Oh, there was something a while back about the XML formats in Office 2003, that Microsoft had somehow patented certain things about the XML, and licensed the XML in such a way that prevented OSS from reading/writing those formats. Maybe it's been cleared up by now.
I always wonder what it really means when Microsoft makes "open standards" and such, ever since the MSO XML debacle. I'll wait to hear some details that confirm that there aren't any dirty tricks involved.
Even so, I'm not sure why I would want to jump on this new standard at the moment. PDF is widely supported, and does a good job for the things it's meant for. Will Microsoft make a program to do the things that Acrobat does? Will it provide different ways to optimize quality/size? Will it work with the companies in the print business to make sure it provides everything they need, and works on their equipment on the same level as PDF? Because as much as PDF is nice for trading print documents online, it's real strength is the support from professional printing industries.
So that's what Microsoft needs to do to be on equal footing with Adobe, which still doesn't tell us why anyone should switch.
What's wrong with GRUB? I'm not offended by you not liking it, but just curious. To me, it doesn't exactly seem perfect and ideal, but it's easy enough to install and use.
Technology usually advances so that it is not only more advanced, but also more efficient. It's fairly obvious that Hollywood studios (just an example) would want cheap CGI, and since there's a need for this to happen, there's also someone working on making that happen.
I wonder how much cheaper it would really be. Yes, your animators will probably save time, but won't you have to have "face actors" standing by to give the animator various "happy faces" to work with, or something? And then the animator would still need to try the different faces out, see which one he liked, clean it up, place it in the scene, etc.
Maybe it's simpler than that, and maybe there are complications I'm not thinking of, but I doubt that, even if successful, it would make the process as trivial as some might be imagining. However, I think the idea of a "Face actor" is interesting. Just like you have specialized voice-actors for cartoons, will we get a new class of actors who are just really good at making faces?
Wouldn't it be more likely to go the other way? If you're making money off of MMORPG, then I would think the subscriptions could arguably be a "business expense", and hence you would get a tax break.
Why go through all that? If it's really an issue of this company complaining that they don't think it's fair to label them "spammers", then how about we just call it a list of "people you probably don't want to receive e-mail from". "Spammers" or not, you don't want e-mail from these guys.
According to the consensus here on Slashdot, I thought the purpose was to drive SCO stock prices up so the executives could pump and dump, meanwhile getting funding from Microsoft so that they could stall and keep the whole thing in court as long as possible so that CIOs would be nervous about Linux.
Wait, so SCO actually had claims? As in, they claimed that IBM actually was doing something wrong? Funny, from everything I've read, I thought SCO had brought IBM to court on account of "nanny-nanny boo-boo."
Yes, I know. But I was saying I hope someone invents something that will sync your files to your hard drive in a specified format. I'm assuming that one of the things Googles API will allow is to upload/export files. If so, you should be able to write something that syncs all the OOo/MSO documents between a given folder and your Google account, which would allow you to keep a local copy in case you wanted to edit your documents offline.
The reason I bring this up is, I probably won't use any of this online stuff until it can be synced automatically. Without a sync, it becomes just another place where I have to keep track of my documents, and where the most up-to-date version is.
think you wouldn't see a story about a no-name application for various reasons. First, mass audiences might be hesitant to upload files to random companies they aren't familiar with and don't trust. For better or worse, people do trust Google well enough.
I know my big concern with no-named companies making web apps is that, even if they're kind of cool, little companies trying something innovative often fizzle out. You spend some time uploading your documents and playing with things. You tell people that they can access your documents there. Next thing you know, right when you're coming to depend on it-- the site is gone. Or sometimes you might think, "This has potential, but they still need to work on it," but the company doesn't really have the money to work on it.
So I think that's part of the reason why this is getting hype: people expect that Google will make it work. Google isn't running out of money anytime soon, and they aren't going out of business. These apps are pretty snappy, and we all know that Google has the servers and bandwidth to run it, so there isn't a big fear of things being overloaded.
I'm not a huge fan of this stuff. Word processors and spreadsheets in web browsers? I take my laptop with me most everywhere, and I'd rather work locally. Still, maybe if Google works on it and other people can find clever things to do with the API, maybe there will be some use for it. I guess it'd be nice to send a simple spreadsheet to someone, and trust that they'll be able to view it with only a web browser, so it's not all useless. But I think the real thing is the promise that Google will figure out how to make it work.
I wouldn't jump to any conclusions there. Google and Apple seem to get along, but Apple and Google aren't that close. There isn't even an office Google Talk client for OSX. Yes, Google has been filling out their support for OSX lately, but Docs still doesn't have support for Pages documents.
I would add, also, that this seems to me to be the sort of thing Apple would like to do themselves. It's only my opinion, but even if it were a fairly open solution (the Pages and Keynote document formats are both regular XML), I would think Apple would want to build the solution themselves, since Apple tends to be a bit controlling about their user-experience. I could imagine something like this integrating well into.Mac.
...Not that I object to the idea, but people get a little carried away with Apple rumors.
It'd be nice if someone could make something that will sync your Google documents into a folder on your hard drive, maybe in.odt and ods format? It seems like the first thing I'd want from Google Docs&Spreadsheet.
Funny, I also got my first Powerbook in 2002, mostly because I had some users requesting Macs and no IT people in the company at the time were familiar with them. Simply becoming an OSX user made me the "company expert", which resulted in a bunch of opportunities for me. So that-- paired with wanting to try out an iPod, which wasn't compatible with Windows yet-- got me to try it out in spite of the fact that I was always a "Windows guy" and generally didn't like Macs.
But it was one of those things where, as time went on, I found myself working more and more on the Mac. At first I didn't even notice, but then I realized that I was actively avoiding my Windows box. I would just go back to Windows for a couple of specific things where Windows was necessary. Those times became more and more rare until, finally, it just didn't feel "worth it" to maintain a Windows machine for those couple of things (which were, at that point, playing a couple of games).
These days, I generally work on either OSX or Ubuntu, and whenever I have to do things in Windows, it's aggravating to me. Whenever read Microsoft news, how Vista is introducing more problems and more restrictions, I think, "Why do people put up with that?" When my parents go to buy a computer, I feel like I have to talk to them about an iMac, and it feels like it's "for their own good". Sadly, I have to admit, I've become one of them: a Mac guy.
Still, it creeps me out when I hear real Mac people talk about Apple. You know, the people who are still upset about Apple moving to OSX? Those guys need to be locked up.
Well, I guess it depends on whose security Microsoft is talking about. It seems Microsoft has locked the end user out of the OS as much as possible, including a bunch of new DRM and anti-piracy measures. Your OS of choice probably isn't as secure against your own legitimate use as Windows Vista is.
That's what I was getting at. If the volume license no longer permits you to use Windows without activation, that fact alone will prohibit many IT departments from upgrading. Disk imaging has become standard operating procedure in a lot of companies, and altering this procedure significantly could mean too many extra man-hours to get a single desktop on the floor.
I wasn't contrasting open-source vs. closed-source there. I was saying that, for small companies, hosted services will often be cheaper and more efficient than in-house services. That's a generalization, but not a bad one. If I have three employees, I might very well be better off getting someone else to host my web/email services, rather than buying servers and expensive internet access. However, hosted services generally aren't appropriate for larger companies.
So I was just pointing out that your comparison was between an in-house solution and a hosted solution, which is a bit of apples vs. oranges. If you're trying to make the comparison between open-source and closed-source, then you should pick two hosted solutions, or two in-house solutions, so that you'll be comparing apples to apples, or oranges to oranges.
I'm... just wow. I guess I was under the impression that there was going to be more anti-piracy stuff to deal with. But wow.
I can't imagine businesses putting up with this. I'm in IT. Specifically I'm the guy in my company that will make the decision on whether to upgrade to Vista, and if the answer wasn't "no" before, it is now. But also I worked my way up from the helpdesk, working in different companies of different sizes in different industries. Thinking back to all the people I've worked with, of everyone who would be in a position to make software decisions, I can't imagine a single one for whom this won't be a deal-breaker.
Really, now that I think about it, I'm trying to imagine the responses to this, and I think across the board, I'm imagining a lot of swearing.
Yeah, NeoOffice isn't perfect, and it's not quite snappy, but I find it to be about on par with OpenOffice on Windows. Pretty impressive for a team which, last I heard, consisted of two people working in their spare time. All things considered, the new betas are really stable and functional.
MS Office is oddly not much better, even when you take into account that it's not a universal binary. I'm looking forward to iWork 07, since supposedly Apple has been working on improving the composition features (as opposed to layout/design). Sorry I can't help with the Japanese or free graphic editor.
I'm not trolling. I'm not anti-Windows either; I've been a Windows user up until a few months ago and liked my Windows experience. In fact, typing this in my MacBook, I miss certain Windows software
Give it time. Honestly, I used to be a Windows user, hated macs. I still kind of like Windows 2000, except that it's just... old and out of date. But I decided to try OSX for a while a few years ago, and as time went on, I've found my frustration with Windows growing. Whenever I have to work on a Windows machine, I find lots of frustrating little details that seem like they should have been fixed years ago.
One of my common complaints (and this is actually not off-topic) is that Windows is hard to image. In both my personal and IT use, I find it incredibly useful to be able to image machines, so that I don't have to go through all the reconfiguration crap every time I want to reinstall or replicate a machine, move a user, switch some hardware around, or whatever. You back up your home directory and image the machine, and you're all set. There are solutions to the problems with Windows imaging, but a lot of those problems are artificially created by Microsoft: activation, WGA, and licensing issues.
If my experience is any indicator, you'll find programs that are better than the ones you miss on Windows. You'll get used to OSX's quirks. You'll realize that drag-and-drop is a better installation method. And after a while, you'll get used to working with an operating system that doesn't sabotage you. You'll start being amazed at how much you used to put up with. You'll sit down at a Windows machine and realize that Microsoft has forcing you to jump through hoops to get things done, and those hoops just shouldn't even exist. You'll become anti-Windows in no time.
Well, the real issue is going to be distributing fake corporate keys for Vista Ultimate, since supposedly all versions of Vista will be sold on the same DVDs.
This is an excellent point to bring up in a Debian discussion. I think it explains exactly why you have Debian, with such versatility and so many packages, and then tons of more-specialized distributions that are based on Debian. So no, it's not a "totally insurmountable problem", and it's already being solved (at least to some degree).
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Oh, there was something a while back about the XML formats in Office 2003, that Microsoft had somehow patented certain things about the XML, and licensed the XML in such a way that prevented OSS from reading/writing those formats. Maybe it's been cleared up by now.
I always wonder what it really means when Microsoft makes "open standards" and such, ever since the MSO XML debacle. I'll wait to hear some details that confirm that there aren't any dirty tricks involved.
Even so, I'm not sure why I would want to jump on this new standard at the moment. PDF is widely supported, and does a good job for the things it's meant for. Will Microsoft make a program to do the things that Acrobat does? Will it provide different ways to optimize quality/size? Will it work with the companies in the print business to make sure it provides everything they need, and works on their equipment on the same level as PDF? Because as much as PDF is nice for trading print documents online, it's real strength is the support from professional printing industries.
So that's what Microsoft needs to do to be on equal footing with Adobe, which still doesn't tell us why anyone should switch.
Running multiple OSes simultaneously without virtualization or emulation? Where/how is Apple doing this?
What's wrong with GRUB? I'm not offended by you not liking it, but just curious. To me, it doesn't exactly seem perfect and ideal, but it's easy enough to install and use.
Technology usually advances so that it is not only more advanced, but also more efficient. It's fairly obvious that Hollywood studios (just an example) would want cheap CGI, and since there's a need for this to happen, there's also someone working on making that happen.
I wonder how much cheaper it would really be. Yes, your animators will probably save time, but won't you have to have "face actors" standing by to give the animator various "happy faces" to work with, or something? And then the animator would still need to try the different faces out, see which one he liked, clean it up, place it in the scene, etc.
Maybe it's simpler than that, and maybe there are complications I'm not thinking of, but I doubt that, even if successful, it would make the process as trivial as some might be imagining. However, I think the idea of a "Face actor" is interesting. Just like you have specialized voice-actors for cartoons, will we get a new class of actors who are just really good at making faces?
Did the internet kill reading?
Are you new here?
Seriously, though, I would have responded the the point you were making, but I just got caught up on that one sentence.
Wouldn't it be more likely to go the other way? If you're making money off of MMORPG, then I would think the subscriptions could arguably be a "business expense", and hence you would get a tax break.
Why go through all that? If it's really an issue of this company complaining that they don't think it's fair to label them "spammers", then how about we just call it a list of "people you probably don't want to receive e-mail from". "Spammers" or not, you don't want e-mail from these guys.
According to the consensus here on Slashdot, I thought the purpose was to drive SCO stock prices up so the executives could pump and dump, meanwhile getting funding from Microsoft so that they could stall and keep the whole thing in court as long as possible so that CIOs would be nervous about Linux.
Wait, so SCO actually had claims? As in, they claimed that IBM actually was doing something wrong? Funny, from everything I've read, I thought SCO had brought IBM to court on account of "nanny-nanny boo-boo."
Yes, I know. But I was saying I hope someone invents something that will sync your files to your hard drive in a specified format. I'm assuming that one of the things Googles API will allow is to upload/export files. If so, you should be able to write something that syncs all the OOo/MSO documents between a given folder and your Google account, which would allow you to keep a local copy in case you wanted to edit your documents offline.
The reason I bring this up is, I probably won't use any of this online stuff until it can be synced automatically. Without a sync, it becomes just another place where I have to keep track of my documents, and where the most up-to-date version is.
think you wouldn't see a story about a no-name application for various reasons. First, mass audiences might be hesitant to upload files to random companies they aren't familiar with and don't trust. For better or worse, people do trust Google well enough.
I know my big concern with no-named companies making web apps is that, even if they're kind of cool, little companies trying something innovative often fizzle out. You spend some time uploading your documents and playing with things. You tell people that they can access your documents there. Next thing you know, right when you're coming to depend on it-- the site is gone. Or sometimes you might think, "This has potential, but they still need to work on it," but the company doesn't really have the money to work on it.
So I think that's part of the reason why this is getting hype: people expect that Google will make it work. Google isn't running out of money anytime soon, and they aren't going out of business. These apps are pretty snappy, and we all know that Google has the servers and bandwidth to run it, so there isn't a big fear of things being overloaded.
I'm not a huge fan of this stuff. Word processors and spreadsheets in web browsers? I take my laptop with me most everywhere, and I'd rather work locally. Still, maybe if Google works on it and other people can find clever things to do with the API, maybe there will be some use for it. I guess it'd be nice to send a simple spreadsheet to someone, and trust that they'll be able to view it with only a web browser, so it's not all useless. But I think the real thing is the promise that Google will figure out how to make it work.
I wouldn't jump to any conclusions there. Google and Apple seem to get along, but Apple and Google aren't that close. There isn't even an office Google Talk client for OSX. Yes, Google has been filling out their support for OSX lately, but Docs still doesn't have support for Pages documents.
I would add, also, that this seems to me to be the sort of thing Apple would like to do themselves. It's only my opinion, but even if it were a fairly open solution (the Pages and Keynote document formats are both regular XML), I would think Apple would want to build the solution themselves, since Apple tends to be a bit controlling about their user-experience. I could imagine something like this integrating well into .Mac.
...Not that I object to the idea, but people get a little carried away with Apple rumors.
No, it was a sarcastic remark, referring to Microsoft's DRM and anti-piracy efforts in Vista.
It'd be nice if someone could make something that will sync your Google documents into a folder on your hard drive, maybe in .odt and ods format? It seems like the first thing I'd want from Google Docs&Spreadsheet.
Funny, I also got my first Powerbook in 2002, mostly because I had some users requesting Macs and no IT people in the company at the time were familiar with them. Simply becoming an OSX user made me the "company expert", which resulted in a bunch of opportunities for me. So that-- paired with wanting to try out an iPod, which wasn't compatible with Windows yet-- got me to try it out in spite of the fact that I was always a "Windows guy" and generally didn't like Macs.
But it was one of those things where, as time went on, I found myself working more and more on the Mac. At first I didn't even notice, but then I realized that I was actively avoiding my Windows box. I would just go back to Windows for a couple of specific things where Windows was necessary. Those times became more and more rare until, finally, it just didn't feel "worth it" to maintain a Windows machine for those couple of things (which were, at that point, playing a couple of games).
These days, I generally work on either OSX or Ubuntu, and whenever I have to do things in Windows, it's aggravating to me. Whenever read Microsoft news, how Vista is introducing more problems and more restrictions, I think, "Why do people put up with that?" When my parents go to buy a computer, I feel like I have to talk to them about an iMac, and it feels like it's "for their own good". Sadly, I have to admit, I've become one of them: a Mac guy.
Still, it creeps me out when I hear real Mac people talk about Apple. You know, the people who are still upset about Apple moving to OSX? Those guys need to be locked up.
Maybe both are just effects of being a semi-autistic geek?
Well, I guess it depends on whose security Microsoft is talking about. It seems Microsoft has locked the end user out of the OS as much as possible, including a bunch of new DRM and anti-piracy measures. Your OS of choice probably isn't as secure against your own legitimate use as Windows Vista is.
That's what I was getting at. If the volume license no longer permits you to use Windows without activation, that fact alone will prohibit many IT departments from upgrading. Disk imaging has become standard operating procedure in a lot of companies, and altering this procedure significantly could mean too many extra man-hours to get a single desktop on the floor.
I wasn't contrasting open-source vs. closed-source there. I was saying that, for small companies, hosted services will often be cheaper and more efficient than in-house services. That's a generalization, but not a bad one. If I have three employees, I might very well be better off getting someone else to host my web/email services, rather than buying servers and expensive internet access. However, hosted services generally aren't appropriate for larger companies.
So I was just pointing out that your comparison was between an in-house solution and a hosted solution, which is a bit of apples vs. oranges. If you're trying to make the comparison between open-source and closed-source, then you should pick two hosted solutions, or two in-house solutions, so that you'll be comparing apples to apples, or oranges to oranges.
I hadn't heard about that. Wow.
I'm... just wow. I guess I was under the impression that there was going to be more anti-piracy stuff to deal with. But wow.
I can't imagine businesses putting up with this. I'm in IT. Specifically I'm the guy in my company that will make the decision on whether to upgrade to Vista, and if the answer wasn't "no" before, it is now. But also I worked my way up from the helpdesk, working in different companies of different sizes in different industries. Thinking back to all the people I've worked with, of everyone who would be in a position to make software decisions, I can't imagine a single one for whom this won't be a deal-breaker.
Really, now that I think about it, I'm trying to imagine the responses to this, and I think across the board, I'm imagining a lot of swearing.
Yeah, NeoOffice isn't perfect, and it's not quite snappy, but I find it to be about on par with OpenOffice on Windows. Pretty impressive for a team which, last I heard, consisted of two people working in their spare time. All things considered, the new betas are really stable and functional.
MS Office is oddly not much better, even when you take into account that it's not a universal binary. I'm looking forward to iWork 07, since supposedly Apple has been working on improving the composition features (as opposed to layout/design). Sorry I can't help with the Japanese or free graphic editor.
Give it time. Honestly, I used to be a Windows user, hated macs. I still kind of like Windows 2000, except that it's just... old and out of date. But I decided to try OSX for a while a few years ago, and as time went on, I've found my frustration with Windows growing. Whenever I have to work on a Windows machine, I find lots of frustrating little details that seem like they should have been fixed years ago.
One of my common complaints (and this is actually not off-topic) is that Windows is hard to image. In both my personal and IT use, I find it incredibly useful to be able to image machines, so that I don't have to go through all the reconfiguration crap every time I want to reinstall or replicate a machine, move a user, switch some hardware around, or whatever. You back up your home directory and image the machine, and you're all set. There are solutions to the problems with Windows imaging, but a lot of those problems are artificially created by Microsoft: activation, WGA, and licensing issues.
If my experience is any indicator, you'll find programs that are better than the ones you miss on Windows. You'll get used to OSX's quirks. You'll realize that drag-and-drop is a better installation method. And after a while, you'll get used to working with an operating system that doesn't sabotage you. You'll start being amazed at how much you used to put up with. You'll sit down at a Windows machine and realize that Microsoft has forcing you to jump through hoops to get things done, and those hoops just shouldn't even exist. You'll become anti-Windows in no time.
Well, the real issue is going to be distributing fake corporate keys for Vista Ultimate, since supposedly all versions of Vista will be sold on the same DVDs.
This is an excellent point to bring up in a Debian discussion. I think it explains exactly why you have Debian, with such versatility and so many packages, and then tons of more-specialized distributions that are based on Debian. So no, it's not a "totally insurmountable problem", and it's already being solved (at least to some degree).