I'm aware that some of the big labels might pull out of France/iTunes because of reduced DRM but this is a short term pain, long term gain situation.
The latter would create a shit storm amongst customers in France, and could rebound on their government quite badly.
Not necessarily. All the government has to do is to make clear they're defending their citizen's freedoms. They can spin just as well as the labels can.
After all, your average member of the public wouldn't give a rats ass about why they can't get music for their iPod any more, they just want it. Period!
Not true. All Apple/iTunes has to do is ramp up non-label content (easier in France than almost any other first world country), remind customers they can import from CD's, make clear to their customers why the labels have withdrawn direct download and watch their customers develop interest in non-label music. Plus buy label CD's and convert the content to iTunes compatible form. And pirate it wholesale because they want to give the labels the finger for saying "France isn't good enough".
Basically, the labels like to think it's "my way or the highway." They forget that others see it differently.
In the long term I think the labels are unlikely to win because they're trying to go against the natural human tendency to share things with friends.
---
Unregulated DRM = Total Customer Control = Ultimate Customer Lockin = Death of the free market.
Well then, if slashdotters should stay out of the law business then perhaps patent lawyers should stay out of the software business.
Fact is, people will discuss anything that affects them. Patent law is currently affecting millions of software developers badly and so will be discussed.
Certainly lawyers on slashdot should correct technical errors about the law-as-it-is if possible but they should not pretend that the law-as-it-is is perfect and the only answer. People will discuss the law-as-it-is versus the law-as-it-should-be and no amount of bitching by lawyers taking advantage of the law-as-it-is is going to change that. Fortunately.
Lawyers in general and lawyers in congress are trying to run a gigantic game of nomic for their own benefit on the general population, incrementally trying to apply law to more and more of daily life, patents being the most obvious example. This will only be fixed when non-lawyers tell the lawyers to take a leap.
---
Creating simple artificial scarcity with copyright and patents on things that can be copied billions of times at minimal cost is a fundamentally stupid economic idea.
There is nothing special about software that should not permit patenting.
Except that 99.9% of software ideas require no investment and thus no protection. Don't confuse business investment with research investment. In any case there is nothing special about software that should permit patenting. I have the idea of opening the first hardware store in a small town. It's new, nobody done it before. It requires investment. WTF shouldn't I be able to get a patent protecting my new idea so there are no competitors in that small town? Or in towns of similar size? Or towns starting with the letter A? Think long and hard about your answer, and what the real purpose of patents are and where they should be applied. The onus is on the patent office to show why they should be interfering in the citizen's business when huge numbers of experts in the field they are interfering in are telling them they are nuts. To put it another way, the patent office is a classic example of "when all you've got is a hammer, everything looks like a nail."
Patents can clearly serve a purpose for software, which is why they are allowed.
The standard USPTO baseless propaganda. "Can" is not the same as "will". There is no scientific evidence for patents being of any benefit at all in software and a lot of anecdotal evidence saying the opposite.
There are plenty of algorithms which rightly deserve to be patentable. Things like public-key encryption, many of the compression algorithms, and so on.
You have no idea. Most of these were incrementally developed over long periods of time by many people with the "inventors" only putting the final piece in the puzzle. The advantage to society that patents in software might give to these ideas, if any, is vastly outweighed by the huge numbers of software ideas that are of more benefit to everybody left unchained.
---
Creating simple artificial scarcity with copyright and patents on things that can be copied billions of times at minimal cost is a fundamentally stupid economic idea.
The law ends up having to draw a sharp line between night and day,
No, only innumerate lawyers and law makers have to arbitrarily define a sharp line between night and day. The rest of us accept that a line may be fuzzy and deal with it accordingly.
A big part of the patent mess is lawyers who think in terms of boxes (e.g. itemized lists of so-called inventions) and have a hard time thinking and reasoning about gradual change, incremental invention and designing laws to reflect the same.
---
Creating simple artificial scarcity with copyright and patents on things that can be copied billions of times at minimal cost is a fundamentally stupid economic idea.
What incentive would, say, Sony BMG have to license music to any French digital music retailer, if that retailer wnated to sell their music in a non-DRM'ed format?
The same incentive as always, to make money. Removing DRM doesn't change that.
It might reduce the value to Sony BMG of the music involved but since the marginal cost to Sony BMG of each piece of music sold is close to zero all that value change is doing is making it a more rational free market. For the consumer this law might reduce the cost (because the retailer can pass on savings) and increase the value (because the consumer can do more with the product). I say "might" because as you say it depends on how the law is worded.
With luck it might even encourage other countries, particularly in the EU, to lift their mostly abysmal legal game on DRM, rights and the free market.
---
Unregulated DRM = Total Customer Control = Ultimate Customer Lockin = Death of the free market.
It wouldn't make sense to say many bad things about a game before it's even finished; it wouldn't be fair.
Nonsense. This is a typical marketer rationalisation for lying.
It is highly unfair to the consumer for a previewer to be allowed to misrepresent the game preview to the consumer.
It is no more or less fair to be positive or negative in a preview. If the game publisher feels that a preview may not be overall in their interest then they don't have to send out the preview. Their choice.
---
The majority of modern marketing is nothing more than an arms race to get mind share. Everybody loses except the parasitic marketing "industry".
Actually, that isn't 'Attention Deficit Disorder'. It's 'flow', otherwise known as 'concentration' or being 'in the zone'.
The symptoms of ADD (in adults difficulty with time management, organization, risk-taking, careless behavior, and distractible and impulsive behavior) have absolutely nothing to do with 'flow'. Any job which requires the manipulation of complex abstract mental models over hours of time while performing a task causes 'flow', particularly abstract models with little relationship to the day-to-day.
Some programmers compensate for their limited ability to create and manipulate a sophisticated mental model of the program by being better at things like documentation and user interface however if you want the code itself to be good you need somebody who can abstract, not just talk. i.e. can juggle complex mental models for hours at a time.
Incidentally, many psychiatrists suffer from the "when all you've got is a hammer, everything looks like a nail" syndrome. Most human behaviour is ambiguous enough to be considered as mental illness if looked at the right way and ADD and other psychiatric disorders are often mis-applied because of this.
---
Open source software is everything that closed source software is. Plus the source is available.
And many are not. That's the interesting thing about open forums such as/.. If a turfer says "oo chart can't do X", then there are bound to be a bunch of people who know damn well it can, and will reply that way.
Astroturfers aren't that stupid. Marketers are masters of innuendo and half truths and they use that skill to the max. Most everything they say is a half truth designed to misdirect the reader without actually being falsifiable.
Now, that's not to say that they can't spread general FUD (e.g. "it's slow as hell" (which it is),
Nonsense. I use OO2 most days on a standard office PC and it's no speed daemon but it is not "slow as hell." Classic piece of innuendo there.
"it makes ugly charts" (it does),
Nonsense. The charts are basic but functional and similar to most graphing packages.
"it doesn't have as many features" (whatever that means)) based on fairly subjective criteria.
OO has a huge feature set. Not as large as M$ office but more than enough for most office tasks.
But those posts are easy to sniff out.
Only if the reader has the time and is aware that they're being deceived. The point of my post was to increase awareness of the fraudulent tactics that marketers engage in.
---
Marketing talk is not just cheap, it has negative value. Free speech can be compromised just as much by too much noise as too little signal.
There's no way in hell spin like this would be tolerated on slashdot.
Bullshit. The only thing even possibly biased in the entire review is the one paragraph "teaser" at the beginning designed to get the reader in. And it's not even biased, it's just making an odd comparison with something completely unrelated.
Anyway, I don't mind this review.. but would like to see reviews of Microsoft products well tolerated on here in a balanced manner.
When M$ tolerates balanced reviews on their own website then maybe we can talk about "balance" on slashdot.
Slashdot is a generally open source website. Open source websites are needed to balance out blatantly biased high volume sites like microsoft, msn and Paul Thurrott.
---
Marketing talk is not just cheap, it has negative value. Free speech can be compromised just as much by too much noise as too little signal.
Be warned that many of the comments and FUD here are by lying astroturfers. Probably sock puppets too.
The reality is that this review is a useful introduction to open office chart, and open office chart and open office in general work just fine.
Remember, OO is open source; you can download it any time you like and make your own decision. No need to believe me or the astroturfers.
M$ and other companies have multi-million dollar incentives to pollute forums like slashdot. e.g. M$ makes $40,000,000,000+ per year. A tiny 1% drop in that revenue is $400,000,000. That pays for an awful lot of marketing propaganda and given the size and global influence of slashdot's readership a 1% drop (or more!) is easily possible over the long term.
Given M$'s business ethics (i.e. if it's halfway legal and it makes money it's ethical) do you honestly think that they won't be going all out? The marketing industry in general regards astroturfing as a legitimate tool. Keep in mind that marketers aren't stupid and can be very sophisticated in their manipulativeness, including fake conversations, fake moderation and entire fake websites.
M$ will be using a third party marketing firm to get plausible deniability when they get caught and also to reduce the impact on the morale of their own developers. M$ has been caught many times before astroturfing and it's common industry practice. Other examples on slashdot that can trigger astroturfing are Adobe's cash cow Photoshop whenever gimp is mentioned and the RIAA whenever copyright and patents are discussed. Astroturfing even happens off the net.
Common astroturfer tactics on slashdot are to emotionally associate open source with something bad, to apply a negative argument to open source that applies equally to all software, to apply a positive argument to commercial software that applies equally to all software, to pretend that commercial licenses are less onerous than open source licenses, to gloss over the fact that readers can download and test open source for themselves, to flood technical stories with irrelevant tachnical information about a commercial product only vaguely relevant to the article at hand, to flood the slashdot editors with commercial propaganda article submissions, and to flood open source discussions with irrelevant nonsense to drown out rational discussion and evaluation.
I have no connection with either OO, M$ or the marketing industry. I just hate liars.
---
Marketing talk is not just cheap, it has negative value. Free speech can be compromised just as much by too much noise as too little signal.
Its too risky for a big corporation or organisation to develop one... You would need auditor sign offs etc.
No, this is no different from any business software. ERP is just lots of little packages working together to organise a business.
And the Oracle and SAP systems are top end...
Only in the sense of "big money". The actual software itself is bottom end. As pretty much anybody who's used it will tell you.
for large organisations milllions of transactions a day. Scaleable systems at that size are not built quickly
FUD. Google, with one of the largest setups on the planet, uses open source software and doesn't seem to have any trouble. Scalability is just a design issue. Like everything else.
and people want to have a vendor to blame.
Sigh, more FUD. I'm quite sure that there are plenty of open source companies that would be happy to step up to the plate for an extremely good value maintenance contract (by SAP/Oracle standards) for any set of software a business wanted.
There are legal issues as well to ensure Sarbanes-Oxley and Basel II compliance.
No different from any piece of business software.
I have tried to get my company to look at building an open source System to replace Peoplesoft instead of Fusion... but there is no interest.
At your company.
Open source ERP is potentially a large investment that could take a while to get payback on but it is also an area that could be done incrementally. There are a number of open source workflow packages that could form the nucleus of an ERP and there are many open source packages that could be adapted to perform various ERP functions. I'd suggest open source companies interested in this area pick some element of the ERP puzzle and specialise in it. By using open standards your software can then work with other ERP specialists and cover a larger part of the ERP space.
If anyone does want to start one though - Im in !
Glad to hear it.
A big hurdle an open source ERP package would face is to find a businesses where the software could be tested in real life. Very few businesses would be willing to risk their core processes on something untested. Again though, it could all be done incrementally. Likely to be more cost effective and safer than many "big bang" SAP conversions.
---
Don't be fooled, slashdot has many lying astroturfers fraudulently misrepresenting company propaganda as third party opinion. FUD too.
Which is why I find it baffling that people let the wool be pulled over their eyes on AMD's mobile offerings.
Don't be fooled.
Many of the posts, stories and positive/negative moderations on slashdot these days are just lying marketing astroturfers and socket puppets, fraudulently misrepresenting company propaganda as a personal opinion. This post for example but they can be much more manipulative with Dorothy Dix'ers and various other forms of fake "conversations" and straw man arguments.
This single story probably has many lying marketers and their sock puppets going for broke. Possibly the story submission itself is a plant - marketers love creating fraudulent "grass roots" web sites to create fake "buzz" and it's a real shame that the law hasn't caught up with them yet. Much of the repetition in slashdot stories and comments is due to marketers repetitively pushing their propaganda.
---
Marketing talk is not just cheap, it has negative value. Free speech can be compromised just as much by too much noise as too little signal.
I was thinking of the closed source Java runtime,.net and a host of other commercial interpreted languages. I've debugged interrupt handling in such interpreted environments (with additional, third-party, compiled, shared libraries e.g. DLL's with M$VisualBasic) and it can get messy.
---
Open source software is everything that closed source software is. Plus the source is available.
This attitude may work well in small throw-away projects, but from experience I can tell you, maintaining a mixed language product is hell.
Only if you didn't plan for it and didn't use standardised languages and tools available from multiple suppliers.
Just think about the awful mess you're going to have 5 years down, when you need to do an upgrade.
One of open source's strengths is the upgrade path. You can't be left hanging by the vendor if you want to keep something running. I've been on projects that lasted more than a decade. In the proprietary, closed source tools were a big problem moving to new platforms but the open source was generally easy. You, not the vendor, controls your destiny.
If the whole project is written in one language, you're going to have to find only one replacement compiler/library/development environment - which can be hard enough.
Again, only if you didn't plan and you used closed source tools that the vendor has decided not to port to whatever your new platform is.
If you have a mix of exotic languages, you basically can forget it, just rewrite the whole mess.
Even if the whole project is in a single language that problem will arise. Rewrites usually happen because of changing requirements, not because of the language[s] that was used. If requirements haven't changed just use legacy hardware
The same applies to training. The original developers may have been the biggest guru in the necessary languages, but where are you going to find maintenance drones that are fluent enough in all of them? Training a halfwit well enough to maintain some crappy C-Code is hard enough, trying to train him in C, Ruby, Scheme and Haskell is impossible. And even if you'd succeed, Mr C-Ruby-Scheme-Haskell-Halfwit won't stay once he comes out of training, he'll be gone to the next job before the ink on his new resume dried.
True, but you need to strike a balance. Having a single language can unnecessarily restrict the speed, flexibility and adaptability of the development. Having too many, particularly closed source proprietary languages, or even narrow open source research languages, will bring the problems you describe.
All in all, if you're doing long term projects stay with one language and try not to use too many extra libraries where you don't have the source code available.
All in all, use all the languages you need to use and no more, whether they be C++, Java, SQL, OpenGL or a library API (which in itself is just another "language"). Make a business case for every language you use being the best alternative with all factors taken into consideration including interroperability and don't be snowed by vendor efforts to sell you "integrated" solutions, which are generally just a polite way of saying "we own you".
---
Unregulated DRM = Total Customer Control = Ultimate Customer Lockin = Death of the free market.
why does factually inaccurate nonsense get moderated as insightful? Anybody?
It's probably publishers' marketing drones using sock puppets to astroturf and mod. Also posting Dorothy Dix'ers. Anything to get their viewpoint as much mindshare as possible. At the expense of every other viewpoint of course.
There are probably dozens of such lying lowlifes on slashdot, and possibly hundreds or even thousands. They justify their lying by claiming that "the message speaks for itself" and "marketers have a right to free speech just like everybody else" and "it doesn't matter who says it". All bullshit of course. If they weren't lying at a minimum they'd have the common decency to put the companies they're representing in their sig's, knowing full well they'd be largely ignored. Guess why?
Misrepresenting company propaganda as an objective, third party viewpoint is fraud and it's a real shame that the law hasn't caught up with them yet. They call it undercover marketing, part of guerilla marketing, but it's really just fraud.
---
Marketing talk is not just cheap, it has negative value. Free speech can be compromised just as much by too much noise as too little signal.
They are copying the whole book, and AFAIK, fair use doesn't allow for that. I fail to see why they should get any special exemption(s).
Copyright is "To promote the progress of science and useful arts". I fail to see why existing copyright holders should get any special exemption(s).
See how changing viewpoint changes what "consistency" and "exemptions" are? In every situation you can categorize things in different ways and as a result change what these words mean. In this case you are automatically assuming that the current, literal law's viewpoint is the only viewpoint. Fortunately, the law can and does change all the time. And before those laws can change they need to be discussed and evaluated.
A lot of "IP" people (i.e. people with a vested interest in maintaining the status quo) have a hard time (possibly wilfully) understanding that.
---
DRM'ed content breaks the copyright bargain. It should not be possible to copyright DRM'ed content.
dedazo, and some of the replies, are probably M$ marketing astroturfers. M$ marketing drones appear to have been trying to deflect attention from M$ to google the last few weeks.
Of course; completely ignoring the fact that, unlike M$, competition for google is just a mouse click away.
---
Astroturfing "marketers" are lying lowlife, misrepresenting company propaganda as a personal opinion.
if you have a large amount of physical RAM, you'll swap a lot less than if you have just enough for the OS.
While technically correct (swapping only applies to the disk) there are several levels to the memory hierarchy with main memory itself having level 1 and 2 caches (3 levels if you include the registers). You want to keep as much as possible in those caches.
The size of the code and data, and the access pattern, can make a huge difference to the speed of the code - 300% or more, even with good algorithms and no disk access at all.
---
Marketing talk is not just cheap, it has negative value. Free speech can be compromised just as much by too much noise as too little signal.
It's astroturfing marketers. The marketers repeatedly submit articles and hope some will get through.
The editors aren't robots, they will make mistakes, this submission flood give them a false view of what's interesting and worthwhile, and it's statistically inevitable that repeats like this will happen. Many of the articles on slashdot these days are created by marketers trying to steal people's time for their own benefit and nobody else's.
---
Marketing talk is not just cheap, it has negative value. Free speech can be compromised just as much by too much noise as too little signal.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm aware that some of the big labels might pull out of France/iTunes because of reduced DRM but this is a short term pain, long term gain situation.
The latter would create a shit storm amongst customers in France, and could rebound on their government quite badly.
Not necessarily. All the government has to do is to make clear they're defending their citizen's freedoms. They can spin just as well as the labels can.
After all, your average member of the public wouldn't give a rats ass about why they can't get music for their iPod any more, they just want it. Period!
Not true. All Apple/iTunes has to do is ramp up non-label content (easier in France than almost any other first world country), remind customers they can import from CD's, make clear to their customers why the labels have withdrawn direct download and watch their customers develop interest in non-label music. Plus buy label CD's and convert the content to iTunes compatible form. And pirate it wholesale because they want to give the labels the finger for saying "France isn't good enough".
Basically, the labels like to think it's "my way or the highway." They forget that others see it differently.
In the long term I think the labels are unlikely to win because they're trying to go against the natural human tendency to share things with friends.
---
Unregulated DRM = Total Customer Control = Ultimate Customer Lockin = Death of the free market.
Well then, if slashdotters should stay out of the law business then perhaps patent lawyers should stay out of the software business.
Fact is, people will discuss anything that affects them. Patent law is currently affecting millions of software developers badly and so will be discussed.
Certainly lawyers on slashdot should correct technical errors about the law-as-it-is if possible but they should not pretend that the law-as-it-is is perfect and the only answer. People will discuss the law-as-it-is versus the law-as-it-should-be and no amount of bitching by lawyers taking advantage of the law-as-it-is is going to change that. Fortunately.
Lawyers in general and lawyers in congress are trying to run a gigantic game of nomic for their own benefit on the general population, incrementally trying to apply law to more and more of daily life, patents being the most obvious example. This will only be fixed when non-lawyers tell the lawyers to take a leap.
---
Creating simple artificial scarcity with copyright and patents on things that can be copied billions of times at minimal cost is a fundamentally stupid economic idea.
There is nothing special about software that should not permit patenting.
Except that 99.9% of software ideas require no investment and thus no protection. Don't confuse business investment with research investment. In any case there is nothing special about software that should permit patenting. I have the idea of opening the first hardware store in a small town. It's new, nobody done it before. It requires investment. WTF shouldn't I be able to get a patent protecting my new idea so there are no competitors in that small town? Or in towns of similar size? Or towns starting with the letter A? Think long and hard about your answer, and what the real purpose of patents are and where they should be applied. The onus is on the patent office to show why they should be interfering in the citizen's business when huge numbers of experts in the field they are interfering in are telling them they are nuts. To put it another way, the patent office is a classic example of "when all you've got is a hammer, everything looks like a nail."
Patents can clearly serve a purpose for software, which is why they are allowed.
The standard USPTO baseless propaganda. "Can" is not the same as "will". There is no scientific evidence for patents being of any benefit at all in software and a lot of anecdotal evidence saying the opposite.
There are plenty of algorithms which rightly deserve to be patentable. Things like public-key encryption, many of the compression algorithms, and so on.
You have no idea. Most of these were incrementally developed over long periods of time by many people with the "inventors" only putting the final piece in the puzzle. The advantage to society that patents in software might give to these ideas, if any, is vastly outweighed by the huge numbers of software ideas that are of more benefit to everybody left unchained.
---
Creating simple artificial scarcity with copyright and patents on things that can be copied billions of times at minimal cost is a fundamentally stupid economic idea.
The law ends up having to draw a sharp line between night and day,
No, only innumerate lawyers and law makers have to arbitrarily define a sharp line between night and day. The rest of us accept that a line may be fuzzy and deal with it accordingly.
A big part of the patent mess is lawyers who think in terms of boxes (e.g. itemized lists of so-called inventions) and have a hard time thinking and reasoning about gradual change, incremental invention and designing laws to reflect the same.
---
Creating simple artificial scarcity with copyright and patents on things that can be copied billions of times at minimal cost is a fundamentally stupid economic idea.
What incentive would, say, Sony BMG have to license music to any French digital music retailer, if that retailer wnated to sell their music in a non-DRM'ed format?
The same incentive as always, to make money. Removing DRM doesn't change that.
It might reduce the value to Sony BMG of the music involved but since the marginal cost to Sony BMG of each piece of music sold is close to zero all that value change is doing is making it a more rational free market. For the consumer this law might reduce the cost (because the retailer can pass on savings) and increase the value (because the consumer can do more with the product). I say "might" because as you say it depends on how the law is worded.
With luck it might even encourage other countries, particularly in the EU, to lift their mostly abysmal legal game on DRM, rights and the free market.
---
Unregulated DRM = Total Customer Control = Ultimate Customer Lockin = Death of the free market.
It wouldn't make sense to say many bad things about a game before it's even finished; it wouldn't be fair.
Nonsense. This is a typical marketer rationalisation for lying.
It is highly unfair to the consumer for a previewer to be allowed to misrepresent the game preview to the consumer.
It is no more or less fair to be positive or negative in a preview. If the game publisher feels that a preview may not be overall in their interest then they don't have to send out the preview. Their choice.
---
The majority of modern marketing is nothing more than an arms race to get mind share. Everybody loses except the parasitic marketing "industry".
Actually, that isn't 'Attention Deficit Disorder'. It's 'flow', otherwise known as 'concentration' or being 'in the zone' .
The symptoms of ADD (in adults difficulty with time management, organization, risk-taking, careless behavior, and distractible and impulsive behavior) have absolutely nothing to do with 'flow'. Any job which requires the manipulation of complex abstract mental models over hours of time while performing a task causes 'flow', particularly abstract models with little relationship to the day-to-day.
Some programmers compensate for their limited ability to create and manipulate a sophisticated mental model of the program by being better at things like documentation and user interface however if you want the code itself to be good you need somebody who can abstract, not just talk. i.e. can juggle complex mental models for hours at a time.
Incidentally, many psychiatrists suffer from the "when all you've got is a hammer, everything looks like a nail" syndrome. Most human behaviour is ambiguous enough to be considered as mental illness if looked at the right way and ADD and other psychiatric disorders are often mis-applied because of this.
---
Open source software is everything that closed source software is. Plus the source is available.
And many are not. That's the interesting thing about open forums such as /.. If a turfer says "oo chart can't do X", then there are bound to be a bunch of people who know damn well it can, and will reply that way.
Astroturfers aren't that stupid. Marketers are masters of innuendo and half truths and they use that skill to the max. Most everything they say is a half truth designed to misdirect the reader without actually being falsifiable.
Now, that's not to say that they can't spread general FUD (e.g. "it's slow as hell" (which it is),
Nonsense. I use OO2 most days on a standard office PC and it's no speed daemon but it is not "slow as hell." Classic piece of innuendo there.
"it makes ugly charts" (it does),
Nonsense. The charts are basic but functional and similar to most graphing packages.
"it doesn't have as many features" (whatever that means)) based on fairly subjective criteria.
OO has a huge feature set. Not as large as M$ office but more than enough for most office tasks.
But those posts are easy to sniff out.
Only if the reader has the time and is aware that they're being deceived. The point of my post was to increase awareness of the fraudulent tactics that marketers engage in.
---
Marketing talk is not just cheap, it has negative value. Free speech can be compromised just as much by too much noise as too little signal.
Warning: the parent post has been mod'ed down from +4 to +1. Probably by astroturfers who don't like being exposed for the lowlife they are.
---
Marketing talk is not just cheap, it has negative value. Free speech can be compromised just as much by too much noise as too little signal.
There's no way in hell spin like this would be tolerated on slashdot.
Bullshit. The only thing even possibly biased in the entire review is the one paragraph "teaser" at the beginning designed to get the reader in. And it's not even biased, it's just making an odd comparison with something completely unrelated.
Anyway, I don't mind this review .. but would like to see reviews of Microsoft products well tolerated on here in a balanced manner.
When M$ tolerates balanced reviews on their own website then maybe we can talk about "balance" on slashdot.
Slashdot is a generally open source website. Open source websites are needed to balance out blatantly biased high volume sites like microsoft, msn and Paul Thurrott.
---
Marketing talk is not just cheap, it has negative value. Free speech can be compromised just as much by too much noise as too little signal.
Be warned that many of the comments and FUD here are by lying astroturfers. Probably sock puppets too.
The reality is that this review is a useful introduction to open office chart, and open office chart and open office in general work just fine.
Remember, OO is open source; you can download it any time you like and make your own decision. No need to believe me or the astroturfers.
M$ and other companies have multi-million dollar incentives to pollute forums like slashdot. e.g. M$ makes $40,000,000,000+ per year. A tiny 1% drop in that revenue is $400,000,000. That pays for an awful lot of marketing propaganda and given the size and global influence of slashdot's readership a 1% drop (or more!) is easily possible over the long term.
Given M$'s business ethics (i.e. if it's halfway legal and it makes money it's ethical) do you honestly think that they won't be going all out? The marketing industry in general regards astroturfing as a legitimate tool. Keep in mind that marketers aren't stupid and can be very sophisticated in their manipulativeness, including fake conversations, fake moderation and entire fake websites.
M$ will be using a third party marketing firm to get plausible deniability when they get caught and also to reduce the impact on the morale of their own developers. M$ has been caught many times before astroturfing and it's common industry practice. Other examples on slashdot that can trigger astroturfing are Adobe's cash cow Photoshop whenever gimp is mentioned and the RIAA whenever copyright and patents are discussed. Astroturfing even happens off the net.
Common astroturfer tactics on slashdot are to emotionally associate open source with something bad, to apply a negative argument to open source that applies equally to all software, to apply a positive argument to commercial software that applies equally to all software, to pretend that commercial licenses are less onerous than open source licenses, to gloss over the fact that readers can download and test open source for themselves, to flood technical stories with irrelevant tachnical information about a commercial product only vaguely relevant to the article at hand, to flood the slashdot editors with commercial propaganda article submissions, and to flood open source discussions with irrelevant nonsense to drown out rational discussion and evaluation.
I have no connection with either OO, M$ or the marketing industry. I just hate liars.
---
Marketing talk is not just cheap, it has negative value. Free speech can be compromised just as much by too much noise as too little signal.
Nobody said "OSS == trustable", you've created a straw man.
OSS is just more trustable as it's harder for the software writer to, accidentally or deliberately, pull a fast one.
There are still many potential problems that need to be addressed, as you and other posters have noted.
Open source is everything that closed source is. Plus the source is available.
---
Don't be fooled, slashdot has many lying astroturfers fraudulently misrepresenting company propaganda as third party opinion. FUD too.
Its too risky for a big corporation or organisation to develop one... You would need auditor sign offs etc.
No, this is no different from any business software. ERP is just lots of little packages working together to organise a business.
And the Oracle and SAP systems are top end...
Only in the sense of "big money". The actual software itself is bottom end. As pretty much anybody who's used it will tell you.
for large organisations milllions of transactions a day. Scaleable systems at that size are not built quickly
FUD. Google, with one of the largest setups on the planet, uses open source software and doesn't seem to have any trouble. Scalability is just a design issue. Like everything else.
and people want to have a vendor to blame.
Sigh, more FUD. I'm quite sure that there are plenty of open source companies that would be happy to step up to the plate for an extremely good value maintenance contract (by SAP/Oracle standards) for any set of software a business wanted.
There are legal issues as well to ensure Sarbanes-Oxley and Basel II compliance.
No different from any piece of business software.
I have tried to get my company to look at building an open source System to replace Peoplesoft instead of Fusion... but there is no interest.
At your company.
Open source ERP is potentially a large investment that could take a while to get payback on but it is also an area that could be done incrementally. There are a number of open source workflow packages that could form the nucleus of an ERP and there are many open source packages that could be adapted to perform various ERP functions. I'd suggest open source companies interested in this area pick some element of the ERP puzzle and specialise in it. By using open standards your software can then work with other ERP specialists and cover a larger part of the ERP space.
If anyone does want to start one though - Im in !
Glad to hear it.
A big hurdle an open source ERP package would face is to find a businesses where the software could be tested in real life. Very few businesses would be willing to risk their core processes on something untested. Again though, it could all be done incrementally. Likely to be more cost effective and safer than many "big bang" SAP conversions.
---
Don't be fooled, slashdot has many lying astroturfers fraudulently misrepresenting company propaganda as third party opinion. FUD too.
Does this mean they're only looking for people with multiple personality disorders?
---
Keep your options open!
We're quick to invoke the constitution in an effort to curtail the rights of our friends who make their living through their creative works,
It's not a right, it's a privilege. The general population has given them this privilege in the hope of creating a win-win situation.
---
DRM'ing breaks the copyright bargain. It should not be possible to copyright DRM'ed content.
Which is why I find it baffling that people let the wool be pulled over their eyes on AMD's mobile offerings.
Don't be fooled.
Many of the posts, stories and positive/negative moderations on slashdot these days are just lying marketing astroturfers and socket puppets, fraudulently misrepresenting company propaganda as a personal opinion. This post for example but they can be much more manipulative with Dorothy Dix'ers and various other forms of fake "conversations" and straw man arguments.
This single story probably has many lying marketers and their sock puppets going for broke. Possibly the story submission itself is a plant - marketers love creating fraudulent "grass roots" web sites to create fake "buzz" and it's a real shame that the law hasn't caught up with them yet. Much of the repetition in slashdot stories and comments is due to marketers repetitively pushing their propaganda.
---
Marketing talk is not just cheap, it has negative value. Free speech can be compromised just as much by too much noise as too little signal.
Agreed.
I was thinking of the closed source Java runtime, .net and a host of other commercial interpreted languages. I've debugged interrupt handling in such interpreted environments (with additional, third-party, compiled, shared libraries e.g. DLL's with M$VisualBasic) and it can get messy.
---
Open source software is everything that closed source software is. Plus the source is available.
This attitude may work well in small throw-away projects, but from experience I can tell you, maintaining a mixed language product is hell.
Only if you didn't plan for it and didn't use standardised languages and tools available from multiple suppliers.
Just think about the awful mess you're going to have 5 years down, when you need to do an upgrade.
One of open source's strengths is the upgrade path. You can't be left hanging by the vendor if you want to keep something running. I've been on projects that lasted more than a decade. In the proprietary, closed source tools were a big problem moving to new platforms but the open source was generally easy. You, not the vendor, controls your destiny.
If the whole project is written in one language, you're going to have to find only one replacement compiler/library/development environment - which can be hard enough.
Again, only if you didn't plan and you used closed source tools that the vendor has decided not to port to whatever your new platform is.
If you have a mix of exotic languages, you basically can forget it, just rewrite the whole mess.
Even if the whole project is in a single language that problem will arise. Rewrites usually happen because of changing requirements, not because of the language[s] that was used. If requirements haven't changed just use legacy hardware
The same applies to training. The original developers may have been the biggest guru in the necessary languages, but where are you going to find maintenance drones that are fluent enough in all of them? Training a halfwit well enough to maintain some crappy C-Code is hard enough, trying to train him in C, Ruby, Scheme and Haskell is impossible. And even if you'd succeed, Mr C-Ruby-Scheme-Haskell-Halfwit won't stay once he comes out of training, he'll be gone to the next job before the ink on his new resume dried.
True, but you need to strike a balance. Having a single language can unnecessarily restrict the speed, flexibility and adaptability of the development. Having too many, particularly closed source proprietary languages, or even narrow open source research languages, will bring the problems you describe.
All in all, if you're doing long term projects stay with one language and try not to use too many extra libraries where you don't have the source code available.
All in all, use all the languages you need to use and no more, whether they be C++, Java, SQL, OpenGL or a library API (which in itself is just another "language"). Make a business case for every language you use being the best alternative with all factors taken into consideration including interroperability and don't be snowed by vendor efforts to sell you "integrated" solutions, which are generally just a polite way of saying "we own you".
---
Unregulated DRM = Total Customer Control = Ultimate Customer Lockin = Death of the free market.
... and often in the middle of code that you don't have a symbol table for, let alone the source.
---
Open source software is everything that closed source software is. Plus the source is available.
why does factually inaccurate nonsense get moderated as insightful? Anybody?
It's probably publishers' marketing drones using sock puppets to astroturf and mod. Also posting Dorothy Dix'ers. Anything to get their viewpoint as much mindshare as possible. At the expense of every other viewpoint of course.
There are probably dozens of such lying lowlifes on slashdot, and possibly hundreds or even thousands. They justify their lying by claiming that "the message speaks for itself" and "marketers have a right to free speech just like everybody else" and "it doesn't matter who says it". All bullshit of course. If they weren't lying at a minimum they'd have the common decency to put the companies they're representing in their sig's, knowing full well they'd be largely ignored. Guess why?
Misrepresenting company propaganda as an objective, third party viewpoint is fraud and it's a real shame that the law hasn't caught up with them yet. They call it undercover marketing, part of guerilla marketing, but it's really just fraud.
---
Marketing talk is not just cheap, it has negative value. Free speech can be compromised just as much by too much noise as too little signal.
They are copying the whole book, and AFAIK, fair use doesn't allow for that. I fail to see why they should get any special exemption(s).
Copyright is "To promote the progress of science and useful arts". I fail to see why existing copyright holders should get any special exemption(s).
See how changing viewpoint changes what "consistency" and "exemptions" are? In every situation you can categorize things in different ways and as a result change what these words mean. In this case you are automatically assuming that the current, literal law's viewpoint is the only viewpoint. Fortunately, the law can and does change all the time. And before those laws can change they need to be discussed and evaluated.
A lot of "IP" people (i.e. people with a vested interest in maintaining the status quo) have a hard time (possibly wilfully) understanding that.
---
DRM'ed content breaks the copyright bargain. It should not be possible to copyright DRM'ed content.
Then again, this is Slashdot...
dedazo, and some of the replies, are probably M$ marketing astroturfers. M$ marketing drones appear to have been trying to deflect attention from M$ to google the last few weeks.
Of course; completely ignoring the fact that, unlike M$, competition for google is just a mouse click away.
---
Astroturfing "marketers" are lying lowlife, misrepresenting company propaganda as a personal opinion.
if you have a large amount of physical RAM, you'll swap a lot less than if you have just enough for the OS.
While technically correct (swapping only applies to the disk) there are several levels to the memory hierarchy with main memory itself having level 1 and 2 caches (3 levels if you include the registers). You want to keep as much as possible in those caches.
The size of the code and data, and the access pattern, can make a huge difference to the speed of the code - 300% or more, even with good algorithms and no disk access at all.
---
Marketing talk is not just cheap, it has negative value. Free speech can be compromised just as much by too much noise as too little signal.
It's astroturfing marketers. See my other post.
---
Paid marketers are the worst zealots.
It's astroturfing marketers. The marketers repeatedly submit articles and hope some will get through.
The editors aren't robots, they will make mistakes, this submission flood give them a false view of what's interesting and worthwhile, and it's statistically inevitable that repeats like this will happen. Many of the articles on slashdot these days are created by marketers trying to steal people's time for their own benefit and nobody else's.
---
Marketing talk is not just cheap, it has negative value. Free speech can be compromised just as much by too much noise as too little signal.