Why should Microsoft have to exclude basic security in their operating system, that is a standard part of Linux and OSX?
Because they are a monopolist. Neither Apple nor Linux disto creators are allowed to bundle products from any market with a product from a market they have monopolized. That is the law MS is breaking. If that law did not exist, IBM (one of the biggest Linux contributors) would have bundled OS2 with their machines and locked out Windows in the first place, and MS would have died before they did anything. IBM was restricted by the antitrust laws that said they can't tie their OS to the monopolized PCs market, thus opening the way for PC clones and Windows.
You, however, are arguing in favor of killing the PC security industry and giving users fewer choices for the sake of making MS wealthier... not a good idea. If MS wants to make a security product, let them. They can sell it just like everyone else and Dell and Gateway and Lenovo can all choose the one they like best to pre-install. Or, MS can split the company into two OS companies that compete with one another and bundle anything they feel like, in competition with one another.
Wow! OSX's market share must have jumped lately. I did not realize they had taken over more than 70% of the desktop OS market, crushing Windows. It is strange the press has not bothered to report on this. Strange indeed.
This is a false dichotomy. They could also just fix the the underlying security problems in the first place.
As for the Adobe part... If Adobe makes PDF an open standard, and MS implements the open standard then Adobe doesn't have a leg to stand on. Or will we see a new version of GPL licensing that says "anybody can use this, except Microsoft".
Who planted this idea in people's heads? This has nothing to do with file formats. MS can make PDF creation tools. MS can make sports cars. MS cannot bundle either PDF creation tools or sports cars with their monopolized OS. It is illegal to bundle a product from an existing market with a product from a market you have monopolized.
In Econ 101 the explanation was something like this. We have a capitalist system because it creates competition and spurs innovation. Abusing monopolies through tying breaks capitalism by removing these benefits. Bundling is a form of tying. For example, The electric company is a monopoly (like MS). Only one company is available in your area to sell you electricity. If that company decided to bundle candy bars with their service, they will take over the candy bar market. It works like this, your electric bill is raised $20 a month and you get 10 candy bars a month in the mail form the electric company. What are you going to do, cancel your electrical service? Nope, you're screwed. So you're out $20 and you have candy bars you don't want. What happens to candy bar sellers? Most people already have more candy than they want. Very few people buy other candy. They go out of business. Now, what incentive does the electric company have to improve their candy bars or lower the price? None. So they let quality slide. What can you do, you need electricity. From a pure business perspective, buying the candy bar bundle is the right solution, but it still results in inferior, overpriced candy taking over the market. Capitalism has failed.
There was a time when companies made great money providing cup holders you could put into your car. In time, cars started having cup holders built into them. The lesson here is. INNOVATE and make money, continue to INNOVATE to keep making it.
The car market is not monopolized. If it was, you would never have gotten those cup holders, because there would have been no incentive to innovate. Why should they spend the money if you're just going to buy the car anyway?
Because of the detrimental effects of anti-competative bundling, it is illegal almost everywhere. MS has been convicted of it in courts around the world. They have lost private lawsuits by the hundreds and paid out money. The problem is, it is making them more money than they are paying out, so they have built their business plan on breaking the law. Remember the huge fines the EU was levying against MS, they still were not as much as MS was making by breaking the law. The normal course of action is for the courts to break MS up. If MS was two companies, both making an OS, they'd have to compete, against one another. They'd have to innovate and they could bundle whatever they wanted. The US courts did in fact rule that MS was guilty and should be split up. Then MS went from donating basically no money to political parties to being one of the largest contributors to the Republican and Democratic parties. The judges were dismissed and their bosses fired before the ruling was finalized and the instead for punishment the US courts ruled nothing would be done to MS. We'd observe them to make sure they did not break the law again in a different way and if they did, we'd watch them a little longer without doing anything.
Because our politicians are so corrupt, you'll note American companies have to go to the European courts just to get the bloody laws enforced. And it is all made possible by a populace that is so complacent and uneducated that they don't even understand what is happening and a media that know it is just too complex for the morons that watch TV so they report on kittens trapped in drain pipes and celebrities that are knocked up. Maybe I should get out before Jeb Bush is elected.
In this case, Adobe is saying "Hey, that's our format, and you're not allowed to do that". As much as everyone has treated PDF as a 'standard' document interchange format, it still belongs to Adobe.
You are 100% wrong. This has nothing to do with the PDF format and everything to do with anti-competative bundling. MS is free to do anything they want with PDF, that is not illegal for them to do with any other open format. Here's an analogy. It is legal to carry a gun. Someone pulls a gun and shoots someone else. They get arrested. And then you say, "but you said it was legal to carry guns, it's not fair to arrest them."
MS, Apple, Sony, Adobe, and DTE electric can all make PDF generation tools. All of them can bundle those tools with anything they want to that is not a product they have monopolized. This is because it is illegal to bundle any product for which there is an existing market, with a product you have monopolized. DTE can bundle PDF generation tools with an OS and sell it. They can't bundle them (or anything else) with your electrical service, because they have monopoly on distributing power to your house. MS can bundle PDF generation tools with the mice they sell or with Halo 3. They can't bundle them with Windows because they have a monopoly on desktop OS's. They also can't legally bundle MS Office, even though they have all the rights to the formats involved. It is the bundling which is illegal, not the use of PDF. In fact half of the case is MS bundling XPS generation tools, a proprietary competitor to PDF, which they invented.
If Microsoft generates PDF's then they will be readable on lots of OS'es with any PDF reader software.
First, we have no real guarantee they won't intentionally break PDF the same way they intentionally break HTML. Second, I believe the previous poster was referring to XPS, MS's proprietary, patented, closed competitor to PDF, which they are planning on bundling with Vista.
Either way, you seems very upset abotu things that are not real.
Nope, you're just not as informed as the previous poster.
They shouldn't have anything to worry about.... Unless they're afriad that a potentially poorly done Microsoft product is going to outdo them at what they do best - which appears to be their thinking, I suppose?
Sigh, you miss the point. Adobe can't do anything about MS fairly competing with them. What MS is doing, however, is unfairly competing. Suppose you have to buy Windows (like most people). It is after all, the only OS that will run most programs. Windows ships with a PDF creation tool. You paid for the developers salaries to create that tool with part of your Windows license fee. You don't have any choice about paying for it. Now, are you going to go and download different tools and pay for them too? Maybe, if they are significantly better. What if the Adobe tools are better, but only a little bit. Are you going to pay for both MS's tools and Adobe's tools, for only a slightly better product? Probably not. So you don't. Capitalism has failed. You just bought an inferior product because MS bundled it. The market did not successfully reward Adobe for making better software.
Fast forward five years. Adobe doesn't make PDF creation software anymore, since they were illegally driven out of the market. Now MS's PDF creation tools are the only one available. It would rule if the PDF creation tools would support 3-D graphics that work with the new 3-D displays everyone is buying. Why should MS spend developer time and money adding that feature? What is their incentive? There aren't any competitors. So go suck an egg. MS is busy creating a new audio editing suite they are going to bundle with Windows. You can just deal with an inferior product from a company with no motivation at all to make their PDF tools better. Capitalism has fallen on its ass and is crying.
I can't believe how many people here on Slashdot don't even understand the basics of capitalism and monopolies. Is Econ 101 no longer a requirement for a bachelors degree?
"Adobe is calling for Microsoft to be barred from building into the OS free software that competes with Acrobat." When a document format is open... wouldn't what Adobe is asking for be anti-competitive instead of what Microsoft is doing?
No. Competition is when two companies each make a product and the buyer chooses whichever is best for him. The free market is broken when a buyer is forced to buy one product because they need a completely different product, thus they don't choose the product that is best for them. If MS bundles PDF generation tools with Windows, the user will not be choosing the best PDF generation tools since they will have already paid MS the development costs and profit for their tools when they buy Windows. As a result, that solution will predominate and MS will have basically no incentive to make it better or lower development costs. Why should they, if people pay them in any case? Even if people go out of their way to acquire Adobe's tools, MS has already been paid for theirs. Thus, the buyer is paying for the cost of two different tools, including one they don't use.
When a buyer pays for something without having a choice, there is no competition and it is called "anti-competitive." It is also illegal. Let MS offer their tools separate from their OS, and if they want people to adopt them, they just have to make them better than Adobe's. In that case we consumers win, which is the whole reason capitalism works.
Adobe said PDF is an open standard and anybody can make a reader/writer for it if they want. Now that Microsoft has, they're trying to renege on that and say it's proprietary? Doesn't work that way, Adobe.
PDF is an open standard. Anyone can make a reader and writer for it. The recipe for cheese is open too and anyone can make and sell cheese. So you don't mind if the electric company (a monopoly) raises your rates by $20 a month and gives you some slightly sub-par cheese do you? And you don't think cheese sellers have any legal right to complain that the electric company is abusing their monopoly to put them out of business do you?
PDF is an open standard. MS is welcome to make PDF creation tools and XPS (PDF competitor) creation tools. They're even welcome to bundle those tools with the mice they sell, or with Halo 3. What they are not free to do is bundle them with anything they have a monopoly on, including Windows, just as they are not legally allowed to bundle anything else with Windows for which their is an existing market. It has nothing to do with how open the format is.
A while back, in the early 90's there was a statistic being bandied about, how there were gonna be far more lawyers in this country than engineers. And I recall someone (my Dad, prolly) saying "Yeah, we wont be able to invent anything new but we sure will be able to sue each other over it." That's whats happening here.
Bullshit. Antitrust law has been being enforced since the 1800s. Microsoft would not even exist if it was not enforced against IBM in the 70s.
See, if Adobe and Symantec wanted to put an end to Microsoft's monopoly they could have a long time ago. They could have joined the LSB project, they could have contributed to OpenGL and OpenAL, they could have released commercially supported apps for Linux or BSD. They could have helped to bring free, open OS'es into the mainstream. Then they could not have been locked out at any level.
I see, so your solution to monopolies is, rather than enforcing the law, other big companies should band together and out compete them, creating an even bigger monopoly in the progress, until there is only one company left standing. Yeah that will be great.
Instead they have more lawyers than engineers.
Take your vitriolic rants elsewhere, unless you can actually produce numbers to back up this absurd claim.
nstead of producing a varied line of products and diversifying their business they depended on one line of income from th MS user base. Instead of helping the industry avoid this pitfall they sat back and did very little.
It is not the job of Adobe or Symantec to break up monopolies in any field. If the electric company raised your bill $200 and started giving away a free copy of a graphic editor would you claim Adobe should have entered the electric distribution business too? The courts are supposed to stop monopoly abuse, not private companies and if the CEO did such a thing, he'd go to jail for fraud. He's supposed to be making money, not fixing the broken economy.
Here's the thing. It's not too late. Fire some lawyers, hire more engineers, and mostly STOP MAKING MS SOFTWARE.
Okay, so Adobe stops making MS software tomorrow and releases their own Linux distro. How many PC OEMs are going to bet on Adobe and pre-install it, knowing MS will raise their Windows licensing fees and put them out of the Windows PC market? I'm guessing that would be zero. That means Adobe's stock goes in the crapper and the CEO is fired. Brilliant. In the mean time, competitors or MS moves in and sells in that space.
get off the MS playing field and take your ball with you.
It's a lovely thought, but it won't work, which is why no one does it. To compete with MS you need a complete vertical chain, including the hardware OEMs and all the software they sell. Take a look at Apple for your model, and they have what, 5% of the market, despite having a superior product in most parts of that chain? And how much room is there for another Apple?
PDF is a public format(anyone may create applications that read and write PDF files ), OO.org can export to pdf, why M$ should not be allowed to use it?
Adobe makes PDF generation tools. Microsoft makes PDF generation tools. the OpenOffice team makes PDF generation tools. All of this is legal. What is illegal for any company to bundle PDF generation tools with a product they have monopolized the market for. For example, Microsoft cannot bundle PDF generation tools or tools that generate a competing format (XPS) with Windows. They can make them. They can sell them. They can give them away. They can bundle them with any product they have not monopolized, like mice, or servers. Similarly, Apple can bundle PDF generation tools with anything they don't have a monopoly on, like OS X, laptops, video editing software, and pretty much anything else with the possible exception of portable digital music players like iPods (which they are close to having a monopoly on).
Generating PDF creation tools or a competing format is legal. Bundling a monopolized product and a non monopolized product is illegal.
It's only going to get worse for companies like Symantec and Adobe. Building software on the Windows platform brings the advantages of a large market. The disadvantage is that Microsoft is not in the business of creating a platform for developers, they're in the business of selling software licenses.
Microsoft is in the business of selling software, but they are also in the business of breaking the law to do it. Adobe has every right to take them to court when they do blatantly violate the law, like they are doing.
And Adobe's complaints really surprise me. OS X has been able to export anything to PDF - a relatively open format - for years, and I can do the same thing on KDE.
Okay, time to explain, once again, what a monopoly is and what the laws says about them and why. Man public education sucks.
Bundling a product from a different market, with a product in a market you've monopolized is illegal, because it breaks capitalism. Apple can bundle PDF or a PDF competitor with OS X, because they don't have a monopoly on desktop OS's. KDE can bundle PDF or a PDF competitor with their desktop, because they too do not have a monopoly. Walmart can bundle a PDF competitor with every alarm clock they sell, because they do not have a monopoly on alarm clocks. DTE Energy cannot bundle a PDF competitor with your electrical service, because they do have a local monopoly on supplying your house with electricity. Microsoft cannot bundle a PDF competitor with Windows because they have a monopoly on desktop OS's. Microsoft can bundle a PDF competitor with every mouse they sell, because they do not have a monopoly on mice.
Imagine, if you buy your electricity from DTE energy. And suppose instead of a PDF competitor, they include 2 gallons of milk every month. You have to buy electricity and it costs $10K or more for a generator that can come close to competing with their prices. So you pay $150 a month instead of $130 a month. What choice do you have? You're paying $20 a month for two gallons of milk, and it is often not very fresh. All the other milk sellers are going out of business, because everyone already has milk. DTE has no incentive to lower the price of their milk. They have incentive to make it better quality or fresher. They have no incentive to innovate a better distribution chain. You have to buy it because you need electricity. The milk industry goes to hell and soon you can't buy milk anywhere else. DTE decides to include two free loaves of bread every month and raise your bill another $10. Do you see where this is going? Do you see why it is illegal?
Windows is a shaky foundation to build a business on - albeit a potentially profitable one until Microsoft decides to assimilate your functionality.
If the division of Microsoft treats their own internal PDF competitor development team or antivirus development team any differently than they treat Adobe or Symantec, they are breaking the law. They have been convicted of it numerous times and always lose. They keep doing it anyway, because the law is too slow and punishments too small (after they liberally spread bribes to politicians) to counter the money they make doing it.
If ever there was a sad statement about the corruption of the US government, it is that American companies have to take other American companies to court, for obvious criminal behavior in Europe, since they can't afford justice in the US.
The things Apple continually receives praise for and advertises about, included applications and higher security, Microsoft gets sued over. Yeah, that's fair.
Oh, you mean Apple bundles a product from a different market with their monopoly? Okay, I'm with you. They are scum and should be dragged into court. Umm, what monopoly do they have again?
Actually, i'm with microsoft on this one. Symantecs OS invading suite of crappy tools just sucks. Integrating PDF generation into applications and office suites ist also a MUST.
I agree Microsoft should immediately spin off half of their OS development division into a separate company with full rights to the Windows code, so that there is competition in the market and it is legal for them to bundle crap with it.
Oh wait, you meant you think they should break the law and illegally bundle software without there being a competitive marketplace? In that case they will just kill that part of the industry ands cause it to stagnate like the Web has. No thanks, I'd rather have progress.
LaTeX and troff have been used nearly from day one for professional writing including graphics and they handle that job the way they were intended to, and the way that its users need them to.
Umm, I've used LaTeX and no, the early tools did not support colored text or graphics and anyone who has ever looked at the markup can see the hacks used to make it work. It stresses consistency, but at the expense of sensible inclusion of more advanced features. They are hacks.
When you're doing layout, you're not a writer, you're a layout editor. LaTeX is not a good layout editor for fancy layouts, but then its users don't need it to be. I'm sorry if you need to supplement your writing with layout editing, but other people don't have that problem.
If you think layout and editing are completely separate tasks, fine, although hundreds of famous authors who were very meticulous and unwavering about the layouts of their books might disagree. The important part of writing is expressing information, and layout, text formatting, and graphics are integral parts of that. Otherwise, just use plain text and vi and you're all set. If, however, you're trying to make a professional book, you may need to include graphics and layout that is very, very painful in LaTeX and very easy in Framemaker or Quark. LaTeX is a layout program, more than a text editor. It is just not a good one for some jobs.
On OS X I have maybe 150 options, but only use about 10 regularly:
spell checking
grammar checking
local dictionary/thesaurus replace w/ thesaurus selection
multiple, consolidated online dictionaries and acronym lookups
create bibliography reference
screenshot options
quick language conversions
statistical summary word/para/char/page count etc.
line ending conversions
scripts I wrote to run regexps and the like against the text
I use others occasionally, but they are not as common. The important thing is simply being able to find and download a service when I have some particular need. Since I make my living mostly by writing these days, it strongly reflects my average work day. When I did development, my commonly used services would have been very different.
It is not the job of professional writers to lay out magazine pages.
No it isn't. It was an example of the types of tasks someone writing and laying out any kind of document may face, where WYSIWYG editors are vastly superior.
The people who lay out magazine pages are layout editors. They get the text from the writer, the graphics from the graphic designers and photographers, and then put it all together using layout software.
For small publications, sometimes one person is many of these things. For publications other than magazines, many times an author needs to write, edit, and perform layout work. For example, I use Adobe InDesign to layout an instructional "brochure" type document that walks a user through the process of installing and configuring a really expensive specialty server. It is a functional document, but includes numerous diagrams and images showing connectors, screenshots, etc. I write the instructions and generate the graphics and layout the document. Trying to do this in LaTeX would be extremely painful and slow by comparison and the results at best, would be the same.
As for content creation, a layout tool is rarely the best tool (I use an XML editor), but sometimes editing is best performed once the layout work is already accomplished for the most part. In these cases, you do a lot of alteration of the text, within the layout application. To claim that this mode is useless, and WYSIWYG interfaces are useless for writing and layout and we should all be using LaTeX for all tasks is simply foolish.
And MSFT takes him for a ride and locks his content to one PC and does what most monopolies do when they think their control will last forever. Isn't that normal? Isn't that what will eventually provide a market correction?
Yes, it is normal, but no it will not provide market correction. The whole point of a monopoly is it allows the monopolist to make a situation where individuals making the best choice for themselves, are still not driving better products or innovation. It breaks capitalism so that capitalism no longer moves towards the most efficient product by allowing the introduction of artificial barriers to better products.
Eventually Joe is going to find that 500$ worth of music he has bought over the last two years is locked into a dying PC or a stolen Zune and he has to pay all over again to get his music back.
Great, by the time this happens to enough people that get mad, MS will have leveraged their desktop OS monopoly to make sure, there are no other options. So the user is screwed. They gave MS a pile of money once and now have to do so again.
When Joe Sixpacks gets mad, he really gets mad. He sues left right and center. Start class action lawsuits.
Except at that point he is fighting the status quo. People get mad about the crappy quality of Windows every day. They get mad about the quality of IE. They are buggy and insecure (for the average user). And people do file class actions and sometimes win. The cost of paying those is passed on to everyone the next time they buy a computer that comes with Windows and IE pre-installed.
Technically, all this is illegal, but the judge who dared to convict them was immediately being discredited for saying MS was acting criminally, right after he convicted them of a crime. After MS's campaign donations they've flaunted their ability to break the law by doing it over and over and over again. Sure, they lose piles of lawsuits, but they have a money factory and everyone has to pay so they just pass the costs on to the people.
Without fixing the corruption in our political system and using the law to stop them, the market cannot and will not correct these abuses.
All in all, I think the "99% of people" figure may have been true at some point, but probably isn't true anymore.
I think you'll find if you do a random survey, you might find a few computer users who are confident they can install a TV tuner card or device and a few more that can attach their computer to their TV to display it. You'll find a small number that would rather do this than just plug in a Tivo and an even smaller number that overlap with the group that know how and are motivated to do so that also are interested in buying television shows ala cart. There is a big difference between who can set up such a thing and who is motivated to do so and doesn't already have a different solution to this problem that does not include Apple.
You are using OS X because of its Services menu? The cluttered thing that most people don't even know what it's for and are loathe to click on? Well, to each their own.
For power users, it is a godsend. I have a list of three main features missing from Linux, but in OS X. Number one is application availability. In OS X, I can run the native programs that work together better than on any platform I've used. I can run Windows applications via an emulator or crossover. I can run Linux/UNIX application in X11.
Services allow me to customize the functionality of most programs, and share configuration between them. I can use one dictionary and all my apps learn the words. I can reuse my scripts and apply functions to text anywhere with a simple key press.
Firewire mode updates. In OS X I can move to my new laptop with a few key presses and a short walk to get some coffee. This includes all my programs, user accounts, files, preferences, Web cookies, authentication keys, etc, including my Windows and Linux software VMs. It is simple and foolproof and I don't have to waste a whole day re-installing and then slowly reconfiguring the machine to try to get all my applications back to the same state I had them in.
If Linux gets these three, things, or even the first two fixed, I'll probably ditch OS X as my main workstation OS. Last I heard, there was some discussion of getting the last one to work, on Apple hardware in one Linux distro, but they decided it was too hard.
So KParts-aware means able to use components in general, without knowledge of a specific component, such as a German-English translator.
Okay, as I said before I don't have a KDE box right now and won't for at least a few weeks. Assuming I download a KParts plug-in for translation of German-English, where do I install it and then how do I access it from within Kopete? I scanned the design docs you link to, but they only seem to talk about how a developer can integrate them and define the interface, not how a user can install and access them.
The quality is good, and the price is right. If iTunes would just carry Stargate and stop making us wait 2 weeks, I'd cancel my cable. Even at a $1.99 an episode, I would probably save money over what I pay Comcast today.
I'm not a typical consumer, but I think I do represent a common market segment in some ways. I don't need or want a telephone, aside from my cell phone. I use the internet and my cell phone to communicate. This is very common among younger people. VoIP is going to kill the normal phone business. My choice for Internet access is Satellite (very slow, pretty pricey), Cable bundled with television, or DSL bundled with a phone connection. DSL is about $20 more expensive and I don't want a phone. It is almost useless to me. I do enjoy the occasional television show. Thus, I get my internet from Comcast and have to pay for cable TV to go with it (technically I could just get internet, but that is more expensive than the bundle including it).
Given this, I already have TV coming in. Apple has not provided any way to capture these TV programs and integrate it into their Computer+TV solution. I can manage this on my own, but 99% of the populace won't because it is too hard. Assuming a big chunk of their potential market is like me, and already is paying for TV in order to get internet fast enough to use this service, why do they expect people to pay for it again?
As soon as high speed internet is available to most of the US, not bundled with cable TV, Apple will have a business plan that might work. Until then, however, I don't see it flying. Or, Apple can capitalize on the incoming stream of TV, and provide a cheap and very easy Tivo like solution that makes their shows available in addition to the ones you can buy from Apple. Heck, build a store where you can price out the programs you want and see if it is cheaper to upgrade your cable or buy them ala cart from Apple.
You can do that in Linux as well. Stardict is an example. You can select any text anywhere, even in a terminal, and stardict will pop-up the dictionary lookup for the selected word.
Creating a broker that will ask what to do with the selected text is just one step further.
So does the Stardict program have to be running all the time for it to work, or is it separated into a background process and a GUI? Does it modify the OS to accomplish this?
I think having an official API, dedicated directories for the system, groups, and users in which such services can be placed, APIs for programs to share these features, and an official GUI element (the Services menu in OS X) is a step ahead of the function you describe in Stardict, but if it works, that's great. Maybe all that is really needed on Linux is developer tools for the easy creation and installation of said services. I know my services menu has about 10 entries and 20 directories of subentries. I use maybe 10 total services normally. If I could get this same functionality it would remove one of the two biggest blockers to my moving to Linux on the desktop.
The applicaton obviously has to be KParts-aware. Kopete, the KDE IM client, uses the spellchecker, I believe.
I'm still unclear on this concept. So Kopete is "KParts-aware." Can I download a KPart that translates English to German and German to English. Can I install that KPart globally, and will Kopete then be able to perform these translations on my chat messages, without the Kopete developers doing any additional work?
I don't believe shared libraries are an adequate replacement for services because shared libraries need the program developer to include them, and no program developer can know which functions are useful to me. A plug-in system, like Mozilla has and OpenOffice is getting is great, but it is really implementing those features at the wrong level. What I think is needed is a OS-wide plug-in system, the user can add and which does not need the application developer to be aware of it (although they can be for better integration). That was the premise of my original post and, while I'm unclear on the functionality of KParts, it is sounding less and less, like they are OS plug-ins for users and more and more like they are a tool for developers.
Here's what I would truly love. Apple should define their services API as an open standard and the Linux community should embrace and improve that standard so that Linux distros can all drop the same services packages in their services directories and all new applications will be able to use those functions. I doubt this is practical, but at very least they should clone this feature.
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Why should Microsoft have to exclude basic security in their operating system, that is a standard part of Linux and OSX?
Because they are a monopolist. Neither Apple nor Linux disto creators are allowed to bundle products from any market with a product from a market they have monopolized. That is the law MS is breaking. If that law did not exist, IBM (one of the biggest Linux contributors) would have bundled OS2 with their machines and locked out Windows in the first place, and MS would have died before they did anything. IBM was restricted by the antitrust laws that said they can't tie their OS to the monopolized PCs market, thus opening the way for PC clones and Windows.
You, however, are arguing in favor of killing the PC security industry and giving users fewer choices for the sake of making MS wealthier... not a good idea. If MS wants to make a security product, let them. They can sell it just like everyone else and Dell and Gateway and Lenovo can all choose the one they like best to pre-install. Or, MS can split the company into two OS companies that compete with one another and bundle anything they feel like, in competition with one another.
Yes - OSX.
Wow! OSX's market share must have jumped lately. I did not realize they had taken over more than 70% of the desktop OS market, crushing Windows. It is strange the press has not bothered to report on this. Strange indeed.
Microsoft has two options.
This is a false dichotomy. They could also just fix the the underlying security problems in the first place.
As for the Adobe part... If Adobe makes PDF an open standard, and MS implements the open standard then Adobe doesn't have a leg to stand on. Or will we see a new version of GPL licensing that says "anybody can use this, except Microsoft".
Who planted this idea in people's heads? This has nothing to do with file formats. MS can make PDF creation tools. MS can make sports cars. MS cannot bundle either PDF creation tools or sports cars with their monopolized OS. It is illegal to bundle a product from an existing market with a product from a market you have monopolized.
In Econ 101 the explanation was something like this. We have a capitalist system because it creates competition and spurs innovation. Abusing monopolies through tying breaks capitalism by removing these benefits. Bundling is a form of tying. For example, The electric company is a monopoly (like MS). Only one company is available in your area to sell you electricity. If that company decided to bundle candy bars with their service, they will take over the candy bar market. It works like this, your electric bill is raised $20 a month and you get 10 candy bars a month in the mail form the electric company. What are you going to do, cancel your electrical service? Nope, you're screwed. So you're out $20 and you have candy bars you don't want. What happens to candy bar sellers? Most people already have more candy than they want. Very few people buy other candy. They go out of business. Now, what incentive does the electric company have to improve their candy bars or lower the price? None. So they let quality slide. What can you do, you need electricity. From a pure business perspective, buying the candy bar bundle is the right solution, but it still results in inferior, overpriced candy taking over the market. Capitalism has failed.
There was a time when companies made great money providing cup holders you could put into your car. In time, cars started having cup holders built into them. The lesson here is. INNOVATE and make money, continue to INNOVATE to keep making it.
The car market is not monopolized. If it was, you would never have gotten those cup holders, because there would have been no incentive to innovate. Why should they spend the money if you're just going to buy the car anyway?
Because of the detrimental effects of anti-competative bundling, it is illegal almost everywhere. MS has been convicted of it in courts around the world. They have lost private lawsuits by the hundreds and paid out money. The problem is, it is making them more money than they are paying out, so they have built their business plan on breaking the law. Remember the huge fines the EU was levying against MS, they still were not as much as MS was making by breaking the law. The normal course of action is for the courts to break MS up. If MS was two companies, both making an OS, they'd have to compete, against one another. They'd have to innovate and they could bundle whatever they wanted. The US courts did in fact rule that MS was guilty and should be split up. Then MS went from donating basically no money to political parties to being one of the largest contributors to the Republican and Democratic parties. The judges were dismissed and their bosses fired before the ruling was finalized and the instead for punishment the US courts ruled nothing would be done to MS. We'd observe them to make sure they did not break the law again in a different way and if they did, we'd watch them a little longer without doing anything.
Because our politicians are so corrupt, you'll note American companies have to go to the European courts just to get the bloody laws enforced. And it is all made possible by a populace that is so complacent and uneducated that they don't even understand what is happening and a media that know it is just too complex for the morons that watch TV so they report on kittens trapped in drain pipes and celebrities that are knocked up. Maybe I should get out before Jeb Bush is elected.
In this case, Adobe is saying "Hey, that's our format, and you're not allowed to do that". As much as everyone has treated PDF as a 'standard' document interchange format, it still belongs to Adobe.
You are 100% wrong. This has nothing to do with the PDF format and everything to do with anti-competative bundling. MS is free to do anything they want with PDF, that is not illegal for them to do with any other open format. Here's an analogy. It is legal to carry a gun. Someone pulls a gun and shoots someone else. They get arrested. And then you say, "but you said it was legal to carry guns, it's not fair to arrest them."
MS, Apple, Sony, Adobe, and DTE electric can all make PDF generation tools. All of them can bundle those tools with anything they want to that is not a product they have monopolized. This is because it is illegal to bundle any product for which there is an existing market, with a product you have monopolized. DTE can bundle PDF generation tools with an OS and sell it. They can't bundle them (or anything else) with your electrical service, because they have monopoly on distributing power to your house. MS can bundle PDF generation tools with the mice they sell or with Halo 3. They can't bundle them with Windows because they have a monopoly on desktop OS's. They also can't legally bundle MS Office, even though they have all the rights to the formats involved. It is the bundling which is illegal, not the use of PDF. In fact half of the case is MS bundling XPS generation tools, a proprietary competitor to PDF, which they invented.
If Microsoft generates PDF's then they will be readable on lots of OS'es with any PDF reader software.
First, we have no real guarantee they won't intentionally break PDF the same way they intentionally break HTML. Second, I believe the previous poster was referring to XPS, MS's proprietary, patented, closed competitor to PDF, which they are planning on bundling with Vista.
Either way, you seems very upset abotu things that are not real.
Nope, you're just not as informed as the previous poster.
They shouldn't have anything to worry about.... Unless they're afriad that a potentially poorly done Microsoft product is going to outdo them at what they do best - which appears to be their thinking, I suppose?
Sigh, you miss the point. Adobe can't do anything about MS fairly competing with them. What MS is doing, however, is unfairly competing. Suppose you have to buy Windows (like most people). It is after all, the only OS that will run most programs. Windows ships with a PDF creation tool. You paid for the developers salaries to create that tool with part of your Windows license fee. You don't have any choice about paying for it. Now, are you going to go and download different tools and pay for them too? Maybe, if they are significantly better. What if the Adobe tools are better, but only a little bit. Are you going to pay for both MS's tools and Adobe's tools, for only a slightly better product? Probably not. So you don't. Capitalism has failed. You just bought an inferior product because MS bundled it. The market did not successfully reward Adobe for making better software.
Fast forward five years. Adobe doesn't make PDF creation software anymore, since they were illegally driven out of the market. Now MS's PDF creation tools are the only one available. It would rule if the PDF creation tools would support 3-D graphics that work with the new 3-D displays everyone is buying. Why should MS spend developer time and money adding that feature? What is their incentive? There aren't any competitors. So go suck an egg. MS is busy creating a new audio editing suite they are going to bundle with Windows. You can just deal with an inferior product from a company with no motivation at all to make their PDF tools better. Capitalism has fallen on its ass and is crying.
I can't believe how many people here on Slashdot don't even understand the basics of capitalism and monopolies. Is Econ 101 no longer a requirement for a bachelors degree?
So will Adobe be going after Apple with regard to Acrobat and PDFs?
Why, is Apple bundling PDF generation tools with some product they have a monopoly on? If so, what product?
"Adobe is calling for Microsoft to be barred from building into the OS free software that competes with Acrobat." When a document format is open... wouldn't what Adobe is asking for be anti-competitive instead of what Microsoft is doing?
No. Competition is when two companies each make a product and the buyer chooses whichever is best for him. The free market is broken when a buyer is forced to buy one product because they need a completely different product, thus they don't choose the product that is best for them. If MS bundles PDF generation tools with Windows, the user will not be choosing the best PDF generation tools since they will have already paid MS the development costs and profit for their tools when they buy Windows. As a result, that solution will predominate and MS will have basically no incentive to make it better or lower development costs. Why should they, if people pay them in any case? Even if people go out of their way to acquire Adobe's tools, MS has already been paid for theirs. Thus, the buyer is paying for the cost of two different tools, including one they don't use.
When a buyer pays for something without having a choice, there is no competition and it is called "anti-competitive." It is also illegal. Let MS offer their tools separate from their OS, and if they want people to adopt them, they just have to make them better than Adobe's. In that case we consumers win, which is the whole reason capitalism works.
Adobe said PDF is an open standard and anybody can make a reader/writer for it if they want. Now that Microsoft has, they're trying to renege on that and say it's proprietary? Doesn't work that way, Adobe.
PDF is an open standard. Anyone can make a reader and writer for it. The recipe for cheese is open too and anyone can make and sell cheese. So you don't mind if the electric company (a monopoly) raises your rates by $20 a month and gives you some slightly sub-par cheese do you? And you don't think cheese sellers have any legal right to complain that the electric company is abusing their monopoly to put them out of business do you?
PDF is an open standard. MS is welcome to make PDF creation tools and XPS (PDF competitor) creation tools. They're even welcome to bundle those tools with the mice they sell, or with Halo 3. What they are not free to do is bundle them with anything they have a monopoly on, including Windows, just as they are not legally allowed to bundle anything else with Windows for which their is an existing market. It has nothing to do with how open the format is.
A while back, in the early 90's there was a statistic being bandied about, how there were gonna be far more lawyers in this country than engineers. And I recall someone (my Dad, prolly) saying "Yeah, we wont be able to invent anything new but we sure will be able to sue each other over it." That's whats happening here.
Bullshit. Antitrust law has been being enforced since the 1800s. Microsoft would not even exist if it was not enforced against IBM in the 70s.
See, if Adobe and Symantec wanted to put an end to Microsoft's monopoly they could have a long time ago. They could have joined the LSB project, they could have contributed to OpenGL and OpenAL, they could have released commercially supported apps for Linux or BSD. They could have helped to bring free, open OS'es into the mainstream. Then they could not have been locked out at any level.
I see, so your solution to monopolies is, rather than enforcing the law, other big companies should band together and out compete them, creating an even bigger monopoly in the progress, until there is only one company left standing. Yeah that will be great.
Instead they have more lawyers than engineers.
Take your vitriolic rants elsewhere, unless you can actually produce numbers to back up this absurd claim.
nstead of producing a varied line of products and diversifying their business they depended on one line of income from th MS user base. Instead of helping the industry avoid this pitfall they sat back and did very little.
It is not the job of Adobe or Symantec to break up monopolies in any field. If the electric company raised your bill $200 and started giving away a free copy of a graphic editor would you claim Adobe should have entered the electric distribution business too? The courts are supposed to stop monopoly abuse, not private companies and if the CEO did such a thing, he'd go to jail for fraud. He's supposed to be making money, not fixing the broken economy.
Here's the thing. It's not too late. Fire some lawyers, hire more engineers, and mostly STOP MAKING MS SOFTWARE.
Okay, so Adobe stops making MS software tomorrow and releases their own Linux distro. How many PC OEMs are going to bet on Adobe and pre-install it, knowing MS will raise their Windows licensing fees and put them out of the Windows PC market? I'm guessing that would be zero. That means Adobe's stock goes in the crapper and the CEO is fired. Brilliant. In the mean time, competitors or MS moves in and sells in that space.
get off the MS playing field and take your ball with you.
It's a lovely thought, but it won't work, which is why no one does it. To compete with MS you need a complete vertical chain, including the hardware OEMs and all the software they sell. Take a look at Apple for your model, and they have what, 5% of the market, despite having a superior product in most parts of that chain? And how much room is there for another Apple?
PDF is a public format(anyone may create applications that read and write PDF files ), OO.org can export to pdf, why M$ should not be allowed to use it?
Adobe makes PDF generation tools. Microsoft makes PDF generation tools. the OpenOffice team makes PDF generation tools. All of this is legal. What is illegal for any company to bundle PDF generation tools with a product they have monopolized the market for. For example, Microsoft cannot bundle PDF generation tools or tools that generate a competing format (XPS) with Windows. They can make them. They can sell them. They can give them away. They can bundle them with any product they have not monopolized, like mice, or servers. Similarly, Apple can bundle PDF generation tools with anything they don't have a monopoly on, like OS X, laptops, video editing software, and pretty much anything else with the possible exception of portable digital music players like iPods (which they are close to having a monopoly on).
Generating PDF creation tools or a competing format is legal. Bundling a monopolized product and a non monopolized product is illegal.
Break what law?
The Sherman Antitrust act in the US. I'm not sure what the antitrust law in the EU is called.
PDF is an open format.
Yes, it is. What is your point and what does that have to do with MS bundling a competing format?
LOL!!! Edumacate urself!!!
Umm, did you miss your meds today? Take a deep breath and sit down for a while. Maybe later you'll be able to handle reality.
It's only going to get worse for companies like Symantec and Adobe. Building software on the Windows platform brings the advantages of a large market. The disadvantage is that Microsoft is not in the business of creating a platform for developers, they're in the business of selling software licenses.
Microsoft is in the business of selling software, but they are also in the business of breaking the law to do it. Adobe has every right to take them to court when they do blatantly violate the law, like they are doing.
And Adobe's complaints really surprise me. OS X has been able to export anything to PDF - a relatively open format - for years, and I can do the same thing on KDE.
Okay, time to explain, once again, what a monopoly is and what the laws says about them and why. Man public education sucks.
Bundling a product from a different market, with a product in a market you've monopolized is illegal, because it breaks capitalism. Apple can bundle PDF or a PDF competitor with OS X, because they don't have a monopoly on desktop OS's. KDE can bundle PDF or a PDF competitor with their desktop, because they too do not have a monopoly. Walmart can bundle a PDF competitor with every alarm clock they sell, because they do not have a monopoly on alarm clocks. DTE Energy cannot bundle a PDF competitor with your electrical service, because they do have a local monopoly on supplying your house with electricity. Microsoft cannot bundle a PDF competitor with Windows because they have a monopoly on desktop OS's. Microsoft can bundle a PDF competitor with every mouse they sell, because they do not have a monopoly on mice.
Imagine, if you buy your electricity from DTE energy. And suppose instead of a PDF competitor, they include 2 gallons of milk every month. You have to buy electricity and it costs $10K or more for a generator that can come close to competing with their prices. So you pay $150 a month instead of $130 a month. What choice do you have? You're paying $20 a month for two gallons of milk, and it is often not very fresh. All the other milk sellers are going out of business, because everyone already has milk. DTE has no incentive to lower the price of their milk. They have incentive to make it better quality or fresher. They have no incentive to innovate a better distribution chain. You have to buy it because you need electricity. The milk industry goes to hell and soon you can't buy milk anywhere else. DTE decides to include two free loaves of bread every month and raise your bill another $10. Do you see where this is going? Do you see why it is illegal?
Windows is a shaky foundation to build a business on - albeit a potentially profitable one until Microsoft decides to assimilate your functionality.
If the division of Microsoft treats their own internal PDF competitor development team or antivirus development team any differently than they treat Adobe or Symantec, they are breaking the law. They have been convicted of it numerous times and always lose. They keep doing it anyway, because the law is too slow and punishments too small (after they liberally spread bribes to politicians) to counter the money they make doing it.
If ever there was a sad statement about the corruption of the US government, it is that American companies have to take other American companies to court, for obvious criminal behavior in Europe, since they can't afford justice in the US.
The things Apple continually receives praise for and advertises about, included applications and higher security, Microsoft gets sued over. Yeah, that's fair.
Oh, you mean Apple bundles a product from a different market with their monopoly? Okay, I'm with you. They are scum and should be dragged into court. Umm, what monopoly do they have again?
Actually, i'm with microsoft on this one. Symantecs OS invading suite of crappy tools just sucks. Integrating PDF generation into applications and office suites ist also a MUST.
I agree Microsoft should immediately spin off half of their OS development division into a separate company with full rights to the Windows code, so that there is competition in the market and it is legal for them to bundle crap with it.
Oh wait, you meant you think they should break the law and illegally bundle software without there being a competitive marketplace? In that case they will just kill that part of the industry ands cause it to stagnate like the Web has. No thanks, I'd rather have progress.
LaTeX and troff have been used nearly from day one for professional writing including graphics and they handle that job the way they were intended to, and the way that its users need them to.
Umm, I've used LaTeX and no, the early tools did not support colored text or graphics and anyone who has ever looked at the markup can see the hacks used to make it work. It stresses consistency, but at the expense of sensible inclusion of more advanced features. They are hacks.
When you're doing layout, you're not a writer, you're a layout editor. LaTeX is not a good layout editor for fancy layouts, but then its users don't need it to be. I'm sorry if you need to supplement your writing with layout editing, but other people don't have that problem.
If you think layout and editing are completely separate tasks, fine, although hundreds of famous authors who were very meticulous and unwavering about the layouts of their books might disagree. The important part of writing is expressing information, and layout, text formatting, and graphics are integral parts of that. Otherwise, just use plain text and vi and you're all set. If, however, you're trying to make a professional book, you may need to include graphics and layout that is very, very painful in LaTeX and very easy in Framemaker or Quark. LaTeX is a layout program, more than a text editor. It is just not a good one for some jobs.
What other entries do you get?
On OS X I have maybe 150 options, but only use about 10 regularly:
I use others occasionally, but they are not as common. The important thing is simply being able to find and download a service when I have some particular need. Since I make my living mostly by writing these days, it strongly reflects my average work day. When I did development, my commonly used services would have been very different.
It is not the job of professional writers to lay out magazine pages.
No it isn't. It was an example of the types of tasks someone writing and laying out any kind of document may face, where WYSIWYG editors are vastly superior.
The people who lay out magazine pages are layout editors. They get the text from the writer, the graphics from the graphic designers and photographers, and then put it all together using layout software.
For small publications, sometimes one person is many of these things. For publications other than magazines, many times an author needs to write, edit, and perform layout work. For example, I use Adobe InDesign to layout an instructional "brochure" type document that walks a user through the process of installing and configuring a really expensive specialty server. It is a functional document, but includes numerous diagrams and images showing connectors, screenshots, etc. I write the instructions and generate the graphics and layout the document. Trying to do this in LaTeX would be extremely painful and slow by comparison and the results at best, would be the same.
As for content creation, a layout tool is rarely the best tool (I use an XML editor), but sometimes editing is best performed once the layout work is already accomplished for the most part. In these cases, you do a lot of alteration of the text, within the layout application. To claim that this mode is useless, and WYSIWYG interfaces are useless for writing and layout and we should all be using LaTeX for all tasks is simply foolish.
And MSFT takes him for a ride and locks his content to one PC and does what most monopolies do when they think their control will last forever. Isn't that normal? Isn't that what will eventually provide a market correction?
Yes, it is normal, but no it will not provide market correction. The whole point of a monopoly is it allows the monopolist to make a situation where individuals making the best choice for themselves, are still not driving better products or innovation. It breaks capitalism so that capitalism no longer moves towards the most efficient product by allowing the introduction of artificial barriers to better products.
Eventually Joe is going to find that 500$ worth of music he has bought over the last two years is locked into a dying PC or a stolen Zune and he has to pay all over again to get his music back.
Great, by the time this happens to enough people that get mad, MS will have leveraged their desktop OS monopoly to make sure, there are no other options. So the user is screwed. They gave MS a pile of money once and now have to do so again.
When Joe Sixpacks gets mad, he really gets mad. He sues left right and center. Start class action lawsuits.
Except at that point he is fighting the status quo. People get mad about the crappy quality of Windows every day. They get mad about the quality of IE. They are buggy and insecure (for the average user). And people do file class actions and sometimes win. The cost of paying those is passed on to everyone the next time they buy a computer that comes with Windows and IE pre-installed.
Technically, all this is illegal, but the judge who dared to convict them was immediately being discredited for saying MS was acting criminally, right after he convicted them of a crime. After MS's campaign donations they've flaunted their ability to break the law by doing it over and over and over again. Sure, they lose piles of lawsuits, but they have a money factory and everyone has to pay so they just pass the costs on to the people.
Without fixing the corruption in our political system and using the law to stop them, the market cannot and will not correct these abuses.
All in all, I think the "99% of people" figure may have been true at some point, but probably isn't true anymore.
I think you'll find if you do a random survey, you might find a few computer users who are confident they can install a TV tuner card or device and a few more that can attach their computer to their TV to display it. You'll find a small number that would rather do this than just plug in a Tivo and an even smaller number that overlap with the group that know how and are motivated to do so that also are interested in buying television shows ala cart. There is a big difference between who can set up such a thing and who is motivated to do so and doesn't already have a different solution to this problem that does not include Apple.
You are using OS X because of its Services menu? The cluttered thing that most people don't even know what it's for and are loathe to click on? Well, to each their own.
For power users, it is a godsend. I have a list of three main features missing from Linux, but in OS X. Number one is application availability. In OS X, I can run the native programs that work together better than on any platform I've used. I can run Windows applications via an emulator or crossover. I can run Linux/UNIX application in X11.
Services allow me to customize the functionality of most programs, and share configuration between them. I can use one dictionary and all my apps learn the words. I can reuse my scripts and apply functions to text anywhere with a simple key press.
Firewire mode updates. In OS X I can move to my new laptop with a few key presses and a short walk to get some coffee. This includes all my programs, user accounts, files, preferences, Web cookies, authentication keys, etc, including my Windows and Linux software VMs. It is simple and foolproof and I don't have to waste a whole day re-installing and then slowly reconfiguring the machine to try to get all my applications back to the same state I had them in.
If Linux gets these three, things, or even the first two fixed, I'll probably ditch OS X as my main workstation OS. Last I heard, there was some discussion of getting the last one to work, on Apple hardware in one Linux distro, but they decided it was too hard.
So KParts-aware means able to use components in general, without knowledge of a specific component, such as a German-English translator.
Okay, as I said before I don't have a KDE box right now and won't for at least a few weeks. Assuming I download a KParts plug-in for translation of German-English, where do I install it and then how do I access it from within Kopete? I scanned the design docs you link to, but they only seem to talk about how a developer can integrate them and define the interface, not how a user can install and access them.
The quality is good, and the price is right. If iTunes would just carry Stargate and stop making us wait 2 weeks, I'd cancel my cable. Even at a $1.99 an episode, I would probably save money over what I pay Comcast today.
I'm not a typical consumer, but I think I do represent a common market segment in some ways. I don't need or want a telephone, aside from my cell phone. I use the internet and my cell phone to communicate. This is very common among younger people. VoIP is going to kill the normal phone business. My choice for Internet access is Satellite (very slow, pretty pricey), Cable bundled with television, or DSL bundled with a phone connection. DSL is about $20 more expensive and I don't want a phone. It is almost useless to me. I do enjoy the occasional television show. Thus, I get my internet from Comcast and have to pay for cable TV to go with it (technically I could just get internet, but that is more expensive than the bundle including it).
Given this, I already have TV coming in. Apple has not provided any way to capture these TV programs and integrate it into their Computer+TV solution. I can manage this on my own, but 99% of the populace won't because it is too hard. Assuming a big chunk of their potential market is like me, and already is paying for TV in order to get internet fast enough to use this service, why do they expect people to pay for it again?
As soon as high speed internet is available to most of the US, not bundled with cable TV, Apple will have a business plan that might work. Until then, however, I don't see it flying. Or, Apple can capitalize on the incoming stream of TV, and provide a cheap and very easy Tivo like solution that makes their shows available in addition to the ones you can buy from Apple. Heck, build a store where you can price out the programs you want and see if it is cheaper to upgrade your cable or buy them ala cart from Apple.
You can do that in Linux as well. Stardict is an example. You can select any text anywhere, even in a terminal, and stardict will pop-up the dictionary lookup for the selected word. Creating a broker that will ask what to do with the selected text is just one step further.
So does the Stardict program have to be running all the time for it to work, or is it separated into a background process and a GUI? Does it modify the OS to accomplish this?
I think having an official API, dedicated directories for the system, groups, and users in which such services can be placed, APIs for programs to share these features, and an official GUI element (the Services menu in OS X) is a step ahead of the function you describe in Stardict, but if it works, that's great. Maybe all that is really needed on Linux is developer tools for the easy creation and installation of said services. I know my services menu has about 10 entries and 20 directories of subentries. I use maybe 10 total services normally. If I could get this same functionality it would remove one of the two biggest blockers to my moving to Linux on the desktop.
The applicaton obviously has to be KParts-aware. Kopete, the KDE IM client, uses the spellchecker, I believe.
I'm still unclear on this concept. So Kopete is "KParts-aware." Can I download a KPart that translates English to German and German to English. Can I install that KPart globally, and will Kopete then be able to perform these translations on my chat messages, without the Kopete developers doing any additional work?
I don't believe shared libraries are an adequate replacement for services because shared libraries need the program developer to include them, and no program developer can know which functions are useful to me. A plug-in system, like Mozilla has and OpenOffice is getting is great, but it is really implementing those features at the wrong level. What I think is needed is a OS-wide plug-in system, the user can add and which does not need the application developer to be aware of it (although they can be for better integration). That was the premise of my original post and, while I'm unclear on the functionality of KParts, it is sounding less and less, like they are OS plug-ins for users and more and more like they are a tool for developers.
Here's what I would truly love. Apple should define their services API as an open standard and the Linux community should embrace and improve that standard so that Linux distros can all drop the same services packages in their services directories and all new applications will be able to use those functions. I doubt this is practical, but at very least they should clone this feature.