Can we have equal time for complaints about Apple's use of patented power connectors?
Sure, just as soon as Apple is declared to have a monopoly on portable, digital music players, which is still an undecided matter by the courts. Also, didn't I read somewhere that Apple just licensed the use of an existing variant of USB from JAE? While it is patented, I don't think it is Apple's patent, so that is a bit different.
How about Sun's legal threats against people who innovate on top of Java in unauthorized fashion?
Why? What do they have a monopoly on?
Is there any party Microsoft has made a patent sharing agreement with to date that is not a net recipient?
I don't think you understand the issue most people have with Microsoft. It isn't that they don't license their patents. It is that they use proprietary technologies to disadvantage potential competitors, and that disadvantage is only possible because of their monopolies (which is illegal and undermines the capitalist free market).
I guess I didn't clarify my definition of "adequate". The OSS solutions are in my opinion inadequate.
Inadequate compared to Trillian's crippleware version or pay version?
Pidgin, GAIM et al for some reason refuse to support features that aren't offered universally by IM networks.
Umm, I think you are a little off base here. Pidgen does not refuse to support features that are only supported by one protocol. They implement numerous such functions. If they are missing one in YMSG or MSNP or OSCAR, remember both Yahoo and Microsoft refuse to publish those protocols to allow interoperability so all functions are the result of a lot of reverse engineering and guesswork. As for AIM/ICQ, they've committed to transitioning to XMMP, so you can expect full support for all features as soon as AOL manages to do so.
For example, Yahoo! has chat rooms
Umm, Pidgin supports chat rooms for Yahoo, AIM, ICQ, IRC, XMMP, and MySpace.
ICQ has "find a random user".... Because Yahoo! doesn't have "find a random user", GAIM won't support that function for the ICQ network...
Yeah, I don't think they've gotten around to that and probably never will unless someone submits a feature request for it. Is this really a major consideration when choosing an IM client for you? It has nothing to do with what YMSG supports.
MSN has video chat
This is actually a valid concern. It has nothing to do with the fact that some protocols don't have a video chat and everything to do with getting enough developers interested in implementing it for a given protocol. There are several video chat protocols in development, but no concrete timetable for MSN. Of course Trillian has been unable to do video chat with versions of MSN Messenger newer than 6.2 (which was released in the summer of 2004). So if you're trying to work with someone who has version 7 or 8 or the new beta of 9, you're SOL on Trillian too. Maybe if Microsoft would publish their protocols, or (I know it's crazy) use one of the well established open and published standards, this wouldn't be an issue.
ICQ and MSN and Yahoo all use different video protocols - the OSS solution to this problem? Don't use any!
I already mentioned the state of video chat on Pidgin. Pidgin, however, is not the only OSS IM client. Kopete, OpenWengo, Proteus, Psi, and Skype all support one or more video chat protocols.
You end up cutting off a huge amount of functionality that these networks have and I have no idea why.
Maybe because those networks are all intentionally trying to make it hard for anyone to implement their features as part of a business plan that relies upon broken or restricted interoperability between networks. This is the same shit they tried with e-mail in the early days, when AOL e-mail users could not send or receive messages from non-AOL subscribers. The idea is, if you can get enough market share you can lock users into only your service and have a monopoly on the service instead of competing. Right now Microsoft and Yahoo have both been losing to AOL, so they are trying to form a partnership to use their joint market share to fight AOL. AOL, on the other hand, has responded by moving to open standards and is now starting to allow any client or service to interoperate easily, or so they claim as they've only made it halfway so far.
Note, what killed the walled garden of e-mail was businesses deciding e-mail was a required tool and setting up their own servers. I know an awful lot of tech companies that have done the same thing with IM and the currently winning standard is XMPP (championed by Google, Sun, IBM, Apple, AOL (very recently). Novell, RedHat, Suse, etc.). There are currently hundreds of free, public Jabber servers and innumerable corporate ones. There are not as many as there are mail servers, of course, but that is the trend t
I just don't see this becoming a success, simply because they tried it as "amd branded" and it didn't work, rebranding it and saying it's not open source doesn't mean it's now magical and delicious. In fact, I suspect they have a hard road ahead.
I'm not sure what you're saying here. Previous to this announcement the libraries were provided as pre-compiled binaries for a subset of OS versions, right? Now they're actually letting people see and make derivatives of the code. If nothing else this might get people in the OSS community to fix compatibility and performance bugs if they're creating a product that uses one of the video codecs, for example. This is not the greatest thing since sliced bread, but neither is it just AMD saying something; they've opened the code and it will likely get some small amount of reuse.
Mozilla has encryption already - along with 9 billion other options and features.
Mozilla Thunderbird has support for encryption... but it completely ignores the workflow necessary to make it usable for normal people and to spur adoption among normal people or even just geeks who need to e-mail normal people. I detailed specifically what was needed elsewhere in this thread.
Again, what is the point of generating keys locally if no one else has them? You need some sort of key management infrastructure in place. Are you asking that Mozilla provide this infrastructure for you?
Yes, to some degree. I want my e-mail client to manage the use of encryption keys for sending e-mail to a given e-mail account in my address book. Further, I want my e-mail client to use a standard way of exchanging public keys with other users and potentially other e-mail clients so that it is actually convenient enough to use encryption for a subset of e-mail messages on a daily basis.
If there is not an easy way to swap keys with other users via e-mail and automatically handle encrypting a subset of messages without annoying people who don't use encryption, then supporting encryption is useless to the vast majority of people. I know a lot of geeks who would like to use encryption to send messages to me and receive messages from me. I know a lot of normal, nontechnical people who will use whatever e-mail client I load onto their computer. If encryption was easy to set up and use, just for those users, without affecting the daily messages I send to other users then it would finally begin being adopted by a significant number of users. Right now, with every e-mail client I've tried that is not the case.
The only reason I sometimes use it rather than Live Messenger is the ability to add multiple accounts; if Messenger gained that I'd have no reason at all to use Trillian.
Someone on Slashdot uses a single protocol IM client?!? Wow! I haven't even considered using one of those since the 90's. Now I haven't used WLM personally, but it is my understanding that it currently has no support for AOL IM, ICQ, IRC, or Skype. Jabber support is only in the closed beta of version 9. It is further my understanding that there is no client for Mac OS X, Linux, Solaris, Blackberry, PalmOS, or pretty much anything other than Windows, the XBox, and a pay-by-the-month client for some Nokia phones. It is also my understanding that it does not support XMMP via ZeroConf and has no support for encryption. Finally, it is one of the three clients out there (the others being YIM and AIM) that is targeted by and is occasionally vulnerable to malware.
I suppose if you don't ever want to send and receive IM's from AIM, Jabber, ICQ, Skype, IRC, Mac OS, Linux, iPhone, Blackberry, or Palm users and you are not concerned about security or who reads your messages and you only use Windows and you never want to auto-discover other users on a LAN, well then I suppose Windows Live Messenger would work. I actually think you might be the only person I've ever talked to that met all those criteria though.
surely the mess would only be in the sig and if gmail supported encryption this wouldnt be noticable, even if it didnt it still wouldnt be "messy".
A large block of seemingly random characters in my sig is acceptable when I'm exchanging messages with other geeks. When I'm talking to my parents it is "scary" and "messy looking." When I'm exchanging messages with clients it is "unprofessional looking" and "call IT! The contractor sent me a virus that is slowing down my intarwebs!"
But as a client never conects to another client how could you possibly tell?
E-mail clients don't "connect to each other" but they do transmit information back and forth. This information is an e-mail message. Thus, if the first time I send a message to someone I can have a line in my sig that says "This user supports Encrypt-envelopes v1.6" followed by a public key then the client used to read that message can parse the text of my sig and add that account to a list of ones it can use encryption for the next time it sends a message. If I never get a message back from that user that includes their key in the sig, my client can stop sending my key to that address until I tell it to try again.
Ive not noticed a noticable difference in speed sending signed/unsigned emails.
The speed is not the problem. The problem is that most people don't use encryption and sending them what appears to be a bunch of gibberish or an attachment every time is not acceptable. Further, getting on the phone and walking every person I want to use encryption with through the process of installing a client and a plug-in and a key is also not easy enough.
You will still need to setup your keys and secure them, if you make it too easy keys will not be kept safe making signing/encryption pointless.
Umm, we're talking public/private key pairs. I can give anyone I want my public key and it does not matter.
OSS delivered pgp, gpg years ago, its not used because nobody cares ( kmail does everything for you but i doubt the adoption of encryption in kmail is above 10% )
That's because 99% of the people Kmail sers send e-mail to aren't running Kmail themselves so it sends them an unprofessional looking message. The only use for the encryption as Kmail now supports it is if you're sending messages internal to a business or government agency, where use of Kmail or another client with support for it is mandatory.
I think you're missing my point. Support for encrypting/decrypting messages is not sufficient. There needs to be support for discovering which e-mail users support a given encryption standard and for automatically deciding which addresses get a message encrypted in a particular way and which get unencrypted messages. Further this "discovery" functionality needs to be standardized across some of the major e-mail clients in use today (Eudora, Groupwise, Lotus Notes, Thunderbird, Mail.app, Evolution, etc.). Until enough users are "auto-magically" capable of exchanging encrypted messages without effort on their part, it will remain in use only for internal e-mails and for a few paranoid geeks.
there is already an instant messaging app that runs on windows, linux and mac that runs under mozilla xul and libpurple. it's called instantbird
Wow, there's a bleeding edge one! It's only been public for a few months and is on version 0.1. It looks promising, but with a long way to go before it is competitive with some of the other offerings in the market. I hope they pull off the multi-platform support well, without becoming a least common denominator offering that cannot take advantage of the platform specific differences (integration with native address books, services for OS X, package managers on Linux, etc.).
google could quite easily allow for encryption, theyd just scan the email as you read it, the conection from mailer -> google would be made safe and on https google -> you would be too.
The problem with that is, there is a threshold of pain involved. In order to use encryption you have to have at least one "messy" e-mail that offers or presents encryption info. If people are going to go to the bother of doing that and if users are going to upgrade to a client that supports it, why wouldn't they encrypt it end-to-end. Also, how can an encryption protocol be standardized if for some accounts it is encrypted/unencrypted in the middle and not for other accounts?
as for finding out encryption capabilities isnt that what digital signing is? (because i access my mail from multiple accounts and i don't keep my key on me at all times theres no otherway to test if i can receive encryption)
Digital signing is a generic term that can apply to a lot of things. The point is, I want to use encryption when talking to people whose clients support it, but I don't want to always send attachments or a large, key filled sig to people who don't have that capability. As such, I want my client to learn which addresses support it and which don't. This is a must to get started in a work environment.
I also think you're confusing the term "e-mail accounts" and the term "e-mail clients." It is perfectly plausible that users will have multiple accounts and be checking those accounts with multiple clients. For example, you might have a work account, account from your ISP, Gmail account, and an account for a professional organization of which you are a member. You might check these accounts from home on Linux, from work on windows, from the airport with your Mac laptop, and from public terminals via several Webmail services.
i sort of agree it should be default but it needs gpg installed so maybe its easier for Mozilla to just keep it as an extension and keep tb light?
I'm of the opinion that if is not on and working flawlessly on an e-mail client, with no set up, it will never reach critical mass. Talking all your friends and relatives through downloading a plug-in, installing it, generating a key, etc. is simply too much resistance to overcome. I can get some people to switch e-mail clients. At work we can mandate a subset of clients. But it also has to work without ugliness for exchanging messages with other companies and not register as a false positive for spam/virus scans and not be scary or ugly all the time for clients I exchange messages with all the time. So far, I haven't seen any client do it right, and we're getting into dangerous waters. If OSS can't do it right and get buy in from major players, you know Microsoft will eventually do it intentionally wrong and use it as a way to lock in users to Windows and Exchange and prevent interoperability. he only way to really guarantee that doesn't happen is to have enough momentum behind an open standard before they bring a proprietary standard to Windows users.
I've never seen an open source IM client that's adequately compatible with "the big four", ICQ, MSN, Yahoo and AIM.
Did you try Google? For me it lists 13 of them: SIM, Proteus, Pidgen(GAIM), OpenWengo, Miranda, Meebo, Kopete, Fire, Centericq, BitlBee, Ayttm, Agile Messenger, and Adium.
Is there a reason the guys at Cerulean can do IM so well where the open source community hasn't to date?
Trillian is a fine IM client, provided you only use Windows (don't need suport for other OS's) and don't mind paying for interoperability with some protocols. I used to use it when trapped on a Windows box at work years ago. That said, claiming the open source clients can't compete or don't exist just exposes that you've never bothered to look. For a reality check go look at the comments on arstechnica when the Trillian OS X client was announced. To summarize, the reaction was a big yawn, since there are several clients available on both Linux and OS X that are free (as in beer) and OSS and are as functional and polished or more. Heck Trillian doesn't even support OTR without a beta version of a third-party plug-in. In fact plug-ins only work on the pro "for pay" version so if you want to chat with something like a Google GTalk user, or XMPP over ZeroConf you have to shell out for a non-crippled version. If you're stuck using just Windows it is a reasonably easy answer, but I'd rather use Pidgin these days and probably Kopete within the next few months now that it is abstracted from the OS enough to be built for Windows and OS X.
Let me answer your question with a question. Why do you assume there are no OSS solutions instead of spending 2 minutes with Google?
Thunderbird comes by default with working encryption.
The last version I tried only supported SMIME which was not on by default and did not generate a key by default. It also was a pain when dealing with any other client since it includes an attachment to the file, which most people assume is a virus. Random chars in your sig are okay, but attachments are not in a normal work environment. It never seemed to learn that those addresses don't have SMIME support and stop sending them and did not handle CC's as I outlined above, making group discussions a mess. Basically, I had to know about it and set it up, and then it was still so user unfriendly I had to disable it. If this has changed in a recent version, please let me know. I'll try it again in a few months anyway, but I don't have a lot of hope.
Lenovo and Thinkpad are not one and the same... If consumer reports included the Lenovo laptops as well as Thinkpads (If they included Thinkpads at all), it could and would skew those results.
That isn't likely since IBM also had and higher failure rate than Apple for laptops, for many years running now.
Personally, what I'd like to see is an e-mail client that comes by default with working encryption... that is to say, it tells other e-mail clients what encryption choices it offers and learns from messages it receives and always chooses the best encryption option when sending messages to others. Further, I'd like that choice to handle when I send a message to a CC list of 30 people, such that it will send messages to all users, some encrypted and some not, but still letting all users get the full CC list for responses. Ideally I'd like to see this built upon an open standard that has buy in not only from the Thunderbird team, but also other major vendors (IBM, Sun, Apple, etc.) as well as other types of software (IM, VoIP, video conferencing, etc.)
Seriously, in this day and age doesn't ist seem idiotic that easy to use encryption is not a built in feature for most e-mail clients? I know why Google hasn't done this (they have a conflict of interest) but what have e-mail software vendors been doing for the last 5 years? How is it possible that someone like Apple hasn't jumped on this and made a snarky advert where the "Mac guy" says, "Oh really, I put my mail in envelopes so random strangers and people at the post office can't read the letters I send to my bank and girlfriend."
I don't think the iPhone has attained the status that any new smartphone must be considered a competitor first and foremost to it.
Do you own a TV? I don't own an iPhone, but I have seen advertisements for months now from every major carrier which feature their iPhone imitator. When every major manufacturer is selling a look-like, then yeah, all new smart phones are going to be compared to it by the media and by normal people.
I think of a laptop is a tool, so aesthetics really aren't something I care about. The Thinkpad is solid and rugged. I'll take that over pretty any day.
As I pointed out in another comment, Apple's laptops actually have a lower failure rate than Lenovo's; according to consumer reports.So the impartial testing of a third party strongly indicates that your implicit assertion that Thinkpads are more "solid and rugged" is actually untrue.
Skip down to the comments. By the 3rd or 4th comment, it turns into a flame war between Mac and Win fanboys.
Ummm.... but these days you can run Windows on a Mac and you can run Linux on either system as well. I could see a Windows versus OS X flame war or even a Apple hardware versus Lenovo hardware flame war. But how can you have a flame war between Macs and Windows users. What side are people running Windows on a Mac supposed to take?
But that doesn't tell the whole story. I'd say IBM sells a greater % of it's laptops to companies than say...HP or Toshiba. If a business owns computer equipment they're much more like to get warranty service since the IT department is there to help and also business users are MUCH more careless with their laptops.
I think you're way off base in your thinking. It is fine to attack the methodology of Consumer Report's studies... but if you're going to do so you should look up what that methodology is. Primarily they use two methods:
Phone Surveys - to people who purchased a device using a specific credit card a set time period ago. This method suffers from self selection, but realistically I don't know how one could get large sample sizes at a reasonable cost otherwise.
Secret Shoppers - who go into retail stores and purchase machines without letting the store know they aren't a normal buyer (to avoid getting cherry picked systems like most reviewers who get them as freebies from the company being reviewed).
Neither of these methods is affected by percentage in use by businesses and availability of IT departments. In fact, I don't even know how IT departments would skew the results. Sure maybe business purchases are more likely to get warranties, but they're also more likely to be able to fix software related problems themselves and which is a larger factor is anyone's guess.
So let me be perfectly frank. Consumer Reports methodology is imperfect and will not be 100% accurate... but they are also the best data set I have seen to date and as such are the best way to make a logical decision instead of one influenced by emotional attachment or revulsion with regard to purchases. Anecdotes are like assholes, everyone has one, but they don't pass the smell test. Personally, having owned both IBM and Apple products, I've had more failures with Apple systems and I've had tons of problems with Dell systems. That does not, however, bias my judgement because when I want an independent, researched opinion I don't look to the tiny sample size that is my experience. I don't even pay too much attention to the data our IT department collected. If you have a better independent and unbiased study you want to put forward, I'd love to see it. Otherwise, you and pretty much every other comment in this thread is just not useful for determining the truth, just for defending one's own insecurity about their past purchases or venting their anger about past incidents.
Sure maybe Apple users tend to live on the west coast more where carbon dioxide emissions in the air tend to make sunspots less damaging to electronics or maybe IBM users tend to be smokers which builds up inside the fans causing those machines to fail more often, whereas in a controlled environment test they would do better. Maybe magic fairy creatures are involved somehow. Maybe it is Newt Gingrich's fault somehow. We can speculate endlessly, but it isn't really productive compared to seeing the result of the best estimation published by an unbiased company who relies upon their reputation for determining these things as their primary asset.
Nothing is more beautiful in my eyes than a machine which does it's job well day after day. It's simple, it's[Thinkpad] rugged, it's the best laptop series that was ever produced.
Actually, according to Consumer Reports, Thinkpad machines have a higher failure rate than Macbooks. In fact, for the second half of 2006, Dell's laptops had a lower failure rate than Thinkpads (crazy how things change huh, Dell's desktops are still below average though). So if you're looking for "rugged" as a criteria the Thinkpad is not the winner. That said, Thinkpads are nice systems. As far as comparing compact super-thin systems... well I don't really care. In fact, I think the emphasis on thin is aiming at a demographic, but I really wish Apple and Lenovo would go after the opposite category too... thicker, cheaper, more fully featured laptops. I have no interest in an ultra-portable, but I'd love a dependable laptop with an extra large battery capacity and a desktop graphics card, even if it weighed twice as much and was twice the thickness.
A lot more people have downloaded Ubuntu than have bought a car without an engine.
Most people running Linux on the desktop bought a computer that came with Windows, then installed Linux, as a custom modification. It is akin to those people who bought a car, and then upgraded the engine in it with aftermarket parts... except their are probably fewer Linux on the desktop users than there are people with aftermarket engine components in their cars.
If BeOS was that much better than the alternatives, wouldn't some of those people have bought BeOS?
No, because people don't buy OS's. People buy computers and computers come with an OS. MS used their monopoly to stop computer makers from selling computers with BeOS pre-installed. Every system in the store had Windows on it or was a Mac, so that is all people had the option of buying. Perhaps I'm not being fair. Yes, some people bought BeOS, most of whom were people who bought the relatively high end BeBox workstations that shipped with it installed. Sadly, those people were very few in number because Be was at that point trying to start an entire vertical chain of supply to bypass MS's monopoly (just as Apple does) so they did not have to try to compete against an abusive monopoly in the "desktop OS" market, but could instead compete against Gateway and Sony in the non-monopolized "computer system" market. Sadly, they were pretty much already killed by MS's illegal (as the courts ruled) behavior so that never really got off the ground.
I sometimes wonder if anyone on Slashdot was awake in Econ 101. The main market MS has monopolized does not sell to end users. It sells to OEMs, like Dell, Sony, HP, etc. Those companies have no viable alternative and as a result pay higher prices than if they could get bids from multiple OS makers and they pass those higher prices on to customers. It also results in MS having little to no pressure to innovate or make a better or cheaper product which is why OS development has ground to a near standstill for decades. If not for Apple(who bypasses their monopoly) and Linux (which relies upon non-traditional distributed ownership scheme to avoid being killed) MS would probably have innovated even less (or copied fewer things from innovators). Right now MS makes more money by introducing anti-features like DRM and bundled products to kill new markets than it does by making their OS better, and we're all suffering for it.
OOXML and ODF are both thin veneers on particular application products.
I call bullshit on this one. I actually did look at both specs. OOXML is indeed a quick and dirty XML-like version of Office formats and doesn't even pretend to try to make functionality generic enough to make it easy for any application to implement. Even for functionality that is designed to interoperate with other types of applications OOXML is written just for the most popular add-on. ODF, on the other hand, makes a reasonable attempt at implementing functionality in a generic way so that it can be easily implemented by not only existing software packages but also new software developers who have no access to the source to existing applications. It certainly isn't perfect, but it is a night and day comparison to OOXML. ODF is already fairly well implemented by software from numerous commercial entities as well as open source projects. OOXML would be very, very hard for any third party to implement as written and it is unclear if anyone will ever be able to write to the spec instead of (as is the current case with MSOffice formats) trying to reverse engineer enough for partial compatibility.
OOXML is MS's attempt to create something close enough to an open standard to fool some bureaucrats or give them plausible deniability when they're bribed, but at the same time make sure that users don't gain the benefits of a truly open standard, which is to say interoperability with numerous programs so that users can easily switch from one to the other and gain all the benefits of real competition. This is business as usual for MS. If you look at their "shared source" initiative it was very much the same strategy. Customers wanted the advantages of open source software (many eyes to find bugs, competitive bids for new development, guaranteed migration path and future proofing) so MS came up with something sort of like open source that they could claim was "just as good" to people who didn't understand what the benefits really were and just knew that open source was beneficial in some way.
HTML is also a document standard.
Yeah HTML is a document standard, but the stuff that you have to hand to IE in order to have it work properly is not HTML because it has to break the standard to work. It also fails to implement pretty much any of the last 6 years of development on HTML and other Web standards. I don't think you picked a very promising example if you're arguing in favor of MS's willingness to use standards. The whole of Web technologies has been artificially retarded by nearly a decade as a way to keep the Web from being a viable alternative platform to Windows. Progress has been crippled and billions of dollars wasted every year in order to insure MS's platform lock-in and avoid fair competition in the marketplace. The whole point of requiring standards compliance in the first place is to insure competition and the other benefits of avoiding a single vendor lock-in for office applications. MS understandably would rather have guaranteed profits than have to actually make a better product, but there is no reason why anyone other than them and people they have paid to go along with it. That is why it is important to have a truly open standard that can be and is fully implement by multiple vendors all of who are truly interoperable. OOXML is clearly an attempt to avoid that.
Is it really possible that you don't see how ridiculous it is for giant government customers to ask vendors to create products that comply with a specification and to have one monopolist tell the customer that "No we won't make a product that meets those specifications. Unlike everyone else we're going to invent another format that is incompatible and we're going to try to force you to use it using our monopoly influence in several markets." Not only should governments not be accepting OOXML as a standard, they should be charging MS with criminal antitrust violation for trying to foist it upon them.
Yeah Apple is so open and this is the reason i can run OS X on my beige bo- OH WAIT I CANNOT !
You're confusing "open" with "free" (as in freedom). Actually OS X is open enough that you can run it on a beige box. It is, however, not free, so the license prohibits you from doing this legally. If you want to complain about Apple not being open enough, you should have picked something else, like not being able to easily customize the native GUI.
But that's not such an issue at least songs i downloaded with Itunes can be played on my noname mp3 play- OH NOES IT FAILS !
Again, this used to be a valid, complaint, excepting the fact that this was a requirement from the RIAA cartel and Apple was actually the company that pressured them into changing that policy... so your complaint falls a little flat. Apple sells non-DRM'd music these days and while it is not in the MP3 format, it is in the MP4 format, which is actually slightly more open in terms of licensing, since the royalty requirements for MP4 are slightly more free (both are equally open as they are both fully documented codecs). If you bought a music player that doesn't support MP4, well that is just as if you bought a really outdated one that doesn't support anything but.WAV files. It isn't Apple's fault as they don't license either codec, the MPEG group does. Most players do support it these days, including even Microsoft's Zune player.
Well at least Itunes runs on Linux, to- SHIT IT DOESN'T !
This one sort of applies, in that it is neither open nor free and as a result you can't port it to Linux yourself without getting a license to the code from Apple. This isn't really much of an issue, however, since it is simply a matter of a software company not maintaining a port for platform X (being Linux in this case). I guess you could argue that all software should be free and open, but I doubt if you'll get a lot of investment in commercial end user applications that way. Just use one of the many programs that do support it, or WINE, which runs it just fine.
Yep, no kidding. A grammar Nazi is a person who strictly and dogmatically points out grammatical nuances that are fairly immaterial to the readability or understandability of the text presented. This is not such a case. In this case, the error was misleading and made it very difficult for both myself and others to even understand what the writer was trying to express.
Picky picky picky. You got the meaning, didn't you?
Sure, the third time I read it trying to figure out what internet explorer had to do with it.
Not punctuating that is hardly the most atrocious of grammatical errors I've seen here.
There are entire books I've read that eschew punctuation and were still understandable. The problem isn't lack of punctuation. The problem is lack of punctuation and improper capitalization used in a context where it makes the phrase you're trying to express not the first thing people associate with your text, nor even the second thing. I generally don't care if people use incorrect grammar. This is a casual forum where I don't proof my submissions and don't expect others to. The problem is when grammatical errors obscure the meaning to a significant extent, such that it is actually difficult to tell what it is you're trying to express.
It's funny, they gave up on acquiring BeOS due to price, but then paid even more for NeXT.
I don't think that is particularly funny. They thought Be was overpriced for what they were getting. Because they paid more for what they eventually purchased does not mean they did not perceive NeXT as providing more value for the price. I might pass on buying an old used ford pickup for $500 and end up buying a new pickup for $15,000. That isn't funny, just an assessment of value and cost where I don't assume all pickup (or software companies) have the same value.
IE, it being based around how they designed MS Word...
I make a point of nat being a grammar nazi, but there does come a time where the meaning you are trying to express is obscured by grammatical errors. IE in terms of Microsoft usually refers to Internet Explorer. IE in terms of ISO means Ireland's TLD. In future you might want to try using "i.e." which the most accepted abbreviation for the latin "id est," meaning "that is; in other words" and is the least confusing way to express your meaning.
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Sure, just as soon as Apple is declared to have a monopoly on portable, digital music players, which is still an undecided matter by the courts. Also, didn't I read somewhere that Apple just licensed the use of an existing variant of USB from JAE? While it is patented, I don't think it is Apple's patent, so that is a bit different.
How about Sun's legal threats against people who innovate on top of Java in unauthorized fashion?Why? What do they have a monopoly on?
Is there any party Microsoft has made a patent sharing agreement with to date that is not a net recipient?I don't think you understand the issue most people have with Microsoft. It isn't that they don't license their patents. It is that they use proprietary technologies to disadvantage potential competitors, and that disadvantage is only possible because of their monopolies (which is illegal and undermines the capitalist free market).
I guess I didn't clarify my definition of "adequate". The OSS solutions are in my opinion inadequate.
Inadequate compared to Trillian's crippleware version or pay version?
Pidgin, GAIM et al for some reason refuse to support features that aren't offered universally by IM networks.
Umm, I think you are a little off base here. Pidgen does not refuse to support features that are only supported by one protocol. They implement numerous such functions. If they are missing one in YMSG or MSNP or OSCAR, remember both Yahoo and Microsoft refuse to publish those protocols to allow interoperability so all functions are the result of a lot of reverse engineering and guesswork. As for AIM/ICQ, they've committed to transitioning to XMMP, so you can expect full support for all features as soon as AOL manages to do so.
For example, Yahoo! has chat rooms
Umm, Pidgin supports chat rooms for Yahoo, AIM, ICQ, IRC, XMMP, and MySpace.
ICQ has "find a random user" .... Because Yahoo! doesn't have "find a random user", GAIM won't support that function for the ICQ network...
Yeah, I don't think they've gotten around to that and probably never will unless someone submits a feature request for it. Is this really a major consideration when choosing an IM client for you? It has nothing to do with what YMSG supports.
MSN has video chat
This is actually a valid concern. It has nothing to do with the fact that some protocols don't have a video chat and everything to do with getting enough developers interested in implementing it for a given protocol. There are several video chat protocols in development, but no concrete timetable for MSN. Of course Trillian has been unable to do video chat with versions of MSN Messenger newer than 6.2 (which was released in the summer of 2004). So if you're trying to work with someone who has version 7 or 8 or the new beta of 9, you're SOL on Trillian too. Maybe if Microsoft would publish their protocols, or (I know it's crazy) use one of the well established open and published standards, this wouldn't be an issue.
ICQ and MSN and Yahoo all use different video protocols - the OSS solution to this problem? Don't use any!
I already mentioned the state of video chat on Pidgin. Pidgin, however, is not the only OSS IM client. Kopete, OpenWengo, Proteus, Psi, and Skype all support one or more video chat protocols.
You end up cutting off a huge amount of functionality that these networks have and I have no idea why.
Maybe because those networks are all intentionally trying to make it hard for anyone to implement their features as part of a business plan that relies upon broken or restricted interoperability between networks. This is the same shit they tried with e-mail in the early days, when AOL e-mail users could not send or receive messages from non-AOL subscribers. The idea is, if you can get enough market share you can lock users into only your service and have a monopoly on the service instead of competing. Right now Microsoft and Yahoo have both been losing to AOL, so they are trying to form a partnership to use their joint market share to fight AOL. AOL, on the other hand, has responded by moving to open standards and is now starting to allow any client or service to interoperate easily, or so they claim as they've only made it halfway so far.
Note, what killed the walled garden of e-mail was businesses deciding e-mail was a required tool and setting up their own servers. I know an awful lot of tech companies that have done the same thing with IM and the currently winning standard is XMPP (championed by Google, Sun, IBM, Apple, AOL (very recently). Novell, RedHat, Suse, etc.). There are currently hundreds of free, public Jabber servers and innumerable corporate ones. There are not as many as there are mail servers, of course, but that is the trend t
I'm not sure what you're saying here. Previous to this announcement the libraries were provided as pre-compiled binaries for a subset of OS versions, right? Now they're actually letting people see and make derivatives of the code. If nothing else this might get people in the OSS community to fix compatibility and performance bugs if they're creating a product that uses one of the video codecs, for example. This is not the greatest thing since sliced bread, but neither is it just AMD saying something; they've opened the code and it will likely get some small amount of reuse.
Mozilla Thunderbird has support for encryption... but it completely ignores the workflow necessary to make it usable for normal people and to spur adoption among normal people or even just geeks who need to e-mail normal people. I detailed specifically what was needed elsewhere in this thread.
Yes, to some degree. I want my e-mail client to manage the use of encryption keys for sending e-mail to a given e-mail account in my address book. Further, I want my e-mail client to use a standard way of exchanging public keys with other users and potentially other e-mail clients so that it is actually convenient enough to use encryption for a subset of e-mail messages on a daily basis.
If there is not an easy way to swap keys with other users via e-mail and automatically handle encrypting a subset of messages without annoying people who don't use encryption, then supporting encryption is useless to the vast majority of people. I know a lot of geeks who would like to use encryption to send messages to me and receive messages from me. I know a lot of normal, nontechnical people who will use whatever e-mail client I load onto their computer. If encryption was easy to set up and use, just for those users, without affecting the daily messages I send to other users then it would finally begin being adopted by a significant number of users. Right now, with every e-mail client I've tried that is not the case.
Someone on Slashdot uses a single protocol IM client?!? Wow! I haven't even considered using one of those since the 90's. Now I haven't used WLM personally, but it is my understanding that it currently has no support for AOL IM, ICQ, IRC, or Skype. Jabber support is only in the closed beta of version 9. It is further my understanding that there is no client for Mac OS X, Linux, Solaris, Blackberry, PalmOS, or pretty much anything other than Windows, the XBox, and a pay-by-the-month client for some Nokia phones. It is also my understanding that it does not support XMMP via ZeroConf and has no support for encryption. Finally, it is one of the three clients out there (the others being YIM and AIM) that is targeted by and is occasionally vulnerable to malware.
I suppose if you don't ever want to send and receive IM's from AIM, Jabber, ICQ, Skype, IRC, Mac OS, Linux, iPhone, Blackberry, or Palm users and you are not concerned about security or who reads your messages and you only use Windows and you never want to auto-discover other users on a LAN, well then I suppose Windows Live Messenger would work. I actually think you might be the only person I've ever talked to that met all those criteria though.
A large block of seemingly random characters in my sig is acceptable when I'm exchanging messages with other geeks. When I'm talking to my parents it is "scary" and "messy looking." When I'm exchanging messages with clients it is "unprofessional looking" and "call IT! The contractor sent me a virus that is slowing down my intarwebs!"
But as a client never conects to another client how could you possibly tell?E-mail clients don't "connect to each other" but they do transmit information back and forth. This information is an e-mail message. Thus, if the first time I send a message to someone I can have a line in my sig that says "This user supports Encrypt-envelopes v1.6" followed by a public key then the client used to read that message can parse the text of my sig and add that account to a list of ones it can use encryption for the next time it sends a message. If I never get a message back from that user that includes their key in the sig, my client can stop sending my key to that address until I tell it to try again.
Ive not noticed a noticable difference in speed sending signed/unsigned emails.The speed is not the problem. The problem is that most people don't use encryption and sending them what appears to be a bunch of gibberish or an attachment every time is not acceptable. Further, getting on the phone and walking every person I want to use encryption with through the process of installing a client and a plug-in and a key is also not easy enough.
You will still need to setup your keys and secure them, if you make it too easy keys will not be kept safe making signing/encryption pointless.Umm, we're talking public/private key pairs. I can give anyone I want my public key and it does not matter.
OSS delivered pgp, gpg years ago, its not used because nobody cares ( kmail does everything for you but i doubt the adoption of encryption in kmail is above 10% )That's because 99% of the people Kmail sers send e-mail to aren't running Kmail themselves so it sends them an unprofessional looking message. The only use for the encryption as Kmail now supports it is if you're sending messages internal to a business or government agency, where use of Kmail or another client with support for it is mandatory.
I think you're missing my point. Support for encrypting/decrypting messages is not sufficient. There needs to be support for discovering which e-mail users support a given encryption standard and for automatically deciding which addresses get a message encrypted in a particular way and which get unencrypted messages. Further this "discovery" functionality needs to be standardized across some of the major e-mail clients in use today (Eudora, Groupwise, Lotus Notes, Thunderbird, Mail.app, Evolution, etc.). Until enough users are "auto-magically" capable of exchanging encrypted messages without effort on their part, it will remain in use only for internal e-mails and for a few paranoid geeks.
Wow, there's a bleeding edge one! It's only been public for a few months and is on version 0.1. It looks promising, but with a long way to go before it is competitive with some of the other offerings in the market. I hope they pull off the multi-platform support well, without becoming a least common denominator offering that cannot take advantage of the platform specific differences (integration with native address books, services for OS X, package managers on Linux, etc.).
The problem with that is, there is a threshold of pain involved. In order to use encryption you have to have at least one "messy" e-mail that offers or presents encryption info. If people are going to go to the bother of doing that and if users are going to upgrade to a client that supports it, why wouldn't they encrypt it end-to-end. Also, how can an encryption protocol be standardized if for some accounts it is encrypted/unencrypted in the middle and not for other accounts?
as for finding out encryption capabilities isnt that what digital signing is? (because i access my mail from multiple accounts and i don't keep my key on me at all times theres no otherway to test if i can receive encryption)Digital signing is a generic term that can apply to a lot of things. The point is, I want to use encryption when talking to people whose clients support it, but I don't want to always send attachments or a large, key filled sig to people who don't have that capability. As such, I want my client to learn which addresses support it and which don't. This is a must to get started in a work environment.
I also think you're confusing the term "e-mail accounts" and the term "e-mail clients." It is perfectly plausible that users will have multiple accounts and be checking those accounts with multiple clients. For example, you might have a work account, account from your ISP, Gmail account, and an account for a professional organization of which you are a member. You might check these accounts from home on Linux, from work on windows, from the airport with your Mac laptop, and from public terminals via several Webmail services.
i sort of agree it should be default but it needs gpg installed so maybe its easier for Mozilla to just keep it as an extension and keep tb light?I'm of the opinion that if is not on and working flawlessly on an e-mail client, with no set up, it will never reach critical mass. Talking all your friends and relatives through downloading a plug-in, installing it, generating a key, etc. is simply too much resistance to overcome. I can get some people to switch e-mail clients. At work we can mandate a subset of clients. But it also has to work without ugliness for exchanging messages with other companies and not register as a false positive for spam/virus scans and not be scary or ugly all the time for clients I exchange messages with all the time. So far, I haven't seen any client do it right, and we're getting into dangerous waters. If OSS can't do it right and get buy in from major players, you know Microsoft will eventually do it intentionally wrong and use it as a way to lock in users to Windows and Exchange and prevent interoperability. he only way to really guarantee that doesn't happen is to have enough momentum behind an open standard before they bring a proprietary standard to Windows users.
Did you try Google? For me it lists 13 of them: SIM, Proteus, Pidgen(GAIM), OpenWengo, Miranda, Meebo, Kopete, Fire, Centericq, BitlBee, Ayttm, Agile Messenger, and Adium.
Is there a reason the guys at Cerulean can do IM so well where the open source community hasn't to date?Trillian is a fine IM client, provided you only use Windows (don't need suport for other OS's) and don't mind paying for interoperability with some protocols. I used to use it when trapped on a Windows box at work years ago. That said, claiming the open source clients can't compete or don't exist just exposes that you've never bothered to look. For a reality check go look at the comments on arstechnica when the Trillian OS X client was announced. To summarize, the reaction was a big yawn, since there are several clients available on both Linux and OS X that are free (as in beer) and OSS and are as functional and polished or more. Heck Trillian doesn't even support OTR without a beta version of a third-party plug-in. In fact plug-ins only work on the pro "for pay" version so if you want to chat with something like a Google GTalk user, or XMPP over ZeroConf you have to shell out for a non-crippled version. If you're stuck using just Windows it is a reasonably easy answer, but I'd rather use Pidgin these days and probably Kopete within the next few months now that it is abstracted from the OS enough to be built for Windows and OS X.
Let me answer your question with a question. Why do you assume there are no OSS solutions instead of spending 2 minutes with Google?
The last version I tried only supported SMIME which was not on by default and did not generate a key by default. It also was a pain when dealing with any other client since it includes an attachment to the file, which most people assume is a virus. Random chars in your sig are okay, but attachments are not in a normal work environment. It never seemed to learn that those addresses don't have SMIME support and stop sending them and did not handle CC's as I outlined above, making group discussions a mess. Basically, I had to know about it and set it up, and then it was still so user unfriendly I had to disable it. If this has changed in a recent version, please let me know. I'll try it again in a few months anyway, but I don't have a lot of hope.
That isn't likely since IBM also had and higher failure rate than Apple for laptops, for many years running now.
Personally, what I'd like to see is an e-mail client that comes by default with working encryption... that is to say, it tells other e-mail clients what encryption choices it offers and learns from messages it receives and always chooses the best encryption option when sending messages to others. Further, I'd like that choice to handle when I send a message to a CC list of 30 people, such that it will send messages to all users, some encrypted and some not, but still letting all users get the full CC list for responses. Ideally I'd like to see this built upon an open standard that has buy in not only from the Thunderbird team, but also other major vendors (IBM, Sun, Apple, etc.) as well as other types of software (IM, VoIP, video conferencing, etc.)
Seriously, in this day and age doesn't ist seem idiotic that easy to use encryption is not a built in feature for most e-mail clients? I know why Google hasn't done this (they have a conflict of interest) but what have e-mail software vendors been doing for the last 5 years? How is it possible that someone like Apple hasn't jumped on this and made a snarky advert where the "Mac guy" says, "Oh really, I put my mail in envelopes so random strangers and people at the post office can't read the letters I send to my bank and girlfriend."
Do you own a TV? I don't own an iPhone, but I have seen advertisements for months now from every major carrier which feature their iPhone imitator. When every major manufacturer is selling a look-like, then yeah, all new smart phones are going to be compared to it by the media and by normal people.
As I pointed out in another comment, Apple's laptops actually have a lower failure rate than Lenovo's; according to consumer reports.So the impartial testing of a third party strongly indicates that your implicit assertion that Thinkpads are more "solid and rugged" is actually untrue.
Ummm.... but these days you can run Windows on a Mac and you can run Linux on either system as well. I could see a Windows versus OS X flame war or even a Apple hardware versus Lenovo hardware flame war. But how can you have a flame war between Macs and Windows users. What side are people running Windows on a Mac supposed to take?
I think you're way off base in your thinking. It is fine to attack the methodology of Consumer Report's studies... but if you're going to do so you should look up what that methodology is. Primarily they use two methods:
Neither of these methods is affected by percentage in use by businesses and availability of IT departments. In fact, I don't even know how IT departments would skew the results. Sure maybe business purchases are more likely to get warranties, but they're also more likely to be able to fix software related problems themselves and which is a larger factor is anyone's guess.
So let me be perfectly frank. Consumer Reports methodology is imperfect and will not be 100% accurate... but they are also the best data set I have seen to date and as such are the best way to make a logical decision instead of one influenced by emotional attachment or revulsion with regard to purchases. Anecdotes are like assholes, everyone has one, but they don't pass the smell test. Personally, having owned both IBM and Apple products, I've had more failures with Apple systems and I've had tons of problems with Dell systems. That does not, however, bias my judgement because when I want an independent, researched opinion I don't look to the tiny sample size that is my experience. I don't even pay too much attention to the data our IT department collected. If you have a better independent and unbiased study you want to put forward, I'd love to see it. Otherwise, you and pretty much every other comment in this thread is just not useful for determining the truth, just for defending one's own insecurity about their past purchases or venting their anger about past incidents.
Sure maybe Apple users tend to live on the west coast more where carbon dioxide emissions in the air tend to make sunspots less damaging to electronics or maybe IBM users tend to be smokers which builds up inside the fans causing those machines to fail more often, whereas in a controlled environment test they would do better. Maybe magic fairy creatures are involved somehow. Maybe it is Newt Gingrich's fault somehow. We can speculate endlessly, but it isn't really productive compared to seeing the result of the best estimation published by an unbiased company who relies upon their reputation for determining these things as their primary asset.
Actually, according to Consumer Reports, Thinkpad machines have a higher failure rate than Macbooks. In fact, for the second half of 2006, Dell's laptops had a lower failure rate than Thinkpads (crazy how things change huh, Dell's desktops are still below average though). So if you're looking for "rugged" as a criteria the Thinkpad is not the winner. That said, Thinkpads are nice systems. As far as comparing compact super-thin systems... well I don't really care. In fact, I think the emphasis on thin is aiming at a demographic, but I really wish Apple and Lenovo would go after the opposite category too... thicker, cheaper, more fully featured laptops. I have no interest in an ultra-portable, but I'd love a dependable laptop with an extra large battery capacity and a desktop graphics card, even if it weighed twice as much and was twice the thickness.
Most people running Linux on the desktop bought a computer that came with Windows, then installed Linux, as a custom modification. It is akin to those people who bought a car, and then upgraded the engine in it with aftermarket parts... except their are probably fewer Linux on the desktop users than there are people with aftermarket engine components in their cars.
If BeOS was that much better than the alternatives, wouldn't some of those people have bought BeOS?No, because people don't buy OS's. People buy computers and computers come with an OS. MS used their monopoly to stop computer makers from selling computers with BeOS pre-installed. Every system in the store had Windows on it or was a Mac, so that is all people had the option of buying. Perhaps I'm not being fair. Yes, some people bought BeOS, most of whom were people who bought the relatively high end BeBox workstations that shipped with it installed. Sadly, those people were very few in number because Be was at that point trying to start an entire vertical chain of supply to bypass MS's monopoly (just as Apple does) so they did not have to try to compete against an abusive monopoly in the "desktop OS" market, but could instead compete against Gateway and Sony in the non-monopolized "computer system" market. Sadly, they were pretty much already killed by MS's illegal (as the courts ruled) behavior so that never really got off the ground.
I sometimes wonder if anyone on Slashdot was awake in Econ 101. The main market MS has monopolized does not sell to end users. It sells to OEMs, like Dell, Sony, HP, etc. Those companies have no viable alternative and as a result pay higher prices than if they could get bids from multiple OS makers and they pass those higher prices on to customers. It also results in MS having little to no pressure to innovate or make a better or cheaper product which is why OS development has ground to a near standstill for decades. If not for Apple(who bypasses their monopoly) and Linux (which relies upon non-traditional distributed ownership scheme to avoid being killed) MS would probably have innovated even less (or copied fewer things from innovators). Right now MS makes more money by introducing anti-features like DRM and bundled products to kill new markets than it does by making their OS better, and we're all suffering for it.
I call bullshit on this one. I actually did look at both specs. OOXML is indeed a quick and dirty XML-like version of Office formats and doesn't even pretend to try to make functionality generic enough to make it easy for any application to implement. Even for functionality that is designed to interoperate with other types of applications OOXML is written just for the most popular add-on. ODF, on the other hand, makes a reasonable attempt at implementing functionality in a generic way so that it can be easily implemented by not only existing software packages but also new software developers who have no access to the source to existing applications. It certainly isn't perfect, but it is a night and day comparison to OOXML. ODF is already fairly well implemented by software from numerous commercial entities as well as open source projects. OOXML would be very, very hard for any third party to implement as written and it is unclear if anyone will ever be able to write to the spec instead of (as is the current case with MSOffice formats) trying to reverse engineer enough for partial compatibility.
OOXML is MS's attempt to create something close enough to an open standard to fool some bureaucrats or give them plausible deniability when they're bribed, but at the same time make sure that users don't gain the benefits of a truly open standard, which is to say interoperability with numerous programs so that users can easily switch from one to the other and gain all the benefits of real competition. This is business as usual for MS. If you look at their "shared source" initiative it was very much the same strategy. Customers wanted the advantages of open source software (many eyes to find bugs, competitive bids for new development, guaranteed migration path and future proofing) so MS came up with something sort of like open source that they could claim was "just as good" to people who didn't understand what the benefits really were and just knew that open source was beneficial in some way.
HTML is also a document standard.Yeah HTML is a document standard, but the stuff that you have to hand to IE in order to have it work properly is not HTML because it has to break the standard to work. It also fails to implement pretty much any of the last 6 years of development on HTML and other Web standards. I don't think you picked a very promising example if you're arguing in favor of MS's willingness to use standards. The whole of Web technologies has been artificially retarded by nearly a decade as a way to keep the Web from being a viable alternative platform to Windows. Progress has been crippled and billions of dollars wasted every year in order to insure MS's platform lock-in and avoid fair competition in the marketplace. The whole point of requiring standards compliance in the first place is to insure competition and the other benefits of avoiding a single vendor lock-in for office applications. MS understandably would rather have guaranteed profits than have to actually make a better product, but there is no reason why anyone other than them and people they have paid to go along with it. That is why it is important to have a truly open standard that can be and is fully implement by multiple vendors all of who are truly interoperable. OOXML is clearly an attempt to avoid that.
Is it really possible that you don't see how ridiculous it is for giant government customers to ask vendors to create products that comply with a specification and to have one monopolist tell the customer that "No we won't make a product that meets those specifications. Unlike everyone else we're going to invent another format that is incompatible and we're going to try to force you to use it using our monopoly influence in several markets." Not only should governments not be accepting OOXML as a standard, they should be charging MS with criminal antitrust violation for trying to foist it upon them.
You're confusing "open" with "free" (as in freedom). Actually OS X is open enough that you can run it on a beige box. It is, however, not free, so the license prohibits you from doing this legally. If you want to complain about Apple not being open enough, you should have picked something else, like not being able to easily customize the native GUI.
But that's not such an issue at least songs i downloaded with Itunes can be played on my noname mp3 play- OH NOES IT FAILS !Again, this used to be a valid, complaint, excepting the fact that this was a requirement from the RIAA cartel and Apple was actually the company that pressured them into changing that policy... so your complaint falls a little flat. Apple sells non-DRM'd music these days and while it is not in the MP3 format, it is in the MP4 format, which is actually slightly more open in terms of licensing, since the royalty requirements for MP4 are slightly more free (both are equally open as they are both fully documented codecs). If you bought a music player that doesn't support MP4, well that is just as if you bought a really outdated one that doesn't support anything but .WAV files. It isn't Apple's fault as they don't license either codec, the MPEG group does. Most players do support it these days, including even Microsoft's Zune player.
Well at least Itunes runs on Linux, to- SHIT IT DOESN'T !This one sort of applies, in that it is neither open nor free and as a result you can't port it to Linux yourself without getting a license to the code from Apple. This isn't really much of an issue, however, since it is simply a matter of a software company not maintaining a port for platform X (being Linux in this case). I guess you could argue that all software should be free and open, but I doubt if you'll get a lot of investment in commercial end user applications that way. Just use one of the many programs that do support it, or WINE, which runs it just fine.
Yep, no kidding. A grammar Nazi is a person who strictly and dogmatically points out grammatical nuances that are fairly immaterial to the readability or understandability of the text presented. This is not such a case. In this case, the error was misleading and made it very difficult for both myself and others to even understand what the writer was trying to express.
Sure, the third time I read it trying to figure out what internet explorer had to do with it.
Not punctuating that is hardly the most atrocious of grammatical errors I've seen here.There are entire books I've read that eschew punctuation and were still understandable. The problem isn't lack of punctuation. The problem is lack of punctuation and improper capitalization used in a context where it makes the phrase you're trying to express not the first thing people associate with your text, nor even the second thing. I generally don't care if people use incorrect grammar. This is a casual forum where I don't proof my submissions and don't expect others to. The problem is when grammatical errors obscure the meaning to a significant extent, such that it is actually difficult to tell what it is you're trying to express.
I don't think that is particularly funny. They thought Be was overpriced for what they were getting. Because they paid more for what they eventually purchased does not mean they did not perceive NeXT as providing more value for the price. I might pass on buying an old used ford pickup for $500 and end up buying a new pickup for $15,000. That isn't funny, just an assessment of value and cost where I don't assume all pickup (or software companies) have the same value.
I make a point of nat being a grammar nazi, but there does come a time where the meaning you are trying to express is obscured by grammatical errors. IE in terms of Microsoft usually refers to Internet Explorer. IE in terms of ISO means Ireland's TLD. In future you might want to try using "i.e." which the most accepted abbreviation for the latin "id est," meaning "that is; in other words" and is the least confusing way to express your meaning.