Reality check: not everyone who writes to one of the ten or so most powerful political leaders in the world gets a hand-written response by return. If some French guy tried this trick at the Whitehouse, he'd probably be dead or under arrest by now.
Precisely. It's the same problem as routinely using PGP for emails - while third parties may not be able to browse your email content, it pretty much guarantees that [i]all[/i] your Internet traffic, at the very least, gets more scrutiny. I know of a real example of this involving (funnily enough) Swiss missionaries in Africa - they weren't doing anything illegal, but a bit of encryption was enough to convince the local security forces otherwise.
For most people, getting lost in the crowd is the best option, and, for those who are on the run from the CIA, this mobile phone doesn't help, unless the manufacturers have also found a way to stop people from triangulating the signal.
In my defence, this week I'm writing XSLT, where = means "is equal to" (and, being a functional language, there isn't really an assignment operator as such, except maybe for initialising variables and parameters, where it's also a single =, ie 'select = "value"').
You'd expect Office to outnumber Sharepoint by 2 orders of magnitude, because Sharepoint is a server application. Office probably outnumbers MS Exchange by almost the same factor.
I'm not sure what you mean by 'overwhelming', but quite a lot of the legal copies of Office 2003 are used in settings where intranets are relevant.
And it's not so much "tie in" as "integrated solution". It isn't a case that Microsoft makes you do this one way when OSS lets you do it 50 different ways. Microsoft lets you do it one way and OSS doesn't let you do it at all.
Dumb question perhaps, but how many people do you think need/want/use that level of functionality?
We really ought to automate these OO discussions. But, in the meantime...
The short answer is "not most of the people who read/., who are not the intended market for high end office applications". If you want to type a college paper, bash out some technical doc and be able to open files other people send you, OO is fine. I used it to write a 20k word dissertation the other month and I really can't complain.
But lots of corporations use various Office integration solutions, and OO just doesn't do that. Sharepoint is bundled with a lot of MS small office packages, and offers some quite useful functionality for building Intranets with no programming. (It's hideous under the bonnet, but the idea is not to look under the bonnet.) I've tried, say, changing the templates with emacs instead of FrontPage 2003, but when you scramble the page to the point where Sharepoint stops working, the recovery files live inside Frontpage 2003. The hooks to save shared documents with version tracking are inside Word and Excel. And so on. This technology is potentially attractive to any company that doesn't think everyone sharing everyone else's C drives and putting files wherever they feel like is a really neat idea.
And, TBH, I'm not aware of any OSS that lets you throw together an intranet with shared documents, task lists, announcements and other dynamic elements as easily as Sharepoint.
I'm guessing that's because their server is Slashdotted.
I'm sure you're right, but isn't that the whole point? The local apps on my laptop don't get slashdotted. I don't have to pay thousands of dollars a month for a guaranteed "finish typing my document" time of less than four hours. Running applications that only produce local results over a WAN just introduces another point of failure that is totally outside the individual's or organisation's control.
I'm all for web applications - I spend a lot of my time working on them - but the only make sense if they use the Internet to provide functionality that cannot be provided locally. Remote backups might be one example with WPs, but, even then, I'd tend to think that using local code to send the backups somewhere safe was a saner way to go.
this is more a case of "working class mums and dads don't want their kids looking up porn".
Not "working class mums don't want their husbands looking up porn?" Or, maybe, "working class mums don't want their husbands finding their photos while looking up porn?". Although I'm intrigued by the implication that middle-class parents do want their kids looking up porn.
I skimmed TFA, and I can't see anything to suggest that CSS has been improved to a point where it is going to enable the sort of layout that most people still implement using TABLEs. As long as managing to produce a webpage with three columns entirely in XHTML and CSS is something to get really excited about, I can't see that strict XHTML compliance has a hope of becoming the de facto standard.
And before everyone bangs on about how CSS is really neat if you understand it, see Eric Meyer - who bought us the W3C CSS1 Test Suite - in "Eric Meyer on CSS", demonstrating how to produce lean and standards-compliant webpages... using TABLEs for layout.
Does anyone know how we got saddled with CSS as a half-baked page description language in the first place?
My understanding, based on CF, is that it's fine for systems that boot from CF, run in RAM and only write to CF when the configuration changes (eg Locustworld's Meshbox), but pretty failure-prone on systems that write logs and otherwise use the CF as workspace (eg IPCop).
It seems pretty obvious to me that sooner or later we will get rid of the remaining moving parts in electronic equipment, but I'm not sure the alternative technology is there yet. Cf the time it took between the first hype of flat screens and serious in-roads into the CRT market.
The Gendarmerie Nationale isn't military in the UK/US sense. They are the people who investigate murders and give out speeding tickets on national highways. In other words, it's the police force, it just happens to be set up a bit like an army. (By memory, it's responsible to the interior minister, to counterbalance the power of the defence minister in the case of a coup, but I could be imagining that bit..)
As mascots for bleeding edge Open Source adoption go, we could do better. The best Hollywood portrayal of French policing I have seen is in the Harrison Ford film "Frantic". They have now replaced their manual typewriters with wordprocessors, but to see them use them you wonder why. My favourite experience was taking a tourist to a police station to report a stolen passport. They had a Word template for the report, and someone had saved all the personal details of a rape victim into it, so everyone who reported anything could read all about it.
Of all the reasons suggested here for why they made the move, I haven't seen the most likely one - cost. Certainly there is a drive to get schools here onto open source to reduce licence costs and/or piracy. And the pupils and staff I know really really hate Open Office.
Hmm, I don't think C is the place to start. After all, as Kerningham and Richie say, C is a small language, and young males tend to go for... well, something a bit more bloated. Maybe PHP?
Sounds like a great name if it is supposed to appeal to C programmers. What would you call it? Brenda? Somehow I can't see C ever catching on with the non-geek population.
Also, I was assuming that it would be called C++09 once the launch date is sorted out. Or should that be C+=9?
Wal-Mart Bad, Google Good... oh dear, isn't it getting complicated!
Apart from that, I think Google would be mad to go the PC route. For a start, the money was never in the hardware. Also, I can't think of a better way to lose goodwill than to start selling budget PCs to the least technically literate segment of the PC-buying population and then failing to provide premium support.
Yes yes, there's Apple, but Apple don't generally do bargain basement prices. If you make an enormous margin on the hardware, you may be able to afford to keep your customers happy, even when they are clueless idiots. No-one, not even Google, will be able to do that on a $200 sale price.
You forgot to add "and if you don't like it you should write your own Window Manager, that's the power of open source". That's my favourite knee-jerk dismissal of constructive criticism.
If the KDE community is happy for their user base to be restricted to those willing to hand tune and compile KDE, fine. But if we're going to stick with the "Linux Desktop takes over the world" mantra beloved by many here, the way KDE runs out of the box does matter.
I've been using KDE for several years. It's hard to say if it has slowed down or speeded up, as I keep upgrading my hardware. But this laptop I'm typing on ran XP and Office just fine in 256Mb of RAM, but needed twice that to run KDE and OpenOffice comfortably.
Now maybe that's down to KDE, or Open Office, or the Redhat Network icon for all I care, the point is that overall system performance does matter, especially when it is worse than that of Windows, and berating the users for noticing the bloat is not a great growth strategy IMHO.
Another GUI layer? What is the minimum RAM requirement for running Open Office with this lovely system going to be? Windows is rapidly starting to look like the low-bloat OS...
Re:For the record
on
Makers
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· Score: 2, Interesting
Probably a bad plan if you move every other week. But buying a new Ikea desk every 5 to 10 years is probably cheaper than buying a solid oak one every 30 years. Makes moving easier too.
The people who currently play online games don't need convincing to play online games, are relatively few in number (compared with computer users who don't play online games) and the market is crowed. What MS and everyone else wants is to snare the people who don't currently play online games, and it's a fairly good bet that continuing to offer the same sort of games that have failed to interest them so far is not going to suddenly start to interest them in the near future. Increased social interaction is one obvious way to go, and is pretty likely to work IMO. I mean, enough people spend hours chatting whilst playing minesweeper or Yahoo Billiards, how hard can it be to improve on that game-playing experience while maintaining the social component?
Also, social interaction is cheaper than scripted content, because the users provide it for you (although of course you need to keep some kind of control on exactly what content they provide...)
By the way, stop using IP as an acronym for Intellectual Property, IP is Internet Protocol.
It's both - short acronyms are as sought-after as short domain names, and there is even less you can do about someone else using the one you thought you owned. Lawyers talk about IP all the time.
Slashdot Mirror
Reality check: not everyone who writes to one of the ten or so most powerful political leaders in the world gets a hand-written response by return. If some French guy tried this trick at the Whitehouse, he'd probably be dead or under arrest by now.
5 hours? I don't think so: that spreads out 40 pages on Tom's Hardware means about 300 words plus 5Gb of adverts and screen clutter.
Precisely. It's the same problem as routinely using PGP for emails - while third parties may not be able to browse your email content, it pretty much guarantees that [i]all[/i] your Internet traffic, at the very least, gets more scrutiny. I know of a real example of this involving (funnily enough) Swiss missionaries in Africa - they weren't doing anything illegal, but a bit of encryption was enough to convince the local security forces otherwise. For most people, getting lost in the crowd is the best option, and, for those who are on the run from the CIA, this mobile phone doesn't help, unless the manufacturers have also found a way to stop people from triangulating the signal.
In my defence, this week I'm writing XSLT, where = means "is equal to" (and, being a functional language, there isn't really an assignment operator as such, except maybe for initialising variables and parameters, where it's also a single =, ie 'select = "value"').
You'd expect Office to outnumber Sharepoint by 2 orders of magnitude, because Sharepoint is a server application. Office probably outnumbers MS Exchange by almost the same factor.
I'm not sure what you mean by 'overwhelming', but quite a lot of the legal copies of Office 2003 are used in settings where intranets are relevant.
And it's not so much "tie in" as "integrated solution". It isn't a case that Microsoft makes you do this one way when OSS lets you do it 50 different ways. Microsoft lets you do it one way and OSS doesn't let you do it at all.
Dumb question perhaps, but how many people do you think need/want/use that level of functionality?
We really ought to automate these OO discussions. But, in the meantime...
The short answer is "not most of the people who read /., who are not the intended market for high end office applications". If you want to type a college paper, bash out some technical doc and be able to open files other people send you, OO is fine. I used it to write a 20k word dissertation the other month and I really can't complain.
But lots of corporations use various Office integration solutions, and OO just doesn't do that. Sharepoint is bundled with a lot of MS small office packages, and offers some quite useful functionality for building Intranets with no programming. (It's hideous under the bonnet, but the idea is not to look under the bonnet.) I've tried, say, changing the templates with emacs instead of FrontPage 2003, but when you scramble the page to the point where Sharepoint stops working, the recovery files live inside Frontpage 2003. The hooks to save shared documents with version tracking are inside Word and Excel. And so on. This technology is potentially attractive to any company that doesn't think everyone sharing everyone else's C drives and putting files wherever they feel like is a really neat idea.
And, TBH, I'm not aware of any OSS that lets you throw together an intranet with shared documents, task lists, announcements and other dynamic elements as easily as Sharepoint.
I'm guessing that's because their server is Slashdotted.
I'm sure you're right, but isn't that the whole point? The local apps on my laptop don't get slashdotted. I don't have to pay thousands of dollars a month for a guaranteed "finish typing my document" time of less than four hours. Running applications that only produce local results over a WAN just introduces another point of failure that is totally outside the individual's or organisation's control.
I'm all for web applications - I spend a lot of my time working on them - but the only make sense if they use the Internet to provide functionality that cannot be provided locally. Remote backups might be one example with WPs, but, even then, I'd tend to think that using local code to send the backups somewhere safe was a saner way to go.
this is more a case of "working class mums and dads don't want their kids looking up porn".
Not "working class mums don't want their husbands looking up porn?" Or, maybe, "working class mums don't want their husbands finding their photos while looking up porn?". Although I'm intrigued by the implication that middle-class parents do want their kids looking up porn.
I skimmed TFA, and I can't see anything to suggest that CSS has been improved to a point where it is going to enable the sort of layout that most people still implement using TABLEs. As long as managing to produce a webpage with three columns entirely in XHTML and CSS is something to get really excited about, I can't see that strict XHTML compliance has a hope of becoming the de facto standard.
And before everyone bangs on about how CSS is really neat if you understand it, see Eric Meyer - who bought us the W3C CSS1 Test Suite - in "Eric Meyer on CSS", demonstrating how to produce lean and standards-compliant webpages... using TABLEs for layout.
Does anyone know how we got saddled with CSS as a half-baked page description language in the first place?
certainly a dumb enough solution that the IT-challenged FBI might go for it.
So dumb it has apparently taken six years for anyone to find it? I don't think 'elegant' is a major consideration in this sort of application.
My understanding, based on CF, is that it's fine for systems that boot from CF, run in RAM and only write to CF when the configuration changes (eg Locustworld's Meshbox), but pretty failure-prone on systems that write logs and otherwise use the CF as workspace (eg IPCop).
It seems pretty obvious to me that sooner or later we will get rid of the remaining moving parts in electronic equipment, but I'm not sure the alternative technology is there yet. Cf the time it took between the first hype of flat screens and serious in-roads into the CRT market.
The Gendarmerie Nationale isn't military in the UK/US sense. They are the people who investigate murders and give out speeding tickets on national highways. In other words, it's the police force, it just happens to be set up a bit like an army. (By memory, it's responsible to the interior minister, to counterbalance the power of the defence minister in the case of a coup, but I could be imagining that bit..)
As mascots for bleeding edge Open Source adoption go, we could do better. The best Hollywood portrayal of French policing I have seen is in the Harrison Ford film "Frantic". They have now replaced their manual typewriters with wordprocessors, but to see them use them you wonder why. My favourite experience was taking a tourist to a police station to report a stolen passport. They had a Word template for the report, and someone had saved all the personal details of a rape victim into it, so everyone who reported anything could read all about it.
Of all the reasons suggested here for why they made the move, I haven't seen the most likely one - cost. Certainly there is a drive to get schools here onto open source to reduce licence costs and/or piracy. And the pupils and staff I know really really hate Open Office.
Hmm, I don't think C is the place to start. After all, as Kerningham and Richie say, C is a small language, and young males tend to go for... well, something a bit more bloated. Maybe PHP?
Because C10 sounds like 2 of these
(Note to American readers - Citroên is a car manufacturer :))
Sounds like a great name if it is supposed to appeal to C programmers. What would you call it? Brenda? Somehow I can't see C ever catching on with the non-geek population.
Also, I was assuming that it would be called C++09 once the launch date is sorted out. Or should that be C+=9?
Wal-Mart Bad, Google Good... oh dear, isn't it getting complicated!
Apart from that, I think Google would be mad to go the PC route. For a start, the money was never in the hardware. Also, I can't think of a better way to lose goodwill than to start selling budget PCs to the least technically literate segment of the PC-buying population and then failing to provide premium support.
Yes yes, there's Apple, but Apple don't generally do bargain basement prices. If you make an enormous margin on the hardware, you may be able to afford to keep your customers happy, even when they are clueless idiots. No-one, not even Google, will be able to do that on a $200 sale price.
More to the point, don't you have to work quite hard not to log it with Apache (and I suspect, most other web servers)?
You forgot to add "and if you don't like it you should write your own Window Manager, that's the power of open source". That's my favourite knee-jerk dismissal of constructive criticism.
If the KDE community is happy for their user base to be restricted to those willing to hand tune and compile KDE, fine. But if we're going to stick with the "Linux Desktop takes over the world" mantra beloved by many here, the way KDE runs out of the box does matter.
I've been using KDE for several years. It's hard to say if it has slowed down or speeded up, as I keep upgrading my hardware. But this laptop I'm typing on ran XP and Office just fine in 256Mb of RAM, but needed twice that to run KDE and OpenOffice comfortably.
Now maybe that's down to KDE, or Open Office, or the Redhat Network icon for all I care, the point is that overall system performance does matter, especially when it is worse than that of Windows, and berating the users for noticing the bloat is not a great growth strategy IMHO.
Another GUI layer? What is the minimum RAM requirement for running Open Office with this lovely system going to be? Windows is rapidly starting to look like the low-bloat OS...
Probably a bad plan if you move every other week. But buying a new Ikea desk every 5 to 10 years is probably cheaper than buying a solid oak one every 30 years. Makes moving easier too.
The people who currently play online games don't need convincing to play online games, are relatively few in number (compared with computer users who don't play online games) and the market is crowed. What MS and everyone else wants is to snare the people who don't currently play online games, and it's a fairly good bet that continuing to offer the same sort of games that have failed to interest them so far is not going to suddenly start to interest them in the near future. Increased social interaction is one obvious way to go, and is pretty likely to work IMO. I mean, enough people spend hours chatting whilst playing minesweeper or Yahoo Billiards, how hard can it be to improve on that game-playing experience while maintaining the social component?
Also, social interaction is cheaper than scripted content, because the users provide it for you (although of course you need to keep some kind of control on exactly what content they provide...)
IBM is a huge company, the IT industry is less stable than for a long time, and they are putting their eggs in more than one basket because they can?
No, the parent is a geek failing to understand how natural language works :)
By the way, stop using IP as an acronym for Intellectual Property, IP is Internet Protocol.
It's both - short acronyms are as sought-after as short domain names, and there is even less you can do about someone else using the one you thought you owned. Lawyers talk about IP all the time.