take Slashdot too seriously. We're just bored and enjoying the scenery.
Thanks for a great concept. Even if the actual chance of finding extraterrestrial intelligence is 0%.
I'm sorry, but what we call "intelligence" is simply our definition of humanity, and this is unlikely to be found anywhere in the universe except HERE.
Slashdot included
WTF, it's TLA overdose here.
Some observations:
Cheap, multiformat DVD players now abound. These are replacing VCD players.
Most new (especially low end) DVD players support MP3, so people are getting used to one disk = 10 hours of music.
The logical next step is DVD audio, with 10 hours of high-quality music.
We're not talking about any revolution here, it is a series of gradual steps.
I'd be happy to buy new material on DVD audio. Yes, give me a 10-hour trance session. Or Wagner, which simply does not work on CD.
Windows is remarkable because it consists of many fat vertical applications running on a relatively thin OS.
Security has to be implemented in each application at many levels.
Linux (and Unix) have a much more robust underlying OS and applications are relatively thinner.
So Unix applications are vulnerable when they (e.g.) chroot to access system resources.
But Windows applications remain vulnerable all the time.
There is really no argument about which approach will work better in the long run.
Time will tell, of course.
But I believe that the GPL and the principles it stands for
will be seen as revolutionary, in times to come.
It is no coincidence, I believe, that GPL'd software is more successful and widespread
than software issued under more liberal licenses, such as the OpenBSD license.
I don't see how you can dismiss as an 'eccentric notion' a thesis that has changed the face of our business.
For saying what has to be said.
While every business must make a profit to survive,
the argument that 'we must close and control this software
for everyone's good' has been discredited long ago.
Free software is not about compromise. That simply does not work in this context.
Stallman is a visionary and a prophet. He has seen a fundamental truth and we hate him for it.
BitKeeper is obviously a good product. But like all closed-source work, it can only survive at the expense of the community's well being.
Free software is not an eccentric notion, it is as fundamentally important as free speech and human rights.
This is not yet obvious today but it will become so, in years to come.