You must be very young to believe Microsoft simply BOUGHT all of their products, or that everything successful is simply the result of their money.(Did I mention MS Office?)
They did buy Powerpoint for the Office suite. Not a single successful product that came out of MS is free of large chunks of purchased products and/or companies.
Nobody told the folks at Lotus or Netscape that they got beat by money, rather than products that kicked theirs in the teeth.
Netscape indeed got beat by money, but not just that. They also used dishonest bundling tactics for which they were convicted in court.
And to put the cherry on top of the argument: even Internet Explorer was bought from another company. Quoting Wikipedia:
"The Internet Explorer project was started in the summer of 1994 by Thomas Reardon and subsequently led by Benjamin Slivka, leveraging source code from Spyglass, Inc.
Microsoft might not have bought all of their products, but 98% of the ones that weren't bought are money-losers.
Speaking as an owner of an iRiver ifp795 player, I'd be wary about buying an iRiver player especially for the vorbis support. I did exactly that, and found that the entire ifp7xx and 8xx series have ogg support problems such as:
- Any.ogg file plays at a noticeably lower volume than MP3s. If you mix oggs with mp3s in your playlists, you'll spend most of the time with your finger on the volume knob.
- Only ogg files of 96kbps average and above are supported. If you want to save storage space by playing low-bitrate ogg files, this is not your player. And if you save a lot of stuff below vorbis quality 3, you'll have to reconvert them.
- Older models may skip, play noise or crash the player if the ogg file drops below 96kbps at any point. This is not the case for my player.
I know there are some iRiver models that play oggs without any of these restrictions (especially the HD models), I'd avise a thorough check on the Internet before buying one. I didn't, and ended up with an ogg player that is so minimally useful for my purposes that I just use it for MP3s.
Though I'm not quite in favor of using torrents to help the media conglomerates save money, the implications can be positive in some respects. For one thing, it'll legitimize P2P and make it a crucial part of the Internet experience.
If the big players depend on the technology, it means we'll have an easier time defeating some of the current restrictions planned to curb P2P... such as limiting DSL upstream to a bare minimum, or charging for higher-than-average upstream.
Lots of providers all over the world are still considering this as we speak. Using commercial torrents would put enormous pressure against such measures.
Instead of simply blocking the connection, AOL could redirect the visitor to a special error page, explaining that the page was blocked for spam reasons and offering an override if the user really wants to see it.
After reading through a page explaining that it is a spam site and that the user might be tracked and harrassed further by those companies for giving them a visit, I'm sure most of them would not click through.
Those masochists looking forward to buying spam and actively supporting these scum could just click "Yes, I really want to see this page" and everyone would be happy. Right?
You are forgetting the crucial network supported by giFT: OpenFT. The old fasttrack network is long gone, dead ever since Sharman Networks dumped it for the new version. OpenFT is being developed exactly because it's tough to depend on proprietary software that chooses which platforms to support and leaves everybody else in the dark.
We should benefit a lot from OpenFT as it matures. So far, it's the best offering we have for a non-centralized, Kazaa-style network.
You want to create a text document without a page number on the title page, with lowercase or uppercase roman numerals on the pages of the table of contents (you do not know how many yet), and then you want to start the page numbering with arabic numerals.
Different Page Styles are the OpenOffice.org Writer equivalent of "section changes" in other text programs.
Section "Page Styles and Page Numbers" in the OpenOffice 1.0 help-file.
I had the same problem you had, and I hacked my way through -- putting a white rectangle graphic over the page number in the first page. It was only later that I read the help files. =)
It is far from certain. OK a few Brazillian software companies may gain from a captive market. But protectionism has costs and in this case the cost is that the government ends up running bespoke software that is expensive to produce and maintain rather than Commercial Off The Shelf (COTS).
Consider imported COTS for Brazil's case. It's a hefty price tag that's such a burden on the country's budget that the alternatives are worth considering.
But anyway, I don't want to sound like I'm defending protectionism -- it really cost Brazil a lot in IT. Lazy, government-protected companies selling outdated hardware for almost three times the US price, because importing US hardware meant paying 10 times more in tariffs. That really hurt.
Fortunately, it doesn't seem like the Brazilian government is headed for protectionist measures again -- it's not forbidding Microsoft from competing. The costs from deploying Linux just seem dramatically lower than importing software for the same task, even after considering its deficiencies.
Finally there is a protectionist angle, keeping out big US software companies helps local companies - perhaps.
You're right, it does help local companies. For Brazil, it's so true it's not even worth questioning.
See, Brazil has very few companies actually making software. Curiously, the Brazilian software market was bigger in the old 8-bit and early PC market, with some popular productivity applications. Then Microsoft came stomping in with Office, and that's the last any Brazilian has heard of Brazilian-made software. There's a few left in niche markets, where MS has no desire to touch.
With Linux, I doubt there will be an incredible upsurge of new coders, but nothing will be lost either. Most existing coders will move if there's demand for Linux. And you will open the market for lots of cheap Linux-specialized services, which could, in time, remove the final barrier toward nationwide Linux adoption: support.
For Brazil, there's none of that "Linux support costs much more than Windows support, yadda TCO-crap yadda", because there's none of that "I know Linux, so I can charge more" elitism as in some other countries.
And with wider adoption of low-price systems comes a bigger service market, which is probably where Brazil would see its IT economy grow the most. Seems like a wise choice to me.
Video card history going back to 1996 isn't really necessary -- if you're around 25 and bought the Voodoo 1 back when it came out, you can probably recite all the facts from 1996-2003 from the back of your head.
And if it's just 3D chipsets that count, what about the [near useless] S3 Virge, before the Voodoo? What about the extra details, like 3dfx buying out STB to manufacture its own integrated 2D/3D solutions (Voodoo3 onwards), effectively pissing off an entire industry?
Do NOT use configuration files for RedHat and then attempt to use them with plain vanilla kernel.org kernels.
you will be VER VERY sorry one of these days if you do...
Thanks for the tip -- but I'm curious as to what the "ticking time bomb" amounts to. What could potentially go wrong by doing this?
From my [admittedly modest] knowledge on this, incompatible kernel options are discarded on different versions, and don't negatively affect anything else. So the worst thing that could happen is one kernel compile that'll miss an option or two... or at least that was what I thought until now.:)
There are no impacts on stability from my experience with this, so are there security implications?
Here's what you can do to use vanilla kernels in RedHat. It may not be the easiest route, but it works like a charm every time.
1) Enter your regular redhat kernel source directory. Everything should be preconfigured, unless you changed things;
2) make menuconfig, then Save Configuration to Alternate File. Pick a name you'll remember;
3) Exit menuconfig, enter vanilla kernel directory;
4) make menuconfig, Load an Alternate Configuration File. Enter the name of the previous config, with full path.
5) Profit! You might want to check any new options just for fun (such as built-in crypto for this kernel release), but it isn't necessary.
Your new kernel should now run just fine under RedHat, with a minimum of fuss. It'll be a long compile, though, because even the kitchen sink will be included. Still, it's more work for the computer and less work for you.
Never got Quicktime and most other video formats working.
That's strange, especially if you tried Linux this year. Xine and mplayer are very good media players and do support every codec you will ever need. Once they're installed (there's the Win32 codec DLL pack) you never have to worry about codecs again.
Surprisingly, Windows usually gives you some headaches when dealing with obscure codecs. You have to find codec packs with flaky installers where if you flag every option, one codec inevitably breaks another. It takes practice to get everything right if you need lots of codecs in Windows. It could have been a lot easier with Media Player's automatic codec download, but MS won't facilitate downloading of standard codecs (divx 4 or 5? Nope. Vorbis? Nope!) in the hopes that everyone will ditch good codecs to adopt their DRM-dirty WMx formats.
I can understand your other troubles with Linux as they're being slowly ironed out, but codec problems in Linux nowadays seem strange to me. It's one of the areas where Linux is a lot easier to work with.
If you are buying a motherboard or a addon card make sure it has an EHCI controller which is proper USB2, or look for an NEC chip.
Let me emphasise that NEC EHCI chips are currently the only ones that work full-speed (er, I mean, hi-speed) with the Linux kernel. They're the ones that come on USB 2.0 "hi-speed" addon cards.
The newer controller chips are under development and currently won't work.
This isn't college. Kids will only learn the basic usability issues that'll get them ready for "real" CS courses -- provided they even want to go that way.
By learning through Linux, they'll probably be one step ahead of the students bound to Windows. As a general rule, those familiar with Linux have no problem running Windows. The opposite is so not true.
In all the other cases, the goverment would sign up for contracts that would tie them to MS software for years. That's even worse than mandating Free Software by law, because once you've signed a multimillion dollar contract for ten years, there's no sensible way to back out until the deal expires. If Free Software ever becomes a burden, just change the law back and buy whatever's necessary. Not trivial, but cheaper than breaching contracts.
And mandating Free Software helps the Brazilian market and software developers, no matter how you look at it. The Brazilian software industry is almost non-existant (except in niche markets), so there's none of that "Free Software software hurts the market and kills jobs" excuse. Proprietary software is rarely Brazilian, and thus has traditionally been a drain on the national market and generates a minimal number of jobs.
I don't know where the "only six million users" statistic came from, but maybe it was related only to the US. ICQ is still huge all over the world (except the US), and although its user base is indeed declining, all the people I know are switching to MSN Messenger (it now comes with Windows, etc).
Lots of places in Asia and Latin America center almost entirely in ICQ and MSN, and most people don't even know AIM if they don't have any American contacts.
And it's not much of a loss either. I'm not meaning to troll, but if you don't communicate with an American userbase, it's probably the worst IM client out of all the "major 4". Yahoo allows offline messaging like ICQ; MSN is just as easy to use, comes pre-installed now and has user appeal right out of the box; ICQ is still, by far, the most feature-rich IM client. And a lot of these exclusive features are, in fact, useful.:)
For me, the integration news is good news. If the ICQ features are made available to AIM contacts as well now (invisible/visible lists, offline messaging), I recommend some AIM users give the integrated ICQ a shot. It's a good reason to ditch the AIM client, not the other way around.
Following the September 11-attacks, it was claimed in some reports that the U.S. authorities investigated if PGP was used to co-ordinate the attacks. Do you regret the decision to release PGP as freeware?
I don't really understand when people bring the subject of PGP being used by terrorists, and how this should weigh against the program. PGP is just a tool that makes encrytion easy for the regular user, and it's not something that suddenly brought encryption to terrorists. There has always been a very simple and effective encryption tool for strong cryptography, called the one-time pad.
I'm just saying that PGP has done nothing to facilitate terrorism. If terrorists really wanted encryption, they could have used it at any point, regardless of PGP's existence. And anyway, historically it seems that terrorists never really used electronic encryption for most of their planning.
Using Palladium to secure P2P would be a nice idea if, and only if, anybody could create applications that took advantage of the Palladium chipset. MS gives everyone the impression that this will be possible by saying things like "everyone will benefit from this technology", but the truth is that Palladium will be very protected by heavy, restrictive licencing. That's pretty much guaranteed.
After all, this is one of the most important parts of the plan. You have to pay to write apps that use it, and this will hurt the only competition MS has: software that doesn't cost any money.
Does anyone think they'll really allow a P2P network to tap into its secure computing resources? I don't think so. They'll be really careful about who they license it to, no matter how much money's involved, because once you get viruses, Bonzi Buddies and spyware that's so secure that removal programs can't get them, or if the users start using Palladium in a way the big labels can't intervene, they'll have a huge problem.
You have a good point. Now that Linux is beginning to get some public recognition, I've heard several people say that "you get what you pay for" in regards to Linux.
From what I've seen so far, some of the biggest user woes in Linux come from simple things. I've seen one user manually ejecting a CD from the drive with a paper clip, because "it would not eject when I pressed the eject button on the drive". And I've only seen one distro so far (Peanut Linux, I think) that allows this out of the box.
Maybe that's why the Thai notebook doesn't come with a CD drive.;)
When I looked at the Firebird feature page, the first thing I remember is one argument Gates (or was it Ballmer?) used against Open Source: Open Source offers no innovation.
Now compare Firebird to IE which has been stagnant for years, ever since Netscape went down. IE takes a severe beating from any other updated browser today in the feature department.
Send a crash report if you have the Feedback Agent installed. It might help convince them to look at the error if all the reports don't come from my IP.;)
I don't really mind the ugly-looking pages that were made only with IE in mind. But crashes are just a little bit embarrassing, especially when you're pushing Mozilla as a good alternative to IE.
But that's my only complaint for now. Mozilla rocks.
Mozilla 1.3, WinXP. Doesn't crash. Looks funky, but doesn't crash.
What the...?
I have no explanation for this. I've been testing Mozilla on this site for every version that comes out, and have had no luck whatsoever until now. Consistent crashes, with just a few ENTER's on that little window.
Windows 2K, XP, 98, Red Hat 7.3, doesn't matter. All builds crash for me and my friends. On Linux, I use Konqueror on that site.
Maybe the recent Mozilla betas fixed this, but I'm surprised with your Moz1.3 not crashing on XP. I just tried it in a Win2K box, and bam.
Go to the little message bar, type in any message long enough to make the scrollbar appear (it won't), and then backspace a few times.
Ladies and gentleman, you have a crash.
It crashes every single version of Mozilla so far, including the current 1.4a. Naturally, with Javascript enabled.
I send them feedback from the feedback agent every new version that comes out. Here's hoping that they'll at least stop it from crashing whenever they get to it.
Slashdot Mirror
And to put the cherry on top of the argument: even Internet Explorer was bought from another company. Quoting Wikipedia:
"The Internet Explorer project was started in the summer of 1994 by Thomas Reardon and subsequently led by Benjamin Slivka, leveraging source code from Spyglass, Inc.
Microsoft might not have bought all of their products, but 98% of the ones that weren't bought are money-losers.
Speaking as an owner of an iRiver ifp795 player, I'd be wary about buying an iRiver player especially for the vorbis support. I did exactly that, and found that the entire ifp7xx and 8xx series have ogg support problems such as:
.ogg file plays at a noticeably lower volume than MP3s. If you mix oggs with mp3s in your playlists, you'll spend most of the time with your finger on the volume knob.
- Any
- Only ogg files of 96kbps average and above are supported. If you want to save storage space by playing low-bitrate ogg files, this is not your player. And if you save a lot of stuff below vorbis quality 3, you'll have to reconvert them.
- Older models may skip, play noise or crash the player if the ogg file drops below 96kbps at any point. This is not the case for my player.
I know there are some iRiver models that play oggs without any of these restrictions (especially the HD models), I'd avise a thorough check on the Internet before buying one. I didn't, and ended up with an ogg player that is so minimally useful for my purposes that I just use it for MP3s.
Though I'm not quite in favor of using torrents to help the media conglomerates save money, the implications can be positive in some respects. For one thing, it'll legitimize P2P and make it a crucial part of the Internet experience.
If the big players depend on the technology, it means we'll have an easier time defeating some of the current restrictions planned to curb P2P... such as limiting DSL upstream to a bare minimum, or charging for higher-than-average upstream.
Lots of providers all over the world are still considering this as we speak. Using commercial torrents would put enormous pressure against such measures.
Instead of simply blocking the connection, AOL could redirect the visitor to a special error page, explaining that the page was blocked for spam reasons and offering an override if the user really wants to see it.
After reading through a page explaining that it is a spam site and that the user might be tracked and harrassed further by those companies for giving them a visit, I'm sure most of them would not click through.
Those masochists looking forward to buying spam and actively supporting these scum could just click "Yes, I really want to see this page" and everyone would be happy. Right?
You are forgetting the crucial network supported by giFT: OpenFT. The old fasttrack network is long gone, dead ever since Sharman Networks dumped it for the new version. OpenFT is being developed exactly because it's tough to depend on proprietary software that chooses which platforms to support and leaves everybody else in the dark.
We should benefit a lot from OpenFT as it matures. So far, it's the best offering we have for a non-centralized, Kazaa-style network.
Section "Page Styles and Page Numbers" in the OpenOffice 1.0 help-file.
I had the same problem you had, and I hacked my way through -- putting a white rectangle graphic over the page number in the first page. It was only later that I read the help files. =)
But anyway, I don't want to sound like I'm defending protectionism -- it really cost Brazil a lot in IT. Lazy, government-protected companies selling outdated hardware for almost three times the US price, because importing US hardware meant paying 10 times more in tariffs. That really hurt.
Fortunately, it doesn't seem like the Brazilian government is headed for protectionist measures again -- it's not forbidding Microsoft from competing. The costs from deploying Linux just seem dramatically lower than importing software for the same task, even after considering its deficiencies.
See, Brazil has very few companies actually making software. Curiously, the Brazilian software market was bigger in the old 8-bit and early PC market, with some popular productivity applications. Then Microsoft came stomping in with Office, and that's the last any Brazilian has heard of Brazilian-made software. There's a few left in niche markets, where MS has no desire to touch.
With Linux, I doubt there will be an incredible upsurge of new coders, but nothing will be lost either. Most existing coders will move if there's demand for Linux. And you will open the market for lots of cheap Linux-specialized services, which could, in time, remove the final barrier toward nationwide Linux adoption: support.
For Brazil, there's none of that "Linux support costs much more than Windows support, yadda TCO-crap yadda", because there's none of that "I know Linux, so I can charge more" elitism as in some other countries.
And with wider adoption of low-price systems comes a bigger service market, which is probably where Brazil would see its IT economy grow the most. Seems like a wise choice to me.
Video card history going back to 1996 isn't really necessary -- if you're around 25 and bought the Voodoo 1 back when it came out, you can probably recite all the facts from 1996-2003 from the back of your head.
And if it's just 3D chipsets that count, what about the [near useless] S3 Virge, before the Voodoo? What about the extra details, like 3dfx buying out STB to manufacture its own integrated 2D/3D solutions (Voodoo3 onwards), effectively pissing off an entire industry?
Oh well. Maybe next time.
From my [admittedly modest] knowledge on this, incompatible kernel options are discarded on different versions, and don't negatively affect anything else. So the worst thing that could happen is one kernel compile that'll miss an option or two... or at least that was what I thought until now.
There are no impacts on stability from my experience with this, so are there security implications?
Here's what you can do to use vanilla kernels in RedHat. It may not be the easiest route, but it works like a charm every time.
1) Enter your regular redhat kernel source directory. Everything should be preconfigured, unless you changed things;
2) make menuconfig, then Save Configuration to Alternate File. Pick a name you'll remember;
3) Exit menuconfig, enter vanilla kernel directory;
4) make menuconfig, Load an Alternate Configuration File. Enter the name of the previous config, with full path.
5) Profit! You might want to check any new options just for fun (such as built-in crypto for this kernel release), but it isn't necessary.
Your new kernel should now run just fine under RedHat, with a minimum of fuss. It'll be a long compile, though, because even the kitchen sink will be included. Still, it's more work for the computer and less work for you.
Surprisingly, Windows usually gives you some headaches when dealing with obscure codecs. You have to find codec packs with flaky installers where if you flag every option, one codec inevitably breaks another. It takes practice to get everything right if you need lots of codecs in Windows. It could have been a lot easier with Media Player's automatic codec download, but MS won't facilitate downloading of standard codecs (divx 4 or 5? Nope. Vorbis? Nope!) in the hopes that everyone will ditch good codecs to adopt their DRM-dirty WMx formats.
I can understand your other troubles with Linux as they're being slowly ironed out, but codec problems in Linux nowadays seem strange to me. It's one of the areas where Linux is a lot easier to work with.
Let me emphasise that NEC EHCI chips are currently the only ones that work full-speed (er, I mean, hi-speed) with the Linux kernel. They're the ones that come on USB 2.0 "hi-speed" addon cards.
The newer controller chips are under development and currently won't work.
But I'll bite. :)
This isn't college. Kids will only learn the basic usability issues that'll get them ready for "real" CS courses -- provided they even want to go that way.
By learning through Linux, they'll probably be one step ahead of the students bound to Windows. As a general rule, those familiar with Linux have no problem running Windows. The opposite is so not true.
In all the other cases, the goverment would sign up for contracts that would tie them to MS software for years. That's even worse than mandating Free Software by law, because once you've signed a multimillion dollar contract for ten years, there's no sensible way to back out until the deal expires. If Free Software ever becomes a burden, just change the law back and buy whatever's necessary. Not trivial, but cheaper than breaching contracts.
And mandating Free Software helps the Brazilian market and software developers, no matter how you look at it. The Brazilian software industry is almost non-existant (except in niche markets), so there's none of that "Free Software software hurts the market and kills jobs" excuse. Proprietary software is rarely Brazilian, and thus has traditionally been a drain on the national market and generates a minimal number of jobs.
I applaud the decision.
I don't know where the "only six million users" statistic came from, but maybe it was related only to the US. ICQ is still huge all over the world (except the US), and although its user base is indeed declining, all the people I know are switching to MSN Messenger (it now comes with Windows, etc).
:)
Lots of places in Asia and Latin America center almost entirely in ICQ and MSN, and most people don't even know AIM if they don't have any American contacts.
And it's not much of a loss either. I'm not meaning to troll, but if you don't communicate with an American userbase, it's probably the worst IM client out of all the "major 4". Yahoo allows offline messaging like ICQ; MSN is just as easy to use, comes pre-installed now and has user appeal right out of the box; ICQ is still, by far, the most feature-rich IM client. And a lot of these exclusive features are, in fact, useful.
For me, the integration news is good news. If the ICQ features are made available to AIM contacts as well now (invisible/visible lists, offline messaging), I recommend some AIM users give the integrated ICQ a shot. It's a good reason to ditch the AIM client, not the other way around.
I'm just saying that PGP has done nothing to facilitate terrorism. If terrorists really wanted encryption, they could have used it at any point, regardless of PGP's existence. And anyway, historically it seems that terrorists never really used electronic encryption for most of their planning.
Using Palladium to secure P2P would be a nice idea if, and only if, anybody could create applications that took advantage of the Palladium chipset. MS gives everyone the impression that this will be possible by saying things like "everyone will benefit from this technology", but the truth is that Palladium will be very protected by heavy, restrictive licencing. That's pretty much guaranteed.
After all, this is one of the most important parts of the plan. You have to pay to write apps that use it, and this will hurt the only competition MS has: software that doesn't cost any money.
Does anyone think they'll really allow a P2P network to tap into its secure computing resources? I don't think so. They'll be really careful about who they license it to, no matter how much money's involved, because once you get viruses, Bonzi Buddies and spyware that's so secure that removal programs can't get them, or if the users start using Palladium in a way the big labels can't intervene, they'll have a huge problem.
You have a good point. Now that Linux is beginning to get some public recognition, I've heard several people say that "you get what you pay for" in regards to Linux.
;)
From what I've seen so far, some of the biggest user woes in Linux come from simple things. I've seen one user manually ejecting a CD from the drive with a paper clip, because "it would not eject when I pressed the eject button on the drive". And I've only seen one distro so far (Peanut Linux, I think) that allows this out of the box.
Maybe that's why the Thai notebook doesn't come with a CD drive.
When I looked at the Firebird feature page, the first thing I remember is one argument Gates (or was it Ballmer?) used against Open Source: Open Source offers no innovation.
Now compare Firebird to IE which has been stagnant for years, ever since Netscape went down. IE takes a severe beating from any other updated browser today in the feature department.
Where's the closed-source innovation, huh guys?
Send a crash report if you have the Feedback Agent installed. It might help convince them to look at the error if all the reports don't come from my IP. ;)
I don't really mind the ugly-looking pages that were made only with IE in mind. But crashes are just a little bit embarrassing, especially when you're pushing Mozilla as a good alternative to IE.
But that's my only complaint for now. Mozilla rocks.
Maybe you have a very lucky nightly. I just installed tonight's Phoenix build, hoping that the problem was fixed, but no. Same thing.
I have no explanation for this. I've been testing Mozilla on this site for every version that comes out, and have had no luck whatsoever until now. Consistent crashes, with just a few ENTER's on that little window.
Windows 2K, XP, 98, Red Hat 7.3, doesn't matter. All builds crash for me and my friends. On Linux, I use Konqueror on that site.
Maybe the recent Mozilla betas fixed this, but I'm surprised with your Moz1.3 not crashing on XP. I just tried it in a Win2K box, and bam.
Oh well.
Try this one:
http://www.clarodigital.com.br/
Go to the little message bar, type in any message long enough to make the scrollbar appear (it won't), and then backspace a few times.
Ladies and gentleman, you have a crash.
It crashes every single version of Mozilla so far, including the current 1.4a. Naturally, with Javascript enabled.
I send them feedback from the feedback agent every new version that comes out. Here's hoping that they'll at least stop it from crashing whenever they get to it.
Yes, my friend. They are fighting a losing battle. We will slaughter these godless infidels and behead them in front of their own mothers.
Don't listen to what the press says. There is no Super-DMCA bill being passed. This is an outright lie as told by these warmongering animals.