"# Use a good toolkit. If GPL is acceptable, consider QT."
QT is an excellent toolkit, and EVEN IF GPL is NOT acceptable Trolltech offers a QT commercial license. As far as portability goes I find it easy to use compiler defines automatically select code segments which would be platform specific. For example, Oracle doesn't require intermediate selects in an aggregate sum to have a name but PostgreSQL does. Appending a select name to a sql statement is a mere "if" test. With the right choice of fonts the GUI front ends are also transparent across Windows and Linux desktops.
That "fee" has no other purpose than to tilt the playing field against FOSS.
The question is NOT why do device makers allow themselves to become enslaved to Microsoft? The question is why doesn't the DOJ nip this MONOPOLIST action right now?
According to Oracle's way of thinking I am. So, I should NOT warn those in danger and just secretly call the Fire Department?
How lame does Oracle think people are... well, just as lame as Microsoft thinks they are. And they must be. Look how many put up with hole after hole after hole, and even defend MS on the blogs for not fixing holes.
People get EXACTLY what they allow, or worse.
Is it GPLed?
on
IE7 Leaked
·
· Score: 0, Flamebait
It seems that IE7 copied so much functionality from FireFox one has to wonder if Gate's coders merely took FF code and incorporated it into IE7. Since FF is GPL one has to ask: "where's the source?"
Oh, BTW, it you think anyone other than MICROSOFT leaked IE7 you're living in a fantasy world.
Three years ago I purchased a Saturn SL four door sedan with 5 speed stick shift. The milage on the sticker said 30 mpg in town and 40 on the hiway. Those numbers are pretty much what I get. My best in town was 32.1 mpg. My best on the hiway was 43.? mpg. That was on I-80 at 65 mpg. When I traver at 75-80 mph my milage drops to somewhere between 38-40 mpg. I am very pleased both with the fuel efficiency and with the over all quality of my Saturn. About two years ago some lady ran a red light and took the facia off the nose of my car. They had to tow her toyota away. I drove mine home, and then to the shop. Her tab. My Saturn still runs great. The only thing I don't like about it was the blue book priced dropped from $16K at sale time to around $5K resale value. I passed on the ICON3 that they offered. Besides, it got only 24mpg city and 30 mpg country.
Financial Pyramid Building Techniques Being Used by Microsoft:
"Stock option programs are an excellent benefit and many companies use them responsibly. At Microsoft, however, stock option accounting is only one of its many pyramid building techniques, what could be called a cash generating component. Additional pyramid building techniques include the following. It is important to note that the genius of the pyramid scheme is to leverage share growth from investors using a passive investment approach based upon indexing to the S&P 500. Most smaller and mid size technology firms are not in the S&P 500 and therefore are locked out of this key aspect of the pyramid from the beginning...."
and there's more. This accountant outlines 12 things Microsoft did and then describes the effects on our economy of those 12 things.
Isn't it about time CEOs start going to jail for this kind of fraud and deception? How many folks lost their retirement portfolio when this scheme crashed?
The fiction of the "CORPoration" - a "person" with even more rights and less responsibilities then a REAL person, a CORPUS, should be outlawed and people in charge held PERSONALLY responsible for these "corporate" crimes.
IF Dialectical Materialism is any measure of adherence to the Communist Manifesto, the USA is the most successful Communist country in the world.
Beginning with the Marshal Plan following WWII, the USA has given away more money and aid than all the other contries of the world combined. Japan and Western Europe were rebuilt by American generosity, and it was well into the 70's before they could begin altrustic donations, and then only because we bought their Volkswagons instead of Detroit's junk.
And now, 50 years later, we are shipping our manufacturing overseas, lowering our standard of living while raising the standard of living of every country that is now manufacturing the goods we once built but now buy at Walmart. China has been the biggest beneficiary.
And, manufacturing wasn't enough. Now we are sending our jobs over seas too.
But, NAFTA and OUT SOURCING aren't altruistic examples. They actually represent the greed of management and the stockholders, who don't understand that they are killing the Goose that laid the Golden eggs.
The fact that both political parties are doing their best to destroy those parts of the Constituion that they don't like, it won't be long before freedom of religion, the right to bear arms, or free speech or association will mean no more in the USA than it does in China.
Conversely, if Qt managed to become the dominant toolkit on Linux, Linux would be in deep trouble because it would simply not be cost competitive with Windows or Macintosh.
IF Qt manged to become the dominate toolkit on Linux? What planet to you live on?
I guess you haven't noticed that KDE has been and still IS the dominate Desktop on Linux and KDE is written using the GPL version of QT. Even when Novell announced it was switching to GNOME the backlash was so great they had to reverse themselves.
KDE is written under the GPL using the GPL version of QT (read ZERO $ licensing costs), which helps Linux to be VERY COMPETITIVE on the GUI desktop against XP and OSX.
I just upgraded my SimplyMEPIS 3.4.2 distro to KDE 3.5 and it is, IMO, far ahead of XP and the equal of OS X. I can even theme my desktop to look like OS X if I wanted to.
BTW, have you also noticed that the VAST MAJORITY of projects on SourceForge are built using QT? Why do you suppose that is? Could it be that the QT widget set is more mature, richer and easier to use?
Have you personally compared the QT Signal/Slot technology against the GTK++ callback functionality by doing some actual coding? I doubt it. Just to give you a clue, why don't you install Glade (and everything else GTK++ requires) and QT 4.1.0 GPL, then use Glade and Qt-Designer to write the same simple GUI app. Then come back and tell me which one was easier, looked nicer, will be easier to maintain, and will be easier to install. I'll know you've done your home work when you can tell me which files have to be deployed with your GNOME executable and which have to be deployed with your QT executable, to a serever that has NEITHER GNOME nor KDE installed, for both the Linux and XP platforms.
Why is KDE more popular? Could it be that GTK++ requires wxWindows (or what ever it's calling itself these days), Perl, and Python in order to use it effectively. And God forbid that your upgrade of GTK++ require's a version of wxWindows or Python or Perl that isn't availabe in a deb or rpm for your particular distro. I ran into that mouse trap while evaluating widget sets for our in house applications. Needless to say, we went with QT. I just completed a major app using QT 4.1.0. The source will compile unchanged on XP or Linux and works against either Oracle or PostgreSQL 8.1. The project began under QT 4.01 and upgrading to 4.10 was childs play.... no version problems at all.
Right out of HS in 1959, I attended the Barns School of Business to learn "computer programming", which was really just using jumper cords to connect holes in a patch board to a neutral bus board on the IBM 402 Tabulator. We used the 540 Gang Punch to enter data onto punch cards for sorting in the 402 Tabulator. The purpose of "programming" was to sort punch cards so the tabulator could tabulate them and sent the results to a printer. But, I looked too young and couldn't convince employers to hire me.
So, after bumbing around on a few jobs for a few years, I went to college. Nine years after my first "programming" training, in 1968, I took Fortran-64 programming in grad school. We used the KSR-133 tele typewriter which supposedly poked along at 10CPS, but if you tried touch typing at 10CPS you couldn't push the keys hard enough to make it punch a hole in the yellow spool of tape into which your program was punched. After spending a couple hours typing in my solution to the quadradic equation I'd put my reel of yellow tape in a brown envelope and the prof would mail it to the CDC6600 computer center in a town 120 miles away. A week later I'd get a printout showing the errors in my typing and the process would start all over. If the printout contained a printing of my program followed by the answer then I had completed the task. IIRC, we completed only 3 or 4 problems that semester. The next semester the physics dept had a contract with the local bank and their B200 computer. We still used the same KSr-133 but the turnaround was the next day because we could go to the bank after hours and see our programs being run. If the errors weren't too bad we could use their KSR-133 and do a "quick" correction on the spot.
I never used Fortran after that class, and it was only ten years later, in 1978, that I got back into programming using Apple II BASIC. In 1980 I resigned my teaching job and I've been programming every since. In 46 years I've seen "programming" go from patching a breadboard to using tools like Eclipse, KDevelop, MSVC++.NET on PERSONAL computers that are millions of times faster than the 402 Tabulator, or even the IBM 1400 series transistorized computer, which was just on the horizon as I graduated from Barnes. Now, researchers are beginning to get a handle on optical and quantum computing with 10's to 100 GB of RAM and all solid state storage replacing mechanical HDs.
OR, an existing monopoly can be APPROVED defacto by the DOJ switching to the monopolist side after the monopolist loses in court.
Then, the DOJ drives a toothless "settlement" through the appeals courts. To help secure the monopoly the DOJ secures office space on the monopolist campus, where the court appointed "watchdogs" can be housed and watched by the monopolist and appropriate pressure applied to them if they see any violations. Then, the monopolist can claim they aren't a monopoly and show the DOJ seal of approval for 'proof'. Meanwhile, they keep their hands around the throats of the OEM's, ready to "cut off their air supply" if the OEMs show any signs of independence.
DELL, HP and other OEMs face business crippling retribution from Microsoft if they put a competeive Linux offering ON THEIR FRONT PAGE and at a COMPETITIVE price.
IF Microsoft is so sure their OS and Office products are so superior to Linux and FOSS then they shouldn't mind if DELL featured a Linux box on page 1 along side an XP ad. IN FACT, if their OS is superior they should encourage DELL and the others to feature such a Linux ad. The resulting complaints and bad PR from disgruntled Linux purchasers would be enough to end the Linux threat for good.
Back in the early 80's I was working on an IBM computer and discovered that if I POKE'd a certain value into a certain memory location, and another value into other memory location within 15 ms, the filiment in the CRT would flare up. If not interrupted it would have burned the filiment out.
Today all one has to do is change the horz or vert sync ranges to some point out of range of the monitor and the monitor could be damaged. This is why about any description on setting up an xserver has warnings about the the horz and vert sync range setting:
Do not select a monitor similar to your monitor unless you are certain that the monitor you are selecting does not exceed the capabilities of your monitor. Doing so may overclock your monitor and damage or destroy it.."
IIRC, the "Patriot" Act was voted on by both houses and signed by Bush BEFORE it was returned from the first printing. Most, if not all, of our congress people DID NOT KNOW exactly what they were voting on, but in the hysteria of the moment they allowed themselves to be railroaded by fear.
Hopefully, this unconstitutional abomination of a bill will never resurrect itself. Any congressmen who tries to bring this monstrosity back should be tried for treason. Why do we need to worry about terrorists when gutless politicians do more damage to the Constitution than a bomb ever could?
I wonder how many Chinese agents/patriots are astroturfing this thread right now?
There's got to be more than one. Do you think their message is that "the US is a great country, and that Democracy is better than dictatorship of the prolitariet?"
cure cancer, the common cold and aid. IT will also result in zero-point energy power plants, and FTL vehicles. The benefits if IP patents just keep rolling in...
The owners of that site apparently were under the impression that Microsoft wanted to know about their bugs so they could fix them. Foolish people. What people actually learned when they reviewed the statistics collected by that site from Win95 through WinXP is that contrary to what Microsoft's PR department, their paid shills, astroturfers, journalists and 'consultants' said about how Windows was getting more stable with each version, the truth the data shows is that the stability has not improved at all.
Like victims of the Stockholm syndrome, users of Windows become sympathetic to their source of their torture. And, like a smoker reaching for a new cigarette when they have two already burning in the ash tray, people using Windows become unaware of the number of times their apps or machine crashes and if asked thinks the number is a lot lower than reality. The Bugtoaster data is like the pile of butts in the ash tray. They give a better measure of how many cigarettes the user smoked, and Bugtoaster gives a better measure of the average number of crashes a typical Windows users experiences.
My only question is what pushed Bugtoaster off line?
Brown quotes George Ou's "comparison" of Excel with OOo 2.0's Calc.
Like many of Ou's comparions, he loads the deck. For example, Ou claims FireFox has as many bugs and security holes as IE6 and even gives the nod to IE6. What he doesn't say is that his data is flawed. While FireFox is developed in full view of the public, with the users contributing to and able to browse the bug database, the users of IE6, including Ou, are kept in the dark about IE6 security holes until Microsoft decides to patch and announce them. So, while he reports ALL the FireFox bugs, he can only report the IE6 bugs that Microsoft allows to be made public, which exprience has shown is much lower in number than the actual IE6 bugs and holes. Ou's conclusion: FireFox has as many bugs and holes as IE6.
The Excel vs Calc comparison was just as loaded, just as slanted and just as impractical. It goes without saying that NO ONE in the real world uses a spreadsheet the way Ou used it, contrary to his claim. IN fact, Ou's spreadsheet was both impractical and worthless. The 'test' was merely a test of load times, comparing Excel with OOo2's Calc. The Excel file was in Excel's format as a 16 sheet spreadsheet with 32K rows per sheet, each row having 13 text fields with a total length of about 128 characters, IIRC. Why didn't Ou post his ODT file as an ODT file for OOo2? Why did he have to convert it to an SXW format to force those who would test his work to reconvert it back to the ODT format? The real question is, why was Ou using a spreadsheet when a database was called for. Ou reported that Excel loaded its Excel spreadsheet in 38 seconds and Calc loaded its ODT spreadsheet in 141 seconds. I don't own Excel but I did download his SXW spreadsheet, converted it to ODT and timed how long it took to load it. I, too, got around 140 seconds load time.
However, as a programmer I want to use the right tool for the job, and playing with 500,000 rows of text data isn't a job for a spreadsheet, it is a job for a database. So, using OOo 2.0's database capabilities I converted the ODT spreadsheet into a database. That took only a minute or so. Testing the load time as a database I found it to take less than ONE SECOND!!. Then I let OOo 2.0 automatically create a form, using its form autopilot, with which I could view, search, navigate, add, edit or delete the data. That also took less than a minute to do.
Then, I thought about timing how long it would take Excel to do those things I did with OOo 2.0, but I discovered that Excel doesn't have a database, it doesn't have a form autopilot, so the time it would take to do those things would be infinite. So, by Ou's logic, OOo 2.0 is infinitely faster than Excel.
Browns other criticisms can be as easily dismissed. By relying on Ou's slanted work to prop up his smear of OOo, Open Source and the Baazar, Brown has unmasked himself as a Microsoft shill of the worst kind... Mimiking the wolf who wore grandma's clothing in his attempt to kill Little Red Riding Hood, Brown is trying to kill FOOS while wearing a Penquin suit.
Slashdot Mirror
QT is an excellent toolkit, and EVEN IF GPL is NOT acceptable Trolltech offers a QT commercial license.
As far as portability goes I find it easy to use compiler defines automatically select code segments which would be platform specific. For example, Oracle doesn't require intermediate selects in an aggregate sum to have a name but PostgreSQL does. Appending a select name to a sql statement is a mere "if" test. With the right choice of fonts the GUI front ends are also transparent across Windows and Linux desktops.
That "fee" has no other purpose than to tilt the playing field against FOSS.
The question is NOT why do device makers allow themselves to become enslaved to Microsoft? The question is why doesn't the DOJ nip this MONOPOLIST action right now?
am I putting citizens at risk too?
According to Oracle's way of thinking I am. So, I should NOT warn those in danger and just secretly call the Fire Department?
How lame does Oracle think people are... well, just as lame as Microsoft thinks they are. And they must be. Look how many put up with hole after hole after hole, and even defend MS on the blogs for not fixing holes.
People get EXACTLY what they allow, or worse.
It seems that IE7 copied so much functionality from FireFox one has to wonder if Gate's coders merely took FF code and incorporated it into IE7. Since FF is GPL one has to ask: "where's the source?"
Oh, BTW, it you think anyone other than MICROSOFT leaked IE7 you're living in a fantasy world.
It will be patched before the number of talkbacks reaches 350, or 24 hours, which ever comes first.
t xt
Er, wait... it's already patched, and talkbacks are only at 194 !!!
http://kde.org/info/security/advisory-20060119-1.
Wow... announced yesterday and patched over night.
in the Netherlands when the trees start turning brown because all their photovoltaic energy is being syphoned off to run computers.
When they kill all the trees what will be their next target? Weeds?
Three years ago I purchased a Saturn SL four door sedan with 5 speed stick shift. The milage on the sticker said 30 mpg in town and 40 on the hiway. Those numbers are pretty much what I get. My best in town was 32.1 mpg. My best on the hiway was 43.? mpg. That was on I-80 at 65 mpg. When I traver at 75-80 mph my milage drops to somewhere between 38-40 mpg. I am very pleased both with the fuel efficiency and with the over all quality of my Saturn. About two years ago some lady ran a red light and took the facia off the nose of my car. They had to tow her toyota away. I drove mine home, and then to the shop. Her tab. My Saturn still runs great. The only thing I don't like about it was the blue book priced dropped from $16K at sale time to around $5K resale value. I passed on the ICON3 that they offered. Besides, it got only 24mpg city and 30 mpg country.
while traveling through the middle of the Nevada desert? That would be a rough awakinging!
http://www.billparish.com/msftfraudfacts.html
Financial Pyramid Building Techniques Being Used by Microsoft:
"Stock option programs are an excellent benefit and many companies use them responsibly. At Microsoft, however, stock option accounting is only one of its many pyramid building techniques, what could be called a cash generating component. Additional pyramid building techniques include the following. It is important to note that the genius of the pyramid scheme is to leverage share growth from investors using a passive investment approach based upon indexing to the S&P 500. Most smaller and mid size technology firms are not in the S&P 500 and therefore are locked out of this key aspect of the pyramid from the beginning.
and there's more. This accountant outlines 12 things Microsoft did and then describes the effects on our economy of those 12 things.
Isn't it about time CEOs start going to jail for this kind of fraud and deception? How many folks lost their retirement portfolio when this scheme crashed?
The fiction of the "CORPoration" - a "person" with even more rights and less responsibilities then a REAL person, a CORPUS, should be outlawed and people in charge held PERSONALLY responsible for these "corporate" crimes.
IF Dialectical Materialism is any measure of adherence to the Communist Manifesto, the USA is the most successful Communist country in the world.
Beginning with the Marshal Plan following WWII, the USA has given away more money and aid than all the other contries of the world combined. Japan and Western Europe were rebuilt by American generosity, and it was well into the 70's before they could begin altrustic donations, and then only because we bought their Volkswagons instead of Detroit's junk.
And now, 50 years later, we are shipping our manufacturing overseas, lowering our standard of living while raising the standard of living of every country that is now manufacturing the goods we once built but now buy at Walmart. China has been the biggest beneficiary.
And, manufacturing wasn't enough. Now we are sending our jobs over seas too.
But, NAFTA and OUT SOURCING aren't altruistic examples. They actually represent the greed of management and the stockholders, who don't understand that they are killing the Goose that laid the Golden eggs.
The fact that both political parties are doing their best to destroy those parts of the Constituion that they don't like, it won't be long before freedom of religion, the right to bear arms, or free speech or association will mean no more in the USA than it does in China.
Conversely, if Qt managed to become the dominant toolkit on Linux, Linux would be in deep trouble because it would simply not be cost competitive with Windows or Macintosh.
IF Qt manged to become the dominate toolkit on Linux? What planet to you live on?
I guess you haven't noticed that KDE has been and still IS the dominate Desktop on Linux and KDE is written using the GPL version of QT. Even when Novell announced it was switching to GNOME the backlash was so great they had to reverse themselves.
KDE is written under the GPL using the GPL version of QT (read ZERO $ licensing costs), which helps Linux to be VERY COMPETITIVE on the GUI desktop against XP and OSX.
I just upgraded my SimplyMEPIS 3.4.2 distro to KDE 3.5 and it is, IMO, far ahead of XP and the equal of OS X. I can even theme my desktop to look like OS X if I wanted to.
BTW, have you also noticed that the VAST MAJORITY of projects on SourceForge are built using QT? Why do you suppose that is? Could it be that the QT widget set is more mature, richer and easier to use?
Have you personally compared the QT Signal/Slot technology against the GTK++ callback functionality by doing some actual coding? I doubt it. Just to give you a clue, why don't you install Glade (and everything else GTK++ requires) and QT 4.1.0 GPL, then use Glade and Qt-Designer to write the same simple GUI app. Then come back and tell me which one was easier, looked nicer, will be easier to maintain, and will be easier to install. I'll know you've done your home work when you can tell me which files have to be deployed with your GNOME executable and which have to be deployed with your QT executable, to a serever that has NEITHER GNOME nor KDE installed, for both the Linux and XP platforms.
Why is KDE more popular? Could it be that GTK++ requires wxWindows (or what ever it's calling itself these days), Perl, and Python in order to use it effectively. And God forbid that your upgrade of GTK++ require's a version of wxWindows or Python or Perl that isn't availabe in a deb or rpm for your particular distro. I ran into that mouse trap while evaluating widget sets for our in house applications. Needless to say, we went with QT. I just completed a major app using QT 4.1.0. The source will compile unchanged on XP or Linux and works against either Oracle or PostgreSQL 8.1. The project began under QT 4.01 and upgrading to 4.10 was childs play.... no version problems at all.
mmm... I added a menu option to my SimplyMEPIS-3.4.2 to do those exact same commands!
Right out of HS in 1959, I attended the Barns School of Business to learn "computer programming", which was really just using jumper cords to connect holes in a patch board to a neutral bus board on the IBM 402 Tabulator. We used the 540 Gang Punch to enter data onto punch cards for sorting in the 402 Tabulator. The purpose of "programming" was to sort punch cards so the tabulator could tabulate them and sent the results to a printer. But, I looked too young and couldn't convince employers to hire me.
So, after bumbing around on a few jobs for a few years, I went to college. Nine years after my first "programming" training, in 1968, I took Fortran-64 programming in grad school. We used the KSR-133 tele typewriter which supposedly poked along at 10CPS, but if you tried touch typing at 10CPS you couldn't push the keys hard enough to make it punch a hole in the yellow spool of tape into which your program was punched. After spending a couple hours typing in my solution to the quadradic equation I'd put my reel of yellow tape in a brown envelope and the prof would mail it to the CDC6600 computer center in a town 120 miles away. A week later I'd get a printout showing the errors in my typing and the process would start all over. If the printout contained a printing of my program followed by the answer then I had completed the task. IIRC, we completed only 3 or 4 problems that semester. The next semester the physics dept had a contract with the local bank and their B200 computer. We still used the same KSr-133 but the turnaround was the next day because we could go to the bank after hours and see our programs being run. If the errors weren't too bad we could use their KSR-133 and do a "quick" correction on the spot.
I never used Fortran after that class, and it was only ten years later, in 1978, that I got back into programming using Apple II BASIC. In 1980 I resigned my teaching job and I've been programming every since. In 46 years I've seen "programming" go from patching a breadboard to using tools like Eclipse, KDevelop, MSVC++.NET on PERSONAL computers that are millions of times faster than the 402 Tabulator, or even the IBM 1400 series transistorized computer, which was just on the horizon as I graduated from Barnes. Now, researchers are beginning to get a handle on optical and quantum computing with 10's to 100 GB of RAM and all solid state storage replacing mechanical HDs.
What a ride it has been!!!
OR, an existing monopoly can be APPROVED defacto by the DOJ switching to the monopolist side after the monopolist loses in court.
Then, the DOJ drives a toothless "settlement" through the appeals courts. To help secure the monopoly the DOJ secures office space on the monopolist campus, where the court appointed "watchdogs" can be housed and watched by the monopolist and appropriate pressure applied to them if they see any violations. Then, the monopolist can claim they aren't a monopoly and show the DOJ seal of approval for 'proof'. Meanwhile, they keep their hands around the throats of the OEM's, ready to "cut off their air supply" if the OEMs show any signs of independence.
DELL, HP and other OEMs face business crippling retribution from Microsoft if they put a competeive Linux offering ON THEIR FRONT PAGE and at a COMPETITIVE price.
IF Microsoft is so sure their OS and Office products are so superior to Linux and FOSS then they shouldn't mind if DELL featured a Linux box on page 1 along side an XP ad. IN FACT, if their OS is superior they should encourage DELL and the others to feature such a Linux ad. The resulting complaints and bad PR from disgruntled Linux purchasers would be enough to end the Linux threat for good.
Or, it took me about a minute to go "wayback" to the March 6th page to see the last complete list that was published.
Back in the early 80's I was working on an IBM computer and discovered that if I POKE'd a certain value into a certain memory location, and another value into other memory location within 15 ms, the filiment in the CRT would flare up. If not interrupted it would have burned the filiment out.
- 1.0-Manual/s1-cd-rom-gui-xconf.html
."
Today all one has to do is change the horz or vert sync ranges to some point out of range of the monitor and the monitor could be damaged. This is why about any description on setting up an xserver has warnings about the the horz and vert sync range setting:
http://www.redhat.com/docs/manuals/haserver/RHHAS
"Caution Caution
Do not select a monitor similar to your monitor unless you are certain that the monitor you are selecting does not exceed the capabilities of your monitor. Doing so may overclock your monitor and damage or destroy it.
IIRC, the "Patriot" Act was voted on by both houses and signed by Bush BEFORE it was returned from the first printing. Most, if not all, of our congress people DID NOT KNOW exactly what they were voting on, but in the hysteria of the moment they allowed themselves to be railroaded by fear.
Hopefully, this unconstitutional abomination of a bill will never resurrect itself. Any congressmen who tries to bring this monstrosity back should be tried for treason. Why do we need to worry about terrorists when gutless politicians do more damage to the Constitution than a bomb ever could?
I wish I could mod you higher but your comment is already at 5.
I wonder how many Chinese agents/patriots are astroturfing this thread right now?
There's got to be more than one. Do you think their message is that "the US is a great country, and that Democracy is better than dictatorship of the prolitariet?"
I hope so!
cure cancer, the common cold and aid. IT will also result in zero-point energy power plants, and FTL vehicles. The benefits if IP patents just keep rolling in...
Not buggy? Ya, right.
t oaster.com/dw15/Reports/OperatingSystems.asp
Why don't you state the real reason: MONOPOLY.
There use to be a website called www.bugtoaster.com. It's purpose was to track bugs in Windows and windows software. It went off line after 6/7/2005 but the last page of the OS bugs is at
http://web.archive.org/web/20040607071525/www.bug
The owners of that site apparently were under the impression that Microsoft wanted to know about their bugs so they could fix them. Foolish people. What people actually learned when they reviewed the statistics collected by that site from Win95 through WinXP is that contrary to what Microsoft's PR department, their paid shills, astroturfers, journalists and 'consultants' said about how Windows was getting more stable with each version, the truth the data shows is that the stability has not improved at all.
Like victims of the Stockholm syndrome, users of Windows become sympathetic to their source of their torture. And, like a smoker reaching for a new cigarette when they have two already burning in the ash tray, people using Windows become unaware of the number of times their apps or machine crashes and if asked thinks the number is a lot lower than reality. The Bugtoaster data is like the pile of butts in the ash tray. They give a better measure of how many cigarettes the user smoked, and Bugtoaster gives a better measure of the average number of crashes a typical Windows users experiences.
My only question is what pushed Bugtoaster off line?
Brown quotes George Ou's "comparison" of Excel with OOo 2.0's Calc.
Like many of Ou's comparions, he loads the deck. For example, Ou claims FireFox has as many bugs and security holes as IE6 and even gives the nod to IE6. What he doesn't say is that his data is flawed. While FireFox is developed in full view of the public, with the users contributing to and able to browse the bug database, the users of IE6, including Ou, are kept in the dark about IE6 security holes until Microsoft decides to patch and announce them. So, while he reports ALL the FireFox bugs, he can only report the IE6 bugs that Microsoft allows to be made public, which exprience has shown is much lower in number than the actual IE6 bugs and holes. Ou's conclusion: FireFox has as many bugs and holes as IE6.
The Excel vs Calc comparison was just as loaded, just as slanted and just as impractical. It goes without saying that NO ONE in the real world uses a spreadsheet the way Ou used it, contrary to his claim. IN fact, Ou's spreadsheet was both impractical and worthless. The 'test' was merely a test of load times, comparing Excel with OOo2's Calc. The Excel file was in Excel's format as a 16 sheet spreadsheet with 32K rows per sheet, each row having 13 text fields with a total length of about 128 characters, IIRC. Why didn't Ou post his ODT file as an ODT file for OOo2? Why did he have to convert it to an SXW format to force those who would test his work to reconvert it back to the ODT format? The real question is, why was Ou using a spreadsheet when a database was called for. Ou reported that Excel loaded its Excel spreadsheet in 38 seconds and Calc loaded its ODT spreadsheet in 141 seconds. I don't own Excel but I did download his SXW spreadsheet, converted it to ODT and timed how long it took to load it. I, too, got around 140 seconds load time.
However, as a programmer I want to use the right tool for the job, and playing with 500,000 rows of text data isn't a job for a spreadsheet, it is a job for a database. So, using OOo 2.0's database capabilities I converted the ODT spreadsheet into a database. That took only a minute or so. Testing the load time as a database I found it to take less than ONE SECOND!!. Then I let OOo 2.0 automatically create a form, using its form autopilot, with which I could view, search, navigate, add, edit or delete the data. That also took less than a minute to do.
Then, I thought about timing how long it would take Excel to do those things I did with OOo 2.0, but I discovered that Excel doesn't have a database, it doesn't have a form autopilot, so the time it would take to do those things would be infinite. So, by Ou's logic, OOo 2.0 is infinitely faster than Excel.
Browns other criticisms can be as easily dismissed. By relying on Ou's slanted work to prop up his smear of OOo, Open Source and the Baazar, Brown has unmasked himself as a Microsoft shill of the worst kind... Mimiking the wolf who wore grandma's clothing in his attempt to kill Little Red Riding Hood, Brown is trying to kill FOOS while wearing a Penquin suit.