If I make a text, book, memorandum with word I expect it to be mine not encrypted in some proprietary mambo jumbo that MS thinks it's the solution for me.
Except that Microsoft has now made a book (program) and published the alphabets (schema) to the book under a free of charge, perpetual licence. What's more, you understand the alphabets just fine (because it's XML) and converting it to your format is a series of trivial XSLT operations.
So what was your complaint again? Oh yes, you want them to publish the schema in YOUR pet format. Yeah, like their engineers have nothing better to do than get involved in the bureaucracy of file-format design-by-committee. (We know how well that worked for HTML/XHTML/CSS -- years of a public standards process and yet Safari, Opera and Gecko can't render alike)
Seems to me that the you're the one spouting 'mambo jumbo' here.
I must say, without all the paranoia Slashdot would be far less entertaining...
> I'll bet anything they have a patent on the 'open' format.
Actually, they do, as they did last year when they released the reference schemas for Office 2003's XML. They are licensed as follows:
- free of charge - include any current or future patent grants - available to anyone: individual or organization - perpetual - code using these is freely distributable under any license, include open-source ones
The new formats are going to be licensed under the same terms.
And whatever happened to Office Integrated Rights Management
You want it, you install and use it ('it' being the Rights Management Server, which is basically a fancy keyserver). Digitally signing XML docs (even those in DOCX/XLSX like zip-containers) is no big deal, Java JARs have been doing it for years, and encrypting them isn't much of a bother either. Of course, if you don't use it, your docs will be easily readable by anyone else, man or machine.
And even if you do use it, 3rd parties who have your keys can decrypt your documents and then use their favorite tool to process them (it's, after all, XML).
What about patents?
Patents concerns were discussed when the Office 2003 schemas were licensed, this new format is being licensed under the same terms.
And regarding the standards-submission process, did you actually have a point in there, or did you just have the urge on defecate on the Slashdot Comments Page?
Fact: WMV is popular. WMV is currently licensed to hardware makers like Samsung using 1-to-1 deals with MS. It's in Microsoft's business interest to standardize it so that any hardware maker can, for a standardized royalty, use it in their devices (nothing says standards have to be free; MP3 isn't, for example). And AFAIK the committee will not endorse one format only, even if WMV is blessed by the committee, other formats will still be used.
Where did I say I was a linguist? I simply responded to a post where a random Slashdotter made an unsubstantiated (and in my mind uninformed) 'English sucks' post and stated (rather negatively I admit, but I had a bad day and this is/. and I've seen worse here) some reasons because of which English most certainly does not suck.
You on the other hand, bring nothing to the conversation other than a gripe about how pathetic my comment is. I'm quite sure that makes your comment less pathetic than mine. Have an excellent day.
Free does mean as-in-freedom. Marketers have co-opted 'Free' to also mean 'Gratis'. English provided them that flexibility. This is not a bug, it's a feature.
Perhaps if English was better, there would be an English word for Free-as-in-Freedom, and we wouldn't have to resort to determining meaning
Do 99.999999% of English speakers give a flying fuck about this little quirk? Hint: they don't. But if you do (and you are Just One Person) you can Make a Difference(tm). Start using the word libre as much as you can. Drop the accent marks to it's easier for English speakers. And lo and behold, sooner or later, more people will use it, and the OED will pick it up (they may already have...)
And yes, I stand by what I said: I'd rather take a language with quirks like these than a brain-damaged gender-typed language (and where new words are made by Academies to boot) English is inherently open-source: you have as much right to add to it as some stuffed shirt in Oxford.
Honestly, what is this guy smoking? We are creative beings... It really doesn't matter what people decide to do with their source code, there will always be innovation because it is human nature to think of new ways to do things.
Even more than creative, humans are _selfish_ beings. Which is why you will always find more innovation for profit than you will in a share-alike/open-source environment.
Innovations that actually make a difference happen mostly because of for-profit private enterprises. From cheap ubiquitous packet switching to Unix to the OS that has the most claim to running the internet -- IOS -- they were all created for profit. Sure, soviet scientists created computers too, but why did the computer revolution start in the US? In the end, the share-alike model could not make a difference.
I'm sure there are examples of open source innovation, but the for-profit will always have _more_ innovation to its credit. It's just the nature of the beast.
To do that on XP, you need to open two different programs, IE and Windows Explorer, and you cannot drag-and-drop if IE is maximized because then you cannot see the other window.
In IE: View | Explorer Bar | Folders. Or add the Folders button to your toolbar. Drag-and-drop is now quite easy.
To view it in XP you end up with three different windows, in konqueror it's done transparently.
Write a zip plugin for IE and you'll have done it in one. However, I'm thankful no one's done it (yet) because I'm not sure where this fetish for single-window mode came from (I have a hunch it's from command-line refugees using bad window managers, or from browseristas who insist on applying the back/forward browser model everywhere) but what's wrong with three windows? Why does everything have to be done within the shell/browser?
I've worked with new users (way back). We used Windows, Mac, and even a couple of custom interfaces we created ourselves in college.
1) The biggest challenge new users face is the keyboard and (if they're older) the mouse. The single mouse button helps. Young children like the mouse but are (very briefly) foxed by the sheer number of buttons on a keyboard.
2) Trying to read onscreen is the next challenge (for older people).
There's no way a new user would shoot for a goal-directed task like "burn CDs to MP3". If he's thinking on that level he's NOT a new user.
I've seen inexperience users ask around for how to rip MP3s in 1998 (unfriendly answer: LAME, friendly answer: MusicMatch), download MusicMatch, install it (Windows installation is not as hard as people make it out to be), pop a CD in and press the big red button that says 'Record'. And today Windows Media Player 10 has this friggin' huge Rip button on the main screen.
Photographs... I know there's an option for showing them as thumbs
XP shows them as thumbnails or slideshows by default if they're in My Pictures, which is exactly where a new user would place them, seeing that XP-ready image programs use that location as their default save folder in the File Save As dialog.
I know of no other application that integrates the web so seamlessly in a computer, and at the same time being so friendly in handling local files.
Apart from IE, you mean (although I grant it isn't very friendly)? Although -- sharing a systemwide HTML renderer is nice, but I'm not sure what user benefit there is in the file explorer and the browser being the same program (unless the file explorer is a web interface, which it's not in either IE or Konq). All it adds is two modes to Konquerer that can only confuse the casial user.
However, assuming a totally netural user who had never used a computer before
The 'totally neutral user' is sort of like the Abominable Snowman, much discussed but difficult to pin down in reality.
Metric time makes complete sense too, for people who've never been exposed to a calendar system before. And base-8 is totally natural if you didn't know base-10. The point is, Windows is so ubiquitous that there are very few totally neutral users, except maybe people living under forced scarcity like North Korea.
The vast untouched pool of 3rd world citizens Slashdot salivates about? Yes, Linux is touching them (witness all the OEM Linux-preloaded PCs selling in China and India), but so does Windows (witness the pirated CDs of XP being passed around), and currently it looks like Windows is winning.
And oh yeah -- there are really poor, uneducated citizens in countries like India for whom *both* Linux and Windows GUIs would be hard: because the Desktop/Folder metaphor itself is meaningless for them (Web-style forms based interfaces work better, probably because guv'mint bureaucracy has made everyone capable of recognizing a form).
Anyway, enough yammering-- I just wanted to say I really wish Linux evangelists wouldn't use this 'neutral user' line: it makes them look bad, almost as if they're telling users it's their fault: "oh this OS is perfect, it's just that your mind is too contaminated to experience the goodness of it." That, IMO, is the wrong message to send when you're migrating users from one OS to another.
I have to say that everyone I've known that has switched to Mac has been amazed at the stability and uptime and lack of neverending configuration hoop-jumping.
The only way the Mac would be used by a wider section of the market was if it supported crappier hardware. And if the Mac OS supported crappier hardware it too would have a pretty bad rep. (Note that this is not the only reason why Windows gets a bad rep, but it is an important reason.)
The idea of someone being 'passionately in love' with Windows is so laughable to all of us primarily because MS has been nothing but reactionary and predictable.
Actually, I'd be quite alarmed to meet anyone 'passionately in love' with Windows, OSX or Linux. I like Linux and think OSX looks neat, but 'passionately love'? It's an OS, for pete's sake. That's kinda like saying I love my screwdriver-set passionately.
Not to be trollish, but -- IMHO -- Macs and Linux are loved because they're used mostly by committed users who have made an active choice to use what they do.
But I've never known anyone who is really passionate about windows, some people prefer it to other operating systems but nobody really seems to love it.
You make a very interesting point: most non-corporate buyers today will not be able to tell you why they chose Windows, beyond a "It's what I'm familiar with" or "Everyone else uses it" or "My bottle-carving program runs on it". Windows is an externally enforced choice for most people. So far so good, and by now the slashbots would be frothing about how great it'd be if only the evil M$ was broken up so that people could finally Choose(tm).
Problem: if MS were to go away, something else would take its place, say Linux. When that happens, when Linux is mandated across broad swathes of business, you can be quite sure that the crowd of lusers that you now have would bring the inevitable kvetching about how The Computer Ate My Work(tm). No amount of telling them '..but Linux is stable!' will help: they'd sooner believe that the computer is a piece of shit than admit a mistake.
And oh: this is already happening today: We have a CRM app that runs crossplatform on Moz and IE, and quite a few of our customers (call centers who want their IT as lean-and-mean as possible) have standardized on Linux/OO.o because their users don't need much more. I've been to a few of these places, and FWIW the IT staff at at these places are happy as clams but user satisfaction has not gone up (it has actually dipped in a couple of places but I'm willing to pin that on poor retraining). Of course, none of this means anything except anecdotally but your post made me wonder how passionate a user in these companies would be about Linux.
Even though I'm a huge SG1 fan, I (and a lot of others in my Information Theory class) had a _lot_ of trouble with the wormhole concept. I don't know enough physics to articulate my problems well, but I really can't imagine how the entropy associated with these things would allow any _useful_ information (leave alone objects) to pass through. Any physics-literate/.-ers care to comment?
Honestly, how many people out there actually use the internet to listen to people's podcasts?
Podcasts are a special case of timeshifted radio: the special bit is that they were never broadcast in the first place. And timeshifted audio has a huge market: commuters who drive or go by train and have MP3 players.
Potential targets would include sports commentary, book club discussions, book readings, tech rants (I imagine Cringely'd be popular). Now, some of this may be available on radio as well -- that's irrelevant because the target market for podcasts are the people who can't, or couldn't, tune in. And why yes, there could be people whose individual podcasts become incredibly popular (how many'd have thought Belle de Jour's weblog would have taken off enough to earn her a book deal?)
I can understand the average/.-er's reaction to hype, but there's a fine line between hype and potential: podcasting's potential is that it can remove the chokehold of a few corps (made possible by a spectrum shortage that podcasting routes around) on radio and make timeshifted 'broadcasting' a reality. And that, my friend, is big.
Yup, we could call ourselves the Open Source Association of America. The OSAA would would be a cartel of orgs big (IBM, Redhat, Novell, etc) and small, and we could go about auditing businesses' code for GPL violations.
When PHBs see our 733T audits-required letters, they'll _finally_ take Open Source seriously, because everyone knows you're not a serious player in this biz unless you send threatening letters by the dozen.
Nothing stops TV companies from offering Janus/Fairplay encoded content (with ads) via BitTorrent. I'm pretty sure they'd get quite a few viewers too because the official seeds would be far more reliable than the unofficial ones operating out of Eastern Europe/someone's crappy home connection.
Any home that has a 2Mbps+ connection is a prime candidate for this sort of service.
With Access 2003 the default (Tools|Macro|Security) is medium security, which prompts the user about whether to run 'potentially unsafe' macros, the default being No. (in practice, all MDB files with macros that I've encountered). You can also choose 'High Security' which only allows macros signed by sources who are in your Trusted list.
It's pretty obvious to a user that a program is written using Delphi. They typically use a lot of stock icons and widgets that are distinctly Delphi.
That's because most programmers aren't artists and reuse whatever came with their IDE. Try Ultra Fractal, it might surprise you.
My rule-of-thumb to tell Delphi programs is (apart from using Spy++): when you right-click on a Delphi app's tab in the taskbar, you get only a Restore/Minimize/Close menu, not the usual Windows-standard Restore/Move/Size/Minimize/Maximize menu that Microsoft's IDEs use as the default. I was told this was something that's baked into Delphi's Forms implementation, I'd appreciate it if any Delphi gurus could correct me on this.
There could _lots_ of beneficial mutations even in our current environment... photographic memory, better regeneration... the problem is, our technology actually _breeds_ biological consistency: a mutant will sooner be carted off to hospital than be allowed to live out the rest of his life as he would normally (which may mean a brutish existence for many but _could_ allow a rare mutant to emerge).
Damn, I hadn't noticed the trolls fighting during the day. I'm afraid my tolkienity rating has dropped.
Actually your 'tolkienity' rating would have dropped _if_ you complained about the trolls who fought in the daytime:-)... Jackson was right there, see the appendices to ROTK (the book).
Yes, but the idea is with a standards-based frontend, the backend becomes interchangeable.. no vice-like Exchange/Domino grip just because you happen to use Notes/Outlook. Many people would use open-source solutions, and companies would pay for Oracle's solution for the reliability if they chose to.
Oracle has been trying since forever for enterprises to take up its Enterprise email offering (which works with Outlook AFAIK. I'm pretty sure they'd love to give a free rich client to their customers, which could explain their love for Mozilla Calendar. And yeah, if open standards-based Calendaring catches on, one of the biggest reasons to use proprietary software (Notes/Exchange) goes away.
If Open-Sourcers had a strategy department, they'd make Mozilla Calendar the most important product they have to ship, far more important than Firefox. Unfortunately (or fortunately for IBM/MS) things don't quite work that way.
Slashdot Mirror
If I make a text, book, memorandum with word I expect it to be mine not encrypted in some proprietary mambo jumbo that MS thinks it's the solution for me.
Except that Microsoft has now made a book (program) and published the alphabets (schema) to the book under a free of charge, perpetual licence. What's more, you understand the alphabets just fine (because it's XML) and converting it to your format is a series of trivial XSLT operations.
So what was your complaint again? Oh yes, you want them to publish the schema in YOUR pet format. Yeah, like their engineers have nothing better to do than get involved in the bureaucracy of file-format design-by-committee. (We know how well that worked for HTML/XHTML/CSS -- years of a public standards process and yet Safari, Opera and Gecko can't render alike)
Seems to me that the you're the one spouting 'mambo jumbo' here.
oops, link to licensing FAQ: http://www.microsoft.com/Office/xml/faq.mspx
> Microsoft is planning something.
I must say, without all the paranoia Slashdot would be far less entertaining...
> I'll bet anything they have a patent on the 'open' format.
Actually, they do, as they did last year when they released the reference schemas for Office 2003's XML. They are licensed as follows:
- free of charge
- include any current or future patent grants
- available to anyone: individual or organization
- perpetual
- code using these is freely distributable under any license, include open-source ones
The new formats are going to be licensed under the same terms.
And whatever happened to Office Integrated Rights Management
You want it, you install and use it ('it' being the Rights Management Server, which is basically a fancy keyserver). Digitally signing XML docs (even those in DOCX/XLSX like zip-containers) is no big deal, Java JARs have been doing it for years, and encrypting them isn't much of a bother either. Of course, if you don't use it, your docs will be easily readable by anyone else, man or machine.
And even if you do use it, 3rd parties who have your keys can decrypt your documents and then use their favorite tool to process them (it's, after all, XML).
What about patents?
Patents concerns were discussed when the Office 2003 schemas were licensed, this new format is being licensed under the same terms.
And regarding the standards-submission process, did you actually have a point in there, or did you just have the urge on defecate on the Slashdot Comments Page?
Fact: WMV is popular. WMV is currently licensed to hardware makers like Samsung using 1-to-1 deals with MS. It's in Microsoft's business interest to standardize it so that any hardware maker can, for a standardized royalty, use it in their devices (nothing says standards have to be free; MP3 isn't, for example). And AFAIK the committee will not endorse one format only, even if WMV is blessed by the committee, other formats will still be used.
Where did I say I was a linguist? I simply responded to a post where a random Slashdotter made an unsubstantiated (and in my mind uninformed) 'English sucks' post and stated (rather negatively I admit, but I had a bad day and this is /. and I've seen worse here) some reasons because of which English most certainly does not suck.
You on the other hand, bring nothing to the conversation other than a gripe about how pathetic my comment is. I'm quite sure that makes your comment less pathetic than mine. Have an excellent day.
Free does mean as-in-freedom. Marketers have co-opted 'Free' to also mean 'Gratis'. English provided them that flexibility. This is not a bug, it's a feature.
Perhaps if English was better, there would be an English word for Free-as-in-Freedom, and we wouldn't have to resort to determining meaning
Do 99.999999% of English speakers give a flying fuck about this little quirk? Hint: they don't. But if you do (and you are Just One Person) you can Make a Difference(tm). Start using the word libre as much as you can. Drop the accent marks to it's easier for English speakers. And lo and behold, sooner or later, more people will use it, and the OED will pick it up (they may already have...)
And yes, I stand by what I said: I'd rather take a language with quirks like these than a brain-damaged gender-typed language (and where new words are made by Academies to boot) English is inherently open-source: you have as much right to add to it as some stuffed shirt in Oxford.
Honestly, what is this guy smoking? We are creative beings... It really doesn't matter what people decide to do with their source code, there will always be innovation because it is human nature to think of new ways to do things.
Even more than creative, humans are _selfish_ beings. Which is why you will always find more innovation for profit than you will in a share-alike/open-source environment.
Innovations that actually make a difference happen mostly because of for-profit private enterprises. From cheap ubiquitous packet switching to Unix to the OS that has the most claim to running the internet -- IOS -- they were all created for profit. Sure, soviet scientists created computers too, but why did the computer revolution start in the US? In the end, the share-alike model could not make a difference.
I'm sure there are examples of open source innovation, but the for-profit will always have _more_ innovation to its credit. It's just the nature of the beast.
To do that on XP, you need to open two different programs, IE and Windows Explorer, and you cannot drag-and-drop if IE is maximized because then you cannot see the other window.
In IE: View | Explorer Bar | Folders. Or add the Folders button to your toolbar. Drag-and-drop is now quite easy.
To view it in XP you end up with three different windows, in konqueror it's done transparently.
Write a zip plugin for IE and you'll have done it in one. However, I'm thankful no one's done it (yet) because I'm not sure where this fetish for single-window mode came from (I have a hunch it's from command-line refugees using bad window managers, or from browseristas who insist on applying the back/forward browser model everywhere) but what's wrong with three windows? Why does everything have to be done within the shell/browser?
IIRC Xenon is only a codename for the IBM POWER chip, whereas Xeon is an actual trademark of Intel's.
Sorry for the double reply--
I've worked with new users (way back). We used Windows, Mac, and even a couple of custom interfaces we created ourselves in college.
1) The biggest challenge new users face is the keyboard and (if they're older) the mouse. The single mouse button helps. Young children like the mouse but are (very briefly) foxed by the sheer number of buttons on a keyboard.
2) Trying to read onscreen is the next challenge (for older people).
There's no way a new user would shoot for a goal-directed task like "burn CDs to MP3". If he's thinking on that level he's NOT a new user.
I've seen inexperience users ask around for how to rip MP3s in 1998 (unfriendly answer: LAME, friendly answer: MusicMatch), download MusicMatch, install it (Windows installation is not as hard as people make it out to be), pop a CD in and press the big red button that says 'Record'. And today Windows Media Player 10 has this friggin' huge Rip button on the main screen.
Photographs... I know there's an option for showing them as thumbs
XP shows them as thumbnails or slideshows by default if they're in My Pictures, which is exactly where a new user would place them, seeing that XP-ready image programs use that location as their default save folder in the File Save As dialog.
I know of no other application that integrates the web so seamlessly in a computer, and at the same time being so friendly in handling local files.
Apart from IE, you mean (although I grant it isn't very friendly)? Although -- sharing a systemwide HTML renderer is nice, but I'm not sure what user benefit there is in the file explorer and the browser being the same program (unless the file explorer is a web interface, which it's not in either IE or Konq). All it adds is two modes to Konquerer that can only confuse the casial user.
However, assuming a totally netural user who had never used a computer before
The 'totally neutral user' is sort of like the Abominable Snowman, much discussed but difficult to pin down in reality.
Metric time makes complete sense too, for people who've never been exposed to a calendar system before. And base-8 is totally natural if you didn't know base-10. The point is, Windows is so ubiquitous that there are very few totally neutral users, except maybe people living under forced scarcity like North Korea.
The vast untouched pool of 3rd world citizens Slashdot salivates about? Yes, Linux is touching them (witness all the OEM Linux-preloaded PCs selling in China and India), but so does Windows (witness the pirated CDs of XP being passed around), and currently it looks like Windows is winning.
And oh yeah -- there are really poor, uneducated citizens in countries like India for whom *both* Linux and Windows GUIs would be hard: because the Desktop/Folder metaphor itself is meaningless for them (Web-style forms based interfaces work better, probably because guv'mint bureaucracy has made everyone capable of recognizing a form).
Anyway, enough yammering-- I just wanted to say I really wish Linux evangelists wouldn't use this 'neutral user' line: it makes them look bad, almost as if they're telling users it's their fault: "oh this OS is perfect, it's just that your mind is too contaminated to experience the goodness of it." That, IMO, is the wrong message to send when you're migrating users from one OS to another.
I have to say that everyone I've known that has switched to Mac has been amazed at the stability and uptime and lack of neverending configuration hoop-jumping.
The only way the Mac would be used by a wider section of the market was if it supported crappier hardware. And if the Mac OS supported crappier hardware it too would have a pretty bad rep. (Note that this is not the only reason why Windows gets a bad rep, but it is an important reason.)
The idea of someone being 'passionately in love' with Windows is so laughable to all of us primarily because MS has been nothing but reactionary and predictable.
Actually, I'd be quite alarmed to meet anyone 'passionately in love' with Windows, OSX or Linux. I like Linux and think OSX looks neat, but 'passionately love'? It's an OS, for pete's sake. That's kinda like saying I love my screwdriver-set passionately.
Not to be trollish, but -- IMHO -- Macs and Linux are loved because they're used mostly by committed users who have made an active choice to use what they do.
But I've never known anyone who is really passionate about windows, some people prefer it to other operating systems but nobody really seems to love it.
You make a very interesting point: most non-corporate buyers today will not be able to tell you why they chose Windows, beyond a "It's what I'm familiar with" or "Everyone else uses it" or "My bottle-carving program runs on it". Windows is an externally enforced choice for most people. So far so good, and by now the slashbots would be frothing about how great it'd be if only the evil M$ was broken up so that people could finally Choose(tm).
Problem: if MS were to go away, something else would take its place, say Linux. When that happens, when Linux is mandated across broad swathes of business, you can be quite sure that the crowd of lusers that you now have would bring the inevitable kvetching about how The Computer Ate My Work(tm). No amount of telling them '..but Linux is stable!' will help: they'd sooner believe that the computer is a piece of shit than admit a mistake.
And oh: this is already happening today: We have a CRM app that runs crossplatform on Moz and IE, and quite a few of our customers (call centers who want their IT as lean-and-mean as possible) have standardized on Linux/OO.o because their users don't need much more. I've been to a few of these places, and FWIW the IT staff at at these places are happy as clams but user satisfaction has not gone up (it has actually dipped in a couple of places but I'm willing to pin that on poor retraining). Of course, none of this means anything except anecdotally but your post made me wonder how passionate a user in these companies would be about Linux.
The point is, you don't know if J Random website will hash your password before storing it.
> Login credentials are often stored unencrypted on the server side
Judging by the number of sites that can email your password back to you, the GP wasn't wrong.
Even though I'm a huge SG1 fan, I (and a lot of others in my Information Theory class) had a _lot_ of trouble with the wormhole concept. I don't know enough physics to articulate my problems well, but I really can't imagine how the entropy associated with these things would allow any _useful_ information (leave alone objects) to pass through. Any physics-literate /.-ers care to comment?
Honestly, how many people out there actually use the internet to listen to people's podcasts?
/.-er's reaction to hype, but there's a fine line between hype and potential: podcasting's potential is that it can remove the chokehold of a few corps (made possible by a spectrum shortage that podcasting routes around) on radio and make timeshifted 'broadcasting' a reality. And that, my friend, is big.
Podcasts are a special case of timeshifted radio: the special bit is that they were never broadcast in the first place. And timeshifted audio has a huge market: commuters who drive or go by train and have MP3 players.
Potential targets would include sports commentary, book club discussions, book readings, tech rants (I imagine Cringely'd be popular). Now, some of this may be available on radio as well -- that's irrelevant because the target market for podcasts are the people who can't, or couldn't, tune in. And why yes, there could be people whose individual podcasts become incredibly popular (how many'd have thought Belle de Jour's weblog would have taken off enough to earn her a book deal?)
I can understand the average
Yup, we could call ourselves the Open Source Association of America. The OSAA would would be a cartel of orgs big (IBM, Redhat, Novell, etc) and small, and we could go about auditing businesses' code for GPL violations.
When PHBs see our 733T audits-required letters, they'll _finally_ take Open Source seriously, because everyone knows you're not a serious player in this biz unless you send threatening letters by the dozen.
Nothing stops TV companies from offering Janus/Fairplay encoded content (with ads) via BitTorrent. I'm pretty sure they'd get quite a few viewers too because the official seeds would be far more reliable than the unofficial ones operating out of Eastern Europe/someone's crappy home connection.
Any home that has a 2Mbps+ connection is a prime candidate for this sort of service.
With Access 2003 the default (Tools|Macro|Security) is medium security, which prompts the user about whether to run 'potentially unsafe' macros, the default being No. (in practice, all MDB files with macros that I've encountered). You can also choose 'High Security' which only allows macros signed by sources who are in your Trusted list.
MDB can contain VBA macros. So can DOC and XLS files. Interestingly, Gmail does not block .xpi attachments which can be just as bad.
Of course, IMHO Google's just being cheap -- both Hotmail and Yahoo have been providing virus-scanning on the server for ages.
It's pretty obvious to a user that a program is written using Delphi. They typically use a lot of stock icons and widgets that are distinctly Delphi.
That's because most programmers aren't artists and reuse whatever came with their IDE. Try Ultra Fractal, it might surprise you.
My rule-of-thumb to tell Delphi programs is (apart from using Spy++): when you right-click on a Delphi app's tab in the taskbar, you get only a Restore/Minimize/Close menu, not the usual Windows-standard Restore/Move/Size/Minimize/Maximize menu that Microsoft's IDEs use as the default. I was told this was something that's baked into Delphi's Forms implementation, I'd appreciate it if any Delphi gurus could correct me on this.
There could _lots_ of beneficial mutations even in our current environment... photographic memory, better regeneration... the problem is, our technology actually _breeds_ biological consistency: a mutant will sooner be carted off to hospital than be allowed to live out the rest of his life as he would normally (which may mean a brutish existence for many but _could_ allow a rare mutant to emerge).
Damn, I hadn't noticed the trolls fighting during the day. I'm afraid my tolkienity rating has dropped.
:-) ... Jackson was right there, see the appendices to ROTK (the book).
Actually your 'tolkienity' rating would have dropped _if_ you complained about the trolls who fought in the daytime
Yes, but the idea is with a standards-based frontend, the backend becomes interchangeable .. no vice-like Exchange/Domino grip just because you happen to use Notes/Outlook. Many people would use open-source solutions, and companies would pay for Oracle's solution for the reliability if they chose to.
Oracle has been trying since forever for enterprises to take up its Enterprise email offering (which works with Outlook AFAIK. I'm pretty sure they'd love to give a free rich client to their customers, which could explain their love for Mozilla Calendar. And yeah, if open standards-based Calendaring catches on, one of the biggest reasons to use proprietary software (Notes/Exchange) goes away.
If Open-Sourcers had a strategy department, they'd make Mozilla Calendar the most important product they have to ship, far more important than Firefox. Unfortunately (or fortunately for IBM/MS) things don't quite work that way.