Marketing mentality, which in wild attempts to get more people to view an ad fails to recognise one simple truth : Someone who has gone out of their way to avoid your advert almost certainly has no intention of buying anything in response to an advert and no amount of advertising will change that.
For some novel open-source software to appear that handles this problem. Then it gets integrated into Thunderbird as an OPTION for a way to send mail. It should work seamlessly, and fall back to old-fashioned e-mail when necessary.
though it's always handy to know of another tool. Really what I'd like is a nice web-based frontend which is easy to integrate everything into - including systems which don't lend themselves to authenticating against LDAP, and overall systems management (ie. things other than user accounts, such as DNS, DHCP, rolling out PCs etc)- but I think sooner or later there's going to be a lot of customisation involved.
I think there has to be something more to this: Microsoft wanted to include more advanced PDF generation capabilities than would be provided by the usual printer-driver type output plugins.
Agreed. OO.o version 2 can not only generate PDFs, but also generate the table of contents that you sometimes see on the left hand side with PDFs - something which a printer-driver type PDF creator cannot do because by the time it sees the document it knows nothing about its structure.
It's the extra features like this which make people buy Adobe's Acrobat product - many organisations wouldn't install a separate full-blown office suite like OpenOffice, but would happily install a Microsoft office upgrade or Adobe Acrobat. Adobe are quite right to be concerned - past history has shown that "the best on the market" doesn't necessarily translate to "the one which gets picked" - quite often "the one which is good enough and requires minimal additional effort" is the one which gets picked. If Microsoft Office is going on a person's computer anyway, it's likely to to qualify as "good enough" with zero additional effort.
I can't speak for Adobe here, but I would speculate that they don't think a Unix-based command line PDF generating utility which has been integrated into very little with a meaningful UI to a typical office worker is a particularly big threat to their Windows-based GUI PDF generating utility which integrates into other software.
OTOH, Microsoft integrating such functionality into Office would effectively kill off a significant market for Adobe Acrobat pretty quickly. A lot of people either don't know of free Windows-based alternatives (hint: provided you don't need much more than "Print to PDF" functionality, they exist, and they don't have to be OpenOffice) or are still of the opinion that free software is free because it's worthless.
usrmgr - IME you can add users OK but try doing much fiddling around with group membership with an LDAP backend and you'll come unstuck very quickly.
Fortunately the smbldap tools are very good and allow you to avoid writing LDIF to update an LDAP backend, I believe there's also a web interface to them.
Stays up, but the NT administrative tools are very flaky - which is pretty damn annoying if you want everything to JFW. Recent versions of Samba are *slightly* better, but by "recent" I mean "in the last few months", not "Available in a 6-month old distribution which packaged that particular piece of software 2 months before release.
And we'll be deploying it, automatically, to around 400 workstations, which will be switched on, and running Win XP, all without any manual intervention.
But the PS3 is said to cost £425 in the UK - a still expensive, but a lesser 33% markup.
That UK price almost certainly includes VAT (our "Sales Tax") at 17.5%, and import duty (depends on the item, but IIRC it's around 11% for consumer electronics). However, US prices are generally given net of tax.
Software vendors will notice this in testing because, unlike XP, it will be difficult to write software with lazy approaches without noticing.
I doubt it.
Even today, though it's rather less noticeable as an issue what with the increasing popularity of MSI packaged applications and various deployment tools built into Windows servers - even today, there STILL exists software which is intended from the off to be used by a number of people in a business environment with several PCs, yet has installation instructions which read "Go to every PC you need to install this on, insert the CD, click on Start, Run, D:\SETUP (where D: is the letter assigned to your CDROM drive)".
Only a few weeks ago I contacted a company supplying such software and said "I've got PC's in three different timezones spread across the globe, and I don't have someone I can trust in every office to physically visit each PC and install your software. How would you suggest I install it?".
Unfortunately, "don't use that software" isn't an option - the business has already decided to use the software and my job is to make sure the business gets what it needs. If that means dealing with the occasional bit of badly-thought out software, that's my problem. As it is, it's almost always possible to work around such problems - but if you're expecting them to disappear I think you're very optimistic.
Re:Why hasn't the RIAA sued Creative?
on
Apple Sues Creative
·
· Score: 2, Funny
What will happen when every company has sued every other company?
There will be about 3 companies left, all cross-licensing everything with each other, and some extremely rich lawyers living on their own private island.
Unfortunately, there will be no further development of anything for fear of further litigation, so when a terrible disease starts to sweep through the population of lawyers, reasearch for a cure will be crippled, resulting in lawyers as a species dying out.
In millions of years, their skeletons will be found by a future generation to ponder over. Some will see it as evidence of Darwinian evolution; others will see it as evidence that even an omnipotent intelligent designer makes the odd mistake.
A few salient points:
- Just because you find the idea abhorrent doesn't mean everyone else does.
- There are a lot of people who develop systems in order to feed their family, not to further their own personal views.
- It's a tool. I can think of several perfectly legal uses which I consider reasonable (monitoring traffic for billing purposes, enforcing IT security policy). Should the tool cease to exist because it has uses I consider unreasonable? If that's the case, the knife I used to prepare dinner last night should probably be outlawed to.
It just never seems to occur to people that to a computer, a thumb is just a bunch of numbers.
It doesn't occur because a lot of people simply don't understand that computers boil everything down to a bunch of numbers.
I had the most terrible trouble explaining this exact scenario to someone when I was on placement - that it was all a bunch of numbers. The person I was explaining it to was absolutely convinced that I was wrong, and that what was sent down the wire was "a picture", not a bunch of numbers. The idea that numbers could somehow be used to represent something else, like a picture, was completely beyond them.
there is absolutely no reason for video cards (and wireless chips) to be any different!
Unless, of course, the hardware company produces 4 different products:
The SuperMax 2 (basic model, RRP £20
The SuperMax 3D 2 (next model up, RRP £35)
The MegaMax Special Edition (next model up again, RRP £70)
The UltraMax Super-Deluxe 9000 GLSi (top of the range, RRP £150)
... and every damn product is identical, all that happens is the driver queries some bit of the firmware when it initialises to find out exactly which feature(s) to cripple.
Then it makes rather a lot of sense NOT to open-source the drivers.
This means that if you happen to be unlucky enough to not be on the blessed platform list, you simply can't use your hardware. That's right, you bought it, you paid good money for it, BUT YOU CANT USE IT.
If you weren't going to be able to use it, why did you buy it? I don't see this scenario much different to going out and buying Microsoft Office, then bitching because it doesn't run on the Solaris UltraSparc workstation you've got.
We hear this kind of thing regularly on/. The thing is, IMO Linux wouldn't have got anywhere near as far as it has today without the GPL.
The reason for this is simple: while many companies base their work on code distributed under the BSD license, relatively few distribute it under the BSD license. It could be argued that a powerful reason NOT to distribute it is that as soon as they do, a competitor can take their work and build on it, but keep their own changes secret.
Under the GPL, however, if a competitor DOES decide to build on the work you distribute under the GPL, they've got to distribute it as well. Essentially, you can write and distribute code under the GPL without necessarily giving a competitive advantage to anyone else.
Of course, this does pose a problem for some companies. If your business plan is "sell this proprietary piece of software" (rather than "sell support for this piece of software"), then you may well have a problem with the GPL. GPL zealots may argue that proprietary software will sooner or later die, as eventually there will be GPL equivalents for everything. I don't actually believe this myself, but hey...
However, at the last check (about 5 months ago), not a single one provided the pretty integrated solution that Outlook and Exchange does. At best, they require a separate plugin for Outlook. I found that adding a plugin which sucks to a PIM which sucks does not tend to reduce the overall level of sucking - indeed, with any significant number of client PCs and a requirement that everyone shares their calendars in an integrated system, Exchange rapidly starts to look attractive.
At worst, they provide nothing more than a web-based interface (yes, this will get screams from those who "must" use Outlook), with one or more of the following:
Poor multi-language support
Bits which sort-of work, mostly don't.
Help files in a completely different language.
Very poor community in terms of users and support. I think this guy has a point.
(this is the real killer to the sales, marketing and management folks who are focused on appearance and functionality, with little concern about Microsoft), THEY DON'T LOOK ANYTHING LIKE OUTLOOK.
If you're lucky, you'll be able to get a usable solution and find a web-based system which doesn't completely suck and you'll get buy-in from the rest of the business.
Now watch this get modded into oblivion because it doesn't tow the party line that There is a Good Open Source Replacement for Everything....
This kind of trend is only gonna end when something catatrophic happens and it's traced back to someone that could have said something but didn't out of fear of losing their job
The problem with that is that when the catastrophic thing does happen, the person who could have said something will remain quiet out of fear of losing their job.
I would like to believe you're a troll, I really would.
The sad thing is I've met people IRL who would do exactly that sort of thing. Without exception, I would have no desire whatsoever to work with them. "Nice office suite you've got here... be a shame if anyone were to report you to the BSA" isn't professional work, it's extortion.
I'm still not convinced that the will exists. With strong keypair-based encryption, unless the RFID has enough intelligence to generate its own keypair, something else is going to have to do that and copy the keys onto the RFID chip.
And you just know someone will keep a copy of all the generated keypairs, and a whole bunch of them will be stolen.
All these are resolveable, technical issues. But they're the kind of thing that gets resolved by academics dedicated to perfecting the theory, not the kind of thing that gets resolved by a company dedicated to getting the per-chip cost down to a fraction of a penny.
Slashdot Mirror
You do this.
I do this.
If you work for a company, however, chances are their finance department does not do this.
Marketing mentality, which in wild attempts to get more people to view an ad fails to recognise one simple truth : Someone who has gone out of their way to avoid your advert almost certainly has no intention of buying anything in response to an advert and no amount of advertising will change that.
For some novel open-source software to appear that handles this problem. Then it gets integrated into Thunderbird as an OPTION for a way to send mail. It should work seamlessly, and fall back to old-fashioned e-mail when necessary.
http://enigmail.mozdev.org/
I was actually thinking of the IdealX management console:
http://imc.sourceforge.net/home.html
though it's always handy to know of another tool. Really what I'd like is a nice web-based frontend which is easy to integrate everything into - including systems which don't lend themselves to authenticating against LDAP, and overall systems management (ie. things other than user accounts, such as DNS, DHCP, rolling out PCs etc)- but I think sooner or later there's going to be a lot of customisation involved.
I think there has to be something more to this: Microsoft wanted to include more advanced PDF generation capabilities than would be provided by the usual printer-driver type output plugins.
Agreed. OO.o version 2 can not only generate PDFs, but also generate the table of contents that you sometimes see on the left hand side with PDFs - something which a printer-driver type PDF creator cannot do because by the time it sees the document it knows nothing about its structure.
It's the extra features like this which make people buy Adobe's Acrobat product - many organisations wouldn't install a separate full-blown office suite like OpenOffice, but would happily install a Microsoft office upgrade or Adobe Acrobat. Adobe are quite right to be concerned - past history has shown that "the best on the market" doesn't necessarily translate to "the one which gets picked" - quite often "the one which is good enough and requires minimal additional effort" is the one which gets picked. If Microsoft Office is going on a person's computer anyway, it's likely to to qualify as "good enough" with zero additional effort.
I can't speak for Adobe here, but I would speculate that they don't think a Unix-based command line PDF generating utility which has been integrated into very little with a meaningful UI to a typical office worker is a particularly big threat to their Windows-based GUI PDF generating utility which integrates into other software.
OTOH, Microsoft integrating such functionality into Office would effectively kill off a significant market for Adobe Acrobat pretty quickly. A lot of people either don't know of free Windows-based alternatives (hint: provided you don't need much more than "Print to PDF" functionality, they exist, and they don't have to be OpenOffice) or are still of the opinion that free software is free because it's worthless.
usrmgr - IME you can add users OK but try doing much fiddling around with group membership with an LDAP backend and you'll come unstuck very quickly.
Fortunately the smbldap tools are very good and allow you to avoid writing LDIF to update an LDAP backend, I believe there's also a web interface to them.
Stays up, but the NT administrative tools are very flaky - which is pretty damn annoying if you want everything to JFW. Recent versions of Samba are *slightly* better, but by "recent" I mean "in the last few months", not "Available in a 6-month old distribution which packaged that particular piece of software 2 months before release.
And we'll be deploying it, automatically, to around 400 workstations, which will be switched on, and running Win XP, all without any manual intervention.
How? Enquiring minds want to know....
But the PS3 is said to cost £425 in the UK - a still expensive, but a lesser 33% markup.
That UK price almost certainly includes VAT (our "Sales Tax") at 17.5%, and import duty (depends on the item, but IIRC it's around 11% for consumer electronics). However, US prices are generally given net of tax.
Suddenly, that 33% markup is about 5%.
How many of them are still running the OS you sent them out with?
Software vendors will notice this in testing because, unlike XP, it will be difficult to write software with lazy approaches without noticing.
I doubt it.
Even today, though it's rather less noticeable as an issue what with the increasing popularity of MSI packaged applications and various deployment tools built into Windows servers - even today, there STILL exists software which is intended from the off to be used by a number of people in a business environment with several PCs, yet has installation instructions which read "Go to every PC you need to install this on, insert the CD, click on Start, Run, D:\SETUP (where D: is the letter assigned to your CDROM drive)".
Only a few weeks ago I contacted a company supplying such software and said "I've got PC's in three different timezones spread across the globe, and I don't have someone I can trust in every office to physically visit each PC and install your software. How would you suggest I install it?".
Unfortunately, "don't use that software" isn't an option - the business has already decided to use the software and my job is to make sure the business gets what it needs. If that means dealing with the occasional bit of badly-thought out software, that's my problem. As it is, it's almost always possible to work around such problems - but if you're expecting them to disappear I think you're very optimistic.
What will happen when every company has sued every other company?
There will be about 3 companies left, all cross-licensing everything with each other, and some extremely rich lawyers living on their own private island.
Unfortunately, there will be no further development of anything for fear of further litigation, so when a terrible disease starts to sweep through the population of lawyers, reasearch for a cure will be crippled, resulting in lawyers as a species dying out.
In millions of years, their skeletons will be found by a future generation to ponder over. Some will see it as evidence of Darwinian evolution; others will see it as evidence that even an omnipotent intelligent designer makes the odd mistake.
seriously, why do people create tools like this?
A few salient points:
- Just because you find the idea abhorrent doesn't mean everyone else does.
- There are a lot of people who develop systems in order to feed their family, not to further their own personal views.
- It's a tool. I can think of several perfectly legal uses which I consider reasonable (monitoring traffic for billing purposes, enforcing IT security policy). Should the tool cease to exist because it has uses I consider unreasonable? If that's the case, the knife I used to prepare dinner last night should probably be outlawed to.
It just never seems to occur to people that to a computer, a thumb is just a bunch of numbers.
It doesn't occur because a lot of people simply don't understand that computers boil everything down to a bunch of numbers.
I had the most terrible trouble explaining this exact scenario to someone when I was on placement - that it was all a bunch of numbers. The person I was explaining it to was absolutely convinced that I was wrong, and that what was sent down the wire was "a picture", not a bunch of numbers. The idea that numbers could somehow be used to represent something else, like a picture, was completely beyond them.
Unless, of course, the hardware company produces 4 different products:
Then it makes rather a lot of sense NOT to open-source the drivers.
This means that if you happen to be unlucky enough to not be on the blessed platform list, you simply can't use your hardware. That's right, you bought it, you paid good money for it, BUT YOU CANT USE IT.
If you weren't going to be able to use it, why did you buy it? I don't see this scenario much different to going out and buying Microsoft Office, then bitching because it doesn't run on the Solaris UltraSparc workstation you've got.
We hear this kind of thing regularly on /. The thing is, IMO Linux wouldn't have got anywhere near as far as it has today without the GPL.
The reason for this is simple: while many companies base their work on code distributed under the BSD license, relatively few distribute it under the BSD license. It could be argued that a powerful reason NOT to distribute it is that as soon as they do, a competitor can take their work and build on it, but keep their own changes secret.
Under the GPL, however, if a competitor DOES decide to build on the work you distribute under the GPL, they've got to distribute it as well. Essentially, you can write and distribute code under the GPL without necessarily giving a competitive advantage to anyone else.
Of course, this does pose a problem for some companies. If your business plan is "sell this proprietary piece of software" (rather than "sell support for this piece of software"), then you may well have a problem with the GPL. GPL zealots may argue that proprietary software will sooner or later die, as eventually there will be GPL equivalents for everything. I don't actually believe this myself, but hey...
However, at the last check (about 5 months ago), not a single one provided the pretty integrated solution that Outlook and Exchange does. At best, they require a separate plugin for Outlook. I found that adding a plugin which sucks to a PIM which sucks does not tend to reduce the overall level of sucking - indeed, with any significant number of client PCs and a requirement that everyone shares their calendars in an integrated system, Exchange rapidly starts to look attractive.
At worst, they provide nothing more than a web-based interface (yes, this will get screams from those who "must" use Outlook), with one or more of the following:
If you're lucky, you'll be able to get a usable solution and find a web-based system which doesn't completely suck and you'll get buy-in from the rest of the business.
Now watch this get modded into oblivion because it doesn't tow the party line that There is a Good Open Source Replacement for Everything....
This kind of trend is only gonna end when something catatrophic happens and it's traced back to someone that could have said something but didn't out of fear of losing their job
The problem with that is that when the catastrophic thing does happen, the person who could have said something will remain quiet out of fear of losing their job.
I would like to believe you're a troll, I really would.
The sad thing is I've met people IRL who would do exactly that sort of thing. Without exception, I would have no desire whatsoever to work with them. "Nice office suite you've got here... be a shame if anyone were to report you to the BSA" isn't professional work, it's extortion.
Assuming, of course, that the police doing the catching are able to keep up with a jet-powered car.
I'm still not convinced that the will exists. With strong keypair-based encryption, unless the RFID has enough intelligence to generate its own keypair, something else is going to have to do that and copy the keys onto the RFID chip.
And you just know someone will keep a copy of all the generated keypairs, and a whole bunch of them will be stolen.
All these are resolveable, technical issues. But they're the kind of thing that gets resolved by academics dedicated to perfecting the theory, not the kind of thing that gets resolved by a company dedicated to getting the per-chip cost down to a fraction of a penny.
This friend of yours didn't happen to make the news because he chased after his stolen merc naked?