Actually, that's one of the things that pisses me off most about the party-based government systems: you can't vote for specific policies, you either pick the Liberal package, or the Labor package
Well actually there is a party in Australia that lets you do just that, it's the Senator online party where you get to vote on each and every bill that goes through the senate. Now we just need the same for a lower house party!! w00t!!!
Well, seeing as how everyone is comparing their methods of transportation, I'll chime mine in. Firstly, I like to drive too, in fact I love driving. However, I have never owned a car. I mostly use public transport or if possible walk or ride a bike. I love catching trains to places now that I'm in the UK, unfortuneatly inter-city/town trains just arn't really a big thing in South Australia. There are times when a car is useful for the weekend or something and on those occasions I rent one. There are also the occasions when a taxi makes sense. Overall I've never really felt the need to own my own car. When you only rent cars occasionally, it means that when you do drive, it's in a nice, fairly new to brand new, clean car. Overall I think it saves me money as I don't often rent a car (maybe 6 times last year). When I do drive though, I like to have the full driving experience, which includes having a manual and not to have too much automated. I do like having ABS and traction control and other electronic safety measures as I don't have the same day to day practice that others do.
I'm not sure what you mean. At least under the MS Windows system, resizing and moving windows using keyboard only is quite easy, just as easy as maximizing. You just hit alt-space then "s" for resize or alt-space then "m" for moving. Then you just use the direction keys to set the size or position of the window and when you're happy with it, hit enter and you're back into your application. Seems rather easy to me. I seem to remember KDE being equally easy, though it's been a little while since I've used KDE. Can't comment on other X Window Managers.
I just wanted to answer a few things that you put into your post. I'm not going to make any comments about system quality or user interfaces. You made mention of a couple of financial points that I think should be discussed.
First:
Microsoft uses their profit for positive benefits to society as well: 1 2 3 4 These are just a few from November, 2005.
Well, the first link connects to a story about Microsoft donating computers to Nigerian Copyright Commission whose job it is to combat piracy and protect intellectual property rights. I.e. to protect Microsoft's sales. Not exactly benevolent now. The second one is a link to a story about Google donating money for a world library, with a tiny mention of Microsoft teaming up with Yahoo and a couple of others to make a competitor. The next link is to a story about the Gates Foundation donating money to malaria control and prevention. This seems to be part of a trend of his to donate money to kick start vaccine usage in the developing world. He also has significant investments in pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies.
Second:
Also, Microsoft employs more than 12,000 people. These people likely buy products or use services that your employer produces.
For this I would just like to point out that the profit margin on Windows and Office are sitting at about 77% and 71% respectively, that means that for every dollar you spend on a copy of Windows $0.77 goes to the company's profit account and $0.23 goes towards the cost of making, marketing, distributing and selling it. That $0.23 includes the wages of the programmers and other workers.
Finally, I would just like to point out that although Microsoft has made a market place for third party software and solutions, that would have happened whoever became the dominant player. There is a health third party software market for just about every software platform there is, Microsoft's simply has the most punters. If the majority of the desktop users switched to something else, the hordes of software developers would switch too.
Hmmm, I think that maybe you are mis-interpreting what they mean when they say standard. Going off of your links, I am assuming that you are using the sixth definition of standard:
Something, such as a practice or a product, that is widely recognized or employed, especially because of its excellence
and the first definition of de facto:
Actual
So you are saying that Exchange is the actual product that is widely employed. This is different to saying somethings conforms to a standard, such as an ISO standard or an IETF standard. I'd say that these use either definition 2.a:
An acknowledged measure of comparison for quantitative or qualitative value; a criterion
or from further down the page, the first definition from the Merriam-Webster Dictionary of Law
Something established by authority, custom, or general consent as a model, example, or point of reference
So you can see that these are in actual fact two very different things you are talking about and that one type of standard is not the same kind of thing as the other.
You could always suggest an alternative to the PDA's. Unfortunately it's not quite out yet, but should be sometime this year and I don't know what your timetable is.
Problems, In China they use GB code for character set, in Taiwan they use Big5, and in Japan it's Shift-JIS. Only few applications are using Unicode. And the truth is, Windows (2000 and XP) has excellent support for all these different character sets.
Hmm, but is it that these countries use Windows 2000/XP because they support GB/Big5/Shift-JIS or do they use GB/Big5/Shift-JIS because of the high quality support in Windows? Logically using Unicode would allow uniform support for all three languages using a more common underlying display mechanism (minus the differences in things like entry systems). Would not the unified development group look for a common/flexible text rendering system that handles all three equally.
Also, would not the reason that few applications are using unicode be that if windows is the majority platform, and if Windows has a history of strong GB/Big5/Shift-JIS, that there would be more windows developers used to programming for GB/Big5/Shift-JIS. If this new Linux based OS uses unicode as it's primary text rendering system, new software developed for it would be in unicode, presumably, as the developers will be learning new skills for programming in Linux, adding a switch to unicode would just make sense.
When I am in a meeting I can look at my Palm to see what's next on my schedule too. Of course if I need to present at the meeting, I tend to get rather nervous and my palms get sweaty and the ink runs, then my schedule is all blurry and I miss my next appointment.
Secondly, if you look up the domain in Netcraft, you'll see that the netblock is owned by a group called Softscape. Further looking at this would seem to indicate that Softscape is quite involved in the running of the Massachusetts Court's IT system (in terms of case and document management). It seems logical that there would be quite a bit of co-hosting going on.
Ummm, IANAL and all that crap, but wasn't the Finding of Fact the statement that described the unlawful conduct as determined by the court (under Jackson) and the Final Judgement was the second stage where a remedy is put forward and assumes that some kind of guilt has already been established (essentially the difference between verdict and then sentencing). Isn't the statement referring to admission that you quoted, simply a measure put in by the Microsoft lawyers to indicate that THEY still admit to doing nothing wrong?
Hi, I just wanted to briefly comment on one item, that I believe you quoted from someone else:
Quote from the SecurityFocus discussion: To make an analogy in the Unix world, it would be like a deamon running as root opening an xterm on the users desktop to manage it. Nobody would say "X is broken" in this case - I think we'd all agree that the app is broken.
I'm not a Linux expert by any means, but I was under the impression that even a privileged user like root could not necessarily launch X applications on someone else's X server, unless they had set up authorities to allow it. So in this case, a properly configured system would prevent the careless programmer from creating a security risk. Is that right or am I off base here somewhere?
Cheers (P.S. I almost submitted with it reading "prevent the carless programmer" he he)
I'm not trying to start any arguments here, but I do think a couple of things are quite ammusing.
Firstly, the complaints are that a US government agency is providing security patches internationally for a product that was designed and built internationally. If they want a Kernel using the NSA security code only for use by US companies, I think that it should only be allowed to use the kernel code developed in the US. Pretty non functional I'd think. It's pretty poor of them to say, "we'll take all the code developed by foreign private companies and foreign governments thanks, but you lot arn't alowed to touch US Gov funded stuff!". If they (private or government) want to build on shared code, they should provide it.
Also I think it's ammusing that MS is kinda fighting on behalf of RedHat.:)
Could you please rephase this in grammatical english?
Could you please learn to spell rephrase before complaining about some elses language skills. Besides, for this person, english could be a second language. Imagine how you would feel if you were a beginner at German or French, and someone made fun of you. The internet is an international medium, you should keep that in mind.
> I think that/opt is "banned" by LSB (Linux Standard Base)./opt is ugly and non-standard./usr/ is where all the programs that aren't in the base-packages should go.
Nope;/opt is where packages installed by the local admin, not part of the distribution's original install , go. That enables you to track what you've done vs what the original install does, so that if upgrading == reinstalling, you don't lose the additional packages you've installed.
I read that too (FHS - 3.12). So from that point of view, would not a distribution installing KDE in/opt/kde be violating the FHS if it is part of the basic install? And that the Redhat/Mandrake way of doing it is in fact right?
A noble sentiment, but if you want to really help then Join the Mandrake club. If you buy CD a lot of that money goes towards packaging distribution and marketing.
True, but buying boxed editions has another positive effect. If lots of people buy the boxes, more stores will stock them, giving the distribution more visibility to people who have not used Linux yet, potentially getting more new users, producing more income. So there are benefits either way.
Well, within the unix market itself this trend is in fact happening as linux kills off minority unixes (which may in fact have advantages over linux in some areas). The market can support two OSs - and its obvious that those will be Win32 and linux. Other OSs may be stronger, but it doesn't matter anymore, the computing market does not favor the minority solution in the long run.
I have a feeling that OpenVMS will escape that prediction, even if no others do.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, that's one of the things that pisses me off most about the party-based government systems: you can't vote for specific policies, you either pick the Liberal package, or the Labor package
Well actually there is a party in Australia that lets you do just that, it's the Senator online party where you get to vote on each and every bill that goes through the senate. Now we just need the same for a lower house party!! w00t!!!
Well, seeing as how everyone is comparing their methods of transportation, I'll chime mine in. Firstly, I like to drive too, in fact I love driving. However, I have never owned a car. I mostly use public transport or if possible walk or ride a bike. I love catching trains to places now that I'm in the UK, unfortuneatly inter-city/town trains just arn't really a big thing in South Australia. There are times when a car is useful for the weekend or something and on those occasions I rent one. There are also the occasions when a taxi makes sense. Overall I've never really felt the need to own my own car. When you only rent cars occasionally, it means that when you do drive, it's in a nice, fairly new to brand new, clean car. Overall I think it saves me money as I don't often rent a car (maybe 6 times last year). When I do drive though, I like to have the full driving experience, which includes having a manual and not to have too much automated. I do like having ABS and traction control and other electronic safety measures as I don't have the same day to day practice that others do.
I'm not sure what you mean. At least under the MS Windows system, resizing and moving windows using keyboard only is quite easy, just as easy as maximizing. You just hit alt-space then "s" for resize or alt-space then "m" for moving. Then you just use the direction keys to set the size or position of the window and when you're happy with it, hit enter and you're back into your application. Seems rather easy to me. I seem to remember KDE being equally easy, though it's been a little while since I've used KDE. Can't comment on other X Window Managers.
I just wanted to answer a few things that you put into your post. I'm not going to make any comments about system quality or user interfaces. You made mention of a couple of financial points that I think should be discussed.
First:
Well, the first link connects to a story about Microsoft donating computers to Nigerian Copyright Commission whose job it is to combat piracy and protect intellectual property rights. I.e. to protect Microsoft's sales. Not exactly benevolent now. The second one is a link to a story about Google donating money for a world library, with a tiny mention of Microsoft teaming up with Yahoo and a couple of others to make a competitor. The next link is to a story about the Gates Foundation donating money to malaria control and prevention. This seems to be part of a trend of his to donate money to kick start vaccine usage in the developing world. He also has significant investments in pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies.
Second:
For this I would just like to point out that the profit margin on Windows and Office are sitting at about 77% and 71% respectively, that means that for every dollar you spend on a copy of Windows $0.77 goes to the company's profit account and $0.23 goes towards the cost of making, marketing, distributing and selling it. That $0.23 includes the wages of the programmers and other workers.
Finally, I would just like to point out that although Microsoft has made a market place for third party software and solutions, that would have happened whoever became the dominant player. There is a health third party software market for just about every software platform there is, Microsoft's simply has the most punters. If the majority of the desktop users switched to something else, the hordes of software developers would switch too.
Hmmm, I think that maybe you are mis-interpreting what they mean when they say standard. Going off of your links, I am assuming that you are using the sixth definition of standard:
and the first definition of de facto:
So you are saying that Exchange is the actual product that is widely employed. This is different to saying somethings conforms to a standard, such as an ISO standard or an IETF standard. I'd say that these use either definition 2.a:
or from further down the page, the first definition from the Merriam-Webster Dictionary of Law
So you can see that these are in actual fact two very different things you are talking about and that one type of standard is not the same kind of thing as the other.
You could always suggest an alternative to the PDA's. Unfortunately it's not quite out yet, but should be sometime this year and I don't know what your timetable is.
Problems, In China they use GB code for character set, in Taiwan they use Big5, and in Japan it's Shift-JIS. Only few applications are using Unicode. And the truth is, Windows (2000 and XP) has excellent support for all these different character sets.
Hmm, but is it that these countries use Windows 2000/XP because they support GB/Big5/Shift-JIS or do they use GB/Big5/Shift-JIS because of the high quality support in Windows? Logically using Unicode would allow uniform support for all three languages using a more common underlying display mechanism (minus the differences in things like entry systems). Would not the unified development group look for a common/flexible text rendering system that handles all three equally.
Also, would not the reason that few applications are using unicode be that if windows is the majority platform, and if Windows has a history of strong GB/Big5/Shift-JIS, that there would be more windows developers used to programming for GB/Big5/Shift-JIS. If this new Linux based OS uses unicode as it's primary text rendering system, new software developed for it would be in unicode, presumably, as the developers will be learning new skills for programming in Linux, adding a switch to unicode would just make sense.
When I am in a meeting I can look at my Palm to see what's next on my schedule too. Of course if I need to present at the meeting, I tend to get rather nervous and my palms get sweaty and the ink runs, then my schedule is all blurry and I miss my next appointment.
Firstly it's IIS/5.0.
Secondly, if you look up the domain in Netcraft, you'll see that the netblock is owned by a group called Softscape. Further looking at this would seem to indicate that Softscape is quite involved in the running of the Massachusetts Court's IT system (in terms of case and document management). It seems logical that there would be quite a bit of co-hosting going on.
Ummm, IANAL and all that crap, but wasn't the Finding of Fact the statement that described the unlawful conduct as determined by the court (under Jackson) and the Final Judgement was the second stage where a remedy is put forward and assumes that some kind of guilt has already been established (essentially the difference between verdict and then sentencing). Isn't the statement referring to admission that you quoted, simply a measure put in by the Microsoft lawyers to indicate that THEY still admit to doing nothing wrong?
Umm, how are either of these (suggestion box and snail mail) telecommunications?
extraction and purification requires a lot of water, which is something of a problem on the moon.
I guess that's where the ice minning would come into it?
You sure it's not the National Biscotto Company?
So you have never installed SuSE 7.x to 8.x anywhere? They ship this and you can enable it upon installation.
Mandrake also have this. Encryped file system is an option on the install. I think they added it in 8.1 or 8.2.
Hi, I just wanted to ask, which version of The GIMP are you running in that screenshot? Is it from current CVS?
Thanks
Hi, I just wanted to briefly comment on one item, that I believe you quoted from someone else:
I'm not a Linux expert by any means, but I was under the impression that even a privileged user like root could not necessarily launch X applications on someone else's X server, unless they had set up authorities to allow it. So in this case, a properly configured system would prevent the careless programmer from creating a security risk. Is that right or am I off base here somewhere?
Cheers (P.S. I almost submitted with it reading "prevent the carless programmer" he he)
I'm not trying to start any arguments here, but I do think a couple of things are quite ammusing.
:)
Firstly, the complaints are that a US government agency is providing security patches internationally for a product that was designed and built internationally. If they want a Kernel using the NSA security code only for use by US companies, I think that it should only be allowed to use the kernel code developed in the US. Pretty non functional I'd think. It's pretty poor of them to say, "we'll take all the code developed by foreign private companies and foreign governments thanks, but you lot arn't alowed to touch US Gov funded stuff!". If they (private or government) want to build on shared code, they should provide it.
Also I think it's ammusing that MS is kinda fighting on behalf of RedHat.
*sigh* that's the solution to EVERYTHING in Star Trek, it's either rephasing or reversing the particle stream.
I found I had the same problem, but, oddly enough, cutting and pasting from mozilla to openoffice works fine. Not surprising really.
Could you please rephase this in grammatical english?
Could you please learn to spell rephrase before complaining about some elses language skills. Besides, for this person, english could be a second language. Imagine how you would feel if you were a beginner at German or French, and someone made fun of you. The internet is an international medium, you should keep that in mind.
> I think that /opt is "banned" by LSB (Linux Standard Base). /opt is ugly and non-standard. /usr/ is where all the programs that aren't in the base-packages should go.
/opt is where packages installed by the local admin, not part of the distribution's original install , go. That enables you to track what you've done vs what the original install does, so that if upgrading == reinstalling, you don't lose the additional packages you've installed.
/opt/kde be violating the FHS if it is part of the basic install? And that the Redhat/Mandrake way of doing it is in fact right?
Nope;
I read that too (FHS - 3.12). So from that point of view, would not a distribution installing KDE in
A noble sentiment, but if you want to really help then Join the Mandrake club.
If you buy CD a lot of that money goes towards packaging distribution and marketing.
True, but buying boxed editions has another positive effect. If lots of people buy the boxes, more stores will stock them, giving the distribution more visibility to people who have not used Linux yet, potentially getting more new users, producing more income. So there are benefits either way.
So when MS says they can't remove IE from Windows, it's true.
Actually they can, it's just that The Beast won't let them...
... and let students have their own opinion on the matter.
:)
Hmmmmm, I think that your uni courses are very different to mine....
Well, within the unix market itself this trend is in fact happening as linux kills off minority unixes (which may in fact have advantages over linux in some areas). The market can support two OSs - and its obvious that those will be Win32 and linux. Other OSs may be stronger, but it doesn't matter anymore, the computing market does not favor the minority solution in the long run.
I have a feeling that OpenVMS will escape that prediction, even if no others do.