Back when WordPerfect was actually giving MS Word a fight, grammatik was a great grammar checking program for DOS, Windows, Macintosh and Unix & years ahead of anything which made it into MS Word. It was developed by Reference Software, before WordPerfect acquired them. I assume Corel still has this & uses it in their WordPerfect Office Suite.
Not perfect (our language is eccentric & computers are stupid), but the best I've seen.
I agree that you may have to make some of these kinds of design changes to benefit for one application processes. But you'd really have to make those if you use other clustering solutions too. With Mosix, you don't have to make the kind of implementation-specific changes, though.
(And, for your particular example, mosix has a number of schedulers & you can schedule manually. You can trivially send one postscript file to each node. Of course you can do this "braindead" clustering with a script, but it isn't as robust, easy, or flexible.)
Mosix sounds good because you don't have to "do" anything special but most apps won't benefit from it.
Somewhat agree for single apps, especially edge cases that you point out. But if a large number of CPU-intensive processes, (open)Mosix is a good, fairly painless way to divide the load.
Granted Mosix is the original and is open source now as well,
Not by OSI/DFSG/FSF standards. The license is still very restrictive. I think the kernel patches might be under GPL, but certainly not the user tools.
it still seems like openMosix is more actively developed.
This is certainly true. Most talent jumped ship & openMosix does have a higher number of active developers (and is somewhat backed by AMD (though I think AMD can and should give more developers to the project)).
openMosix is a GPLed fork of MOSIX & is undergoing rapid development. No need to recode apps. Apps will work like they do in an SMP machine. So, if they are already faster on a dual-processor machine, they won't need to use special libraries or threading methods to work over several workstations.
Not at all. It is like saying that marketing by Red Hat or Novell is just as biased towards selling their distros as Microsoft marketing is biased towards selling Windows.
When most people talk about advocacy, they aren't talking about companies who make their bread and butter off of the products they talk up.
Propaganda doesn't become "advocacy" just because you (and I) like the product better.
which product will benefit MOST from the wide adoption of OpenDocument. Hint: the only one with a cross-platform, well-developed office suite.
You mean AbiWord?
I'm a huge fan of abiword on win32, OS X, and Linux. But it doesn't come with a spreadsheet (though gnumeric is AWESOME) or presentation software.
if Microsoft were to add filters for the OpenDocument format to Office, I doubt that any product would notice any immediate change in the status quo.
I mostly agree. Adobe manages to sell Acrobat, after all. But the only thing MS would get out of it is some good PR. There's little incentive for them to do it.
Personally I'd like to see other important proprietary office suites start to support OpenDocument.
Considering that most of them (Corel, IBM/Lotus) were on OASIS, I bet they will.
Tim Bray's job at Sun was to work on XML formats for OO.o.
Open Document is NOT an "Open Office format" like Microsoft says.
Agreed. But guess which product will benefit MOST from the wide adoption of OpenDocument. Hint: the only one with a cross-platform, well-developed office suite. Guess which company will be able to provide more support. Even if they weren't the "top dog" in this, Sun would still benefit from MS's loss.
Hey--I drink the kool-aid. I've given money for the development of OO.o and Abiword. (You should to--see my URL.) But I know self-interest when I see it.
In fact, OO.Org were/are one of the last free software suites to give support to OD
They were well-represented at OASIS & They have had it in beta for a long time.
Tim Bray is also an employee of Sun, the company who started OO.o. I agree with what he says & am quite sympathetic to the cause, but this is like Scoble saying MA should standardize on MS word format.
I would seriously question the wisdom of PDF files. Although they represent documents fairly well, the format is too proprietary
Yes, PDF is controlled by Adobe. No, most wouldn't consider it proprietary. It is completely documented & has implementations for both authoring tools and viewers not written by Adobe. It is considered by most to be an open format.
and too variable to be safe.
Each version has had incremental changes. Readers which support version 1.5 of the PDF spec are backwards-compatible to earlier versions. I even use xpdf to open 1.6 PDFs (created in Acrobat 7), which aren't compatible. I get warnings, but I can use the documents.
Even if there is a MAJOR change in the spec, there are open source viewers & you won't be stuck out in the cold. This is why a lot of places DO use PDF for archiving. If they don't think they'll be stuck out in the cold, why do you?
With the merge of Adobe and Macromedia,
This is neither here, nor there.
the constant toying with DRM schemes
Authors get to decide whether a document is protected or not. Patches for the free viewers are available to remove DRM if you have accidentally added it.
the allowing of unsafe code in current Adobe formats,
Can you elaborate?
A good example of this was the use of Laserdisks for the 1980's survey of Britain to commemorate the Domesday Book. The Domesday Project is now unusable on anything but a very small number of machines, because they weren't adequately careful.
I dare-say that PDF has much broader adoption than laserdisks ever had. Certainly, ANY software format (deprecated or not) are more accessible than dead removable media formats. However, you can always find a reader & dump the files onto a new medium.
As far as medium goes, I agree that magnetic medium makes the most sense. Put it on the hard drive of at least one networked machine & back it up to tape. Hard drives also die, but there is no excuse not to make the data accessible & the files can always be recovered from backup.
The problems with flatbeds are that they are often slow & the ADF jams quite a bit. A nice scanner dedicated to documents is what you want.
I am extremely happy with my Canon DR-2080C. Note: It is the only piece of hardware I've bought, knowing that it won't work with Linux. I ran windows SPECIFICALLY to use this document scanner. It looks like it has been discontinued & the DR-2050C is the model to get now. Looks like it does larger documents, which is nice. These do duplex scans in one pass, so you can get about 40 sides (so 20 2-sided pages) per minute. These will probably set you back ~$650 new.
If you have more money to spend, there are even better document scanners available.
Thousands of pages? That is VERY little. One piece of paper is ~0.1mm thick. 10,000 pages would take up only 1 m, which is only one or two drawers in a filing cabinet.
They are better sandboxed than IE ActiveX controls used to be.
Here, I made a (rightly well-criticized) mistatement. I'm wrong. Both XPCOM and ActiveX can execute with full user-priviledges.
As I said, though: webpages could tell IE (at least used to) where to download an ActiveX control. If the control was not already installed, IE would automatically download and install the control from the specified source. In firefox, the page must me whitelisted before extensions could be downloaded. Can someone tell me if IE has changed to the whitelist model yet? Last I heard, they were even maintaining a list of malicious ActiveX controls. This seemed inance to me, as there is most likely more malicious junk out there than truly useful controls.
Has anyone seen galley copies of Pro Firefox: Extension and Application Development? Or does anyone have any other suggestions for dead-tree guides for developing firefox extensions? I know of booksonXUL , but none targetted for basic extension programming.
The problem is he probably ISN'T a spambot. The FROM header is very easily spoofed. His machine need not be the sender for the message to claim it came from him.
Because Firefox has no security vulnerabilities that would allow extensions to be installed without the user's explicit consent.
Are there open IE bugs that allow this? Both products are susceptible to any worm/trojan dropping a malicious extension into the user's profile and/or whitelisting other sites.
Because Firefox has such a low market share, it is simply not profitable to deploy spyware extensions for it.
Security through low marketshare?! There have been malicious ads/extensions that have targeted firefox.
ActiveX can't be exploited by other browsers & also limits the architecture and OS choice. The history of security problems with ActiveX has a much richer history. I don't know how much their model has really improved. Firefox extensions are in a combination of XML and JavaScript, so their functionality is a bit more limited. They are better sandboxed than IE ActiveX controls used to be. Firefox extension websites must be whitelisted before an install. I think IE has also moved to this model, but there were big problems when thing would be installed by default.
Yeah--my overzealousness to point out how bad an idea this was made me miss a BLOCKQUOTE tag.
I would really like is the ability to click on one or a group of e-mail and send back to the sender (or whatever e-mail address the lying spammer has used for the reply address)
This is a bad idea because, as you noted, most spam spoofs FROM: and/or REPLY TO:
Instead of bouncing spam, you just harrass & send spam to some poor guy who had his email address borrowed by some spam bot. Congratulations! You just became as bad as the spammers.
I would really like is the ability to click on one or a group of e-mail and send back to the sender (or whatever e-mail address the lying spammer has used for the reply address)This is a bad idea because, as you noted, most spam spoofs FROM: and/or REPLY TO:
Instead of bounding spam, you just harrass & send spam to some poor guy who had his email address borrowed by some spam bot. Congratulations! You just became as bad as the spammers.
Run ClamAV on the Linux servers. Disallow file sharing from any other machine. Have good firewall rules. Don't allow people to run as Administrator.
This will prevent the spread of most worms. Email virii and trojans are still a concern. You might get by with running ClamWin on as much as possible. This lacks a real-time scanner, so you may still want a commercial package. All of the big names have their own pros & cons.
I'm all for good open source drivers. I would and have gladly paid more money and waited longer for them.
Linux hardware support is great compared to OS X hardware support. On either system, you can buy a machine on which every single piece of hardware is supported out of the box. However, if you upgrade your machine, you are FAR more likely to find drivers for graphics or other peripheral cards you plugin & probably as likely to find drivers for USB and other devices.
The original Model M keyboards had key caps, which could easily be removed & the keyboard woulst still be functional. I also saw a company selling clear keycaps.
He is probably reading the copyright date. The sticker on the back of MY 1391401 has a large IBM logo and (c) IBM Corp. 1984 on the right. More specific information is in dot-matrix on the left. Under date, mine says "05AUG92", so mine appears to be from the last year IBM made them (Lexmark started making them in 93).
Collect all of the tests, photocopy them, and allow students to grade themselves (walking through answers in class should take less than one class session & will help students understand what they missed). Cheaters can be caught by comparison to the photocopies.
If privacy isn't a concern, you can chop off the corner with the students' name & write a number on top & allow them to grade someone else's exam.
So many of the scantron-style tests had heavy-black marks on either or both sides of the exam. The machine use these marks to locate each question. (A big square would correspond to start/stop of the test and a line would correspond to an individual question or similar). Ths beats having to guesstimate where the questions were by feed-through rate & also led to high-speed machine-grading.
Well, a clever student decided to draw his own marks on the side of the exam. This managed to trick the idiotic machine into thinking all questions were one off & subsequently his test & all tests which were fed through after his had a low grade; the machine tested if question 1 had the answer expected of question 2 and so on.
Slashdot Mirror
Back when WordPerfect was actually giving MS Word a fight, grammatik was a great grammar checking program for DOS, Windows, Macintosh and Unix & years ahead of anything which made it into MS Word. It was developed by Reference Software, before WordPerfect acquired them. I assume Corel still has this & uses it in their WordPerfect Office Suite.
Not perfect (our language is eccentric & computers are stupid), but the best I've seen.
The sourceforge link in the summary didn't require all words in the search. Requiring BOTH 'english' and 'grammar' yielded a few interesting projects:
Queequeg, an English grammar checker for non-native English speakers
LanguageTool, an Open Source language checker for the English and German language.
graviax, Grammar rules (XML files containing regular expressions) and grammar checker.
Yes, they are even less developed than commercial alternatives. But they are all interesting starts...
(And, for your particular example, mosix has a number of schedulers & you can schedule manually. You can trivially send one postscript file to each node. Of course you can do this "braindead" clustering with a script, but it isn't as robust, easy, or flexible.)Somewhat agree for single apps, especially edge cases that you point out. But if a large number of CPU-intensive processes, (open)Mosix is a good, fairly painless way to divide the load.
openMosix is a GPLed fork of MOSIX & is undergoing rapid development. No need to recode apps. Apps will work like they do in an SMP machine. So, if they are already faster on a dual-processor machine, they won't need to use special libraries or threading methods to work over several workstations.
Not at all. It is like saying that marketing by Red Hat or Novell is just as biased towards selling their distros as Microsoft marketing is biased towards selling Windows.
When most people talk about advocacy, they aren't talking about companies who make their bread and butter off of the products they talk up.
Propaganda doesn't become "advocacy" just because you (and I) like the product better.
Hey--I drink the kool-aid. I've given money for the development of OO.o and Abiword. (You should to--see my URL.) But I know self-interest when I see it.They were well-represented at OASIS & They have had it in beta for a long time.
Tim Bray is also an employee of Sun, the company who started OO.o. I agree with what he says & am quite sympathetic to the cause, but this is like Scoble saying MA should standardize on MS word format.
Even if there is a MAJOR change in the spec, there are open source viewers & you won't be stuck out in the cold. This is why a lot of places DO use PDF for archiving. If they don't think they'll be stuck out in the cold, why do you?This is neither here, nor there.Authors get to decide whether a document is protected or not. Patches for the free viewers are available to remove DRM if you have accidentally added it.Can you elaborate?I dare-say that PDF has much broader adoption than laserdisks ever had. Certainly, ANY software format (deprecated or not) are more accessible than dead removable media formats. However, you can always find a reader & dump the files onto a new medium.
As far as medium goes, I agree that magnetic medium makes the most sense. Put it on the hard drive of at least one networked machine & back it up to tape. Hard drives also die, but there is no excuse not to make the data accessible & the files can always be recovered from backup.
The problems with flatbeds are that they are often slow & the ADF jams quite a bit. A nice scanner dedicated to documents is what you want.
I am extremely happy with my Canon DR-2080C. Note: It is the only piece of hardware I've bought, knowing that it won't work with Linux. I ran windows SPECIFICALLY to use this document scanner. It looks like it has been discontinued & the DR-2050C is the model to get now. Looks like it does larger documents, which is nice. These do duplex scans in one pass, so you can get about 40 sides (so 20 2-sided pages) per minute. These will probably set you back ~$650 new.
If you have more money to spend, there are even better document scanners available.
Thousands of pages? That is VERY little. One piece of paper is ~0.1mm thick. 10,000 pages would take up only 1 m, which is only one or two drawers in a filing cabinet.
As I said, though: webpages could tell IE (at least used to) where to download an ActiveX control. If the control was not already installed, IE would automatically download and install the control from the specified source. In firefox, the page must me whitelisted before extensions could be downloaded. Can someone tell me if IE has changed to the whitelist model yet? Last I heard, they were even maintaining a list of malicious ActiveX controls. This seemed inance to me, as there is most likely more malicious junk out there than truly useful controls.
Has anyone seen galley copies of Pro Firefox: Extension and Application Development? Or does anyone have any other suggestions for dead-tree guides for developing firefox extensions? I know of books on XUL , but none targetted for basic extension programming.
The problem is he probably ISN'T a spambot. The FROM header is very easily spoofed. His machine need not be the sender for the message to claim it came from him.
Instead of bouncing spam, you just harrass & send spam to some poor guy who had his email address borrowed by some spam bot. Congratulations! You just became as bad as the spammers.
Run ClamAV on the Linux servers. Disallow file sharing from any other machine. Have good firewall rules. Don't allow people to run as Administrator.
This will prevent the spread of most worms. Email virii and trojans are still a concern. You might get by with running ClamWin on as much as possible. This lacks a real-time scanner, so you may still want a commercial package. All of the big names have their own pros & cons.
I'm all for good open source drivers. I would and have gladly paid more money and waited longer for them.
Linux hardware support is great compared to OS X hardware support. On either system, you can buy a machine on which every single piece of hardware is supported out of the box. However, if you upgrade your machine, you are FAR more likely to find drivers for graphics or other peripheral cards you plugin & probably as likely to find drivers for USB and other devices.
The original Model M keyboards had key caps, which could easily be removed & the keyboard woulst still be functional. I also saw a company selling clear keycaps.
He is probably reading the copyright date. The sticker on the back of MY 1391401 has a large IBM logo and (c) IBM Corp. 1984 on the right. More specific information is in dot-matrix on the left. Under date, mine says "05AUG92", so mine appears to be from the last year IBM made them (Lexmark started making them in 93).
Collect all of the tests, photocopy them, and allow students to grade themselves (walking through answers in class should take less than one class session & will help students understand what they missed). Cheaters can be caught by comparison to the photocopies.
If privacy isn't a concern, you can chop off the corner with the students' name & write a number on top & allow them to grade someone else's exam.
So many of the scantron-style tests had heavy-black marks on either or both sides of the exam. The machine use these marks to locate each question. (A big square would correspond to start/stop of the test and a line would correspond to an individual question or similar). Ths beats having to guesstimate where the questions were by feed-through rate & also led to high-speed machine-grading.
Well, a clever student decided to draw his own marks on the side of the exam. This managed to trick the idiotic machine into thinking all questions were one off & subsequently his test & all tests which were fed through after his had a low grade; the machine tested if question 1 had the answer expected of question 2 and so on.