Statements like these are not new. Linus has been avoiding GPL 3 for a while now, even though he says he likes the final license better than some of the early drafts. It's really all to obscure the fact that he can't change the license even if he wanted to. He would have to control the copyrights for all contributed code in order to switch from GPL 2 to any other license, including GPL 3. Unfortunately (or fortunately, depending on your option of the new revision) he does not have the power to do this.
What a ridiculous complaint. 2007 was not a bad tech year at all. Consider the following:
Mobile is now king. Apple sold a ton of iPhones. Other smartphones are selling like hotcakes. 2007 is the year decent wireless computing ended up in the pockets of millions of people.
Mobile is guaranteed to get infinitely better, regardless of the specifics. Google changed the wireless game the moment they put their feet in the water by getting involved in two initiatives: spectrum bidding and the Android (mostly) open handheld platform. Neither has gone anywhere, but it doesn't matter. Wireless providers realize they can no longer close their networks to approved devices, and whoever wins the 700 MHz spectrum bid will have to play nice.
SCO basically died. Good riddance. Congrats to Novell and IBM for sticking it out rather than settling when the settling would have been easy.
Speaking of settling, Microsoft caved in. They blinked, the EU didn't. MS has realized that if they want to be allowed to sell products in the EU they have to release documentation explaining how a lot of the software they sell actually works. Look for Samba to bring a lot more features to file and print sharing and directory services in the near future.
Amazon's 1-click patent died. You may recall that this patent covered "the use of browser cookies to do what browser cookies were invented to do" (or perhaps something more wordy).
Backups got easy. Watch for Windows and Linux developers to copy the ease of use Leopard users have with their Time Machine backup app. Whether you're a Mac user or not, your future holiday photos got a new lease on life with this app and those it will inspire.
DRM is dead. In fact, it was DOA for most of us here, but now the people who bankrolled it realize how stupid they were to do so.
OOXML is a laughing stock, and so is ISO. Did you know you can buy an ISO vote for a crappy standard? Apparently you can, and it's called the whole process into question. Laughably, the standard still didn't pass muster. MS can either improve it to the point where other people can implement it, or else find a better way to bribe people.
... and there's more. On the downside, Dvorak is still writing whiny articles that bear little resemblance to reality.
I had been downloading and compiling PINE because of this license issue, so I expected some third party to create a differently licensed clone for some time. Imagine my surprise when the expected PINE clone (no pun intended, honest) arrived from no less an institution than UW, distributors of the original PINE. For those who, like me, wondered why they didn't just relicense PINE and call it "PINE 5.0," the Alpine story 'splains it. I never realized that trademark issues were involved. Quoth Alpine:
We wanted to reorganize the Pine source code, distribute the Web version that has been very popular here at the Univerity of Washington, and relax our trademark obligation for source code quality control to a world-wide customer base.
The trademark obligation represented an ongoing administrative effort. Coincidentally, the UW is standardizing its license for the several other products we offer to the Apache License, Version 2.0.
The cleanest way to do all this was to stop developing Pine (a registered trademark) and start a new product that would be released under the Apache License, Version 2.0. Thus Alpine was born.
I'm with you most of the way, but I actually can think of one great use of eBooks: travel literature. Travel guidebooks can be rather large and cumbersome to carry around when exploring a city or country far from home. And most travel books could contain a lot more information if size weren't such an issue, so they are scaled down for portability.
My wife and I recently traveled around central Europe and Greece, hitting five countries. So we had five guidebooks, and kept talking about shipping some of the used ones back or discarding them. An eBook with big, indexed guides to Stockholm, Berlin, Prague, Budapest and Greece would have made our luggage a lot lighter. I'm not sure if any of the ones on the market now would quite do, but this is probably a good niche for eBook reader vendors to target.
Interesting that despite Vista's high score on the low list, not too many people have noticed OS X 10.5 on there as well. But one of the main reasons for it being on the list should have taken no one by surprise: new versions of OS X always have nasty bugs that affect a few scattered people and make big headlines. In fact, it's not just limited to Apple's operating systems, but rather is a key part of the Apple Product Cycle. The company's products are usually quite good, but it's always worth letting the early adopters try them first.
Microsoft Office will comply with the new Dutch rules once Microsoft's so-called "Open Office XML" standard is approved as an international ISO standard in February.
This sounds optimistic to me, but it could easily be true. Actually, it would be very good news if it became n ISO standard... if Microsoft gets the standard by improving and clarifying it, and by explicitly dropping all patent restrictions on its features. But it's entirely possible that they won't do that but will get an ISO standard anyway, in which case we'll have an "open" standard that can't be implemented properly by any third parties, and can't be implemented legally in the United States without licensing patents on the standard from Microsoft.
This is why I think it's important for governments to clearly define what they mean by "open." The definition should have nothing to do with any standards body like ISO or Ecma. As we've all seen, ISO votes can be rigged, so "open" should mean that a standard is well-documented and contains no patent, copyright or trademark restrictions that would prevent a third party from implementing it without working with the developer of the standard. It should also require that the original developer of the standard not be the sole authority in charge of developing it further, and keeps their own products compliant with it. (How many people have imagined Microsoft "deviating" from their own OOXML standard in undocumented ways when they release the next version of Office?)
Look at the results of the poll. In this case it is ironic. The poll shows (at least at the moment) that the community has overwhelmingly voted against a comic as the preferred vehicle of Firefly's return, and during the poll an article came up announcing the release of a comic. So it's not the coincidence that's ironic, but rather the disconnect between what's happening and what people seem to want.
No kidding. I don't even play WOW and I laughed a good minute. I had a single mod point when I reached this page, and I wish I could have given it to the original post.
I don't think it's likely to have that effect, since Konqueror's advanced features never really got in the way of basic file management. The really big things that could attract users are the results of the re-architecture. Getting nifty widgets without having to install Superkaramba will be a big improvement (if you like nifty widgets).
I'm excited about most of these changes (if only because of what will be done with them once the developers are used to them) but when I installed Kubuntu Gutsy I got an early glimpse of the KDE 3.5 version of the Dolphin file manager, and it's a bit of a letdown. It's neat for what it is, and very easy to use. In fact, it's simplified in a rather smart way, with some neat utilities cleverly docked on the left and right sidebars. But the thing that has always drawn me to KDE is Konqueror. About 90% of KDE users will echo that.
Heck, I even use Konqueror when I'm in GNOME sometimes. I've never had a file management app that can access so many protocols in such a standard way (URLs, so smb:// for a Windows share, sftp:// for and SSH share, and it can even speak POP, IMAP and a wide range of others because of a subsystem called KIO). Yet Konqueror's perfectly simple to use. If you didn't know the advanced features were there you could use it like a simple Windows Explorer or Finder interface and be happy, so I'm not sure why the developers thought Dolphin was needed. Why not outfit Konqueror with a way to lose its address bar and have some sort of Simple Mode?
At any rate, to turn Dolphin off, go into your System Configuration and find the File Associations. Under Inode and Directory you need to change the order of Konqueror and Dolphin. Fixed.
Off the top of my head I'd say Dennis Kucinich wouldn't be afraid of protecting free speech on the internet. That said, I don't see anything on his site about it (but look, there's his wife!). Amongst candidates who are more likely to win the primary, Barack Obama has said he'd protect the internet as an open network that benefits our democracy (albeit in the context of a net neutrality question here).
On the Republican side, as much as I like hearing from Ron Paul, I don't think he would protect the internet, because the Constitution doesn't grant the federal government the power to regulate networks, so any such activity would be up to the states. I respect this... but I wouldn't want it in practice.
Because of my experience following the whole ODF vs Microsoft debate in my home state of Massachusetts, I had suspected that Mitt Romney would have a favorable position on many technology issues, so I went to his site. It took me forever to find the actual issues (you know, those things we're supposed to be voting about?). As a comparison, the second you get to his home page you get treated to a YouTube video about illegal immigration and a nice page about his wife. But when you find the Issue Watch section there's nothing about the internet at all.
Guiliani knows that terrorists are allowed to use the internet, and there are objectionable things there that he doesn't like. So it needs to be controlled by a powerful executive. Who isn't you.
Life was started when the Great Green Arkleseizure sneezed it across the universe to this location. Stop shattering my worldview with these so-called "discoveries."
Sorry, but I'm curious. It's not the best office suite I've seen, but it's filled the niche nicely from what I've seen, with even a lot of Windows people using it. Still, some people seem to hate it with a detached "It goes without saying that this app stinks" attitude that I've read in a lot of places. Personally I've found it to be stable, and it has all the features I need. The default settings leave a lot to be desired, but that takes only a minute to remedy. What sorts of things do you find to be lacking in it?
I know, choice has alwasy been there but I counted the days of 90% IE (and above) as a "single browser web" because at that level developers will happily disregard anything but the browser with the largest share.
That's a completely fair comparison and you're probably right: the reviews would look like that. But frankly after so many years of a single-browser web, IE still has a lot of apologizing to do, even if they improve things drastically.
A lot of companies grew so complacent during that dark time that they're still not prepared for a simple browser upgrade ("It'll break our IE-only intranet apps!") so IE6 users abound. And have you used IE6 lately? I have it on my work computer. It's like a pair of handcuffs, only less liberating. Type in a new address, or press the Back button, or even the Stop button, and prepare to wait... and wait... while the browser tries to decide what you want it to do. The Titanic would be less sluggish. And to be totally fair I should pretend the IE world has advanced to IE7, but even that version has a lot of annoyances. Any reason why when I push Ctrl+L the browser has to open a Go To window instead of simply putting my cursor in the address bar? I haven't forgotten why Firefox (or Phoenix when I started using it) was so revolutionary, and it hasn't lost any of that. The bloat of version 2 still doesn't detract.
We can apply your depth of reasoning to anything that's happened between 9/11 and today, and it's all equally valid. Let's have fun with it:
In 2002 the president signed the Sarbanes-Oxley Act. Since that time there have been no further terrorist attacks in the United States, so SOX has prevented terrorism.
In 2002 the president signed the Help America Vote Act. Since that time there have been no further terrorist attacks in the United States, so HAVA has prevented terrorism.
In 2002 Spain switched from the Peseta to the Euro, joining the European Monetary Union (EMU). Since that time there have been no further terrorist attacks in the United States, so Spain's use of the common currency has prevented terrorism.
In 2003 the United States invaded Iraq. Since that time there have been no further terrorist attacks in the United States, so the Iraq war has prevented terrorism. (Oh wait, that was your point. Sorry for the dupe, but hey, this is Slashdot.)
In 2004 the Republic of Ireland banned smoking in work places, including in pubs. Since that time there have been no further terrorist attacks in the United States, so the smoking ban has prevented terrorism.
In 2006 I visited Belgium. Since that time there have been no further terrorist attacks in the United States, so my travels prevented terrorism. You're welcome, America.
You can't really prove these things. But then again, you can't really disprove them, so it's about time the liberals finally accepted that they're all true.
I don't know where else you could do that, but I'm not sure why you'd want to do it today. It's only 12 degrees in London right now - you guys must be freezing!
Let's have a sense of perspective - this is Japan we're talking about. Smaller gadgets always have more impact on the Japanese market, and that will influence the market for PCs. Not that the overall prediction of PCs becoming less important is wrong, but it's premature to suggest that this is happening outside of Japan.
Slashdot Mirror
Statements like these are not new. Linus has been avoiding GPL 3 for a while now, even though he says he likes the final license better than some of the early drafts. It's really all to obscure the fact that he can't change the license even if he wanted to. He would have to control the copyrights for all contributed code in order to switch from GPL 2 to any other license, including GPL 3. Unfortunately (or fortunately, depending on your option of the new revision) he does not have the power to do this.
Faced with the task of coming up with a consistent naming scheme, the following ideas were rejected but could appear as future products:
What a ridiculous complaint. 2007 was not a bad tech year at all. Consider the following:
... and there's more. On the downside, Dvorak is still writing whiny articles that bear little resemblance to reality.
I had been downloading and compiling PINE because of this license issue, so I expected some third party to create a differently licensed clone for some time. Imagine my surprise when the expected PINE clone (no pun intended, honest) arrived from no less an institution than UW, distributors of the original PINE. For those who, like me, wondered why they didn't just relicense PINE and call it "PINE 5.0," the Alpine story 'splains it. I never realized that trademark issues were involved. Quoth Alpine:
I'm with you most of the way, but I actually can think of one great use of eBooks: travel literature. Travel guidebooks can be rather large and cumbersome to carry around when exploring a city or country far from home. And most travel books could contain a lot more information if size weren't such an issue, so they are scaled down for portability.
My wife and I recently traveled around central Europe and Greece, hitting five countries. So we had five guidebooks, and kept talking about shipping some of the used ones back or discarding them. An eBook with big, indexed guides to Stockholm, Berlin, Prague, Budapest and Greece would have made our luggage a lot lighter. I'm not sure if any of the ones on the market now would quite do, but this is probably a good niche for eBook reader vendors to target.
You know, I'm actually all out of jokes for this topic.
Interesting that despite Vista's high score on the low list, not too many people have noticed OS X 10.5 on there as well. But one of the main reasons for it being on the list should have taken no one by surprise: new versions of OS X always have nasty bugs that affect a few scattered people and make big headlines. In fact, it's not just limited to Apple's operating systems, but rather is a key part of the Apple Product Cycle. The company's products are usually quite good, but it's always worth letting the early adopters try them first.
This sounds optimistic to me, but it could easily be true. Actually, it would be very good news if it became n ISO standard ... if Microsoft gets the standard by improving and clarifying it, and by explicitly dropping all patent restrictions on its features. But it's entirely possible that they won't do that but will get an ISO standard anyway, in which case we'll have an "open" standard that can't be implemented properly by any third parties, and can't be implemented legally in the United States without licensing patents on the standard from Microsoft.
This is why I think it's important for governments to clearly define what they mean by "open." The definition should have nothing to do with any standards body like ISO or Ecma. As we've all seen, ISO votes can be rigged, so "open" should mean that a standard is well-documented and contains no patent, copyright or trademark restrictions that would prevent a third party from implementing it without working with the developer of the standard. It should also require that the original developer of the standard not be the sole authority in charge of developing it further, and keeps their own products compliant with it. (How many people have imagined Microsoft "deviating" from their own OOXML standard in undocumented ways when they release the next version of Office?)
Look at the results of the poll. In this case it is ironic. The poll shows (at least at the moment) that the community has overwhelmingly voted against a comic as the preferred vehicle of Firefly's return, and during the poll an article came up announcing the release of a comic. So it's not the coincidence that's ironic, but rather the disconnect between what's happening and what people seem to want.
This is a different Forbes, actually, called Fortune. Though admittedly I thought the same thing for about two seconds. :)
No kidding. I don't even play WOW and I laughed a good minute. I had a single mod point when I reached this page, and I wish I could have given it to the original post.
I don't think it's likely to have that effect, since Konqueror's advanced features never really got in the way of basic file management. The really big things that could attract users are the results of the re-architecture. Getting nifty widgets without having to install Superkaramba will be a big improvement (if you like nifty widgets).
I'm excited about most of these changes (if only because of what will be done with them once the developers are used to them) but when I installed Kubuntu Gutsy I got an early glimpse of the KDE 3.5 version of the Dolphin file manager, and it's a bit of a letdown. It's neat for what it is, and very easy to use. In fact, it's simplified in a rather smart way, with some neat utilities cleverly docked on the left and right sidebars. But the thing that has always drawn me to KDE is Konqueror. About 90% of KDE users will echo that.
Heck, I even use Konqueror when I'm in GNOME sometimes. I've never had a file management app that can access so many protocols in such a standard way (URLs, so smb:// for a Windows share, sftp:// for and SSH share, and it can even speak POP, IMAP and a wide range of others because of a subsystem called KIO). Yet Konqueror's perfectly simple to use. If you didn't know the advanced features were there you could use it like a simple Windows Explorer or Finder interface and be happy, so I'm not sure why the developers thought Dolphin was needed. Why not outfit Konqueror with a way to lose its address bar and have some sort of Simple Mode?
At any rate, to turn Dolphin off, go into your System Configuration and find the File Associations. Under Inode and Directory you need to change the order of Konqueror and Dolphin. Fixed.
Off the top of my head I'd say Dennis Kucinich wouldn't be afraid of protecting free speech on the internet. That said, I don't see anything on his site about it (but look, there's his wife!). Amongst candidates who are more likely to win the primary, Barack Obama has said he'd protect the internet as an open network that benefits our democracy (albeit in the context of a net neutrality question here).
On the Republican side, as much as I like hearing from Ron Paul, I don't think he would protect the internet, because the Constitution doesn't grant the federal government the power to regulate networks, so any such activity would be up to the states. I respect this ... but I wouldn't want it in practice.
Because of my experience following the whole ODF vs Microsoft debate in my home state of Massachusetts, I had suspected that Mitt Romney would have a favorable position on many technology issues, so I went to his site. It took me forever to find the actual issues (you know, those things we're supposed to be voting about?). As a comparison, the second you get to his home page you get treated to a YouTube video about illegal immigration and a nice page about his wife. But when you find the Issue Watch section there's nothing about the internet at all.
Guiliani knows that terrorists are allowed to use the internet, and there are objectionable things there that he doesn't like. So it needs to be controlled by a powerful executive. Who isn't you.
Life was started when the Great Green Arkleseizure sneezed it across the universe to this location. Stop shattering my worldview with these so-called "discoveries."
Whats wrong with using apostrophe's?
And you refuse to use openoffice because ...?
Sorry, but I'm curious. It's not the best office suite I've seen, but it's filled the niche nicely from what I've seen, with even a lot of Windows people using it. Still, some people seem to hate it with a detached "It goes without saying that this app stinks" attitude that I've read in a lot of places. Personally I've found it to be stable, and it has all the features I need. The default settings leave a lot to be desired, but that takes only a minute to remedy. What sorts of things do you find to be lacking in it?
I know, choice has alwasy been there but I counted the days of 90% IE (and above) as a "single browser web" because at that level developers will happily disregard anything but the browser with the largest share.
That's a completely fair comparison and you're probably right: the reviews would look like that. But frankly after so many years of a single-browser web, IE still has a lot of apologizing to do, even if they improve things drastically.
A lot of companies grew so complacent during that dark time that they're still not prepared for a simple browser upgrade ("It'll break our IE-only intranet apps!") so IE6 users abound. And have you used IE6 lately? I have it on my work computer. It's like a pair of handcuffs, only less liberating. Type in a new address, or press the Back button, or even the Stop button, and prepare to wait ... and wait ... while the browser tries to decide what you want it to do. The Titanic would be less sluggish. And to be totally fair I should pretend the IE world has advanced to IE7, but even that version has a lot of annoyances. Any reason why when I push Ctrl+L the browser has to open a Go To window instead of simply putting my cursor in the address bar? I haven't forgotten why Firefox (or Phoenix when I started using it) was so revolutionary, and it hasn't lost any of that. The bloat of version 2 still doesn't detract.
We can apply your depth of reasoning to anything that's happened between 9/11 and today, and it's all equally valid. Let's have fun with it:
You can't really prove these things. But then again, you can't really disprove them, so it's about time the liberals finally accepted that they're all true.
In Soviet Russia, asteroid finds you.
(Bracing for mod down ...)
I don't know where else you could do that, but I'm not sure why you'd want to do it today. It's only 12 degrees in London right now - you guys must be freezing!
Let's have a sense of perspective - this is Japan we're talking about. Smaller gadgets always have more impact on the Japanese market, and that will influence the market for PCs. Not that the overall prediction of PCs becoming less important is wrong, but it's premature to suggest that this is happening outside of Japan.
Apparently not the Democrats. They were our last hope.
No, I'm Brian of Nazareth!