Here's my question - I'm hoping some knowledgeable slashdotter with some IP nouse can clear up my confusion.
Are there any technical, or any legal reasons, why a 3rd party app cannot simply wrap Skype, at least for voice calls (leave video aside for now).
Lots of 3rd party apps present as printers to the OS, and when you print to that virtual printer, they create an eps file or a PDF file or whatever....
Why is it hard for a 3rd party app, similarly, to present as a headset (mic + speakers) to the OS, allowing the user to run Skype as well as the 3rd part VOIP app, and select that headset in the Skype audio options.
You could then run your 3rd party VOIP solution, and have Skype set up to start in the background. calls in either direction to others on Skype could be handled transparently in the 3rd party VOIP app, and that would give users the chance to gradually get their network of friends and family swapped over to open, standards compliant VOIP solutions, without having to give up on contact with those running Skype (face it, that's everyone), or switch between 2 apps for calls (I understand the API already exposes things like accept call...)
If this is a viable way to overcome the powerful networking externailities that Skype now has working in its favour as a barrier to new entrants, has it not been done because of a)legal b)technical c)marketing or d)other issues?
OK, so I'm on Ubuntu for media player/lounge computer, and family has standardised on Android phones, BUT, I work from home, and I work on a PC. Sometimes I also use an old XP instance in a VM on my Ubuntu box.
1. I need to remote in to a server, and the Ubuntu citrix solutions are not acceptable (poor dual screen support for a start)
2. I do serious document processin using CMS systems. Windows required again - Open Office? lol.
3. For work I need to use Microsoft Exchange, and Outlook to book resources/meetings. I sync, but really, I need to use native Outlook to just get shit done.
4. Dragon Naturally speaking saves my wrists from a helluva lot of punishment. Nothing remotely as functional for speech-to-text in the FOSS world.
5. My bank's website still doesn't really work right with anything other than Internet Explorer (and not IE9 either)
6. For work I need to use Skype as my VOIP client. Skype on Ubuntu is OK, but features like group video and "share my screen" don't work.
7. Support calls to your ISP for things that are their problem (like "you need to check the copper wire down my street, seriously") go faster if you start by logging in with Win7/IE8, rather than Kubuntu and some homebrew Firefox fork.
You could sum it all up in 2 words.
"Network Effect" - http://goo.gl/jQPtc
Best Solution IMHO:
Madcap Flare: http://www.madcapsoftware.com/products/flare/home. aspx
Native XML, publishes to all formats that matter (including Microsoft Word), good learning curve, totally future-proof. One month free trial to get you started.
Personally, I would do everything in my power to sell my boss on this product.
Probably second best:
AuthorIT http://www.authorit.com/
clunky interface, steeper learning curve, but a bit cheaper, and does everything you'll need , most of it very well (again, publishes to all formats that matter).
The real advantage of these products is their "single sourcing" capability - i.e. with only a little effort invested upfront, they allow you write your content once, then publish it to Word, PDF, HTML etc very quickly and easily, and allow you vary which bits of content go into which formats too.
This is the heart of the matter. Nothing proven, just craven surrender to big business interests despite no law being broken and probably no business relationship between the ISP and the mining companies involved. Pathetic.
Yup.
It's 20 years worth of cruft-in-a-box.
Much of it is undocumented.
Much of it is unreliable black-box mumbo-jumbo.
What you say about editing templates is so depressing and familiar - I've had similar moments of madness recently. My background is in RDBMS coding/design... I can optimise and debug nasty SQL Stored procedures for a large finance-house application, but I can't get alternate-page headers and footers to work reliably in an MSWord mail-merge - something is rotten!
I'm keeping my fingers crossed an escape route will exist, however briefly, and getting ready to bail, even if there's some pain involved.
Let's make it count.
Forward the link to people you know, and ask them to click through - even if they're human-agency-global-warming skeptics (http://www.miningnsw.com.au/ - yes, it's back up presently), especially to people outside Oz. This is a free speech issue above all else.
Let's make the buggers notice that trying to stifle free speech by pressuring ISPs is a dangerous, often counterproductive game.
I've sent the link to much of my address book.
The/. effect is good here, but let's maximise it if we care about free speech.
Errr.... Because business isn't black and white?
Because there are hosts of "win-win" scenarios, like, using the cross-platform possibilities to grow the office user base for all concerned. Isn't it better to figure out ways to work where both companies, and the consumers, all win?
That's one of the reasons MS is derided and hated - they rarely try to think in this way. Co-opting, standardising, and co-operating can be one of the quickest ways to grow business - plus, it wins you friends.
This is kinda the whole point here. We're not talking efficiency and effectiveness. We're talking about the kind of deep and pervasive "lock in" that you get once you've spent some time in companies where the MS Office suite is a standard.
I'm a freelance technical writer, and there is simply NO WAY I can leave word behind, much as I would want to. Examples of why I'm locked in include: 3rd party products I have to use because they're company standard, which rely on the (latest version of the) MS Word API to get the job done; the requirement that has built up in many companies (through history, not individual poor decisions necessarily) to push parts of the office suite (Word in particular) into areas it should never have gone (publishing large books and manuals, for example, for which, in a sane world, most of us would be using Framemaker or similar). Nevertheless, that is the real world in which many of us operate.
Yes, OO is better than MS Office - doesn't mean it can do what I need.
Yes, it is reprehensible (but neither surprising, nor uniquely microshaft) that a company with so complete a monopoly at both the OS level and office productivity suite level should even consider throwing its weight around in that sort of calculatedly evil way.
My feeling is that the really important projects over the next coupla years to free us from the encroaching tyranny are the inheritors of Wine &Co - if we can get to the point where I can sidestep Vista and everything it entails, but keep all the work I've done in the MS environment, then me (and hundreds of thousands like me, perhaps millions) will have a real choice.
Nice line of thought.
I guess people with land will therefore start offering such rights to the highest bidder.
Will it be illegal to have hardcore goat pr0n depicted on your dude-ranch in such a manner that it can only be seen from space (and on google earth)..... Food for thought (and goatse)
spot on mate.
And sometimes this can take pretty ironic forms.... my partner is a web designer. She has used Macromedia Flash, Fireworks and Dreamweaver for 11 years. Over that time the MacOs version has slowly but surely diverged from the 'doze version.... And now, finally she has the chance to go freelance and stop working at BigCorp where they standardize on 'doze (even for designers, jeez...) so she goes into a shop and has a play with Fireworks on the Mac.... And, yes, it's just different enough so that if she switched over the learning curve would blow out the tight deadlines on her freelance project.... So we trudged out of the mac shop and lined up with the sheep to buy a Dell.
Don't want to and aren't interested is part of the explanation, yes.
I think if we're honest, we'd admit that most (80% or so...) guys smart enough to work in IT would consider IT a boring way to use their smarts. I don't believe which "kind" of smarts you have matters very much - from web-design to tinkering with hardware there's something for almost any kind of smarts in the IT field if you're interested to start with.
So we could be talking a relative small difference in perceptions (which itself is almost certainly rooted in the usual murky 50-50ish nature/nurture mix of causes) leading that 80% to be more like 98% in the fairer sex. That's how I've always explained the gap to my own satisfaction anyway.
I have had the same experience as yagu - working in a large London based insurance firm which offered free cross-training to women, often at grades were an IT role would roughly double their salary. Depressingly, every single participant dropped out within 4 months - each either hated the work, or couldn't do it, but more of the former than the latter I noticed.
I was born in the UK (socialised medicine), have lived in New Zealand (socialised medicine), and now live in Queensland, Australia (Socialised medicine).
The idea that you have to wait for life-threatening conditions to be fixed is, basically, false. I'm sure there are many examples of this happening, but generally speaking, emergency ops happen at energency speed, and the long waits are for things like hip replacements etc. where there is discomfort, but no risk of death.
This is so true. I work as a technical writer at a large Australian corporation - we have AuthorIT, Framemaker and Acrobat.... And for 90% of our documents, the entire lifecycle is MSWord, MSWord, and some more MSWord.... And then getting printed into acrobat straight from Word at the last minute... ho hum...
I admit it - that was just far enough out in the leftfield that for a moment I thought "no-one could make that up..." I wish the Koreans HAD conquered japan using hot air balloons in the 4th century... IRL, pre-Montgolfier, the only use of flying machines to my knowledge was the Chinese strapping unfortunate observers to enormous kites prior to battle, to get a good view of enemy troop movements.... Which is cool, but not nearly as cool as the vision you gave me of thousands of spit-and-paper balloons with wild-eyed bamboo-armour-wearing nutters clinging to them, borne across the sea of Japan by the high tornados...... Damn!
Yeah, I fully agree with this - in real life, a big part of being safe in any given city/county is leaving the biggest space it is possible to leave without someone immediately filling it. When you move from somewhere with a relatively large value for this factor (in my case, rural England) to somewhere with a small value (Auckland, New Zealand - some of the worst drivers I've seen in the world and I've lived in over 10 countries) your first few days on the road is bewildering as people in the outside lanes literally line up to swoop into the gap you create as you back off, and back off, and back off....
Which libertarian road? The one built on the internet, which in turn is built on a series of backbones put together by massive taxpayer-funded, semi-military projects like Arpanet? Or maybe the one using Satellites for communication, the entire infrastructure for launching and maintaining which was paid for by governments... Or maybe the copper wire network 90% of people in the world still use to run their ADSL over, which was built in most of the world (even in most of the USA if you check your telecoms history) by GOVERNMENTS, raising, you know, TAXES.
"Most activities do not need regulation" Correct. This does not mean governments should abrogate the right to tax transactions. Nor does it mean its very hard to retain this right, even in the modern world. Americans who envision a world with no-one out there raising taxes on those generating the wealth should remember that only the most naive proto-marxists ever believed in a "withering away of the state".
Marxian theories have, on the contrary, largely proven correct since his death.
Marx did not argue "for" violent overthrow, but rather that violent attempts to overthrow capitalism were at his time of writing inevitable - and therefore not worth arguing "for" or "against".
Governments (state and local) use the tax base to provide/subsidise/regulate infrastructure that everyone uses (y'know - roads, street lighting, the police...) and (partly because of that infrastructure being in place) the US economy grows faster than places where it isnt (y'know - Zaire, Moldova, Elbonia). That economic growth spurs new forms of entrepreneurial activity (like selling stuff over the web). To keep the virtous cycle going, you've got to tax those new forms of economic activity.
Slashdot Mirror
Here's my question - I'm hoping some knowledgeable slashdotter with some IP nouse can clear up my confusion. Are there any technical, or any legal reasons, why a 3rd party app cannot simply wrap Skype, at least for voice calls (leave video aside for now). Lots of 3rd party apps present as printers to the OS, and when you print to that virtual printer, they create an eps file or a PDF file or whatever.... Why is it hard for a 3rd party app, similarly, to present as a headset (mic + speakers) to the OS, allowing the user to run Skype as well as the 3rd part VOIP app, and select that headset in the Skype audio options. You could then run your 3rd party VOIP solution, and have Skype set up to start in the background. calls in either direction to others on Skype could be handled transparently in the 3rd party VOIP app, and that would give users the chance to gradually get their network of friends and family swapped over to open, standards compliant VOIP solutions, without having to give up on contact with those running Skype (face it, that's everyone), or switch between 2 apps for calls (I understand the API already exposes things like accept call...) If this is a viable way to overcome the powerful networking externailities that Skype now has working in its favour as a barrier to new entrants, has it not been done because of a)legal b)technical c)marketing or d)other issues?
OK, so I'm on Ubuntu for media player/lounge computer, and family has standardised on Android phones, BUT, I work from home, and I work on a PC. Sometimes I also use an old XP instance in a VM on my Ubuntu box. 1. I need to remote in to a server, and the Ubuntu citrix solutions are not acceptable (poor dual screen support for a start) 2. I do serious document processin using CMS systems. Windows required again - Open Office? lol. 3. For work I need to use Microsoft Exchange, and Outlook to book resources/meetings. I sync, but really, I need to use native Outlook to just get shit done. 4. Dragon Naturally speaking saves my wrists from a helluva lot of punishment. Nothing remotely as functional for speech-to-text in the FOSS world. 5. My bank's website still doesn't really work right with anything other than Internet Explorer (and not IE9 either) 6. For work I need to use Skype as my VOIP client. Skype on Ubuntu is OK, but features like group video and "share my screen" don't work. 7. Support calls to your ISP for things that are their problem (like "you need to check the copper wire down my street, seriously") go faster if you start by logging in with Win7/IE8, rather than Kubuntu and some homebrew Firefox fork. You could sum it all up in 2 words. "Network Effect" - http://goo.gl/jQPtc
Probably second best: AuthorIT http://www.authorit.com/ clunky interface, steeper learning curve, but a bit cheaper, and does everything you'll need , most of it very well (again, publishes to all formats that matter).
The real advantage of these products is their "single sourcing" capability - i.e. with only a little effort invested upfront, they allow you write your content once, then publish it to Word, PDF, HTML etc very quickly and easily, and allow you vary which bits of content go into which formats too.
Good luck :)
This is the heart of the matter. Nothing proven, just craven surrender to big business interests despite no law being broken and probably no business relationship between the ISP and the mining companies involved. Pathetic.
Yup. It's 20 years worth of cruft-in-a-box. Much of it is undocumented. Much of it is unreliable black-box mumbo-jumbo. What you say about editing templates is so depressing and familiar - I've had similar moments of madness recently. My background is in RDBMS coding/design... I can optimise and debug nasty SQL Stored procedures for a large finance-house application, but I can't get alternate-page headers and footers to work reliably in an MSWord mail-merge - something is rotten! I'm keeping my fingers crossed an escape route will exist, however briefly, and getting ready to bail, even if there's some pain involved.
Let's make it count. Forward the link to people you know, and ask them to click through - even if they're human-agency-global-warming skeptics (http://www.miningnsw.com.au/ - yes, it's back up presently), especially to people outside Oz. This is a free speech issue above all else. Let's make the buggers notice that trying to stifle free speech by pressuring ISPs is a dangerous, often counterproductive game. I've sent the link to much of my address book. The /. effect is good here, but let's maximise it if we care about free speech.
Errr.... Because business isn't black and white? Because there are hosts of "win-win" scenarios, like, using the cross-platform possibilities to grow the office user base for all concerned. Isn't it better to figure out ways to work where both companies, and the consumers, all win? That's one of the reasons MS is derided and hated - they rarely try to think in this way. Co-opting, standardising, and co-operating can be one of the quickest ways to grow business - plus, it wins you friends.
This is kinda the whole point here. We're not talking efficiency and effectiveness. We're talking about the kind of deep and pervasive "lock in" that you get once you've spent some time in companies where the MS Office suite is a standard. I'm a freelance technical writer, and there is simply NO WAY I can leave word behind, much as I would want to. Examples of why I'm locked in include: 3rd party products I have to use because they're company standard, which rely on the (latest version of the) MS Word API to get the job done; the requirement that has built up in many companies (through history, not individual poor decisions necessarily) to push parts of the office suite (Word in particular) into areas it should never have gone (publishing large books and manuals, for example, for which, in a sane world, most of us would be using Framemaker or similar). Nevertheless, that is the real world in which many of us operate. Yes, OO is better than MS Office - doesn't mean it can do what I need. Yes, it is reprehensible (but neither surprising, nor uniquely microshaft) that a company with so complete a monopoly at both the OS level and office productivity suite level should even consider throwing its weight around in that sort of calculatedly evil way. My feeling is that the really important projects over the next coupla years to free us from the encroaching tyranny are the inheritors of Wine &Co - if we can get to the point where I can sidestep Vista and everything it entails, but keep all the work I've done in the MS environment, then me (and hundreds of thousands like me, perhaps millions) will have a real choice.
Nice line of thought. I guess people with land will therefore start offering such rights to the highest bidder. Will it be illegal to have hardcore goat pr0n depicted on your dude-ranch in such a manner that it can only be seen from space (and on google earth)..... Food for thought (and goatse)
spot on mate. And sometimes this can take pretty ironic forms.... my partner is a web designer. She has used Macromedia Flash, Fireworks and Dreamweaver for 11 years. Over that time the MacOs version has slowly but surely diverged from the 'doze version.... And now, finally she has the chance to go freelance and stop working at BigCorp where they standardize on 'doze (even for designers, jeez...) so she goes into a shop and has a play with Fireworks on the Mac.... And, yes, it's just different enough so that if she switched over the learning curve would blow out the tight deadlines on her freelance project.... So we trudged out of the mac shop and lined up with the sheep to buy a Dell.
I think if we're honest, we'd admit that most (80% or so...) guys smart enough to work in IT would consider IT a boring way to use their smarts. I don't believe which "kind" of smarts you have matters very much - from web-design to tinkering with hardware there's something for almost any kind of smarts in the IT field if you're interested to start with.
So we could be talking a relative small difference in perceptions (which itself is almost certainly rooted in the usual murky 50-50ish nature/nurture mix of causes) leading that 80% to be more like 98% in the fairer sex. That's how I've always explained the gap to my own satisfaction anyway.
I have had the same experience as yagu - working in a large London based insurance firm which offered free cross-training to women, often at grades were an IT role would roughly double their salary. Depressingly, every single participant dropped out within 4 months - each either hated the work, or couldn't do it, but more of the former than the latter I noticed.
Somehow it's depressing that those training the next generation for the future are so fuzzy about how things work in the present :(
I was born in the UK (socialised medicine), have lived in New Zealand (socialised medicine), and now live in Queensland, Australia (Socialised medicine). The idea that you have to wait for life-threatening conditions to be fixed is, basically, false. I'm sure there are many examples of this happening, but generally speaking, emergency ops happen at energency speed, and the long waits are for things like hip replacements etc. where there is discomfort, but no risk of death.
This is so true. I work as a technical writer at a large Australian corporation - we have AuthorIT, Framemaker and Acrobat.... And for 90% of our documents, the entire lifecycle is MSWord, MSWord, and some more MSWord.... And then getting printed into acrobat straight from Word at the last minute... ho hum...
No, I think you'll find, it doesn't.
I admit it - that was just far enough out in the leftfield that for a moment I thought "no-one could make that up..." I wish the Koreans HAD conquered japan using hot air balloons in the 4th century... IRL, pre-Montgolfier, the only use of flying machines to my knowledge was the Chinese strapping unfortunate observers to enormous kites prior to battle, to get a good view of enemy troop movements.... Which is cool, but not nearly as cool as the vision you gave me of thousands of spit-and-paper balloons with wild-eyed bamboo-armour-wearing nutters clinging to them, borne across the sea of Japan by the high tornados...... Damn!
Yeah, I fully agree with this - in real life, a big part of being safe in any given city/county is leaving the biggest space it is possible to leave without someone immediately filling it. When you move from somewhere with a relatively large value for this factor (in my case, rural England) to somewhere with a small value (Auckland, New Zealand - some of the worst drivers I've seen in the world and I've lived in over 10 countries) your first few days on the road is bewildering as people in the outside lanes literally line up to swoop into the gap you create as you back off, and back off, and back off....
Brilliant. Yes yes yes!
HAHAHA. +1 funny etc etc.... What a weird place /.ers live in to believe this of the real world.
Which libertarian road? The one built on the internet, which in turn is built on a series of backbones put together by massive taxpayer-funded, semi-military projects like Arpanet? Or maybe the one using Satellites for communication, the entire infrastructure for launching and maintaining which was paid for by governments... Or maybe the copper wire network 90% of people in the world still use to run their ADSL over, which was built in most of the world (even in most of the USA if you check your telecoms history) by GOVERNMENTS, raising, you know, TAXES. "Most activities do not need regulation" Correct. This does not mean governments should abrogate the right to tax transactions. Nor does it mean its very hard to retain this right, even in the modern world. Americans who envision a world with no-one out there raising taxes on those generating the wealth should remember that only the most naive proto-marxists ever believed in a "withering away of the state".
Which libertarian road? The one built along an internet backbone paid for by the US-taxpayer funded network?
Yeah, I use an encrypted textfile on my thumbdrive too. Seems a great compromise between security and convenience to me. :)
It's spelt Kraut, you dumbass yank.
Marxian theories have, on the contrary, largely proven correct since his death. Marx did not argue "for" violent overthrow, but rather that violent attempts to overthrow capitalism were at his time of writing inevitable - and therefore not worth arguing "for" or "against".
Governments (state and local) use the tax base to provide/subsidise/regulate infrastructure that everyone uses (y'know - roads, street lighting, the police...) and (partly because of that infrastructure being in place) the US economy grows faster than places where it isnt (y'know - Zaire, Moldova, Elbonia). That economic growth spurs new forms of entrepreneurial activity (like selling stuff over the web). To keep the virtous cycle going, you've got to tax those new forms of economic activity.