people don't care about IP, about paying licensing fees, about the work involved in getting an app made. PEOPLE care about getting things done.
... and what about who controls the standards, and how that can impede on getting things done. Try changing a MS Office file without having an office license, and consider the data processing issues of this. Maybe the main users of Macs, which seems to be artists and graphic designers don't worry about such things, but in the data processing world, it's a big concern.
I'm starting to work on people I work with to explain this. We got sent a bunch of data in spreadsheets and someone wanted to process it on a server, until I explained that we can't run an office license on a server.
As for lagging behind? Since when has MS Office had XML file formats or PDF export? Open Office will start moving ahead of MS Office in the same way that Mozilla has moved ahead of IE.
I'm not an open source zealot, and OOo 1.1 isn't that important, but iTunes most definitely isn't. And that's part of my point - I view even OOo 1.1 as more important than iTunes. As far as I can see, there is nothing original in iTunes, except it looks pretty.
I'd like to know the time of Katzenburg's tenure, but it certainly seems that about the time of his arrival, Disney's movies were garbage, and after he arrived, The Little Mermaid, Beauty and the Beast, Aladdin and The Lion King were made. Since? Lilo and Stitch, Mulan, Treasure Planet, Hercules, Return to Never Land? Although Emporer's New Groove is meant to be excellent.
Personally, I don't like the Lion King, but it seems that the only movies Disney have made post-Katzenberg that have become real household names are Pixar ones (the best measure is stuffed toys and characters on Disney parades).
Pixar are also becoming a household name. Why did I buy the Finding Nemo DVD without seeing it? Because it's made by Pixar, who it seems can't produce anything but top quality entertainment.
So, which Office suite has export to PDF built in? Which was the first suite to have native file formats in XML?
There's nothing particularly original about iTunes. It's music downloading software. Find music and download it. Plenty of people have been doing this before.
The support costs of PCs are immense. I used to work for a company with 2000 employees that had 3 network guys to look after the network and terminals.
All software of course sat on the mainframe - usage could be easily tracked, software errors easily detected.
PCs added DLL problems, shoddy disk drives that failed, users needing upgrades in order to run some new piece of software, users accidentally deleting software.
The configuration hell we had with some early apps, where if app 1 and app 2 were on the same machine nearly drove me nuts!
The biggest thing that I saw drove people to PCs were drop down boxes for codes, and pointless animations.
I've got friends on COBOL mainframe, and I'm starting to think they have a much easier life than I. They learnt COBOL 10+ years ago, and just don't have to reskill. They've become better and better programmers because they aren't spending time chasing their tails.
They also have code that is over 15 years old, and will probably be over 25 years old in 10 years when it is still running.
How much code written for Windows will still run in that timeframe. It's also a good reason for thinking about a Linux move.
Sure, Java and C# have a whole bunch of features that COBOL doesn't, but so what? 95+% of all code written is used for accepting and pushing data around, something COBOL does more simply than C#. Also, because it is quite limited and unchanging, there is very little geek onupmanship with it - it is about delivering a professional solution. I have ONE COBOL book, and it's about 300 pages, and it tells me or anyone else everything about COBOL. Compare that with C# or Java.
It also takes a more 'sandboxed' view of the world than C#. On mainframes, you could only read a file if the control language around the program delivered the file to you. This meant that the planning was more detailed, but also that programmers became more disciplined in design.
Some years ago, I worked on Mainframes and we opened up the mainframe to allow access from Windows systems via TCP/IP. I can't really tell you the company but was very chuffed to browse my account online and there was my old code serving data.
When I moved off Mainframes onto Windows, I was really shocked at the error rate/crash rate and how people just found these acceptable. We had to reboot an NT server about twice a week because it crashed. Our mainframe went down about once a year (we didn't work Xmas day and so it got powered down).
The other danger that companies should consider is the risk of churn of skills with Windows and.NET. It seems that every few years, Microsoft bring out another "no, THIS is the way forward" in order to sell some new software. What happens to your code when this happens? It starts to become redundant, partly because you know that future things aren't going to work with it in future, but also because the skilled staff more towards the 'golden' future. People have less chance to become experts in it unless they work day and night on it.
The promise of COBOL was that everyone could use the same language, cross-platform and that skills could grow. Shame it's dying.
Apart from the fact that the $40,000 Dell server is also going to need maintenance, did that company have to upgrade their PCs as often, though?
One cost that many people missed was the software upgrade costs for every user.
Before that, you had thousands of dumb terminals that lasted for over a decade. PCs came in and network staff cost went up (having to install software/fix PCs), software license prices came in to play and hardware had to be changed because of the increased demands of the software running on it.
Is that usage or users? There may be more Win XP users who use the net more.
And many users won't upgrade. I see ads on TV for 3.0Ghz machines for good prices, but I haven't had anyone recently from friends/family asking my advice on buying a computer. People with 1Ghz+ have a machine they are happy with now that does what they need.
Microsoft are going to find it very hard to ship operating systems to such people.
Fine, write your documents in open office, save as.sxw and rename the file as.DOC.
A document submitted with a.DOC extension, as requested.
Oh, can't read it? Well, give them a CD with Open Office on;)
Alternatively, get Open Office for $0, write the document and export back to.doc. Tell everyone you know. And then start finding those people who also have it and start trading the.SXW files.
I was talking to someone at the weekend about a local charity who needed a certain amount of money to do something (150,000 GBP) and put it in terms of "If everyone gave 1GBP in the town, we'll do it". That's half a pint of beer to most people. They raised the money in a week.
I think it's a more effective way of fundraising than having open ended needs.
But I don't see any harm in a few ads on the website you download it from, or something in the help about, or even in the startup screen or installer. Something gentle like "our project is supported by contributions. Thanks for listening". Enough to help people think about what they are giving back.
If something had a nag that prevented me getting somewhere until I'd pressed the reminder button, I'd get annoyed, though.
As it's open source, you could always remove anything like that that you don't like;-)
It's totally different. It's about voluntary sponsorship. With shareware you are legally meant to pay for it, with OSS, it's just a request without compunction. I use lots of OSS, and I've mostly used it for free apart from giving a bit of encouragement.
That's my FTP Client, web browser, email client as well as a whole bunch of source code for projects.
Saved me a ton of money over commercial software.
As it's saved me some money, I'm going to personally give something back.
When my tax refund cheque comes through, I'm going to give some money to 1 or more OSS projects. It's only going to be something like $50 (poor, wife and kids to support!) but it's because I believe in it.
I believe in doing this because if lots of people gave $50 (or even $10) to help projects like Open Office or organisations like the EFF, we'd all be much better off.
Imagine living in a country when every family give over the equivalent of the price of a CD to help development of OpenOffice. Like $15 a year. That would be $1billion in development value. Think how good it could be for that. How much it could advertise itself, and how you'd have a free office suite for $15 a year instead of over a hundred bucks a year for MS Office. How WE could get control of file formats back.
Imagine how many corporations the EFF could stop from abusing copyright laws through barratry with a couple of billion dollars, or how many politicians they could lobby?
And the world isn't a bad place because of Bill Gates, George Bush and Rupert Murdoch. It's a bad place because I don't do enough.
The other problem that MS Office has is that they are struggling to add anything new that anyone wants, and meanwhile, the code in Open Office is adding more and more features.
I run Office 2K at home and always check out what's in each release since, and don't see any good reason to upgrade.
OOo is now getting so good, that they are getting ahead of Microsoft now with features like Export to PDF.
My biggest fear in the whole Google floatation is that they go the way of Yahoo. I used to like Yahoo, even after I heard of Google because of the category searching.
Now, I look at their site, and it's just a great big load of stuff. What is ads and what is content is too heavily blurred. The page is now more like 2 screens than 1 because of this, so getting to the category area takes time.
I know what people will say - they have to advertise to get the revenue. Of course, if no-one visits, that's no revenue.
People like Google because you get results in an unobtrusive manner with a couple of little text ads at the top and some ads down the side. It doesn't get in the way of the results.
Sites with popups and Flash ads that appear over text on say 1 in 10 clicks really cheese me off - enough that I just don't visit them again.
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I'm starting to work on people I work with to explain this. We got sent a bunch of data in spreadsheets and someone wanted to process it on a server, until I explained that we can't run an office license on a server.
As for lagging behind? Since when has MS Office had XML file formats or PDF export? Open Office will start moving ahead of MS Office in the same way that Mozilla has moved ahead of IE.
I'm not an open source zealot, and OOo 1.1 isn't that important, but iTunes most definitely isn't. And that's part of my point - I view even OOo 1.1 as more important than iTunes. As far as I can see, there is nothing original in iTunes, except it looks pretty.
It's time that I got in touch with the Mozilla people and asked about how easy it would be to have a "plugins blocked for this site" put in.
Personally, I don't like the Lion King, but it seems that the only movies Disney have made post-Katzenberg that have become real household names are Pixar ones (the best measure is stuffed toys and characters on Disney parades).
Pixar are also becoming a household name. Why did I buy the Finding Nemo DVD without seeing it? Because it's made by Pixar, who it seems can't produce anything but top quality entertainment.
There's nothing particularly original about iTunes. It's music downloading software. Find music and download it. Plenty of people have been doing this before.
I'd rather put Open Office 1.1 in there.
All software of course sat on the mainframe - usage could be easily tracked, software errors easily detected.
PCs added DLL problems, shoddy disk drives that failed, users needing upgrades in order to run some new piece of software, users accidentally deleting software.
The configuration hell we had with some early apps, where if app 1 and app 2 were on the same machine nearly drove me nuts!
The biggest thing that I saw drove people to PCs were drop down boxes for codes, and pointless animations.
I've also worked somewhere where they owned their mainframe and paid support and software licenses annually.
I've got friends on COBOL mainframe, and I'm starting to think they have a much easier life than I. They learnt COBOL 10+ years ago, and just don't have to reskill. They've become better and better programmers because they aren't spending time chasing their tails.
They also have code that is over 15 years old, and will probably be over 25 years old in 10 years when it is still running.
How much code written for Windows will still run in that timeframe. It's also a good reason for thinking about a Linux move.
Sure, Java and C# have a whole bunch of features that COBOL doesn't, but so what? 95+% of all code written is used for accepting and pushing data around, something COBOL does more simply than C#. Also, because it is quite limited and unchanging, there is very little geek onupmanship with it - it is about delivering a professional solution. I have ONE COBOL book, and it's about 300 pages, and it tells me or anyone else everything about COBOL. Compare that with C# or Java.
It also takes a more 'sandboxed' view of the world than C#. On mainframes, you could only read a file if the control language around the program delivered the file to you. This meant that the planning was more detailed, but also that programmers became more disciplined in design.
Also, their workbench product and other tools give good debugging. Does cost money, though.
When I moved off Mainframes onto Windows, I was really shocked at the error rate/crash rate and how people just found these acceptable. We had to reboot an NT server about twice a week because it crashed. Our mainframe went down about once a year (we didn't work Xmas day and so it got powered down).
The other danger that companies should consider is the risk of churn of skills with Windows and .NET. It seems that every few years, Microsoft bring out another "no, THIS is the way forward" in order to sell some new software. What happens to your code when this happens? It starts to become redundant, partly because you know that future things aren't going to work with it in future, but also because the skilled staff more towards the 'golden' future. People have less chance to become experts in it unless they work day and night on it.
The promise of COBOL was that everyone could use the same language, cross-platform and that skills could grow. Shame it's dying.
One cost that many people missed was the software upgrade costs for every user.
Before that, you had thousands of dumb terminals that lasted for over a decade. PCs came in and network staff cost went up (having to install software/fix PCs), software license prices came in to play and hardware had to be changed because of the increased demands of the software running on it.
And many users won't upgrade. I see ads on TV for 3.0Ghz machines for good prices, but I haven't had anyone recently from friends/family asking my advice on buying a computer. People with 1Ghz+ have a machine they are happy with now that does what they need.
Microsoft are going to find it very hard to ship operating systems to such people.
I can understand that when it was built, the river had huge significance, but nowadays, it's pretty insignificant.
Surely, basing the capital at a central point (like near Leicester) would be better now?
And let's not forget the South Bank ;-)
A document submitted with a .DOC extension, as requested.
Oh, can't read it? Well, give them a CD with Open Office on ;)
Alternatively, get Open Office for $0, write the document and export back to .doc. Tell everyone you know. And then start finding those people who also have it and start trading the .SXW files.
There's no interesting rumours going around on campus about this guy, are there?
Anyone care to investigate?
At least we get who we vote for *duck*
that wasn't in my mind when I wrote it. Honest!
I was talking to someone at the weekend about a local charity who needed a certain amount of money to do something (150,000 GBP) and put it in terms of "If everyone gave 1GBP in the town, we'll do it". That's half a pint of beer to most people. They raised the money in a week.
I think it's a more effective way of fundraising than having open ended needs.
But I don't see any harm in a few ads on the website you download it from, or something in the help about, or even in the startup screen or installer. Something gentle like "our project is supported by contributions. Thanks for listening". Enough to help people think about what they are giving back.
If something had a nag that prevented me getting somewhere until I'd pressed the reminder button, I'd get annoyed, though.
As it's open source, you could always remove anything like that that you don't like ;-)
That's my FTP Client, web browser, email client as well as a whole bunch of source code for projects.
Saved me a ton of money over commercial software.
As it's saved me some money, I'm going to personally give something back.
When my tax refund cheque comes through, I'm going to give some money to 1 or more OSS projects. It's only going to be something like $50 (poor, wife and kids to support!) but it's because I believe in it.
I believe in doing this because if lots of people gave $50 (or even $10) to help projects like Open Office or organisations like the EFF, we'd all be much better off.
Imagine living in a country when every family give over the equivalent of the price of a CD to help development of OpenOffice. Like $15 a year. That would be $1billion in development value. Think how good it could be for that. How much it could advertise itself, and how you'd have a free office suite for $15 a year instead of over a hundred bucks a year for MS Office. How WE could get control of file formats back.
Imagine how many corporations the EFF could stop from abusing copyright laws through barratry with a couple of billion dollars, or how many politicians they could lobby?
And the world isn't a bad place because of Bill Gates, George Bush and Rupert Murdoch. It's a bad place because I don't do enough.
I run Office 2K at home and always check out what's in each release since, and don't see any good reason to upgrade.
OOo is now getting so good, that they are getting ahead of Microsoft now with features like Export to PDF.
My sentiments exactly!
My biggest fear in the whole Google floatation is that they go the way of Yahoo. I used to like Yahoo, even after I heard of Google because of the category searching.
Now, I look at their site, and it's just a great big load of stuff. What is ads and what is content is too heavily blurred. The page is now more like 2 screens than 1 because of this, so getting to the category area takes time.
I know what people will say - they have to advertise to get the revenue. Of course, if no-one visits, that's no revenue.
People like Google because you get results in an unobtrusive manner with a couple of little text ads at the top and some ads down the side. It doesn't get in the way of the results.
Sites with popups and Flash ads that appear over text on say 1 in 10 clicks really cheese me off - enough that I just don't visit them again.