If Microsoft makes office for linux,will it be open ??
Of course not. But what the article fails to realise is that it can never happen, and the reasons are actually pretty simple.
Microsoft are probably the ONLY company on the planet with a business model based on selling something which literally EVERYONE with a computer wants, yet they will not customise. Other companies either offer software development services & solutions (cf. IBM), hardware (cf. Sun, IBM) or cater for a specific market (rather than "Everyone", cf. Intuit).
I would postulate that this therefore puts the operating system (and, in the advent of truly Open file formats, potentially quite a bit of basic productivity software) in the "commodity" market. Provided they all talk to each other properly, who cares if it's Microsoft's product?
But Microsoft care. They've built a $30billion company up, primarily on the strength of these two products. Nothing else they have comes close to raising that level of hard cash. And now, something which they can't crush has the potential to greatly reduce the money Windows & Office brings in.
So, back to the original point - there's no way on Earth Microsoft can do something which might encourage people to look at Linux. If a company is prepared to stop paying the Windows tax, they might be equally prepared to stop paying the Office tax in a few years if replacing Windows turns out to be easy enough.
If Seagate wants this warranty to be worth anything, they needs to work together with all their resellers.
Maybe things are different where you are, but here in the UK I have never in the whole of history returned a computer part under warranty to the retailer. Always to the manufacturer. Same story with several disks, video cards, hubs, tape drives.... Never had an argument over the matter.
Seeing as the crux of their argument is that they are starting to have doubts about SCO having a case, and SCO have done nothing to allay those fears, I doubt it.
seems like you could just skip releases until such a time as it's really useful for you then, only do critical security minor changes. Pick-say-every third release minor variation instead of every single one.
You could, but if you want to update the various dependencies it could eventually get very painful.
I don't really consider Gentoo as a suitable server OS for exactly this reason - it would be only too easy to wind up with some weird inter-package problem which only happens with a very unusual combination of package versions. IMHO less likely to happen with a more thoroughly tested distro, such as Debian or Redhat, which doesn't update every little package every few weeks.
Does this mean the following could (theoretically) become illegal:
1. Any (re)writable media. So hard disks, floppies, USB keys, CD/DVD writers, printers (mustn't print out a picture of Mickey Mouse!).... 4. Notepads & pens 5. Camcorders 6. The Unix commands cp, tar, dd, cpio and any others which can be used to copy stuff I may have forgotten? 7. The DOS & VMS command "copy". 8. Paintbrushes & other artists materials
I'm in the UK so I'm mercifully exempt from this silly law (until the EU decides to emulate it), would US politicians make similar excuses to ours? By which I mean:
Politician: "Well, of course, it wouldn't be enforced that way...."
I think the MPAA have given up on that, in Europe at least. My guess is that they'd rather worry about either making films or building a successor with far nastier region encoding.
I'm going to be modded a troll for this, but what the hell.
You're quite right, Novell have a lot. But right now a lot of this is potential, not actual sales. We all hear this being the "Year of the Linux Desktop" (as was last year, as next year probably will be...).
I can see an IT revolution occurring in the next 3-5 years, as all the predictions of everything being web-based either come to fruition or come to nothing, Microsoft invent ever more onerous licenses and the various KDE/Gnome/(insert desktop environment here) developers improve their products still further. But, as with any revolution, there will be winners, losers, and also-rans-who-could-have-been-winners. It won't be easy for Novell, but they could easily be winners.
Unfortunately, they could just as easily be also-rans. Whatever happens, there will be a lot of hard work involved. Should be interesting to watch.
Historically the BBC has never been afraid to challenge the UK establishment:
In 1995 they aired an interview with Princess Diana, which at the time was something of an embarrassment to the royal family. Still got aired.
They employ Jeremy Paxman for a lot of political shows. I doubt anyone in the States has heard of him - he's like an angry dobermann if a politician won't give an answer. Paxman has been known to ask the same question 14 times in order to get an answer, and will make no secret of it if he doesn't like the answer.
Most recently, they refused to back down having made allegations that the government went to war in Iraq on the back of a dossier which was intentionally "sexed up". This ultimately led to 2 resignations/sackings at the highest level, and a senior MoD weapons expert mysteriously "committed suicide".
The sad thing is, having said all that about editorial independence, it looks very likely that they may soon lose it because our current government doesn't like being publicly criticised by a body which they can ultimately pull the funding on.
If the government really doesn't like what is being said on the news, regardless of who's saying it, they can go to court & demand that the publisher/broadcaster doesn't go with the story. This is fairly unusual, and they don't always get their demands (publishers tend to then publish a story all about how they're not allowed to publish the story they'd like to), but we technically have no such thing as freedom of the speech or of the press.
Not that I reckon our system's perfect, but to criticise it without understanding it is IMHO equally foolish. YOpinionMV, TWIAVBP, etc etc etc.
Just to clarify, in the UK, TV owners are legally obliged to pay for a TV license to fund the BBC but the BBC does have editorial independence (that includes from the government).
This tends to confuse our stateside cousins somewhat...
So what happens in a few years time when StorageTek stop supporting the hardware and a business still has data they need to recover from an old tape but they don't have a working tape drive?
It shouldn't happen - the business should have thought about that already. But reality and idealism don't always meet...
A couple of years ago I'd have agreed with you. But Mandrake (no idea about others, I'd hope much the same holds true) have done some wonderful work in making their X configuration tools xinerama capable - to the point where minimal tweaking is needed.
I have hand-hacked an xinerama-capable XF86Config and can offer this advice if you really want to do it the hard way - don't.
Agreed. I have an Epson Perfection Photo 2400, works beautifully (transparency adaptor works as well). A touch more expensive than most, but support is orders of magnitude better.
Very true, but I think the OP was discussing OEMs selling to the home market.
Further, the amount of crap users (both home and business) will tolerate from Microsoft is stunning.
I mean seriously, until Windows 2000/XP started replacing '9x, most non-tech people thought there was nothing wrong with computers which crashed for no apparent reason, giving meaningless error messages, required the neighbours kid to look at every couple of months, sometimes worked with the latest camera/scanner/printer and sometimes didn't etc etc etc.... Businesses wouldn't put up with it on the server side, but even then a lot of desktop users in large companies silently put up with a similar level of stability. And all the time, nobody outside the tech community said "This is a load of crap, There must be an alternative."
Things have improved since 2k and XP were released. But for Open Source to succeed in any battle with Microsoft software, it must not be equal. It must be superior in cost, in availability of support (who do you call when the neighbour's kid goes to university?), in stability and in hardware support.
Slashdot Mirror
The Patriot Act, at it's core was designed to prevent people from breaking the law.
So, what you're saying is, people can be prevented from breaking existing laws by passing a law against it?
That explains quite a bit....
He did. Some years ago. The DivX's haven't been available from there for ages.
If Microsoft makes office for linux,will it be open ??
Of course not. But what the article fails to realise is that it can never happen, and the reasons are actually pretty simple.
Microsoft are probably the ONLY company on the planet with a business model based on selling something which literally EVERYONE with a computer wants, yet they will not customise. Other companies either offer software development services & solutions (cf. IBM), hardware (cf. Sun, IBM) or cater for a specific market (rather than "Everyone", cf. Intuit).
I would postulate that this therefore puts the operating system (and, in the advent of truly Open file formats, potentially quite a bit of basic productivity software) in the "commodity" market. Provided they all talk to each other properly, who cares if it's Microsoft's product?
But Microsoft care. They've built a $30billion company up, primarily on the strength of these two products. Nothing else they have comes close to raising that level of hard cash. And now, something which they can't crush has the potential to greatly reduce the money Windows & Office brings in.
So, back to the original point - there's no way on Earth Microsoft can do something which might encourage people to look at Linux. If a company is prepared to stop paying the Windows tax, they might be equally prepared to stop paying the Office tax in a few years if replacing Windows turns out to be easy enough.
MS controls 100% of the market that they want to, the businesses that pay for software. Why change?
RTFA. I think the author is saying "...but with a number of high-profile government rollouts, it's only a matter of time before that changes".
If Seagate wants this warranty to be worth anything, they needs to work together with all their resellers.
Maybe things are different where you are, but here in the UK I have never in the whole of history returned a computer part under warranty to the retailer. Always to the manufacturer. Same story with several disks, video cards, hubs, tape drives.... Never had an argument over the matter.
I had to replace 2 western digital drives that failed at the same time...so much for my mirrored RAID setup :-)
I heard of a case once where 2 drives in a RAID5 setup died almost simultaneously.
Turned out they had the same manufacture date & sequential serial numbers - make of that what you will....
I'm buying 2 disks to set up my own RAID. One Seagate and one WD.
Seeing as the crux of their argument is that they are starting to have doubts about SCO having a case, and SCO have done nothing to allay those fears, I doubt it.
seems like you could just skip releases until such a time as it's really useful for you then, only do critical security minor changes. Pick-say-every third release minor variation instead of every single one.
You could, but if you want to update the various dependencies it could eventually get very painful.
I don't really consider Gentoo as a suitable server OS for exactly this reason - it would be only too easy to wind up with some weird inter-package problem which only happens with a very unusual combination of package versions. IMHO less likely to happen with a more thoroughly tested distro, such as Debian or Redhat, which doesn't update every little package every few weeks.
What next, mandatory chemical castration?
t ion%22+site%3Anews.bbc.co.uk&sourceid=firefox&star t=0&start=0&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8
2 coff=1&q=%22chemical+castration%22+site%3Acnn.com& ;btnG=Search
Already happened. cf. Alan Turing.
In fact, it's being considered for so many things that a Google for "chemical castration" on the BBC news site returns over a dozen recent hits:
http://www.google.com/search?q=%22chemical+castra
A similar search on CNN:
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&c
What next, mandatory chemical castration? Already happened. cf. Alan Turing. In fact, it's being considered for so many things that a Google for "chemical castration" on the BBC news site returns over a dozen recent hits: http://www.google.com/search?q=%22chemical+castrat ion%22+site%3Anews.bbc.co.uk&sourceid=firefox&star t=0&start=0&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8
A similar situation exists on CNN:
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&c2 coff=1&q=%22chemical+castration%22+site%3Acnn.com& btnG=Search
/. needs a +1, Terrifying mod option.
Does this mean the following could (theoretically) become illegal:
1. Any (re)writable media. So hard disks, floppies, USB keys, CD/DVD writers, printers (mustn't print out a picture of Mickey Mouse!)....
4. Notepads & pens
5. Camcorders
6. The Unix commands cp, tar, dd, cpio and any others which can be used to copy stuff I may have forgotten?
7. The DOS & VMS command "copy".
8. Paintbrushes & other artists materials
I'm in the UK so I'm mercifully exempt from this silly law (until the EU decides to emulate it), would US politicians make similar excuses to ours? By which I mean:
Politician: "Well, of course, it wouldn't be enforced that way...."
WELL WHY ON EARTH DID YOU WRITE IT THAT WAY THEN?
I think the MPAA have given up on that, in Europe at least. My guess is that they'd rather worry about either making films or building a successor with far nastier region encoding.
Remains to be seen which one they choose...
We simply need more support from hardware manufacturers.
Unfortunately, the manufacturers are saying "we can do this but to justify it we need more users". Circular dependencies, anyone?
The RIAA stopped supporting artists years ago, cf. Britney Spears, Mariah Scarey.
I'm going to be modded a troll for this, but what the hell.
You're quite right, Novell have a lot. But right now a lot of this is potential, not actual sales. We all hear this being the "Year of the Linux Desktop" (as was last year, as next year probably will be...).
I can see an IT revolution occurring in the next 3-5 years, as all the predictions of everything being web-based either come to fruition or come to nothing, Microsoft invent ever more onerous licenses and the various KDE/Gnome/(insert desktop environment here) developers improve their products still further. But, as with any revolution, there will be winners, losers, and also-rans-who-could-have-been-winners. It won't be easy for Novell, but they could easily be winners.
Unfortunately, they could just as easily be also-rans. Whatever happens, there will be a lot of hard work involved. Should be interesting to watch.
The sad thing is, having said all that about editorial independence, it looks very likely that they may soon lose it because our current government doesn't like being publicly criticised by a body which they can ultimately pull the funding on.
If the government really doesn't like what is being said on the news, regardless of who's saying it, they can go to court & demand that the publisher/broadcaster doesn't go with the story. This is fairly unusual, and they don't always get their demands (publishers tend to then publish a story all about how they're not allowed to publish the story they'd like to), but we technically have no such thing as freedom of the speech or of the press.
Not that I reckon our system's perfect, but to criticise it without understanding it is IMHO equally foolish. YOpinionMV, TWIAVBP, etc etc etc.
Just to clarify, in the UK, TV owners are legally obliged to pay for a TV license to fund the BBC but the BBC does have editorial independence (that includes from the government).
This tends to confuse our stateside cousins somewhat...
(please mod funny)
If you need to ask, you don't deserve the mod.
1. In Soviet Russia, music buys YOU!
2. Sell music online, ???, PROFIT!!!
3. I don't have an iPod, you insensitive clod!
So what happens in a few years time when StorageTek stop supporting the hardware and a business still has data they need to recover from an old tape but they don't have a working tape drive?
It shouldn't happen - the business should have thought about that already. But reality and idealism don't always meet...
Hear hear! It's a simple "I'll do what I'm good at, you do what you're good at and that way we're all happy" scenario.
As often as not, those people who you've shown how to do something for the Nth time are directly earning the business money that pays your wages.
A couple of years ago I'd have agreed with you. But Mandrake (no idea about others, I'd hope much the same holds true) have done some wonderful work in making their X configuration tools xinerama capable - to the point where minimal tweaking is needed.
I have hand-hacked an xinerama-capable XF86Config and can offer this advice if you really want to do it the hard way - don't.
Agreed. I have an Epson Perfection Photo 2400, works beautifully (transparency adaptor works as well). A touch more expensive than most, but support is orders of magnitude better.
Very true, but I think the OP was discussing OEMs selling to the home market.
Further, the amount of crap users (both home and business) will tolerate from Microsoft is stunning.
I mean seriously, until Windows 2000/XP started replacing '9x, most non-tech people thought there was nothing wrong with computers which crashed for no apparent reason, giving meaningless error messages, required the neighbours kid to look at every couple of months, sometimes worked with the latest camera/scanner/printer and sometimes didn't etc etc etc.... Businesses wouldn't put up with it on the server side, but even then a lot of desktop users in large companies silently put up with a similar level of stability. And all the time, nobody outside the tech community said "This is a load of crap, There must be an alternative."
Things have improved since 2k and XP were released. But for Open Source to succeed in any battle with Microsoft software, it must not be equal. It must be superior in cost, in availability of support (who do you call when the neighbour's kid goes to university?), in stability and in hardware support.