KOffice is getting (a lot) better, but I still use StarOffice more because:
It doesn't crash. KWord/KSpread do sometimes.
It's a lot better at dealing with M$Office document formats.
As to performance, StarOffice was unusable on my ancient box (a P166, 32Mb RAM), usable on my old laptop (PII-400, 128Mb RAM) although it takes some time to start, and fine on my new laptop (PIII-1000, 384Mb RAM, yum).
StarOffice, though not free software, is the application that has enabled me to ditch Windows altogether because it can handle the Office formats pretty well. KOffice can't yet - I've just been opening some.DOCs with the new 1.1.1 and it's better but not good enough yet.
What Stallman is trying to do is ram his ideology (good aspects notwithstanding) down everyones (sic) throat in much the same way that Microsoft tries to ram their ideology down our throats.
YAWN. How many times have we had to read this babble on Slashdot? It's getting pretty tiring. Who the $#@! moderates this up?
OK, one more time. Your statement is equivalent to the following: "What Gandhi was trying to do is ram his ideology (good aspects notwithstanding) down everyone's throat in much the same way that Saddam Hussain tries to ram his ideology down our throats."
If someone is using government power to bleed people dry that is really in no way comparable to someone who is trying to find ways to give people as much freedom as possible within an oppressive system.
Stop this nonsense now. Show the man some respect, he deserves it.
licensing
on
GTK-- vs. QT
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· Score: 5, Informative
Overall functionality, momentum for future growth, ease of use, licensing, and pretty much anything else is relevant to our decision.
To pick up your point on licensing, Qt is either GPL or pay. So if your application will also be GPL, it's free, if your application will not be GPL you will have to pay up for Qt. GTK is LGPL AFAIK (enough acronyms for you?;-) so that will not stand in the way of making your app non-free.
BTW, if you know C++ and want to get to know a bit about Qt, they have a pretty good tutorial online here. Just walking through the examples made me realize just how cool it is, and how much you can do in just a few lines of code.
Brazilian Notary and Register Association claims that one can even print as many copies of, say, your driver license as desired, though I don't see how this part would work..."
Well, if you have an image containing a bar code that is a digital signature of the data (name,date of birth,expiry date etc) on the licence, made by the government's secret key, anyone with a barcode scanner and a palmtop that can run PGP or something can validate the document. All you need is the government's public key.
I think that would be a very elegant way to save money, while making the production of false documents more difficult.
I railed for us to make our site a Netscape-only one then much as I rail for my company to make our site an Internet Explorer-only site now. IE may extend the standards, but at least it supports them.
Tell me, what standards does IE support that, say, Mozilla and Konqueror don't?
It was my impression that standards compliance is better in Mozilla and Konqueror than in IE, and that Opera is not significantly worse.
The only reason you would make your site IE-only is that it does not support the standard correctly in some cases, and that you want to work around its bugs without having to worry about how your hacks look in minority browsers.
That may be a valid argument if you are strapped for cash and are not very ethical about supporting monopolies. But to say that IE is ahead of other browsers in standards support is simply untrue.
We are licensing some of our 3D code under the Aladdin Free Public License, which restricts certain forms of commercial redistribution.
So, their "Open Source Philosophy" is not to be an Open Source project. Until they have 20000 (!) subscribers. Then, well, they'll think about it.
It's fine if they don't want to be open source, but I think they shouldn't pretend (by putting a big bold title 'Open Source Philosophy' and then mention in the 3rd paragraph they'll be using the AFPL, and then you have to click a link to find out that the AFPL is not Open Source).
All in all, it seems like the FSF has successfuly enforced the GPL even though it was neither an owner nor co-owner of the software
I suppose you mean to say that the FSF is not the copyright holder of (part of) the software?
Copyright does not make you an owner, it makes you the beneficiary of a temporary exclusive right to copy the work. You can't own software.
You may think I'm nit-picking, but I think that that's a very important distinction to make. The general public's (and politician's) failure to see this point is a (the?) basic problem in the thinking behind all those bad IP laws.
I can assure you, that if anyone tries to market a key that will unlock any Ford, that person will get thrown in jail if caught. Why should software be different?
Because software is speech, not a physical object like a car-key.
I agree that Ed Felten is on higher moral ground than Dmitry Sklyarov (or, actually, ElcomSoft his employer), even when taking into account the little fact that when you're a student in Russia you're going to need every buck you can possibly get so that you can feed your children.
But that does not mean that he should go to jail. Nobody should go to jail for publishing software, because when you publish software, you are publishing an explanation, an opinion, an expression of ideas, in short: speech.
the EU wants to go "free/open" and this is a great excuse for a public flogging to justify it
Let me remind you that the EU Council of Ministers has recently approved a Copyright Directive that is at least as evil as the DMCA, and that it is very close to approving software patents.
On the other hand, it's true that the EU will be subsidizing free software projects. So I suppose there are contradictory signals. But certainly there hasn't been any high-level decision that Free Software is the way to go.
This article really is a great summary of the whole Sklyarov scandal. And what's more: it's in Newsweek! This makes the evils of the DMCA clear to more and more non-geek people.
It's a terrible deal for Dmitry, but I'm starting to believe that at least something good may be resulting from his suffering.
To paraphrase, the article states that people dislike the idea of their online grocery store having access to their online stock trading when they use the same password. This problem doesn't go away with Passport, it is just enhanced.
I don't think that's true. There is a redirect through Passport for every site the user visits, and both the grocery store and the online stock broker has registered its own key with Passport.
You can only use a cookie set by Passport for one single site, and the grocery store can't use the authentication token you used to access its site to impersonate you at your online stock trader, because that token has to be encrypted in the stock trader's key (which the grocery store doesn't have).
That said, you make a valid point too: what you get in return for locking your grocer out of your stock account is the little fact that Microsoft is now able to access all your accounts. Because they have all the keys.
just b/c we are altering the state of the earth does not mean that we will 'destroy it' 'kill it' 'kill ourselves off' etc. The earth will return. We will survive. Get over it.
Millions of people's houses around the world are going to be flooded because Americans demand cheap gas. And your response to those people's concerns is "get over it"?
This is most certainly an interesting development- so far the Open Source/Free Software division has been the main one, but not we have a third branch.
Oh, come on. Open Source and Free Software are almost completely the same thing. Which name you use is nothing but an indication of the reason why you think the freedom to use/modify/redistribute is important.
"Shared source", however, is a completely different thing. It gives you none of the freedoms both Open Source and Free Software give you.
Calling it a "third branch" is exactly the kind of misrepresentation you'd expect from the Microsoft FUDmeisters, but not from a Slashdot editor.
RMS once more makes fools out of those who call him an extremist (or even communist).
He has a very balanced view on issues, and, what's more, he communicates it very clearly. I especially like his comparison of the present government attitude to copying to that of the Soviet Union.
We desperately need more geeks like RMS who can argue a political case so well.
Isn't open source about keeping IP intact? just open?
Open Source may be - Free Software certainly is not. Actually, this may be the most accurate way to describe the difference between the two terms in one short sentence.
I'm very grateful for Stallman's contribution to the software field, but in speaking and writing he often sounds like a total loon. Linus' writings are always so relaxed, eloquent, and poingent, even when he's basically calling someone an idiot.
Torvalds certainly has a very readable writing style. Stallman tends to be more thoughtful, and that may make his writing less accessible to the casual reader, but he never sounds like a "total loon". The fact that you think so says more about you than about RMS.
Many, if not most, people here on Slashdot seem to prefer ESR-style 'Open Source' over RMS-style 'Free Software'. That's fine, I like to think we can "agree to disagree" about the details.
But please, show each other some respect. Calling RMS a 'total loon' (or, like ESR, making vicious remarks about his personal hygiene) is way out of line, IMHO.
People want.com. They don't want country codes, and they don't want the other minor ones.
That's simply not true (with the possible exception of ".us"). The local CCTLD is the number one choice in most places I know.
Additionally, people want a good domain name or a generic one. As nobody is going to try to guess these random TLDs and assume that their ISP supports it, this names provide no value.
I disagree. Why shouldn't a domain name like "slash.dot" be valuable? In a system with 'free' gTLDs we could move to a situation where you wouldn't have to add ".com" to a company's name to find it, but simply type its name into the Location:-bar. I don't see why that couldn't work.
Did you know that there are companies who specialize in registering your name in as many of the approx. 250 existing gTLD's as possible? This is happening on a big scale, and is quickly rendering gTLDs useless as they no longer satisfy their goal of data distribution.
It's sad that companies with such large budgets and such talented programmers, have to resort to theft of code.
Oh, come on. It's not theft, it's using code without permission from the original author. Those are two very different things.
It would have been nice if they had credited the original author, but that's all there is to it. He hasn't actually lost anything.
What should happen is not that small players should get the power to take on big companies, it's the other way around: big companies (or anyone else, for that matter) should not be able to obtain government-enforced monopolies under the "intellectual property" misnomen.
Instead of releasing something every week or month or whatever, I think the developers of Linux should make it a quarterly process, and release kernels with a slew of things fixed or added.
That's what the distributors do. Linux is just the kernel, and there is usually no need to upgrade when a new patchlevel is released.
But I like to have the patch quickly if my system happens to need it. With a quarterly cycle, you have no choice but to wait for the whole next release.
Re:Oracle submits a laundry list of changes?
on
Preview Of Linux 2.5
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· Score: 5
A tad overbearing of them, eh? I'm wondering what sort of resource support they will be pledging to see these enhancements made in a timely fashion, and what sort of strings will we attached, if any.
I don't think you should see this as Oracle demanding stuff from Linux hackers. I think it is very useful that developers of high-performance application software, such as Oracle, are giving this kind of feedback on kernel performance issues.
Kernel hackers can use this for our (the users) good, not just Oracle's.
Perhaps it's not encryption. But DMCA isn't about encryption and decryption, it's about copy protection mechanisms. So in theory if they ROT13 a movie and call it their "copy protection", you can't reverse that. Plain silly, but true.
It doesn't even need to be copy protection, the DMCA talks about access control. CSS doesn't really provide copy protection, but it does do access control.
3. HTTP provides the final value-add in that it's ubquitious, firewall-friendly, and clear-text. (emphasis added)
Simple firewalls work because different protocols use different port numbers. What we now see starting to happen on the internet is that everybody is starting to tunnel their funky new protocol over port 80 because firewalls usually leave that open.
Now, I don't call that firewall-friendly, but firewall-unfriendly. The people who are trying to maintain a security policy soon will not be able to filter port numbers any more.
Slashdot Mirror
KOffice is getting (a lot) better, but I still use StarOffice more because:
As to performance, StarOffice was unusable on my ancient box (a P166, 32Mb RAM), usable on my old laptop (PII-400, 128Mb RAM) although it takes some time to start, and fine on my new laptop (PIII-1000, 384Mb RAM, yum).
StarOffice, though not free software, is the application that has enabled me to ditch Windows altogether because it can handle the Office formats pretty well. KOffice can't yet - I've just been opening some .DOCs with the new 1.1.1 and it's better but not good enough yet.
YAWN. How many times have we had to read this babble on Slashdot? It's getting pretty tiring. Who the $#@! moderates this up?
OK, one more time. Your statement is equivalent to the following: "What Gandhi was trying to do is ram his ideology (good aspects notwithstanding) down everyone's throat in much the same way that Saddam Hussain tries to ram his ideology down our throats."
If someone is using government power to bleed people dry that is really in no way comparable to someone who is trying to find ways to give people as much freedom as possible within an oppressive system.
Stop this nonsense now. Show the man some respect, he deserves it.
To pick up your point on licensing, Qt is either GPL or pay. So if your application will also be GPL, it's free, if your application will not be GPL you will have to pay up for Qt. GTK is LGPL AFAIK (enough acronyms for you? ;-) so that will not stand in the way of making your app non-free.
BTW, if you know C++ and want to get to know a bit about Qt, they have a pretty good tutorial online here. Just walking through the examples made me realize just how cool it is, and how much you can do in just a few lines of code.
Well, if you have an image containing a bar code that is a digital signature of the data (name,date of birth,expiry date etc) on the licence, made by the government's secret key, anyone with a barcode scanner and a palmtop that can run PGP or something can validate the document. All you need is the government's public key.
I think that would be a very elegant way to save money, while making the production of false documents more difficult.
Yeah.
Shame it asks me for userid/password *every* time I try to open a file or directory...
Tell me, what standards does IE support that, say, Mozilla and Konqueror don't?
It was my impression that standards compliance is better in Mozilla and Konqueror than in IE, and that Opera is not significantly worse.
The only reason you would make your site IE-only is that it does not support the standard correctly in some cases, and that you want to work around its bugs without having to worry about how your hacks look in minority browsers.
That may be a valid argument if you are strapped for cash and are not very ethical about supporting monopolies. But to say that IE is ahead of other browsers in standards support is simply untrue.
So, their "Open Source Philosophy" is not to be an Open Source project. Until they have 20000 (!) subscribers. Then, well, they'll think about it.
It's fine if they don't want to be open source, but I think they shouldn't pretend (by putting a big bold title 'Open Source Philosophy' and then mention in the 3rd paragraph they'll be using the AFPL, and then you have to click a link to find out that the AFPL is not Open Source).
I suppose you mean to say that the FSF is not the copyright holder of (part of) the software?
Copyright does not make you an owner, it makes you the beneficiary of a temporary exclusive right to copy the work. You can't own software.
You may think I'm nit-picking, but I think that that's a very important distinction to make. The general public's (and politician's) failure to see this point is a (the?) basic problem in the thinking behind all those bad IP laws.
Because software is speech, not a physical object like a car-key.
I agree that Ed Felten is on higher moral ground than Dmitry Sklyarov (or, actually, ElcomSoft his employer), even when taking into account the little fact that when you're a student in Russia you're going to need every buck you can possibly get so that you can feed your children.
But that does not mean that he should go to jail. Nobody should go to jail for publishing software, because when you publish software, you are publishing an explanation, an opinion, an expression of ideas, in short: speech.
Let me remind you that the EU Council of Ministers has recently approved a Copyright Directive that is at least as evil as the DMCA, and that it is very close to approving software patents.
On the other hand, it's true that the EU will be subsidizing free software projects. So I suppose there are contradictory signals. But certainly there hasn't been any high-level decision that Free Software is the way to go.
This article really is a great summary of the whole Sklyarov scandal. And what's more: it's in Newsweek! This makes the evils of the DMCA clear to more and more non-geek people.
It's a terrible deal for Dmitry, but I'm starting to believe that at least something good may be resulting from his suffering.
I don't think that's true. There is a redirect through Passport for every site the user visits, and both the grocery store and the online stock broker has registered its own key with Passport.
You can only use a cookie set by Passport for one single site, and the grocery store can't use the authentication token you used to access its site to impersonate you at your online stock trader, because that token has to be encrypted in the stock trader's key (which the grocery store doesn't have).
That said, you make a valid point too: what you get in return for locking your grocer out of your stock account is the little fact that Microsoft is now able to access all your accounts. Because they have all the keys.
This is either a troll or one of those FIRST POST people who don't have time to read the article before posting.
Millions of people's houses around the world are going to be flooded because Americans demand cheap gas. And your response to those people's concerns is "get over it"?
You seem to have a serious attitude problem.
Oh, come on. Open Source and Free Software are almost completely the same thing. Which name you use is nothing but an indication of the reason why you think the freedom to use/modify/redistribute is important.
"Shared source", however, is a completely different thing. It gives you none of the freedoms both Open Source and Free Software give you.
Calling it a "third branch" is exactly the kind of misrepresentation you'd expect from the Microsoft FUDmeisters, but not from a Slashdot editor.
The key servers talk HTTP on port 11371. There's also a way to do requests by e-mail, but I don't know the details of how that works.
RMS once more makes fools out of those who call him an extremist (or even communist).
He has a very balanced view on issues, and, what's more, he communicates it very clearly. I especially like his comparison of the present government attitude to copying to that of the Soviet Union.
We desperately need more geeks like RMS who can argue a political case so well.
Open Source may be - Free Software certainly is not. Actually, this may be the most accurate way to describe the difference between the two terms in one short sentence.
Torvalds certainly has a very readable writing style. Stallman tends to be more thoughtful, and that may make his writing less accessible to the casual reader, but he never sounds like a "total loon". The fact that you think so says more about you than about RMS.
Many, if not most, people here on Slashdot seem to prefer ESR-style 'Open Source' over RMS-style 'Free Software'. That's fine, I like to think we can "agree to disagree" about the details.
But please, show each other some respect. Calling RMS a 'total loon' (or, like ESR, making vicious remarks about his personal hygiene) is way out of line, IMHO.
That's simply not true (with the possible exception of ".us"). The local CCTLD is the number one choice in most places I know.
I disagree. Why shouldn't a domain name like "slash.dot" be valuable? In a system with 'free' gTLDs we could move to a situation where you wouldn't have to add ".com" to a company's name to find it, but simply type its name into the Location:-bar. I don't see why that couldn't work.
Did you know that there are companies who specialize in registering your name in as many of the approx. 250 existing gTLD's as possible? This is happening on a big scale, and is quickly rendering gTLDs useless as they no longer satisfy their goal of data distribution.
So why not just get rid of them?
Oh, come on. It's not theft, it's using code without permission from the original author. Those are two very different things.
It would have been nice if they had credited the original author, but that's all there is to it. He hasn't actually lost anything.
What should happen is not that small players should get the power to take on big companies, it's the other way around: big companies (or anyone else, for that matter) should not be able to obtain government-enforced monopolies under the "intellectual property" misnomen.
That's what the distributors do. Linux is just the kernel, and there is usually no need to upgrade when a new patchlevel is released.
But I like to have the patch quickly if my system happens to need it. With a quarterly cycle, you have no choice but to wait for the whole next release.
I don't think you should see this as Oracle demanding stuff from Linux hackers. I think it is very useful that developers of high-performance application software, such as Oracle, are giving this kind of feedback on kernel performance issues.
Kernel hackers can use this for our (the users) good, not just Oracle's.
It doesn't even need to be copy protection, the DMCA talks about access control. CSS doesn't really provide copy protection, but it does do access control.
Simple firewalls work because different protocols use different port numbers. What we now see starting to happen on the internet is that everybody is starting to tunnel their funky new protocol over port 80 because firewalls usually leave that open.
Now, I don't call that firewall-friendly, but firewall-unfriendly. The people who are trying to maintain a security policy soon will not be able to filter port numbers any more.