Excellent post, and you hit the nail on the head where the features of Monopoly Office are concerned. Most of them are far too complex or obscure for the average user, or are simply not needed. Any basic office suite will do everything that most people will ever need, OOo happens to be well above basic level, but lacking some of the unnecessary features of M$.
As I keep telling people, it has an amazing ability to rescue corrupt.doc or.xls files, which M$ Office itself has corrupted and can't open. For that reason alone, OOo (or Star Office) should be on every PC, everywhere. It might just save hours of work one day, it has for me at least 15 times.
As to your networking issues, I wasted hours trying to make Xandros 2 share the internet connection with whatever other PCs were on my network at the time. Silly me, I should have read the book, because it was already configured, instead of hacking text files to fiddle with iptables (which worked), all I needed to do was enable the firewall, which was already configured correctly. There was a menu entry to do just that. I was confused in the nomenclature, expecting something like "Internet Connection Sharing", when I really wanted "Firewall". Next time, it will be easy. Obviously I have been brainwashed by Sir Bill, or maybe assimilated by the Borg, despite all my attempts to resist.
There is no comparison between Xandros (or for that matter, SuSE, which is equally easy but different) and Windoze XP. The inferior product (same PC, dual-boot) needs its networking settings reset manually every so often, because like all versions of Windoze from 95 onwards, it loses or corrupts them with depressing regularity. Also, the automatic setup is utterly useless, it assigns an improper block of IP addresses, whereas most home users will want the 192.168 block, so you can't use the wizard if you want things to work. Yet, Linux manages to play by the rules, and get the correct results.
When you have printers with HP JetDirect servers built in, you usually don't want anything else to do the serving. If you let it, XP assumes that role, and you then have to configure printer sharing, samba and a whole lot of things, so all the PCs can print, when they can see the printer on the same subnet directly. Yet, either Xandros or SuSE again manages to get it right, and leaves the printer to do its own serving. On Windoze you have to read the virtually non-existent mind of Sir Bill to realise that to get what you want, the printer, which is clearly attached to a network hub or switch, has to be installed as local. Makes no sense at all, yet Linux/CUPS can appreciate that a JetDirect server is not the same as a local port. XP also loses the printers from time to time, you have to go through all the trials and tribulations again, often several times, trying to remember how you got it to work last time, whereas Linux, once configured, stays configured. I suspect that the ability to write-protect config files has a lot to do with it.
I will concede that Windoze gets the configuration of Nvidia cards somewhat better, even an abject incompetent like Sir Bill might get the odd thing right occasionally, but no doubt SuSE will fix that one in due course.
I think SuSE may have something suitable. And what about the stuff which was funded by the German government fairly recently?
Maybe the time to get rid of Exchange is not quite right yet, but it is not far away, and I don't think many will be sad to see it go.
If using Linux, Ximian Evolution seems to me to be better than anything else, but is should be a matter of eprsonal choice, where open protocols are used. On Windoze I might well chose Thunderbird, it is good also.
Very well said indeed, and my sentiments exactly, when an irresponsible idiot first of all emailed me, from his PC, (at my work!) a warning that his PC had a virus (it had!), followed later by another infected email saying that an "expert" had assured him that it was only a hoax. A few months later, he sibscribed to a seemingly useful service that helps to keep your Outlook address book up to date, known as Plaxo, which was running lots of expensive servers at a number of world-wide locations, had no visible income, so should have aroused suspicion in any reasonable person. It was, and AFAIK still is, in fact an email harvesting operation, they fund their server farms by selling emails to the spamming scumbags, so of course I have been innundated with spam, mostly infected with the latest worm, ever since.
People who are as irresponsible and reckless as that should not be allowed near anything which is the least bit technical, as they are certain to do damage to others.
Quite right. I am sick of spambots, it seems that there are at least 200 infected PCs with me in the Outlook address book, and none of them have bothered to do anything about it. If they are disconnected, and banned for ever from the net, I will be very happy.
Why should we all pay for other people's stupidity?
Of course, if it were up to me, the first time someone sent an email from Outlook, they would receive compulsory psychiatric treatment, the second time they would be banned for life. It is in fact the fault of Sir Bill and his cowboys that we are in this mess. His Criminal Monopoly has brainwashed so many people that, even when explained in words of one syllable, they can't understand that Outlook is a serious security problem, or that it can quickly, easily and at no cost be replaced by any one of a number of decent alternative email clients.
What may start to drive a change is that IE has stagnated, in fact having done its illegal job of killing Netscape, it is of no value to M$, so it has been all but abandoned, and standards compliance (which always was number one priority with competent webmasters, who of course never use FrontPage) is becoming important again, so there is a slow but discernible swing back towards either Mozilla (or a variant thereof) or Opera, in the Windoze world. Most people who install Mozilla go for the full package, and get a decent email client. Some will even learn to use it.
I use Ximian Evolution, currently under SuSE 9.0, at home and for my own company business, sadly have only NT and Lotus Notes at the present work site. I gave up browsing or emailing from Windoze at home about a year ago, except maybe for the occasional software download. Far less trouble, hardly ever a crash, none of them serious, and no risk of spambots on my machine, just a load of trash emails with a nice block of Windoze virus or worm code attached every day!
Inferior maybe, but in places that don't really matter. The vast majority of users never have time to explore the fancy features of an office suite, nor need them.
However, in some areas OOo is vastly superior, the drawing program works, unlike the perverse thing that has been incorporated within Word for many years. OOo will not displace Autocad or Corel Draw, but for lots of basic diargams it is all you need, especially if you don't have or can't afford Visio. The OOo files are tiny compared to the equivalent in Visio (surprise, I thought they would both be vector graphics and so Visio should be compact also).
It also quite often (about 15 successes so far and no failures) can rescue a Word or Excel file that the M$ application has trashed and can't open.
But, there are places where things may not be there yet, I can't recall any that have caused me major annoyance, certainly not in the latest version. I don't think that OOo needs to match M$ feature for feature, some of the worst features of Word can well be ignored! The spreadsheet seems to be ahead, maybe slower to recalculate, but better scope for creating user-defined functions and that sort of thing.
I would rate the functionality about equal, if you assess value for money as features divided by cost, you get into a mathematical problem where the cost is zero! Even if you buy Star Office (I have, I use OOo on some PCs, Star on another, mainly to see how they compare), Star wins in a ratio of at leat 5:1.
If current trends continue, OOo will soon be a far more attractive proposition than M$ to the general public, and I don't see how M$ will recover market share, because how do you make a better word processor, when even the most basic ones do everything that most people want?
And it is controlled by international treaty, basically to protect the environment, and so it can't be claimed by one country, which is quite reasonable. However, there is increasing disregard for this. You could probably get away with setting up a server farm if it could be passed off as part of a serious research project.
There are other small islands in the far south which are uninhabited, and might not have had sufficient occupation to legally belong to anyone. The weather may be terrible, some are volcanic.....
If the country which most recently claimed ownership is very far away and sufficiently non-belligerent, it might be possible to simply acquire such an island, and declare independence.
MEPs are elected, but the system is absolutely rotten with corruption. Almost every one of them is cheating big-time on their expenses for a start. Most people in the UK don't even know who their MEP is, so their chances of being unseated at elections are practically nil.
Most thinking people in the UK don't want the present Socialist State of Europe.
The UK government (assuming Tory B. Liar to be still in power) would simply find a judge who is about to retire, secretly double his pension, and employ him to conduct a public enquiry.
No, the GPL is a licence, which allows you to do certain things, provided you do not do certain other things, mainly to do with limiting the rights of others. If you violate the terms of the GPL, it no longer applies to you (as far as the affected code is concerned), if you are copying without the licence, you are in breach of simple copyright law.
I don't know about any allegations against Philips or Vivendi (haven't even heard of Vivendi), but if they have broken the terms of the licence, their actions in copying the code clearly become a simple matter of copyright violation, which in some countries, since these organisations are businesses, is a criminal offence, punishable by imprisonment (if appropraite) of company directors etc. In the UK this could easily result in several years in prison. It is also a civil offence, damages could be claimed in court, but I don't know how they would be assessed.
I would like to see such a case persued through the couts in the UK, it would teach the global monopolists to behave, or at least withdraw the offending products from the UK market, which would be a start.
Re:How do they decide which companies can do it?
on
EU Passes Nasty IP Law
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
It actually means that the FSF, Linus and other copyright owners can raid SCO because they are distributing GPL code, their right to do so having terminated when they attempted to illegally sell licences for GPL code.
I hope that they will do so, it should be sufficient to put an end to SCO and their illegal behaviour.
Well said, and it shows that it is developments in LCD technology, or its replacement by something else (probably not yet devised) that would bring the most tangible benefit.
The strange thing is that if you made the screen from LEDs, with a miniature lens on each pixel so the light goes mostly where it is wanted, the efficiency would be more than double that of the LCD plus backlight!
Has technology taken a wrong turn here, I wonder.
The problem with using LEDs simplistically is that without the lens, the light output is Lambertian, so a lot of it goes where it is not wanted, straying into adjacent pixels that are supposed to be dark for a start.
There has been much talk of ferroelectric and other new forms of display, these like LCD are based on blocking the light rather than controlling its creation, however they might manage better efficiency. But with a single white light source, you still need to divide it unequally into three colours by selective filtering, so two thirds (very roughly) is gone for a start. Now, if you can integrate the pixels on top of dots of colour phosphor which emit only light of the colour relevant to the pixel, you might get a very good improvement, but it would mean integrating the backlight and the LCD in one structure. Also, the surface area of a large flat fluorescent would kill its efficiency, I think. (In the above, I mean sub-pixels, i.e. the red, green or blue, not the pixel, which effectively can take any colour.)
I expect that something new, and a bit better than what we have now, will eventually come along, and when it does, it will be so obvious that everyone will wonder why it did not happen 10 years ago. Some would-be inventor out there maybe has the answer now, but not the money....
The sad thing is that over the years some stupid measures of light have been invented. I have a degree in physics, yet have never known what a lumen is, because it is not a physicists unit, and probably not an engineers unit either. I assume that it is a marketing unit, as it is often applied to LCD projectors, one of 1800 lumens being said to be much more powerful than one of only 1700, although in fact the difference visually is negligible, and swamped by lamp ageing anyway.
What really matters is that the energy will divide 3 ways, heat (bad), out of band light (UV, very bad, IR just bad) and visible light. (For the pedantic, there may also be a trace of acoustic or RF emissions, but in either case a small fraction of a watt would have such nuisance value that it would not be allowed.) You need to know what fraction of the energy is visible, and the spectral distribution, is it white or an aceptable approximation?
AFAIK, a normal LED can get to about 22% (depending on colour) while a high-efficiency fluorescent can get about 70%, but these figures will have changed since my brain had its last update.
There will be a definite limit imposed by the laws of physics, normal LEDs are hitting this now, and despite what one may read in the press, will not ever replace fluorescents for general lighting. They are not even appropriate for bicycle headlights, for which they are sold, and are utterly inappropraite for car headlights, despite the best efforts of one of the more incompetent European lighting manufacturers. In both cases an optimised gas discharge source of some sort (i.e. fluorescent) would be best, preferably not like these vile headlights with the excessive UV content used by BMW, which surprisingly has not yet landed them in court. (It will.....) In fact they are struggling to get double the efficiency of quartz-halogen, which is only a bit better than normal tungsten. I don't know the physics of an OLED, but it will have a definite limit, and I suspect will not be particularly impressive.
Factor in cost and life, and general use of these things will be a long way off, none of which is intended to denigrate the good work which has gone into the concept in any way. Research like this should be done, the mistake is to allow the marketing men to create expectations which cannot be satisfied due to the physics.
I will be sticking to the highest efficiency miniature fluorescents for my domestic lighting, probably for a long time, but when something which is actually better comes along, I will make the change willingly. It was a no-brainer to replace ordinary tungsten bulbs with fluorescents, it will need a bit of thought next time, because there is not nearly as much scope left for efficiency improvement, since you can't get to 100%.
That would be illegal, because you can't licence Linux except as provided for, very comprehensively, by the GPL. Selling or giving away any other licence makes your GPL null and void, any distribution of Linux then is a violation of ordinary copyright law.
If they have indeed sold or given away Linux licences, they have committed a criminal offence in most countries signatory to the Berne conventions. By "they" I mean of course SCO, not CA. It seems to me that receiving an illegally given licence is simply the act of receiving a truly worthless piece of paper, which is what CA have. I almost feel sorry for them, they will face the vast expense of putting it in the bin with all the other garbage.
It is time that someone pointed out to Darl McFraud and his pathetic team of schysters that every time he licences Linux to someone, he is adding to his own eventual, and quite certain, prison sentence. He has stated that the GPL is invalid, (true, his copy is...) therefore he knowingly is violating simple copyright law on code copyrighted by Linus and many others.
If he pulled that stunt in the UK he would be subject to arrest and imprisonment, just like the pirates who hang around street corners in London, selling illegal copies of Windoze (and better things from Adobe, Corel....). His offence is exactly the same, he is violating normal copyright law for commercial gain.
It makes me sick that the DOJ have not moved on this already. You need better laws in the US, not a vast excess of lawyers!
It is high time that these criminal elements, which are parasitical on the whole world, not just the US, were removed from society for a decent period of time. The same goes for his paymaster, the vile Convicted Monopolist, who seems to get away with continuing to ignore court rulings, extending the Criminal Monopoly on a daily basis. Don't they ever punish real criminals in the US?
I was rummaging around trying to find a ribbon for my CD label printer some time ago, and wondered why I needed one at all. The solution was obvious. It could have been implemented in the first CD writer, long before I thought I would ever need a CD writer for backup. It needed no new technological breakthrough, just the application of what was well-known at the time.
I expect that a few thousand (million?) others had also had that same thought at some time.
The sad fact is that millions of people have good ideas and are far too busy trying to survive to be able to get embroiled in serious product development. In any case, only a large corporation could afford to do this, the prototype would likely have cost millions.
It is unfortunate that the principles of open source can't work in hardware development, where mechanisms, mouldings and precise little bits are concerned. Otherwise, we could have lots of things sooner.
It is only going to get worse as technology advances. What gets developed depends entirely on the whims of the marketing men, an area where people of the greatest imagination are rarely to be found.
It is worth remembering that a boy called Humphrey Potter created the first self-acting steam engine, and therefore laid the foundation for the Industrial Revolution, because he had better things to do than open and shut valves sequentially all day. Humphrey Potter actually achieved what the Convicted Monopolist has never achieved, and never will, he really invented something useful and innovative. It is sad that such real grass-roots innovation is scarcely possible nowadays, even the simplest thing involves far too much expense. Humphrey Potter's requirements were simple, and within reach of most people: string and pulleys for example.
Now this latest "invention" will not have the effect of Humphrey Potter's work (he caused massive unemployment of engine boys, including himself!), but the fact remains that it is late, and was not spotted by any of the large corporations who make CD and DVD writers, until recently.
Manufacturing industry needs to find a way of listening to the modern-day Humphrey Potters, not the ever so slow marketing men.
.... is about $5000, if you factor in all the time wasted on support, lost data, and all the other consequences of using trash on your computer.
IMHO, Sir Bill should therefore be paying each and every one of us $4955 per copy! That is its true worth.
How can something that has significantly retarded the progress of mankind, and very substantially decreased office productivity, have any kind of positive value?
The Monopolist's contribution to society is equivalent to that of John Logie Baird, who contrary to popular belief did not invent television, in fact he retarded progress in that area by at least 20 years, yet became known to everyone as the inventor. Note that M$ in general, and Sir Bill in particular, has never invented anything except a new form of Criminal Monopoly.
If implemented, we might see the last of those nasty little bugs that thrive in the area between Redmond and the hardware manufacturer, and also be able to run any OS and hardware combination.
I predict that the whole idea will be resisted, villified and obstructed in every way possible by the Convicted Monopolist. Sir Bill would rather fund a vastly bigger development team than is needed, in order to deal with driver code, than do anything which might help compatability with another OS.
IIRC there was a move about 10 years ago, maybe a bit less, to code the device BIOS (graphics, SCSI etc) in some sort of universal language so that it could be interpreted, or re-compiled into native code for faster execution. I have not heard anything of it since, maybe an idea whose time had not yet come.
The key to doing the whole thing properly of course is that there needs to be a set of standards for the BIOS API, so that every OS can call all the basic functions identically. That should be easy, for example a disc can basically seek, read or write, only three basic operations. It might queue these, with arbitrary priority, which adds a little bit of complexity. It gets messy with 3D graphics.....
Thinking about it, as I have been for years, the correct place to split between BIOS and OS might be at the file system level, the file system (ext3, Reiser, JFS (watch out for false claims about ownership from SCO!), etc, even FAT, should reside in the bios. That way a totally trashed PC can be recovered without the OS, i.e. the OS is truly file system independent and vice versa. It would make for very clean software design. What is more, the access permissions would be handled in the open-sourced BIOS code, all security holes could be filled rapidly.
Next stage, the memory management.....
Taken to its logical conclusion, the OS would be reduced to a mere compatability layer on top of the BIOS. It has a lot of advantages, especially if the hardware write inhibit for the flash is reinstated (used to be a jumper, often not fitted to the motherboard to save next to nothing, and expose people to destruction of their flash by viruses), preferably by a key switch on the front panel, so all updates need manual intervention.
There is a real possibility of a major advance in software quality and security here, as well as the elimination of future hardware incompatabilities, somehow I don't think it will happen, because it will not be to the liking of the small-minded Monopolist with the large bank balance. Until M$ are eradicated from the face of the earth, they will remain as a major obstacle to each and every form of progress, as do all Illegal Monopolies.
Aren't you lucky? My SuSE 9.0 reverted to twm, a WM of less than zero usefulness, last night, with no obvious way of either doing anything useful, or fixing it, and no reason why, except that I had just used Yast to do some Samba configuration. That could be a new bug. I eventually worked out how to get a shell....
At least fvwm2 has useful functionality!
As to your laptop, I do hope that the developers can end the continual bloat. I am sure they are open to suggestions, maybe a large team of masochists need to volunteer to replicate it in hand-optimised assembler? The continual bloat of everything, even the kernel, is not a good thing. Some people need a small memory footprint and CPU usage, not simply because they have old hardware, but because of the energy requirements and other factors. Simplicity is best, it can be quite difficult to achieve. Oh for Unix V7 with its 52K kernel! (Strange how some very clever people could get a multi-user, multi-tasking kernel in similar space to MessyDOS!)
...that the Seattle Times is not prejudiced in favour of their local Criminal Monopoly!
This is actually quite a good article, and the observations about Xandros are in line with my own experience. (I don't intend to try Lindows any time soon, Xandros and SuSE do everything I want right now. No time....)
The one awful problem with Xandros, SuSE, the Fedora rubbish, and every other distro I have tried so far, is that updating large packages on a dial-up 56k with a 2 hour timeout (as most of the world has at the moment) simply does not work. I can't update kernel source in either SuSE or Xandros. Now technology to resume interrupted downloads exists, I suspect it even was invented in the Linux/BSD world rather than M$, but it is simply not implemented, or is broken, or not implemented on the servers, or something on all three of my Linux machines (different hardware!) stops it. I have mentioned this before, if they (meaning all distros) fix this, it will be a very big step forward. There is a lot of dis-information about, I read on a web site that SuSE uses wget, and of course wget can resume interrupted downloads, so I tried..... Guess what, a ps ax during the download showed no trace of wget! So, it is down to hacking into umpteen dense and inadequately commented perl or python scripts, etc, to try to find what is going on. Life is too short....
Why can't the authors of these broken programs, who are the best people to tackle the problem because they know the code, fix them, and get the update process up to the same (generally good) standard as the rest of the distro? The same goes for configuring an Nvidia card, I had a fight with SuSE again last night. (Xandros has a Matrox card IIRC so I can't compare yet). The instructions tell you specifically to download and run the Nvidia installer (works OK), and then tell you to run Sax to configure the card for the accelerated driver etc. That is guaranteed to blow away any useful settings in XF86Config, and often leave you with an unusable, unbootable PC (if set to boot into X). Now I can fix that in a jiffy, but why should I have to, and what about all the inexperienced users who will be put off Linux for ever by something like this?
I seriously say to all developers, distro configurers, and anyone else who will listen: Please fix the installation and configuration bugs, these are the only things holding back Linux from making substantial inroads on the desktop.
No-one with any technical competence has ever taken Sir Bill seriously, nor will they ever, when this sort of drivel is the best that he can come up with. It is of course an idea created in panic, as he sees his illegal empire collapsing under the weight of spam, and no workable solution in sight.
A cornered rat can be very dangerous.
Re:Cha ching, reloaded.
on
Gates on Spam
·
· Score: 1
Just out of interest I just tried this on an Athlon 1.2 gig.
bash> time factor 56029043
56029043: 7 19 43 97 101
real 0m0.017s
user 0m0.001s
sys 0m0.003s
bash>
Much faster than I expected! The last time I used factor was many years ago, under a Unix V 7 derivative, and it was slow..... BTW this was in a window under KDE, on SuSE 9.0, so there was some overhead.
factor seems to be limited to about 19 digits here, IIRC the Unix V7 version was essentially unlimited.
Like most things, I have been unable to find a way to do this under Windoze, even XP. A simple task that Unix could do in at least 1980, probably earlier. Illegal monopolies inevitably result in zero, or backward, progress.
Much as I respect Linus, I have to disagree with him on this. The Convicted Monopolist globally has done far, far more damage than McBride could even imagine being able to achieve, through their incompetence, greed, and lack of concern for the security of other people's data. SCO's product is at least of moderately good quality, even if very old-fashioned compared to the latest Linux distros. SCO may be in second place.
McFraud in particular, and SCO in general, are at the moment a mere pawn in the game being played by their paymaster, Sir Bill, and his vile monopoly.
However Linus's other observation regarding lack of honesty is proven to be accurate on a daily basis, with every fresh utterance from the (unspecified) McFraud orifice.
Yes, their Linux was a better overall package that their Unix. They shot themselves in the foot on that one, by not putting enough development into Unix to keep ahead. Better still, they themselves could have legally merged the code, and made Unix free, earning real money from support etc, as the more commercially oriented Linux distros do very nicely. "If you can't beat them, join them."
I have SCO (Caldera) Unix and SCO (Caldera) Linux at home, somewhere.....
They don't licence Unix freely for personal use any more, because allegedly people were cheating and using it commercially. That is of course criminal, and should not be condoned. But I doubt that it happened on a large scale, there never was much sign that AT&T Unix for example was being copied illegally. Business users usually know that the penalties for being causght are too great, and if your servers are visible on the Internet, you will be caught, sooner or later.... I think the withdrawal of new licences for personal use was simply one of the first McBrideisms, trying to show how poor little SCO was being ripped off by unscrupulous FOSS people (who would of course not bother, because Linux or BSD offers more facilities, as I discovered).
I agree where legal things are concerned, although M$ is a proven Illegal Monopoly. But, where software is concerned, SCO Unix is far, far better than anything Sir Bill and his gang of hopeless incompetents has ever come up with, which is not to suggest that it is nearly as good as either Linux or BSD, of course. I understand that McBride was not part of the company when the product was developed to its present standard.
SCO servers tend to run for a year or more between reboots, the average for Windoze is a few weeks at best. Linux or BSD are normally rebooted only to do kernel updates or clean the air filters, SCO reliability is similar but the overall package lacks a lot.
If the legal proceedings go badly wrong for SCO, which is certain, it is not impossible that the court may eventually order the code to be put in the public domain, or under GPL, as part of punitive damages, in fact it may be the only asset SCO can put up to pay the damages. In that case, the value (true worth, as intellectual property, and working code) will rise enormously, but the cost (economic) will fall to zero. Publicly available code is of inestimable value, but no economic worth whatsoever. The value is in the knowledge, functionality and usefulness, and is priceless. Information is in its own right always valuable, even if it is not sold. Free as in speech does not mean worthless, nor does free as in beer. Things which are freely shared and used by all, such as the air we breathe, have a value, maybe not a cash value but a value in supporting life. The true value of the entire GPL codebase, in terms of the spread of useful knowledge, is many, many billions of whatever currency you happen to use. Its net worth to an accountant is of course zero. Free market forces don't work here.
The other day, someone here mentioned an open source project which was of immediate use to me, value to me nearly priceless (months of work saved, in fact something will be done that could not have been done in the time I have), cost zero. The standard laws of economics can't apply when the product is free. The cost and the value become separated. It works the other way too, some of the less well engineered applications which come with a Linux distro are, to most people worthless, yet they have a (smallish) incremental cost in the download, or in the number of CDs needed.
The problem is of course linguistic, we use the word value in several ways.
If the courts eventually do dispose of the source in the appropriate manner, to compensate all users and creators of free software for the damage done, it will not damage IBM, Sun, HP and other licencees because their proprietary additions (and therefore their full codebase) would still remain closed, at their discretion of course.
I am guessing that the value of the Unix source on the open market might be $50 to $100 million, if it finally emerges that Linux has been damaged by (say) $25M (although I would already rate it higher) then applying punitive damages, giving the rights to the source to the FSF, Linus etc would be about the correct remedy.
Slashdot Mirror
As I keep telling people, it has an amazing ability to rescue corrupt .doc or .xls files, which M$ Office itself has corrupted and can't open. For that reason alone, OOo (or Star Office) should be on every PC, everywhere. It might just save hours of work one day, it has for me at least 15 times.
As to your networking issues, I wasted hours trying to make Xandros 2 share the internet connection with whatever other PCs were on my network at the time. Silly me, I should have read the book, because it was already configured, instead of hacking text files to fiddle with iptables (which worked), all I needed to do was enable the firewall, which was already configured correctly. There was a menu entry to do just that. I was confused in the nomenclature, expecting something like "Internet Connection Sharing", when I really wanted "Firewall". Next time, it will be easy. Obviously I have been brainwashed by Sir Bill, or maybe assimilated by the Borg, despite all my attempts to resist.
There is no comparison between Xandros (or for that matter, SuSE, which is equally easy but different) and Windoze XP. The inferior product (same PC, dual-boot) needs its networking settings reset manually every so often, because like all versions of Windoze from 95 onwards, it loses or corrupts them with depressing regularity. Also, the automatic setup is utterly useless, it assigns an improper block of IP addresses, whereas most home users will want the 192.168 block, so you can't use the wizard if you want things to work. Yet, Linux manages to play by the rules, and get the correct results.
When you have printers with HP JetDirect servers built in, you usually don't want anything else to do the serving. If you let it, XP assumes that role, and you then have to configure printer sharing, samba and a whole lot of things, so all the PCs can print, when they can see the printer on the same subnet directly. Yet, either Xandros or SuSE again manages to get it right, and leaves the printer to do its own serving. On Windoze you have to read the virtually non-existent mind of Sir Bill to realise that to get what you want, the printer, which is clearly attached to a network hub or switch, has to be installed as local. Makes no sense at all, yet Linux/CUPS can appreciate that a JetDirect server is not the same as a local port. XP also loses the printers from time to time, you have to go through all the trials and tribulations again, often several times, trying to remember how you got it to work last time, whereas Linux, once configured, stays configured. I suspect that the ability to write-protect config files has a lot to do with it.
I will concede that Windoze gets the configuration of Nvidia cards somewhat better, even an abject incompetent like Sir Bill might get the odd thing right occasionally, but no doubt SuSE will fix that one in due course.
Maybe the time to get rid of Exchange is not quite right yet, but it is not far away, and I don't think many will be sad to see it go.
If using Linux, Ximian Evolution seems to me to be better than anything else, but is should be a matter of eprsonal choice, where open protocols are used. On Windoze I might well chose Thunderbird, it is good also.
People who are as irresponsible and reckless as that should not be allowed near anything which is the least bit technical, as they are certain to do damage to others.
Why should we all pay for other people's stupidity?
Of course, if it were up to me, the first time someone sent an email from Outlook, they would receive compulsory psychiatric treatment, the second time they would be banned for life. It is in fact the fault of Sir Bill and his cowboys that we are in this mess. His Criminal Monopoly has brainwashed so many people that, even when explained in words of one syllable, they can't understand that Outlook is a serious security problem, or that it can quickly, easily and at no cost be replaced by any one of a number of decent alternative email clients.
What may start to drive a change is that IE has stagnated, in fact having done its illegal job of killing Netscape, it is of no value to M$, so it has been all but abandoned, and standards compliance (which always was number one priority with competent webmasters, who of course never use FrontPage) is becoming important again, so there is a slow but discernible swing back towards either Mozilla (or a variant thereof) or Opera, in the Windoze world. Most people who install Mozilla go for the full package, and get a decent email client. Some will even learn to use it.
I use Ximian Evolution, currently under SuSE 9.0, at home and for my own company business, sadly have only NT and Lotus Notes at the present work site. I gave up browsing or emailing from Windoze at home about a year ago, except maybe for the occasional software download. Far less trouble, hardly ever a crash, none of them serious, and no risk of spambots on my machine, just a load of trash emails with a nice block of Windoze virus or worm code attached every day!
However, in some areas OOo is vastly superior, the drawing program works, unlike the perverse thing that has been incorporated within Word for many years. OOo will not displace Autocad or Corel Draw, but for lots of basic diargams it is all you need, especially if you don't have or can't afford Visio. The OOo files are tiny compared to the equivalent in Visio (surprise, I thought they would both be vector graphics and so Visio should be compact also).
It also quite often (about 15 successes so far and no failures) can rescue a Word or Excel file that the M$ application has trashed and can't open.
But, there are places where things may not be there yet, I can't recall any that have caused me major annoyance, certainly not in the latest version. I don't think that OOo needs to match M$ feature for feature, some of the worst features of Word can well be ignored! The spreadsheet seems to be ahead, maybe slower to recalculate, but better scope for creating user-defined functions and that sort of thing.
I would rate the functionality about equal, if you assess value for money as features divided by cost, you get into a mathematical problem where the cost is zero! Even if you buy Star Office (I have, I use OOo on some PCs, Star on another, mainly to see how they compare), Star wins in a ratio of at leat 5:1.
If current trends continue, OOo will soon be a far more attractive proposition than M$ to the general public, and I don't see how M$ will recover market share, because how do you make a better word processor, when even the most basic ones do everything that most people want?
There are other small islands in the far south which are uninhabited, and might not have had sufficient occupation to legally belong to anyone. The weather may be terrible, some are volcanic.....
If the country which most recently claimed ownership is very far away and sufficiently non-belligerent, it might be possible to simply acquire such an island, and declare independence.
Most thinking people in the UK don't want the present Socialist State of Europe.
The UK government (assuming Tory B. Liar to be still in power) would simply find a judge who is about to retire, secretly double his pension, and employ him to conduct a public enquiry.
I hope that this little button deletes all M$ code. The world would be a far better place if the Criminal Monopoly had never existed.
I don't know about any allegations against Philips or Vivendi (haven't even heard of Vivendi), but if they have broken the terms of the licence, their actions in copying the code clearly become a simple matter of copyright violation, which in some countries, since these organisations are businesses, is a criminal offence, punishable by imprisonment (if appropraite) of company directors etc. In the UK this could easily result in several years in prison. It is also a civil offence, damages could be claimed in court, but I don't know how they would be assessed.
I would like to see such a case persued through the couts in the UK, it would teach the global monopolists to behave, or at least withdraw the offending products from the UK market, which would be a start.
I hope that they will do so, it should be sufficient to put an end to SCO and their illegal behaviour.
The strange thing is that if you made the screen from LEDs, with a miniature lens on each pixel so the light goes mostly where it is wanted, the efficiency would be more than double that of the LCD plus backlight!
Has technology taken a wrong turn here, I wonder.
The problem with using LEDs simplistically is that without the lens, the light output is Lambertian, so a lot of it goes where it is not wanted, straying into adjacent pixels that are supposed to be dark for a start.
There has been much talk of ferroelectric and other new forms of display, these like LCD are based on blocking the light rather than controlling its creation, however they might manage better efficiency. But with a single white light source, you still need to divide it unequally into three colours by selective filtering, so two thirds (very roughly) is gone for a start. Now, if you can integrate the pixels on top of dots of colour phosphor which emit only light of the colour relevant to the pixel, you might get a very good improvement, but it would mean integrating the backlight and the LCD in one structure. Also, the surface area of a large flat fluorescent would kill its efficiency, I think. (In the above, I mean sub-pixels, i.e. the red, green or blue, not the pixel, which effectively can take any colour.)
I expect that something new, and a bit better than what we have now, will eventually come along, and when it does, it will be so obvious that everyone will wonder why it did not happen 10 years ago. Some would-be inventor out there maybe has the answer now, but not the money....
What really matters is that the energy will divide 3 ways, heat (bad), out of band light (UV, very bad, IR just bad) and visible light. (For the pedantic, there may also be a trace of acoustic or RF emissions, but in either case a small fraction of a watt would have such nuisance value that it would not be allowed.) You need to know what fraction of the energy is visible, and the spectral distribution, is it white or an aceptable approximation?
AFAIK, a normal LED can get to about 22% (depending on colour) while a high-efficiency fluorescent can get about 70%, but these figures will have changed since my brain had its last update.
There will be a definite limit imposed by the laws of physics, normal LEDs are hitting this now, and despite what one may read in the press, will not ever replace fluorescents for general lighting. They are not even appropriate for bicycle headlights, for which they are sold, and are utterly inappropraite for car headlights, despite the best efforts of one of the more incompetent European lighting manufacturers. In both cases an optimised gas discharge source of some sort (i.e. fluorescent) would be best, preferably not like these vile headlights with the excessive UV content used by BMW, which surprisingly has not yet landed them in court. (It will.....) In fact they are struggling to get double the efficiency of quartz-halogen, which is only a bit better than normal tungsten. I don't know the physics of an OLED, but it will have a definite limit, and I suspect will not be particularly impressive.
Factor in cost and life, and general use of these things will be a long way off, none of which is intended to denigrate the good work which has gone into the concept in any way. Research like this should be done, the mistake is to allow the marketing men to create expectations which cannot be satisfied due to the physics.
I will be sticking to the highest efficiency miniature fluorescents for my domestic lighting, probably for a long time, but when something which is actually better comes along, I will make the change willingly. It was a no-brainer to replace ordinary tungsten bulbs with fluorescents, it will need a bit of thought next time, because there is not nearly as much scope left for efficiency improvement, since you can't get to 100%.
If they have indeed sold or given away Linux licences, they have committed a criminal offence in most countries signatory to the Berne conventions. By "they" I mean of course SCO, not CA. It seems to me that receiving an illegally given licence is simply the act of receiving a truly worthless piece of paper, which is what CA have. I almost feel sorry for them, they will face the vast expense of putting it in the bin with all the other garbage.
It is time that someone pointed out to Darl McFraud and his pathetic team of schysters that every time he licences Linux to someone, he is adding to his own eventual, and quite certain, prison sentence. He has stated that the GPL is invalid, (true, his copy is...) therefore he knowingly is violating simple copyright law on code copyrighted by Linus and many others.
If he pulled that stunt in the UK he would be subject to arrest and imprisonment, just like the pirates who hang around street corners in London, selling illegal copies of Windoze (and better things from Adobe, Corel....). His offence is exactly the same, he is violating normal copyright law for commercial gain.
It makes me sick that the DOJ have not moved on this already. You need better laws in the US, not a vast excess of lawyers!
It is high time that these criminal elements, which are parasitical on the whole world, not just the US, were removed from society for a decent period of time. The same goes for his paymaster, the vile Convicted Monopolist, who seems to get away with continuing to ignore court rulings, extending the Criminal Monopoly on a daily basis. Don't they ever punish real criminals in the US?
I expect that a few thousand (million?) others had also had that same thought at some time.
The sad fact is that millions of people have good ideas and are far too busy trying to survive to be able to get embroiled in serious product development. In any case, only a large corporation could afford to do this, the prototype would likely have cost millions.
It is unfortunate that the principles of open source can't work in hardware development, where mechanisms, mouldings and precise little bits are concerned. Otherwise, we could have lots of things sooner.
It is only going to get worse as technology advances. What gets developed depends entirely on the whims of the marketing men, an area where people of the greatest imagination are rarely to be found.
It is worth remembering that a boy called Humphrey Potter created the first self-acting steam engine, and therefore laid the foundation for the Industrial Revolution, because he had better things to do than open and shut valves sequentially all day. Humphrey Potter actually achieved what the Convicted Monopolist has never achieved, and never will, he really invented something useful and innovative. It is sad that such real grass-roots innovation is scarcely possible nowadays, even the simplest thing involves far too much expense. Humphrey Potter's requirements were simple, and within reach of most people: string and pulleys for example.
Now this latest "invention" will not have the effect of Humphrey Potter's work (he caused massive unemployment of engine boys, including himself!), but the fact remains that it is late, and was not spotted by any of the large corporations who make CD and DVD writers, until recently.
Manufacturing industry needs to find a way of listening to the modern-day Humphrey Potters, not the ever so slow marketing men.
IMHO, Sir Bill should therefore be paying each and every one of us $4955 per copy! That is its true worth.
How can something that has significantly retarded the progress of mankind, and very substantially decreased office productivity, have any kind of positive value?
The Monopolist's contribution to society is equivalent to that of John Logie Baird, who contrary to popular belief did not invent television, in fact he retarded progress in that area by at least 20 years, yet became known to everyone as the inventor. Note that M$ in general, and Sir Bill in particular, has never invented anything except a new form of Criminal Monopoly.
I predict that the whole idea will be resisted, villified and obstructed in every way possible by the Convicted Monopolist. Sir Bill would rather fund a vastly bigger development team than is needed, in order to deal with driver code, than do anything which might help compatability with another OS.
IIRC there was a move about 10 years ago, maybe a bit less, to code the device BIOS (graphics, SCSI etc) in some sort of universal language so that it could be interpreted, or re-compiled into native code for faster execution. I have not heard anything of it since, maybe an idea whose time had not yet come.
The key to doing the whole thing properly of course is that there needs to be a set of standards for the BIOS API, so that every OS can call all the basic functions identically. That should be easy, for example a disc can basically seek, read or write, only three basic operations. It might queue these, with arbitrary priority, which adds a little bit of complexity. It gets messy with 3D graphics.....
Thinking about it, as I have been for years, the correct place to split between BIOS and OS might be at the file system level, the file system (ext3, Reiser, JFS (watch out for false claims about ownership from SCO!), etc, even FAT, should reside in the bios. That way a totally trashed PC can be recovered without the OS, i.e. the OS is truly file system independent and vice versa. It would make for very clean software design. What is more, the access permissions would be handled in the open-sourced BIOS code, all security holes could be filled rapidly.
Next stage, the memory management.....
Taken to its logical conclusion, the OS would be reduced to a mere compatability layer on top of the BIOS. It has a lot of advantages, especially if the hardware write inhibit for the flash is reinstated (used to be a jumper, often not fitted to the motherboard to save next to nothing, and expose people to destruction of their flash by viruses), preferably by a key switch on the front panel, so all updates need manual intervention.
There is a real possibility of a major advance in software quality and security here, as well as the elimination of future hardware incompatabilities, somehow I don't think it will happen, because it will not be to the liking of the small-minded Monopolist with the large bank balance. Until M$ are eradicated from the face of the earth, they will remain as a major obstacle to each and every form of progress, as do all Illegal Monopolies.
At least fvwm2 has useful functionality!
As to your laptop, I do hope that the developers can end the continual bloat. I am sure they are open to suggestions, maybe a large team of masochists need to volunteer to replicate it in hand-optimised assembler? The continual bloat of everything, even the kernel, is not a good thing. Some people need a small memory footprint and CPU usage, not simply because they have old hardware, but because of the energy requirements and other factors. Simplicity is best, it can be quite difficult to achieve. Oh for Unix V7 with its 52K kernel! (Strange how some very clever people could get a multi-user, multi-tasking kernel in similar space to MessyDOS!)
This is actually quite a good article, and the observations about Xandros are in line with my own experience. (I don't intend to try Lindows any time soon, Xandros and SuSE do everything I want right now. No time....)
The one awful problem with Xandros, SuSE, the Fedora rubbish, and every other distro I have tried so far, is that updating large packages on a dial-up 56k with a 2 hour timeout (as most of the world has at the moment) simply does not work. I can't update kernel source in either SuSE or Xandros. Now technology to resume interrupted downloads exists, I suspect it even was invented in the Linux/BSD world rather than M$, but it is simply not implemented, or is broken, or not implemented on the servers, or something on all three of my Linux machines (different hardware!) stops it. I have mentioned this before, if they (meaning all distros) fix this, it will be a very big step forward. There is a lot of dis-information about, I read on a web site that SuSE uses wget, and of course wget can resume interrupted downloads, so I tried..... Guess what, a ps ax during the download showed no trace of wget! So, it is down to hacking into umpteen dense and inadequately commented perl or python scripts, etc, to try to find what is going on. Life is too short....
Why can't the authors of these broken programs, who are the best people to tackle the problem because they know the code, fix them, and get the update process up to the same (generally good) standard as the rest of the distro? The same goes for configuring an Nvidia card, I had a fight with SuSE again last night. (Xandros has a Matrox card IIRC so I can't compare yet). The instructions tell you specifically to download and run the Nvidia installer (works OK), and then tell you to run Sax to configure the card for the accelerated driver etc. That is guaranteed to blow away any useful settings in XF86Config, and often leave you with an unusable, unbootable PC (if set to boot into X). Now I can fix that in a jiffy, but why should I have to, and what about all the inexperienced users who will be put off Linux for ever by something like this?
I seriously say to all developers, distro configurers, and anyone else who will listen: Please fix the installation and configuration bugs, these are the only things holding back Linux from making substantial inroads on the desktop.
No-one with any technical competence has ever taken Sir Bill seriously, nor will they ever, when this sort of drivel is the best that he can come up with. It is of course an idea created in panic, as he sees his illegal empire collapsing under the weight of spam, and no workable solution in sight.
A cornered rat can be very dangerous.
bash> time factor 56029043
56029043: 7 19 43 97 101
real 0m0.017s
user 0m0.001s
sys 0m0.003s
bash>
Much faster than I expected! The last time I used factor was many years ago, under a Unix V 7 derivative, and it was slow..... BTW this was in a window under KDE, on SuSE 9.0, so there was some overhead.
factor seems to be limited to about 19 digits here, IIRC the Unix V7 version was essentially unlimited.
Like most things, I have been unable to find a way to do this under Windoze, even XP. A simple task that Unix could do in at least 1980, probably earlier. Illegal monopolies inevitably result in zero, or backward, progress.
Much as I respect Linus, I have to disagree with him on this. The Convicted Monopolist globally has done far, far more damage than McBride could even imagine being able to achieve, through their incompetence, greed, and lack of concern for the security of other people's data. SCO's product is at least of moderately good quality, even if very old-fashioned compared to the latest Linux distros. SCO may be in second place.
McFraud in particular, and SCO in general, are at the moment a mere pawn in the game being played by their paymaster, Sir Bill, and his vile monopoly.
However Linus's other observation regarding lack of honesty is proven to be accurate on a daily basis, with every fresh utterance from the (unspecified) McFraud orifice.
I have SCO (Caldera) Unix and SCO (Caldera) Linux at home, somewhere.....
They don't licence Unix freely for personal use any more, because allegedly people were cheating and using it commercially. That is of course criminal, and should not be condoned. But I doubt that it happened on a large scale, there never was much sign that AT&T Unix for example was being copied illegally. Business users usually know that the penalties for being causght are too great, and if your servers are visible on the Internet, you will be caught, sooner or later.... I think the withdrawal of new licences for personal use was simply one of the first McBrideisms, trying to show how poor little SCO was being ripped off by unscrupulous FOSS people (who would of course not bother, because Linux or BSD offers more facilities, as I discovered).
SCO servers tend to run for a year or more between reboots, the average for Windoze is a few weeks at best. Linux or BSD are normally rebooted only to do kernel updates or clean the air filters, SCO reliability is similar but the overall package lacks a lot.
The other day, someone here mentioned an open source project which was of immediate use to me, value to me nearly priceless (months of work saved, in fact something will be done that could not have been done in the time I have), cost zero. The standard laws of economics can't apply when the product is free. The cost and the value become separated. It works the other way too, some of the less well engineered applications which come with a Linux distro are, to most people worthless, yet they have a (smallish) incremental cost in the download, or in the number of CDs needed.
The problem is of course linguistic, we use the word value in several ways.
If the courts eventually do dispose of the source in the appropriate manner, to compensate all users and creators of free software for the damage done, it will not damage IBM, Sun, HP and other licencees because their proprietary additions (and therefore their full codebase) would still remain closed, at their discretion of course.
I am guessing that the value of the Unix source on the open market might be $50 to $100 million, if it finally emerges that Linux has been damaged by (say) $25M (although I would already rate it higher) then applying punitive damages, giving the rights to the source to the FSF, Linus etc would be about the correct remedy.