Open source advocates should lobby for no software patents, because by using the "enemy's" weapon it validates it. Do not give credibility to patents, lobby against them.
Idealists don't win wars. MS is taking a war to linux, and as a linux user, I'd like Linux to stick around as a strong, viable OS. I don't really give a shit about the software patent movement - I think it has little chance in the US - and I don't really see a reason to weaken Linux's position and legal strength to satisfy idealists of a separate movement. No thanks.
I wonder if they plan to incorporate this technology into their design at all.
Perhaps its still too new, but you'd think they would be looking to the future for ideas...
No. Good Christ, that stuff if it ever works is a minimum of 30 years away. Using nanotubes at all for chips is at least 10. And Intel is working on that, I believe. But for a chip that's coming out in the next 1-3 years? You gotta be kidding.
And when you add that small 'convenience' factor (that you're OK with giving up) across thousands or tens of thousands of users, you get a huge savings, in training, increased efficiencies, etc. It's little wonder people stick with MS with innovations such as that - and I'm being completely serious here. It wasn't until I saw the day to day goings on in a 2200+ person company that I realized the efficiencies that MS integration can bring.
And I've also seen the effects of virii and spyware that allows MS to bring a company to its knees. Not sure where the savings offset is there, but I'm pretty sure that if your userbase is competent, you win with non-MS OS's, even without these integration benefits.
Back to your point - *you* can successfully work in an MS office without MS software. But at what price to the employer and the rest of the workplace? It's not just your measured productivity that goes down when it takes you an extra couple of minutes to download/open/edit/save/reupload a document
Yes, but my measured productivity goes up so much from using Linux vs. Windows that it absolutely swamps that convenience difference. As a fairly proficient user, I save more time by having actual shell scriping abilities and other benefits of a functional command line. Given same, I can also do the dl,edit,save,ul cycle a lot faster than most (the dl/save/ul part takes me easily under a minute). Therefore, my system is a definite time saver for me. I don't recommend it to others because it wouldn't work for most.
the others you are communicating back to lose out as well.
I don't see how, as far as they're concerned they can't tell. Given OWA, I even still have full exchange functionality, so my OS choice is invisible to my coworkers. Got my samba tricked out and everything.
I do wish some of the larger companies - Novell, IBM, etc. - would throw resources at this issue of office suite integration with external tools (browsers, LDAP, calendaring, etc.).
Novell is, they bought Ximian for just that reason.
Most OSS zealots I talked to about it either didn't understand what it was, or said that was pointless/useless/stupid/whatever. Being in the web application development space, I saw a HUGE need for this.
So you're right and they're wrong because....? You won't win many arguments invoking the z-word. Integration is a double (at least) edged sword, because it also means complete vendor lockin, and that's not a benefit.
this *only* a case of "it doesn't affect me, so I won't write software for it?" Don't throw back the "write it yourself" mantra. Plenty of OSS is written by individuals who don't have a direct need for the software - this is done by corps like Sun, IBM, Novell, etc. So why aren't they devoting more to this space? Do they fear a backlash from MS?
It's not as easy as you make it sound. For one, there is no single company who can do this - developing standards - arbitrarily, so it takes a coalition which is actually buiding. The things you talk about are all actually being developed. So it's a matter of time.
Second, MS is a moving target and intentionally so. What Novell et al. need is not just an integrated suite - honestly, that's pretty much done as of 3 years ago minimum - they need a suite which mirrors MS's piece for piece. And what MS will do, if they even succeed at completely mirroring all the closed stantards MS uses - is change the standards. They did it to Word Perfect all the time and that was a single, standalone product. When you're talking about communication between a number of products, their potential to break OSS integration is limitless. And they will do that, because it's what they always do.
In short, Microsoft is staying ahead of the competition now by offering extremely tight integration among their core products, and it's only going to continue to go down that path. Not saying it's a bad thing - it's really the only way they *can* go, and I think it'll serve them well easily for another 3-5 years. That's about as far as I'll make predictions.:)
Well, you're right. I work in one of those organizations as well, and yes - I lose the convenience of the integration because I have to download, edit, save, and upload where an MS user won't have to.
I'm not concerned about using OO for evangelism. Personally, I already know that the sacrifices of convenience caused by not using MS's tightly integrated suite will be made up when I don't have to deal with all the other MS related hassles.
Therefore, to me it doesn't matter if OO loses that functionality, because I don't care that I won't convince the rest of the office to switch. All that matters to me is that someone using Word can send me a document, I can edit it, send it back, they reopen it, and can't tell that I *don't* use word. That's what I mean by interoperability. If that didn't work, I'd have to switch away from linux and back to MS hell. Or go with Vmware, which has its own issues, or crossover (same), etc.
Assuming we're not using specific 3rd-party plugins to Word - and we don't - I can successfully work in an MS workplace without MS software. OO is there now, and it wasn't there two years ago. This, to me, is a major victory.
I do think you make a good point about Novell doing something about browser ingeration and such.
Most of the documents I'm dealing with contain inserted images, figures drawn with the built-in drawing utility, tables, styles, templates, equations and whatnot. Using a recent OO version, I can generally access the text and images, but that's about it: forget about page layout, most equations and drawings, etc.
I'm a scientist, so I can assure you I deal with equations, figures, pictures, etc. all the time. The newest version of OO - 1.9 - deals with equations from MS Equation and images too. Not sure what you're using for your drawings. I'd recommend common image formats and the conversion will be fine - if you use less supported proprietary standards and expect them to work outside Word, well, that's not very realistic when the plugin was probably made for Word and Word alone.
The layout looked fine too for me. I agree that, with the myriad of vendor plugins that exist for Word, that guaranteeing interoperability won't get you far. But as a user you can make sure your documents open fine in either by avoiding more rare plugin formats.
There will always be issues with embedded MS specific object/controls etc. MS has convinced the powers that be in most organizations that they cannot live w/o these 'features' that will tie them forever to Windows.
You're right. That's a primary reason why I don't use them, and (if possible) discourage their use. Vendor lock in is bad, and if one tool you have only works with about 3 others, you have a crappy toolbox.
I don't know...I installed OpenOffice on my mother-in-law's new computer to save her the expense of Office...showed her how to use it and open her files etc... It ended up being a never ending headache for me getting calls about how it wouldn't display her office files right, or how she couldn't figure out how to do something. In the end she ended up sneaking a copy of MS Office on there without me knowing. I could never pin down exactly what her problems were, it may have just been resistance to change, but she sure hated OpenOffice.
My questions would be 1) when did you do this? 2) what version?
This *used* to be a problem for me. I do some fairly complicated stuff in files, but outside of MS-specific plugins, I have no problem.
For many users - maybe your mother in law - using computers was kind of a hard thing to learn. They sure as hell aren't going to go through that learning curve twice. It isn't much of a curve, but there are a few things that OO could do to make it easier.
Even conceding that current versions of Star/Open Office are far superior to the version in question, Star/OpenOffice obviously still does not work and play well with MS Office. Given that 95% of the Scottish police stations use MS Office, interoperability is a primary requirement.
You know, I used to be the standard-bearer for that argument, but as of OO 1.9x, interoperability with MS is getting pretty damned good. Particularly the word processor.
Anyone having trouble with it still is usually using Linux and hasn't gotten their true-type fonts working correctly.
Re:I don't even know where to begin...
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Spring Into PHP 5
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· Score: 1
Python actually correctly handles linefeed differences, and as long as you don't *mix* tabs and spaces in a file, it will execute correctly whether your editor understands tabs or not. On the other hand, if you're actually writing code, in the year 2005, in an editor that doesn't understand tabs you're a fuckup anyway.
If you're working in an interpreter and copy/pasting from a script, the interpreter (at least those I used) would generally screw up the linefeeds when I'd try to copy part of the script and dump it in the interpreter window. Particularly if you actually used whitespace in your code, loops didn't work right when I tried to do that. This has been a few years, perhaps the interpreters are better now. And no, that isn't directly a core language issue, but treating whitespace as an integral part of the language like that sets you up for such problems.
The whitespace-as-code concept really just causes more problems than it solves. Use an auto-intenting editor - if you're programming in 2005 without one of *those* you're also a screwup.
Re:I don't even know where to begin...
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Spring Into PHP 5
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· Score: 1
And Python is the stupidest language ever, white space as block delimiters? What happens when you cut and past from one windows that has tabs into another where the editor doesn't understand them?
Oh, it screws it up royally. And don't get me started on linefeeds between windows and unix. And the whole "lambda" function concept...actually, I'm going to have to fight you. I think that's dumber than the whitespace thing, and that's saying something.
Other than that, though, python has some advantages as a deployable rapid development language. It has a ton of support for math and science applications, including an easy interface for precompiled LAPACK binaries and such. You can code very quickly, the code is very readable, and if you've done a good job and avoided loops as much as possible, the code runs fast too.
Basically, you can code in Python almost as fast as you can code in something like Matlab, with the difference being that it's much more portable since python is a more accepted standard and doesn't cost thousands of dollars a seat.
Who are you trying to impress? Why don't you just write whatever PHP you need to get the job done, no one cares if your code looks more advanced, it drives me nuts when people have this mentality in my office.
Yeah, that crap drives me nuts. What are these "advanced concepts" anyway? "For" loops?
I don't know what was more immature - their previous "reporting" or this passive aggressive approach to their problem.
In general, in journalism, if you depend on a source for news and interviews, pissing them off is a really bad idea. Most journalists learn this in school, CNet just had to learn the hard way.
But is the employer always, then, responsible? Under what conditions are they not responsible?)
All conditions. Because of the failings of the government and demands in society in this country, social welfare has been forced onto the private sector, employers specifically. If the government can't afford something, it'll just pass on the cost to employers.
Exactly the same risks as downloading a tarball of sourcecode and compiling it. Oh, you read every line of source you download? Including the configure script, which may well contain a trojan? Ignore me then!
Well, except that almost every program on windows expects to be run with elevated priveleges, to the point that it's about impossible to install any program otherwise. So if a user is duped, your machine is rooted. Not true of unix, unless you're installing it as root, which you probably shouldn't do for anything shady.
These days, as far as local exploits go, that's the big difference between unix and windows - unix has an inherent sense of privileges, which Windows really still lacks in large part.
You do make a good point though - using a !33+ OS doesn't make one secure.
They don't need to exploit a buffer overflow to execute their code if you execute it for them.
Hell, even Mitnick showed that the front door is usually easier to get through than the back door. Never understimate the power of some good, old fashioned social engineering. Also really gullible people.
I have more on my website than just "endless crappy vacation pictures". Granted, most people won't give a shit about 90% of what's on there but I do get plenty of hits to my website looking for local restaurants and activities.
I'll give you credit, you put more work into your page than most people. If the service there is any indication, you just helped the reader screw himself though.
Who the hell is this "we" shit? Who is to determine what gets built on it? Him? The enligtened Philosopher-Kings of ancient times?
No shit. I'm sick of these people who are too self-important to just stick up a web page - no, they have to have their blog in the blogosphere or the blogoverse and if they actually recorded something they had to podcast it. And it's not enough just to do your own thing - no, we have to consider the implications it will have on our society, or God bless, humanity.
I have to agree with you, that quote was the biggest piece of drivel I've read in years. I'd amost think it was one big troll.
I'm wondering if people will use VMware to crack whatever BIOS DRM Apple uses to prevent OS X on commodity x86 hardware. It's cheaper to buy a cheap PC, throw on vmware, and install OSX than to buy an Apple. It's also probably easier to trick OS X into thinking it's running on a Mac when running it in a virtual machine.
Of course, that's only of interest for those who want OS X more than a mac.
Slashdot Mirror
Screw that, does it run NetBSD? That shit even runs on your toaster now.
Idealists don't win wars. MS is taking a war to linux, and as a linux user, I'd like Linux to stick around as a strong, viable OS. I don't really give a shit about the software patent movement - I think it has little chance in the US - and I don't really see a reason to weaken Linux's position and legal strength to satisfy idealists of a separate movement. No thanks.
In other words, a moral victory is neither.
Cron. Check it out, it's the newest fad. Podcasting is so 15 minutes ago.
Sorry, my bad. With all the morons who say that crap seriously, you need to ramp up the sarcasm to make it clear.
No. Good Christ, that stuff if it ever works is a minimum of 30 years away. Using nanotubes at all for chips is at least 10. And Intel is working on that, I believe. But for a chip that's coming out in the next 1-3 years? You gotta be kidding.
And when you add that small 'convenience' factor (that you're OK with giving up) across thousands or tens of thousands of users, you get a huge savings, in training, increased efficiencies, etc. It's little wonder people stick with MS with innovations such as that - and I'm being completely serious here. It wasn't until I saw the day to day goings on in a 2200+ person company that I realized the efficiencies that MS integration can bring.
And I've also seen the effects of virii and spyware that allows MS to bring a company to its knees. Not sure where the savings offset is there, but I'm pretty sure that if your userbase is competent, you win with non-MS OS's, even without these integration benefits.
Back to your point - *you* can successfully work in an MS office without MS software. But at what price to the employer and the rest of the workplace? It's not just your measured productivity that goes down when it takes you an extra couple of minutes to download/open/edit/save/reupload a document
Yes, but my measured productivity goes up so much from using Linux vs. Windows that it absolutely swamps that convenience difference. As a fairly proficient user, I save more time by having actual shell scriping abilities and other benefits of a functional command line. Given same, I can also do the dl,edit,save,ul cycle a lot faster than most (the dl/save/ul part takes me easily under a minute). Therefore, my system is a definite time saver for me. I don't recommend it to others because it wouldn't work for most.
the others you are communicating back to lose out as well.
I don't see how, as far as they're concerned they can't tell. Given OWA, I even still have full exchange functionality, so my OS choice is invisible to my coworkers. Got my samba tricked out and everything.
I do wish some of the larger companies - Novell, IBM, etc. - would throw resources at this issue of office suite integration with external tools (browsers, LDAP, calendaring, etc.).
Novell is, they bought Ximian for just that reason.
Most OSS zealots I talked to about it either didn't understand what it was, or said that was pointless/useless/stupid/whatever. Being in the web application development space, I saw a HUGE need for this.
So you're right and they're wrong because....? You won't win many arguments invoking the z-word. Integration is a double (at least) edged sword, because it also means complete vendor lockin, and that's not a benefit.
this *only* a case of "it doesn't affect me, so I won't write software for it?" Don't throw back the "write it yourself" mantra. Plenty of OSS is written by individuals who don't have a direct need for the software - this is done by corps like Sun, IBM, Novell, etc. So why aren't they devoting more to this space? Do they fear a backlash from MS?
It's not as easy as you make it sound. For one, there is no single company who can do this - developing standards - arbitrarily, so it takes a coalition which is actually buiding. The things you talk about are all actually being developed. So it's a matter of time.
Second, MS is a moving target and intentionally so. What Novell et al. need is not just an integrated suite - honestly, that's pretty much done as of 3 years ago minimum - they need a suite which mirrors MS's piece for piece. And what MS will do, if they even succeed at completely mirroring all the closed stantards MS uses - is change the standards. They did it to Word Perfect all the time and that was a single, standalone product. When you're talking about communication between a number of products, their potential to break OSS integration is limitless. And they will do that, because it's what they always do.
Well, you're right. I work in one of those organizations as well, and yes - I lose the convenience of the integration because I have to download, edit, save, and upload where an MS user won't have to.
I'm not concerned about using OO for evangelism. Personally, I already know that the sacrifices of convenience caused by not using MS's tightly integrated suite will be made up when I don't have to deal with all the other MS related hassles.
Therefore, to me it doesn't matter if OO loses that functionality, because I don't care that I won't convince the rest of the office to switch. All that matters to me is that someone using Word can send me a document, I can edit it, send it back, they reopen it, and can't tell that I *don't* use word. That's what I mean by interoperability. If that didn't work, I'd have to switch away from linux and back to MS hell. Or go with Vmware, which has its own issues, or crossover (same), etc.
Assuming we're not using specific 3rd-party plugins to Word - and we don't - I can successfully work in an MS workplace without MS software. OO is there now, and it wasn't there two years ago. This, to me, is a major victory.
I do think you make a good point about Novell doing something about browser ingeration and such.
I'm a scientist, so I can assure you I deal with equations, figures, pictures, etc. all the time. The newest version of OO - 1.9 - deals with equations from MS Equation and images too. Not sure what you're using for your drawings. I'd recommend common image formats and the conversion will be fine - if you use less supported proprietary standards and expect them to work outside Word, well, that's not very realistic when the plugin was probably made for Word and Word alone.
The layout looked fine too for me. I agree that, with the myriad of vendor plugins that exist for Word, that guaranteeing interoperability won't get you far. But as a user you can make sure your documents open fine in either by avoiding more rare plugin formats.
You're right. That's a primary reason why I don't use them, and (if possible) discourage their use. Vendor lock in is bad, and if one tool you have only works with about 3 others, you have a crappy toolbox.
My questions would be 1) when did you do this? 2) what version?
This *used* to be a problem for me. I do some fairly complicated stuff in files, but outside of MS-specific plugins, I have no problem.
For many users - maybe your mother in law - using computers was kind of a hard thing to learn. They sure as hell aren't going to go through that learning curve twice. It isn't much of a curve, but there are a few things that OO could do to make it easier.
You know, I used to be the standard-bearer for that argument, but as of OO 1.9x, interoperability with MS is getting pretty damned good. Particularly the word processor.
Anyone having trouble with it still is usually using Linux and hasn't gotten their true-type fonts working correctly.
If you're working in an interpreter and copy/pasting from a script, the interpreter (at least those I used) would generally screw up the linefeeds when I'd try to copy part of the script and dump it in the interpreter window. Particularly if you actually used whitespace in your code, loops didn't work right when I tried to do that. This has been a few years, perhaps the interpreters are better now. And no, that isn't directly a core language issue, but treating whitespace as an integral part of the language like that sets you up for such problems.
The whitespace-as-code concept really just causes more problems than it solves. Use an auto-intenting editor - if you're programming in 2005 without one of *those* you're also a screwup.
Oh, it screws it up royally. And don't get me started on linefeeds between windows and unix. And the whole "lambda" function concept...actually, I'm going to have to fight you. I think that's dumber than the whitespace thing, and that's saying something.
Other than that, though, python has some advantages as a deployable rapid development language. It has a ton of support for math and science applications, including an easy interface for precompiled LAPACK binaries and such. You can code very quickly, the code is very readable, and if you've done a good job and avoided loops as much as possible, the code runs fast too.
Basically, you can code in Python almost as fast as you can code in something like Matlab, with the difference being that it's much more portable since python is a more accepted standard and doesn't cost thousands of dollars a seat.
Yeah, that crap drives me nuts. What are these "advanced concepts" anyway? "For" loops?
Right, well, that is what did it.
In general, in journalism, if you depend on a source for news and interviews, pissing them off is a really bad idea. Most journalists learn this in school, CNet just had to learn the hard way.
You must have incredibly large hands.
All conditions. Because of the failings of the government and demands in society in this country, social welfare has been forced onto the private sector, employers specifically. If the government can't afford something, it'll just pass on the cost to employers.
Well, except that almost every program on windows expects to be run with elevated priveleges, to the point that it's about impossible to install any program otherwise. So if a user is duped, your machine is rooted. Not true of unix, unless you're installing it as root, which you probably shouldn't do for anything shady.
These days, as far as local exploits go, that's the big difference between unix and windows - unix has an inherent sense of privileges, which Windows really still lacks in large part.
You do make a good point though - using a !33+ OS doesn't make one secure.
Hell, even Mitnick showed that the front door is usually easier to get through than the back door. Never understimate the power of some good, old fashioned social engineering. Also really gullible people.
Why? Putting Stallman on the stand is about the only way to fuck the case up.
I'll give you credit, you put more work into your page than most people. If the service there is any indication, you just helped the reader screw himself though.
Um...what else is there? Endless crappy vacation pictures?
No shit. I'm sick of these people who are too self-important to just stick up a web page - no, they have to have their blog in the blogosphere or the blogoverse and if they actually recorded something they had to podcast it. And it's not enough just to do your own thing - no, we have to consider the implications it will have on our society, or God bless, humanity.
I have to agree with you, that quote was the biggest piece of drivel I've read in years. I'd amost think it was one big troll.
Of course, that's only of interest for those who want OS X more than a mac.