Basically Google's operating system is open source like Apple's operating system is open source.
Not really. OS X, the OS itself is partially open source and partially closed source. Things like the graphics frameworks have proprietary, closed source parts. Then they provide some closed source applications lie iTunes on top of it.
Android is actually open source through and through. All of it is open source and not even managed just by Google. So it would be more like if Apple released all of OS X as open source and spun it off to a third party, but still provided closed source applications like iTunes on top of it which they did not open source.
...but the things that are actually useful and make it valuable are proprietary and can't be messed with without being sued.
If you consider the apps Google writes and ties to their services to be the only thing useful about Android, then I suppose. But that's like saying StarOffice is the only thing useful about Solaris.
However, if users are going to use a central App Store, they're gonna want to trust that stuff in that store at the least isn't malware (crapware is another story). Should something be confirmed malware, I think MS has a duty to remove it.
So there are a couple concerns here. Anything really successful on Windows Mobile is likely to be pulled into the regular version of Windows. MS as a central authority blacklisting programs based upon their designation that something is malware can be very problematic. Moreover, there are legitimate reasons to run malware (research or antivirus cleanup development) and if MS's store becomes the only way to get new applications onto the device that would become problematic. If MS only outright bans malware on Mobile and don't gain monopoly influence on the smartphone OS market, then they are probably in the clear legally, but I'd still rather leve ultimate control in the hands of the user. Make them click through a button choice: "This program is from an unknown source and has been determined by Microsoft and Norton to be a virus. (Don't install it!)(Install the virus and let it take control of my phone. Note this voids the warranty and support for this phone)." If they click the second button, give them another dialogue to confirm they did not accidentally click the first one, then run it.
I don't think anyone could fault MS in the above scenario and at the same time it protects them from legal liability if they want to extend it to Windows proper and lets researchers and other users have the ultimate power. Alternately, they could deny the ability to run the malware altogether unless the user first changed a setting to enable such dialogue choices. Basically though, they want to avoid being the ultimate gatekeeper in favor of letting a well informed user with good choices do it. Ideally they'd present the third option of running malware in a sandbox.
There is no mass export, sure, but show me the OSS alternative that exports things en masse to SharePoint...
Obviously other tools have no control over what SharePoint can import seamlessly, since it does not operate to an open specification. There exists, however, the PSI protocol for interchange of CMS data. So you can take Exorcist and pull data between Drupal and Midgaard, for example. If SharePoint were willing to support the format it would have no problem exchanging data en masse.
The argument that you can get at the data because the source is there is fucking retarded. To 99.999% of the people in the world having the source doesn't mean a thing so you're going to need a new battle cry if you expect people to give a shit.
To 99.999% of the people in the world installing and running any server is not going to happen. We're not talking about the general populace here. We're talking about which professionals you can hire. With Sharepoint, you can hire MS if they're willing. With an OSS server you can hire any competent coder. The people that wrote it will be faster, but you'll never be completely stuck, even if the product is mothballed. and it's six years later and you're looking to move to something new.
This type of article is just a copy of the crap that MS does, you won't when[sic] people over that way.
Actually, Google forming a group to focus on data portability into and out of Google products, backed with finances and a promise that they will avoid lock-in and compete based upon the features of their products/services is winning a lot of people over. Being able to migrate into and out of a system and having the freedom to choose is a feature and a very good selling point. MS has avoided this feature because they're afraid to compete.
The Search is one of the biggest and most important features of SharePoint. If your admin had a clue, he/she would have set it up in the beginning with appropriate IFilters for all of the documents being uploaded.
If by adding appropriate iFilters you mean adding the PDF one, I think most admins get to that. If you mean actually supporting all the file types in use today (especially in an office that is not just using Microsoft products) I'd like to ask "are there such things and how much do they cost?" Last time I looked, there wasn't even an iFilter for MS Publisher, let alone anything from Adobe other than PDF. No Lotus or EPS or Quark or Framemaker or really anything useful. I don't think there were even OpenOffice plug-ins.
The problems at your organization sound like bad planning on the part of whoever oversaw the implementation.
Planning to implement SharePoint sounds like bad planning from all my experiences. It's a single vendor system with less capabilities than even freeware CMS's. You don't want any system designed and implemented by people who "have no idea what they're doing" as you put it. So if you have a manager evaluating options presented by a contractor or internal IT people and they say, "let's go with SharePoint" first ask them to show you their work where they compared it to Drupal. Then fire them and don't provide a recommendation unless it's to a competitor you want to harm.
Why are you so quick to jump to Microsofts defense?
So if you don't gush over Google that means you're jumping to Microsoft's defense?
No, when you jump to Microsoft's defense you're jumping to Microsoft's defense. The article was about letting you migrate data out of Sharepoint using a free tool provided by Google. That means you have a way to move things out of Sharepoint if you want, not that you're forced to move off of SharePoint and use Google. This means you have a choice as opposed to no choice. Whatever you think about MS or Google as companies does not matter to whether or not having choice is a good thing. The fact that Google provided the choice means they did something good for users, even if they did so for selfish reasons.
In response to this article you wrote, "This is great news if you believe that Microsoft is pure evil and Google is goodness and light." That demonstrates a specific bias. An analogy would be an article that says John Smith opened up an auto shop downtown so now there are two shops. You can go to Bob Johnsons's auto body as everyone has been or you can go to the new shop. And then you reply, "This is great news if you believe that Bob Johnson is pure evil and John Smith is goodness and light." That's a clear bias.
but in reality they often make the most well-designed and engineered products on the market
Youll[sic] want to cite that.
What's the measure of well-designed and engineered? The most sales? The best customer satisfaction? What study criteria would you accept as a citation for such an assertion? Is it even possible to objectively measure without more parameters? He did provide more parameters you know, talking about making things suitable for average users. For that you can actually look at formal usability studies of users performing common tasks.
Sansa Fuzes are, as i understand it, generally considered superior to iPods...
Generally considered by whom? By geeks on slashdot or reporters for Wired magazine or by the average consumer?
The point the pervious poster was getting at and which you miss by removing the context when quoting him is not that Apple makes the best of everything, but that they make products that are better suited to average users than other companies do. This isn't a new idea, and has been postulated to be the core of their business model by many different pundits.
You make mention of the Blackberry which is a good example. RIM carved out a profitable niche for themselves. They targeted corporate users and built devices well suited to those users. It's a good market and a big market and you can get bulk sales by giving them certain, special features. It was low hanging fruit. Apple's entry into smartphones, like their entrance into the mp3 player market, targeted average consumers instead. When the iPhone came out, it was much, much better suited to average users than Blackberries were. One could argue that Blackberry has moved on and started aggressively targeting the "average user" market as well offering lower end devices tailored to them, but they have not had the same level of success in that market. Apple has, likewise, tried to move into the corporate market with only modest success. The difference between these companies and approaches is not that Apple makes the most well designed and well-engineered smartphone (as you seem to have interpreted the previous poster) but that Apple makes a smartphone that is "the most well-designed and engineered... because it works really well for the average person".
It's important to note that criteria because if you're a corporate user or a high-tech geek, it's not designed with you as the primary target market and some of the design decisions which make the device nicer for normal people will annoy you. Slashdot users are not the target market for iPhones and whining about that as half the posts whenever the topic comes up aren't going to make Apple drop their strategy of opening up the market to normal users in favor of targeting a tiny subset of the population. Referring to things like the Apple store as a flaw simply shows lack of perspective. It's like complaining the baseball cap you bought is flawed because it doesn't protect you in a motorcycle crash.
So why is Apple polluting Windows with these services?
I place the blame for this crap squarely on Microsoft. They could have implemented cross-platform standards compliant mDNS, like everyone else. There are even BSD licensed implementations written to promote adoption. Instead MS decided to implement their own, closed and proprietary version that by design cannot interoperate with non-Windows systems. As a result Apple, Adobe, and numerous other companies end up implementing their own version in Windows programs so they can interoperate with Mac and Linux versions of their software. And the end user is left with confusion (like you) and decreased security because two different services are exposed that provide the same functionality, and sometimes multiple implementations of one of them, increasing the exposure of a system to attack.
This is another case where MS intentionally broke compatibility to try to shield their product from fair competition, decreasing security to do so.
This is what's actually good in Windows Mobile. Anyone can write software for it and anyone can start a Store site for it.
Well, this is both good and bad. You see, a lot of users consider a centralized store combined with a package manager is a feature and are voting with their wallets. MS will doubtless respond eventually. It is possible they will do it right, but unlikely.
What they should do is open an official app store, but rather than making it monolithic, allow any server to serve applications through the store. Handle all licensing/sales centrally and send out checks. Don't outright block any applications for any reason, even if MS considers them to be confirmed malware. Instead, review all software for safety and provide it with a rating. Unreviewed software where MS knows nothing about it can be a 5. Software which is confirmed by multiple parties to be malware can be 1. Software with open source whose code has been reviewed by multiple partners and has a posted bond can be 10. Raise the rating of software from known reputable companies and for signed software. Lower the rating for software from companies that publish adware or other near-malware. Raise the rating for software from companies that have multiple products, signed and known good. Allow for user reviews to be taken into account. Finally, build a system into Windows Mobile so that by default only a certain level of software will run and any risky software will result in a warning and prompt the user to confirm they want to buy software that is rated as potentially dangerous. Make the warnings increasingly dire. Allow the user to change the settings on their device for what level of risk is acceptable.
By implementing something like I've described a company can have all the benefits of a central store and more, but with none of the drawbacks and hassle.
currently make a living writing software, as millions of others do, and I'd like to continue making a living for the foreseeable future. Developers need to eat, too. The normal reply to a comment like this is that customers will pay for the support, rather than the software itself.
This is perilously close to a strawman. I give you the benefit of the doubt only because it is such a common misperception that OSS coders don't get paid. Developers get paid to write OSS code. The main difference is who is paying them and how. Support is another market, but it is joined together after a fashion. So right now if you work at Microsoft you get paid to work on new feature X to get customers to buy the new version of a closed source project based upon MS's customer surveys and feature requests. As on open source developer, you get paid by your company to work on a new feature Y instead. The company you're working for might be a large corporation who is a big user of the software and who wants that feature. They keep you on retainer to constantly contribute to the OSS package and add features they want as well as provide support within the company. Or you might be working for a company that sells services and support who is paid by medium sized companies who also use the package and want specific improvements. Or you might work for yourself or an industry group, writing the whole thing by yourself or with a team and being paid for individual services. You add a feature either when hired outright to do so or when enough users pledge a specific amount of money towards that feature. In all cases you're still getting paid to code. The difference is some of the inefficiency is taken out. You won't be paid residuals forever for some package, so you need to make sure to extract your fees up front. You won't be able to lock in users as easily by being the only possible developer for a package, so you have to compete harder. Realistically, being a coder working in OSS is a leaner business model and is not to the advantage of the individual coder for the industry to move that direction.
Okay with me, but then how are customers going to save one trillion dollars?
Some of that trillion dollars comes from coders being paid less because the industry is more competitive. A lot of it comes from all the other people in the software industry. Instead of 150 HR people scattered across 50 commercial closed source companies, you have three working at contract companies. There are a lot fewer executives and CEO's taking a share as well. There are a lot fewer actual brick and mortar locations with more people working in existing businesses. All the sales guys and their salaries and commissions are gone and that's a big chunk. A move to open source for coding is not going to bring more pork to coders, but it is also not going to hurt them so much as it will other people in the industry and that is a small harm compared tot he great benefit it brings to everything but the software industry.
The important thing to remember though, is OSS is about being more competitive. While it may not benefit coders in general it hurts slow adopters the most. It's like any other change in the industry. Using development practices that take twice as long for the same result benefit coders too, they gat paid twice as many hours... right up until their company goes out of business because a more efficient method is being used by a competitor. If you don't know what the broken window fallacy of economics is, look it up. It might be a great to be a glazier in an economy where people believe such a fallacy, but it is selfish to advocate such a policy even if you are a glazier and not a good long term strategy. Eventually someone figures out how to make bulletproof glass and it's better to be the glazier that invents it rather than one of the ones who becomes a house painter when the market adapts.
On the same vein, I don't see how reading this article immediately makes me jump up and go "Oh! Let's transition off of oracle for our company wide HR system."
I don't think that was his point. He seemed to be targeting a higher level of action, like getting enterprises to perform cost analysis and see if they can get a chunk of savings, and getting industry working groups to look into OSS collaboration in areas where it makes sense but is not in use do to sheer momentum in the industry, and finally for governments and other organizations looking at the economy and wondering where we can innovate with tax dollars that will both save tax dollars long term and provide real benefits tot he rest of the economy. Buying a hundred thousand troop transports for Ford under the idea that "what's good for Ford is good for the US" is not really a practical economic incentive in the long term. Paying 10,000 US coders to spend 5 years working on open source projects the government can use, on the other hand dumps the same cash into the US economy and reduces unnecessary costs for corporations in the US that can use the same projects because copying it is free, and provides the government with more flexibility going forward as they can hire anyone to work on these projects at the end of those 5 years, as opposed to just one company.
I don't think his intention is to say, "you can save one trillion dollars, but Redhat!" so much as to point out how inefficient our current software development and licensing is and how much waste is involved and how we could have fewer "broken windows" (Microsoft deriding pun intended) and a more competitive national economy.
I spend more on support than I do on software and there's almost no support even purchasable for opens source so I'd save a bundle!
What open source software can't you find support for? Have you tried IBM, Redhat, and Canonical? I usually attribute support as a win for OSS, since you can take bids from multiple companies for your support needs. Obviously it only scales well on the top end, but a lot of larger companies hire an engineer to support a package internally as well as do development on that package to better meet the company's needs. I tell you, support is never better when one of the core developers for a project is on the payroll and works on that software 24-7.
Open source is not a cheap replacement if your time has value.
This is often quite true for individuals using packages that are not very widely in use. But that's not what this article was all about. He's talking about big businesses who spend huge amounts of money on software licensing for small returns. By the numbers, those companies could work together to fund the creation of OSS tools for a small fraction of the cost. We're not talking about you donating $5 bucks to use the GIMP and then supporting it yourself. We're talking about a couple hundred companies each paying a coder to work on developing it and saving all the photoshop license fees which currently cost them 25 times as much. Mind you, that's how the numbers he put together represent it for the low hanging fruit programs in use right now in the industry. It probably would be a lesser benefit going forward. For those companies, support becomes a whole lot better than it is now. The internal employee or directly paid contractor you have developing the GIMP is going to be a lot better in general than going through the hell that is trying to get an answer and solution from Adobe. For individuals, most of the problems they have are smoothed out by the big players and they get a free ride, but for support, well then they have to go with a contracting company that supports that package. But at least as an individual you can still shop around and pick your support company and I bet it is cheaper than paying Adobe licensing and support. Try telling Adobe you don't like their support so you're going to somewhere else that supports Photoshop if they don't improve responsiveness.
The real problem with all this is showing businesses how much the status quo is costing them and convincing them of the real savings they can get, and convincing enough of them to make those savings a reality. For this, third party companies can be a support barrier which is why organizational groups are probably more efficient. Then you still have to overcome the momentum of business culture. You might, possibly get a raise or a promotion if you save your company money by switching to an OSS project, but it is risky. It's a lot safer to let a commercial vendor take you on a few junkets, buy you some nice meals and expensive booze, take in a show, and sign off on a purchase order and don't rock the boat.
The BSD license represents a gift which makes no assumptions or demands of its' potential recipients. People talk about pragmatism, of course, because that's necessary to impress corporations, but at the heart of the issue, the license represents a gift given by those who create software for its' own sake.
Let me give you another example. Is it better to give the gift of a valuable and important painting to a private collector with no strings attached or to a non-profit museum, who is bound by their charter to not sell it and to publicly display it for all to see? Do you really think gifts without strings attached are always better for society and morally superior? If so, the previous poster's accusation that you're a zealot is completely justified. You're buying into a dogma about the BSD license that even most of the contributors to the BSD would find silly. I've worked at several companies that put out significant code in the BSD license and none of them consider it to be a gift for society. It's just the best license to make money for that particular chunk of code we are writing.
The GPL as a license is based on erroneous, fear-based logic...
The GPL is a trade-off and has been a very successful one for motivating corporate contributions in an entire spectrum of the market where the BSD license is not suitable. Obviously, without the GPL other, similar licenses would have emerged and some have. Regardless of the motivations of Mr. Stallman and the FSF, the GPL fills a niche and provides significant benefit. Projects at one company I worked would be closed source today if there was not a GPL style license that made it a good business case for publication.
For the last three months or so, we have also begun seeing stories in the trade press about how business is gradually waking up to the reality of, and abandoning, the GPL as a license; particularly given how much more of a legal minefield version 3 of it is.
Yeah, we do see the occasional story, but they are jokes in real industry. Stories about how scary the GPL is are 90% aimed at companies that don't actually contribute or understand the value proposal. There is a tiny subset of the industry where new versions of the GPL are not as suitable for them, by design, but most contributors see that as a good thing as it is protecting their own investments. There is not some migration away from the GPL going on, no matter what sensationalist, half-informed nonsense gets printed.
My primary motivation here on Slashdot, for at least four years now, has been to try and communicate this to otherwise well-meaning, positively minded, and conscientious individuals, who have fallen prey to a combination of distorted, deceptive logic, and a handful of the tactics customarily observed among destructive cults that operate in other areas of human experience.
It sounds like you need to get a life. I mean, seriously, that's just sad. You don't come to Slashdot to enjoy discussion and learn, but to lecture people about software licensing? It's a license. There is not some perfect license for all instances and a bunch of imperfect ones used by people too stupid to understand that the one true license should be applied all the time, whether you're a BSD or GPL zealot. Both are the best fit for different uses. Fixating on one as evil is just, well silly.
This, naturally, compromises other machines on the same network... Or try to control your computer; it's a lot easier to attack a computer when you're behind the firewall.
Most enterprises now segregate their internal networks with a series of firewalls as well.
So the question is this: What are good ways for a corporate IT network to know whether a given computer is a zombie?
There are a lot of tools designed for exactly this purpose. Some of the better ones integrate with your routers and will do more than give you a list of infected machines. They'll attempt to find them automatically and identify them and notify you and either automatically or on command quarantine the infected systems by filtering out traffic from them or from a chunk of your network using the routers. At least one tool can quarantine a particular network section, while still whitelisting the normal, critical traffic in and out of that subsection, so if a branch office is infected, the machines' traffic to the rest of the world and to the rest of your network is blackholed, with the exception of the server they host which uploads payroll. That server is limited to it's normal connections though, so it can only talk to the other payroll server and only on the same port at the normal time.
In other words, the BSD is a vastly morally superior license, and of the two, is a far more pure manifestation of the older hacker gift culture.
People have morals; licenses do not. Picking a license is usually not a moral or ethical choice, it's a business decision. Is it always morally superior to give without asking something in return? I say no. For example, is giving poison to children more moral than giving them $100 in exchange for a promise to read an educational book?
Generally the people picking a license these days are businesses, who do most OSS development. A large number of these companies use multiple licenses. For example, if you're creating a core underlying technology and you want to use it in your products and you want it to be as widely adopted as possible because the more it is used the more useful your products become, well BSD is probably a better fit (zeroconf is a good example). It can be implemented in more situations and you aren't really worried people are going to charge for use of it, since it is not a product in and of itself. If you're developing an application, however, which you plan to use within your company, the GPL may be a better fit, since that way any of your competitors that use it and make improvements come back to you for use as well and it discourages vendors from making a closed version with improvements and charging you for it. If you're developing software which is part of your core competency (for example, a search algorithm is you're a search company) or which you are going to be selling directly to end users, then a closed source license might be better.
The point of this being, all of those licenses are being chosen because they maximize long term profit for the licenser. How can one of them be morally superior if the motivation is identical in all instances? Oh, and as for the older hacker culture, the GPL in my mind fits very well since it is a hack of our copyright system, making copyright law work to do basically the opposite of the original intention.
FreeBSD benefits enormously from user contributions (both commercial and hobbiest), yet has no requirement to make changes public.
This is basically the difference between a nonprofit and a business. FreeBSD asks for charity and sometimes companies give them code, because it gets them goodwill and is occasionally beneficial for the companies to make sure others have what they're giving away.
The GPL is not a charity. They offer code in exchange for the promise of other code. If you want to use their code, you have to pay by releasing any changes.
So by analogy, your argument boils down to a belief that people will give to charity, so there's no reason to run a business in order to make enough money to get by. We can all close up our shops and live on charity provided to us by others. Why there's a soup kitchen just down the street, it pretty much obviates the need for the diner. And why should I work to make money for food when I can get it free at the soup kitchen?
Oh it MUST matter you say - it's the PRINCIPLE.
Some people work because they do support working for money in principal and are believers in capitalism. Most, however, work because they want the money to buy clothing and eat and have shelter and buy nonessentials. Most companies and individuals who contribute code under the GPL don't do it because they support the principal, but because they want the practical benefits, the free code from others going forward so they can use an ever better product. Do you seriously think companies pay full time coders to work on the linux kernel because they support the principal of the GPL over BSD? They do it because it will make them more money in the long term.
Those who keep IE mostly do it for two reasons: 1) it's a corporate policy and their business apps need it, and 2) they don't know any better.
So for group one some of them can install this plug-in and render the pages they want with the faster frame, while still using the IE engine for the pages that require it, without having to run two whole browsers and interfaces and windows.
For the second group, a significant portion are used to installing pug-ins for every Web page under the sun. They install one more and suddenly Google Web apps run fast enough to be usable. Some of them would be happy to install and run Chrome, if they knew what that was and if it launched from then on when they clicked the blue 'e' one their desktop, but they have a tenuous grasp of the connection between starting the internet by clicking the blue 'e' and getting to the internet by some other method. That's why a lot of people end up installing Firefox or Chrome and replacing the icon with that of IE when they install a browser at a less than competent relative's home.
The only dividents[sic] to be had from this project appear to be political.
On the contrary, it lowers the barrier to entry in getting users to open Google Web applications using a functional, fast, and compliant browser.
Last time some competition showed up for IE, Microsoft put vast resources in order to catch up and create IE7 and 8.
If this gets MS to make IE faster and more compliant with new standards, that's a good thing isn't it?
If Google were to do something like this with Safari, would Apple allow it? Or will the next update break it?
Why would Apple care? They allow Java and Silverlight and a bunch of other plug-ins. I don't see why they'd care at all. They might like it for testing Google's JS engine without leaving Safari. Now they wouldn't allow it on the iPhone, but that's just the no interpreted code stuff they do for security, control, and to keep their phone company partners happy.
This isn't about creating a good Browser design. It's about creating a technological work around to a human engineering problem, working around MS's anticompetitive bundling and intentional noncompliance and poor performance with IE. This lets Google create standards compliant Web applications that need new standards and good performance, while at the same time supporting those users still using the broken IE browser. Getting people to switch browsers when MS is leveraging their desktop OS monopoly is very hard. Getting people to install a plug-in is a lot less so. They're not trying to create the best browser here, they're trying to enable and motivate the creation of the best Web. They're not making IE the best browser, just a less significant roadblock to progress.
quote>Looks like Google are going to try and beat Microsoft at their own game: Embrace, Extend, Extinguish.
I've seen several people mention this in the last mention of Google's plug-in as well. I don't understand and I have to wonder if the people saying this know what the strategy they're referring to is. The concept of "embrace, extend, extinguish" is to comply with a standard interoperably until you are popular. Then extend the standard in a non-interoperable way, counting on your popularity and the new functionality to drive adoption. Then, extinguish the competition by utilizing the standard ubiquitously and in a non-interoperable fashion so that anyone who does not have access to the proprietary extensions you added, is removed from the market.
So for IE the strategy was to implement HTML and other technologies interoperably until IE was very popular, then extend HTML with nonstandard elements and rendering and add ActiveX for more functionality no one else could use. Then extinguish competition by building lots of tools and that rely upon the proprietary version and relying on Web developers to target IE's broken version of HTML instead of the actual standard.
So I'm trying to understand how people think Google is employing this strategy. They are embracing IE, sort of by implementing Web standards within it. How do people think Google is going to extend those Web standards in a proprietary way? Do they mean by building proprietary Web applications that use the standards? Do people actually think Google's strategy is to make Google apps really popular and then break compatibility with non-chrome browsers by making them no longer use Web standards? Won't that be hard while maintaining backwards compatibility especially since they're using an OSS browser? I suppose this is possible, but I don't see why people would assume it is Google's strategy.
So basically, while I see that Google is extending IE to use Web standards, I don't see this as a likely part of an "embrace, extend, extinguish" strategy. Nothing stops Microsoft from creating a better implementation of Web standards in IE's rendering engine and out competing Google's plug-in and they have a lot of advantages if they do decide to compete. Rather, this is Google managing to chip away at MS's anti-competitive use of IE and make MS actually compete fairly a little more, pretty much the opposite of Google trying to kill fair competition which is what the EEE strategy is all about.
The problem is if the needed feature is in front of the user and determining what is needed where. If a menu system is more than three levels deep, you've failed as a UI designer.
Excuse me, but that sounds wildly arbitrary.
It isn't. It's the result of a lot of testing and experience. Having a few items fall into a third level menu can still have okay usability, if it is rare. If you're more than three levels deep, nested menus are not an interface choice that is going to provide decent usability, at least not in any case I've ever been involved in or seen a case study of.
However, there are some rather complex professional programs out there (i.e. CAD and IDEs) which have a very large set of commands, all or most of which make sense to experts who have learned to use the software as part of their chosen profession. In such cases menus, command consoles, keyboard shortcuts or some combination thereof are basically unavoidable.
Obviously, even using loose guidelines for menu development say you have 10 top level menus each with 20 items all of which nest another 20 in some mythical perfect storm. That gives you 4000 executable commands. Complex programs can surpass that. The solution is to provide only a subset of commands in the menu system and move the rest to an alternative interface, like a console, palette, or workflow chart. My assertion is that if you're 4 deep in menus, your usability testing will show alternative interfaces tested as superior and if they don't you need to be presenting your case study at a conference because a lot of people will want to see it.
This is actually a point of contention among usability engineers.
No its not. They can not argue this.
Usability engineers and UI designers have a natural curiosity about design processes. It's a normal topic of discussion if UI started out as a way to improve usability or if some guy in marketing wanted shnazzy looking changes that had nothing to do with usability. While the end result can be tested independent of this information (and should be).
You're entire argument is based on the concept that MS is lying about this.
I did not really make an argument, but I do make the assumption that marketing materials do not necessarily reflect facts in any way. Do you make any other assumption based upon the marketing you've seen? The prevailing theory, which I presented, is that MS tried to use a cool new interface idea, but ended up using the appearance of a cool new interface idea. The reasons for that and whether usability was a factor in the decision and the resultant usability was left as a big question mark.
I can tell you why the did it however. It was done so they could sell more copies of Office.
Will obviously that is the theoretical end goal of the company, but the specific working in the short term are never quite so simple. A lot of times an unprofitable change will be made because of internal politics or poor decision making. Anyone who has worked in interface design has probably seen one or more fairly decent interface replaced with interfaces with poor usability for one reason or another. It happens all the time and sometimes it makes money and sometimes it loses money.
In general, Citations are needed for your comments if you want people to by into it.
Please be specific. Is there some fact I mentioned you don't believe? I'm certainly not citing every fact I make in an informal discussion but I'm happy to back up any specific fact with a citation if an actual fact is in dispute.
Everything is a point of contention among usability engineers. Look at KDE vs Gnome...
I thought all usability engineers died when they looked at either... you know sort of like that video tape in "The Ring". Seriously though, there are some fairly well accepted concepts and methods. The real truism is simply, until it goes through formal usability testing with end-users, no one knows.
...or the difference in application interfaces between Mac and Windows.
Actually, that's not particularly contentious from my experience. I think a large majority of usability engineers agree that the Windows style of application interface runs afoul of several important design principals and testing has been pretty one sided for new users. Heck, textbooks reference Windows style application interface as a cautionary tale on a regular basis.
MS's ribbon will probably meets more than most because of vocal minorities and because the coupled it with a switch that temporarily eliminated some features.
It's not a vocal minority -- you haven't shown any data to support that assertion.
Sigh, does no one learn rhetoric anymore? My comment was a speculative opinion, not an assertion. You can tell because it began with the word "probably".
The people who actually like this interface are the minority, not the other way around!
Did you read the "studies" you cite? They're even less rigorous than the ones I referred to as "less than methodical" in my previous comments.
Even for advanced users, the majority don't like the ribbon.
Even for advanced users? The majority of the people who complain seem to be advanced users. New users and low end users who have time to get used to it seem to have less complaint according to all reports I've read.
US case law would disagree with you. One of the criteria that the US looks in a every monopoly case is what constitutes a monopoly. Being the dominant player is only one criteria. Are there significant barriers to competition is another criteria.
I truly don't understand how you're interpreting US case law to come to this conclusion. Monopoly determination for any case is based upon effect upon the customers, but barriers to entry are not a defined characteristic and are usually only applied in cases where there is a small market share that is segregated from the larger market. In most per se cases, barriers to entry were never even discussed in rulings. You usually only find it discussed in rule of reason cases since it speaks to motivation.
If you had the only grocery store within a hundred square miles because the store is in a remote location, probably no one could sue for anti-trust. There exists significant barriers to competition in this market, but that barrier due to geography.
That's pretty much the exact opposite of what the courts have set as precedent. The Sherman act specifically states that is does not matter why a company has monopoly power and intentionally gaining a monopoly by any means was not even illegal until the Clayton act. Because having monopolies is not illegal under either act, they speak only to the illegality of taking anticompetitive actions when you do have one. Abusing a natural monopoly is just as illegal as abusing an intentionally gained monopoly and gaining a monopoly is only illegal more recently if conducted by certain methods such as mergers.
If there are no significant barriers to entry then the dominant company cannot be considered a monopoly. From US v Microsoft, III.B.
You can't cite the random bits of the Microsoft case as though it were a normal antitrust case. It was a bizarre aberration from the start as any legal expert will tell you.
Vogue magazine for the most part influences fashion in many parts of the world. Vogue can make or break designers and labels in a single issue.
Entirely true and this actually helps make my case.
But no one would consider Vogue to have monopoly power in fashion magazines.
Of course not because Vogue does not have 70% market share for fashion magazines, nor are they a gatekeeper for people looking to sell fashion articles. If they did, the courts might well reconsider that issue.
The fact that an artist could easily sell music without iTunes weakens your argument that Apple has monopoly power.
So because I can easily buy diamonds from a canadian mining company that means DeBeers does not have monopoly influence on the diamond market? Sorry, your argument does not hold water. But keep in mind, I never, ever said Apple does have monopoly power in the online digital music market. I merely said it is reasonable to think that the courts might decide it does after gathering better data than I have, since it is a close proposition based upon case law.
They are, but not with the same APIs Apple uses and without the same level of functionality. Don't you think if Palm could get the same level of functionality using a plug-in they would have done it?
Considering freeware plugins have been able to sync up 3rd party devices, there is a high probability that they could.
Freeware plug-ins and plug-ins supplied by hardware makers can and do synch with iTunes. They don't do so from within the iTunes interface automatically when you're purchasing music from the store, the way iPhones do. Nor do they support all of the rest of the synching features. Most third party smartphones end up writing an alternative application to manage their phones and then use a plug-in to get music from i
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Basically Google's operating system is open source like Apple's operating system is open source.
Not really. OS X, the OS itself is partially open source and partially closed source. Things like the graphics frameworks have proprietary, closed source parts. Then they provide some closed source applications lie iTunes on top of it.
Android is actually open source through and through. All of it is open source and not even managed just by Google. So it would be more like if Apple released all of OS X as open source and spun it off to a third party, but still provided closed source applications like iTunes on top of it which they did not open source.
...but the things that are actually useful and make it valuable are proprietary and can't be messed with without being sued.
If you consider the apps Google writes and ties to their services to be the only thing useful about Android, then I suppose. But that's like saying StarOffice is the only thing useful about Solaris.
However, if users are going to use a central App Store, they're gonna want to trust that stuff in that store at the least isn't malware (crapware is another story). Should something be confirmed malware, I think MS has a duty to remove it.
So there are a couple concerns here. Anything really successful on Windows Mobile is likely to be pulled into the regular version of Windows. MS as a central authority blacklisting programs based upon their designation that something is malware can be very problematic. Moreover, there are legitimate reasons to run malware (research or antivirus cleanup development) and if MS's store becomes the only way to get new applications onto the device that would become problematic. If MS only outright bans malware on Mobile and don't gain monopoly influence on the smartphone OS market, then they are probably in the clear legally, but I'd still rather leve ultimate control in the hands of the user. Make them click through a button choice: "This program is from an unknown source and has been determined by Microsoft and Norton to be a virus. (Don't install it!)(Install the virus and let it take control of my phone. Note this voids the warranty and support for this phone)." If they click the second button, give them another dialogue to confirm they did not accidentally click the first one, then run it.
I don't think anyone could fault MS in the above scenario and at the same time it protects them from legal liability if they want to extend it to Windows proper and lets researchers and other users have the ultimate power. Alternately, they could deny the ability to run the malware altogether unless the user first changed a setting to enable such dialogue choices. Basically though, they want to avoid being the ultimate gatekeeper in favor of letting a well informed user with good choices do it. Ideally they'd present the third option of running malware in a sandbox.
There is no mass export, sure, but show me the OSS alternative that exports things en masse to SharePoint ...
Obviously other tools have no control over what SharePoint can import seamlessly, since it does not operate to an open specification. There exists, however, the PSI protocol for interchange of CMS data. So you can take Exorcist and pull data between Drupal and Midgaard, for example. If SharePoint were willing to support the format it would have no problem exchanging data en masse.
The argument that you can get at the data because the source is there is fucking retarded. To 99.999% of the people in the world having the source doesn't mean a thing so you're going to need a new battle cry if you expect people to give a shit.
To 99.999% of the people in the world installing and running any server is not going to happen. We're not talking about the general populace here. We're talking about which professionals you can hire. With Sharepoint, you can hire MS if they're willing. With an OSS server you can hire any competent coder. The people that wrote it will be faster, but you'll never be completely stuck, even if the product is mothballed. and it's six years later and you're looking to move to something new.
This type of article is just a copy of the crap that MS does, you won't when[sic] people over that way.
Actually, Google forming a group to focus on data portability into and out of Google products, backed with finances and a promise that they will avoid lock-in and compete based upon the features of their products/services is winning a lot of people over. Being able to migrate into and out of a system and having the freedom to choose is a feature and a very good selling point. MS has avoided this feature because they're afraid to compete.
The Search is one of the biggest and most important features of SharePoint. If your admin had a clue, he/she would have set it up in the beginning with appropriate IFilters for all of the documents being uploaded.
If by adding appropriate iFilters you mean adding the PDF one, I think most admins get to that. If you mean actually supporting all the file types in use today (especially in an office that is not just using Microsoft products) I'd like to ask "are there such things and how much do they cost?" Last time I looked, there wasn't even an iFilter for MS Publisher, let alone anything from Adobe other than PDF. No Lotus or EPS or Quark or Framemaker or really anything useful. I don't think there were even OpenOffice plug-ins.
The problems at your organization sound like bad planning on the part of whoever oversaw the implementation.
Planning to implement SharePoint sounds like bad planning from all my experiences. It's a single vendor system with less capabilities than even freeware CMS's. You don't want any system designed and implemented by people who "have no idea what they're doing" as you put it. So if you have a manager evaluating options presented by a contractor or internal IT people and they say, "let's go with SharePoint" first ask them to show you their work where they compared it to Drupal. Then fire them and don't provide a recommendation unless it's to a competitor you want to harm.
Why are you so quick to jump to Microsofts defense?
So if you don't gush over Google that means you're jumping to Microsoft's defense?
No, when you jump to Microsoft's defense you're jumping to Microsoft's defense. The article was about letting you migrate data out of Sharepoint using a free tool provided by Google. That means you have a way to move things out of Sharepoint if you want, not that you're forced to move off of SharePoint and use Google. This means you have a choice as opposed to no choice. Whatever you think about MS or Google as companies does not matter to whether or not having choice is a good thing. The fact that Google provided the choice means they did something good for users, even if they did so for selfish reasons.
In response to this article you wrote, "This is great news if you believe that Microsoft is pure evil and Google is goodness and light." That demonstrates a specific bias. An analogy would be an article that says John Smith opened up an auto shop downtown so now there are two shops. You can go to Bob Johnsons's auto body as everyone has been or you can go to the new shop. And then you reply, "This is great news if you believe that Bob Johnson is pure evil and John Smith is goodness and light." That's a clear bias.
but in reality they often make the most well-designed and engineered products on the market
Youll[sic] want to cite that.
What's the measure of well-designed and engineered? The most sales? The best customer satisfaction? What study criteria would you accept as a citation for such an assertion? Is it even possible to objectively measure without more parameters? He did provide more parameters you know, talking about making things suitable for average users. For that you can actually look at formal usability studies of users performing common tasks.
Sansa Fuzes are, as i understand it, generally considered superior to iPods...
Generally considered by whom? By geeks on slashdot or reporters for Wired magazine or by the average consumer?
The point the pervious poster was getting at and which you miss by removing the context when quoting him is not that Apple makes the best of everything, but that they make products that are better suited to average users than other companies do. This isn't a new idea, and has been postulated to be the core of their business model by many different pundits.
You make mention of the Blackberry which is a good example. RIM carved out a profitable niche for themselves. They targeted corporate users and built devices well suited to those users. It's a good market and a big market and you can get bulk sales by giving them certain, special features. It was low hanging fruit. Apple's entry into smartphones, like their entrance into the mp3 player market, targeted average consumers instead. When the iPhone came out, it was much, much better suited to average users than Blackberries were. One could argue that Blackberry has moved on and started aggressively targeting the "average user" market as well offering lower end devices tailored to them, but they have not had the same level of success in that market. Apple has, likewise, tried to move into the corporate market with only modest success. The difference between these companies and approaches is not that Apple makes the most well designed and well-engineered smartphone (as you seem to have interpreted the previous poster) but that Apple makes a smartphone that is "the most well-designed and engineered... because it works really well for the average person".
It's important to note that criteria because if you're a corporate user or a high-tech geek, it's not designed with you as the primary target market and some of the design decisions which make the device nicer for normal people will annoy you. Slashdot users are not the target market for iPhones and whining about that as half the posts whenever the topic comes up aren't going to make Apple drop their strategy of opening up the market to normal users in favor of targeting a tiny subset of the population. Referring to things like the Apple store as a flaw simply shows lack of perspective. It's like complaining the baseball cap you bought is flawed because it doesn't protect you in a motorcycle crash.
So why is Apple polluting Windows with these services?
I place the blame for this crap squarely on Microsoft. They could have implemented cross-platform standards compliant mDNS, like everyone else. There are even BSD licensed implementations written to promote adoption. Instead MS decided to implement their own, closed and proprietary version that by design cannot interoperate with non-Windows systems. As a result Apple, Adobe, and numerous other companies end up implementing their own version in Windows programs so they can interoperate with Mac and Linux versions of their software. And the end user is left with confusion (like you) and decreased security because two different services are exposed that provide the same functionality, and sometimes multiple implementations of one of them, increasing the exposure of a system to attack.
This is another case where MS intentionally broke compatibility to try to shield their product from fair competition, decreasing security to do so.
This is what's actually good in Windows Mobile. Anyone can write software for it and anyone can start a Store site for it.
Well, this is both good and bad. You see, a lot of users consider a centralized store combined with a package manager is a feature and are voting with their wallets. MS will doubtless respond eventually. It is possible they will do it right, but unlikely.
What they should do is open an official app store, but rather than making it monolithic, allow any server to serve applications through the store. Handle all licensing/sales centrally and send out checks. Don't outright block any applications for any reason, even if MS considers them to be confirmed malware. Instead, review all software for safety and provide it with a rating. Unreviewed software where MS knows nothing about it can be a 5. Software which is confirmed by multiple parties to be malware can be 1. Software with open source whose code has been reviewed by multiple partners and has a posted bond can be 10. Raise the rating of software from known reputable companies and for signed software. Lower the rating for software from companies that publish adware or other near-malware. Raise the rating for software from companies that have multiple products, signed and known good. Allow for user reviews to be taken into account. Finally, build a system into Windows Mobile so that by default only a certain level of software will run and any risky software will result in a warning and prompt the user to confirm they want to buy software that is rated as potentially dangerous. Make the warnings increasingly dire. Allow the user to change the settings on their device for what level of risk is acceptable.
By implementing something like I've described a company can have all the benefits of a central store and more, but with none of the drawbacks and hassle.
Assuming that losing license fees directly means profit gain is somewhat dubious logic to say the least.
That's true, but since no one proposed any such thing, it's not particularly pertinent. The article talked about ROI numbers.
currently make a living writing software, as millions of others do, and I'd like to continue making a living for the foreseeable future. Developers need to eat, too. The normal reply to a comment like this is that customers will pay for the support, rather than the software itself.
This is perilously close to a strawman. I give you the benefit of the doubt only because it is such a common misperception that OSS coders don't get paid. Developers get paid to write OSS code. The main difference is who is paying them and how. Support is another market, but it is joined together after a fashion. So right now if you work at Microsoft you get paid to work on new feature X to get customers to buy the new version of a closed source project based upon MS's customer surveys and feature requests. As on open source developer, you get paid by your company to work on a new feature Y instead. The company you're working for might be a large corporation who is a big user of the software and who wants that feature. They keep you on retainer to constantly contribute to the OSS package and add features they want as well as provide support within the company. Or you might be working for a company that sells services and support who is paid by medium sized companies who also use the package and want specific improvements. Or you might work for yourself or an industry group, writing the whole thing by yourself or with a team and being paid for individual services. You add a feature either when hired outright to do so or when enough users pledge a specific amount of money towards that feature. In all cases you're still getting paid to code. The difference is some of the inefficiency is taken out. You won't be paid residuals forever for some package, so you need to make sure to extract your fees up front. You won't be able to lock in users as easily by being the only possible developer for a package, so you have to compete harder. Realistically, being a coder working in OSS is a leaner business model and is not to the advantage of the individual coder for the industry to move that direction.
Okay with me, but then how are customers going to save one trillion dollars?
Some of that trillion dollars comes from coders being paid less because the industry is more competitive. A lot of it comes from all the other people in the software industry. Instead of 150 HR people scattered across 50 commercial closed source companies, you have three working at contract companies. There are a lot fewer executives and CEO's taking a share as well. There are a lot fewer actual brick and mortar locations with more people working in existing businesses. All the sales guys and their salaries and commissions are gone and that's a big chunk. A move to open source for coding is not going to bring more pork to coders, but it is also not going to hurt them so much as it will other people in the industry and that is a small harm compared tot he great benefit it brings to everything but the software industry.
The important thing to remember though, is OSS is about being more competitive. While it may not benefit coders in general it hurts slow adopters the most. It's like any other change in the industry. Using development practices that take twice as long for the same result benefit coders too, they gat paid twice as many hours... right up until their company goes out of business because a more efficient method is being used by a competitor. If you don't know what the broken window fallacy of economics is, look it up. It might be a great to be a glazier in an economy where people believe such a fallacy, but it is selfish to advocate such a policy even if you are a glazier and not a good long term strategy. Eventually someone figures out how to make bulletproof glass and it's better to be the glazier that invents it rather than one of the ones who becomes a house painter when the market adapts.
On the same vein, I don't see how reading this article immediately makes me jump up and go "Oh! Let's transition off of oracle for our company wide HR system."
I don't think that was his point. He seemed to be targeting a higher level of action, like getting enterprises to perform cost analysis and see if they can get a chunk of savings, and getting industry working groups to look into OSS collaboration in areas where it makes sense but is not in use do to sheer momentum in the industry, and finally for governments and other organizations looking at the economy and wondering where we can innovate with tax dollars that will both save tax dollars long term and provide real benefits tot he rest of the economy. Buying a hundred thousand troop transports for Ford under the idea that "what's good for Ford is good for the US" is not really a practical economic incentive in the long term. Paying 10,000 US coders to spend 5 years working on open source projects the government can use, on the other hand dumps the same cash into the US economy and reduces unnecessary costs for corporations in the US that can use the same projects because copying it is free, and provides the government with more flexibility going forward as they can hire anyone to work on these projects at the end of those 5 years, as opposed to just one company.
I don't think his intention is to say, "you can save one trillion dollars, but Redhat!" so much as to point out how inefficient our current software development and licensing is and how much waste is involved and how we could have fewer "broken windows" (Microsoft deriding pun intended) and a more competitive national economy.
I spend more on support than I do on software and there's almost no support even purchasable for opens source so I'd save a bundle!
What open source software can't you find support for? Have you tried IBM, Redhat, and Canonical? I usually attribute support as a win for OSS, since you can take bids from multiple companies for your support needs. Obviously it only scales well on the top end, but a lot of larger companies hire an engineer to support a package internally as well as do development on that package to better meet the company's needs. I tell you, support is never better when one of the core developers for a project is on the payroll and works on that software 24-7.
Open source is not a cheap replacement if your time has value.
This is often quite true for individuals using packages that are not very widely in use. But that's not what this article was all about. He's talking about big businesses who spend huge amounts of money on software licensing for small returns. By the numbers, those companies could work together to fund the creation of OSS tools for a small fraction of the cost. We're not talking about you donating $5 bucks to use the GIMP and then supporting it yourself. We're talking about a couple hundred companies each paying a coder to work on developing it and saving all the photoshop license fees which currently cost them 25 times as much. Mind you, that's how the numbers he put together represent it for the low hanging fruit programs in use right now in the industry. It probably would be a lesser benefit going forward. For those companies, support becomes a whole lot better than it is now. The internal employee or directly paid contractor you have developing the GIMP is going to be a lot better in general than going through the hell that is trying to get an answer and solution from Adobe. For individuals, most of the problems they have are smoothed out by the big players and they get a free ride, but for support, well then they have to go with a contracting company that supports that package. But at least as an individual you can still shop around and pick your support company and I bet it is cheaper than paying Adobe licensing and support. Try telling Adobe you don't like their support so you're going to somewhere else that supports Photoshop if they don't improve responsiveness.
The real problem with all this is showing businesses how much the status quo is costing them and convincing them of the real savings they can get, and convincing enough of them to make those savings a reality. For this, third party companies can be a support barrier which is why organizational groups are probably more efficient. Then you still have to overcome the momentum of business culture. You might, possibly get a raise or a promotion if you save your company money by switching to an OSS project, but it is risky. It's a lot safer to let a commercial vendor take you on a few junkets, buy you some nice meals and expensive booze, take in a show, and sign off on a purchase order and don't rock the boat.
The BSD license represents a gift which makes no assumptions or demands of its' potential recipients. People talk about pragmatism, of course, because that's necessary to impress corporations, but at the heart of the issue, the license represents a gift given by those who create software for its' own sake.
Let me give you another example. Is it better to give the gift of a valuable and important painting to a private collector with no strings attached or to a non-profit museum, who is bound by their charter to not sell it and to publicly display it for all to see? Do you really think gifts without strings attached are always better for society and morally superior? If so, the previous poster's accusation that you're a zealot is completely justified. You're buying into a dogma about the BSD license that even most of the contributors to the BSD would find silly. I've worked at several companies that put out significant code in the BSD license and none of them consider it to be a gift for society. It's just the best license to make money for that particular chunk of code we are writing.
The GPL as a license is based on erroneous, fear-based logic...
The GPL is a trade-off and has been a very successful one for motivating corporate contributions in an entire spectrum of the market where the BSD license is not suitable. Obviously, without the GPL other, similar licenses would have emerged and some have. Regardless of the motivations of Mr. Stallman and the FSF, the GPL fills a niche and provides significant benefit. Projects at one company I worked would be closed source today if there was not a GPL style license that made it a good business case for publication.
For the last three months or so, we have also begun seeing stories in the trade press about how business is gradually waking up to the reality of, and abandoning, the GPL as a license; particularly given how much more of a legal minefield version 3 of it is.
Yeah, we do see the occasional story, but they are jokes in real industry. Stories about how scary the GPL is are 90% aimed at companies that don't actually contribute or understand the value proposal. There is a tiny subset of the industry where new versions of the GPL are not as suitable for them, by design, but most contributors see that as a good thing as it is protecting their own investments. There is not some migration away from the GPL going on, no matter what sensationalist, half-informed nonsense gets printed.
My primary motivation here on Slashdot, for at least four years now, has been to try and communicate this to otherwise well-meaning, positively minded, and conscientious individuals, who have fallen prey to a combination of distorted, deceptive logic, and a handful of the tactics customarily observed among destructive cults that operate in other areas of human experience.
It sounds like you need to get a life. I mean, seriously, that's just sad. You don't come to Slashdot to enjoy discussion and learn, but to lecture people about software licensing? It's a license. There is not some perfect license for all instances and a bunch of imperfect ones used by people too stupid to understand that the one true license should be applied all the time, whether you're a BSD or GPL zealot. Both are the best fit for different uses. Fixating on one as evil is just, well silly.
This, naturally, compromises other machines on the same network... Or try to control your computer; it's a lot easier to attack a computer when you're behind the firewall.
Most enterprises now segregate their internal networks with a series of firewalls as well.
So the question is this: What are good ways for a corporate IT network to know whether a given computer is a zombie?
There are a lot of tools designed for exactly this purpose. Some of the better ones integrate with your routers and will do more than give you a list of infected machines. They'll attempt to find them automatically and identify them and notify you and either automatically or on command quarantine the infected systems by filtering out traffic from them or from a chunk of your network using the routers. At least one tool can quarantine a particular network section, while still whitelisting the normal, critical traffic in and out of that subsection, so if a branch office is infected, the machines' traffic to the rest of the world and to the rest of your network is blackholed, with the exception of the server they host which uploads payroll. That server is limited to it's normal connections though, so it can only talk to the other payroll server and only on the same port at the normal time.
In other words, the BSD is a vastly morally superior license, and of the two, is a far more pure manifestation of the older hacker gift culture.
People have morals; licenses do not. Picking a license is usually not a moral or ethical choice, it's a business decision. Is it always morally superior to give without asking something in return? I say no. For example, is giving poison to children more moral than giving them $100 in exchange for a promise to read an educational book?
Generally the people picking a license these days are businesses, who do most OSS development. A large number of these companies use multiple licenses. For example, if you're creating a core underlying technology and you want to use it in your products and you want it to be as widely adopted as possible because the more it is used the more useful your products become, well BSD is probably a better fit (zeroconf is a good example). It can be implemented in more situations and you aren't really worried people are going to charge for use of it, since it is not a product in and of itself. If you're developing an application, however, which you plan to use within your company, the GPL may be a better fit, since that way any of your competitors that use it and make improvements come back to you for use as well and it discourages vendors from making a closed version with improvements and charging you for it. If you're developing software which is part of your core competency (for example, a search algorithm is you're a search company) or which you are going to be selling directly to end users, then a closed source license might be better.
The point of this being, all of those licenses are being chosen because they maximize long term profit for the licenser. How can one of them be morally superior if the motivation is identical in all instances? Oh, and as for the older hacker culture, the GPL in my mind fits very well since it is a hack of our copyright system, making copyright law work to do basically the opposite of the original intention.
FreeBSD benefits enormously from user contributions (both commercial and hobbiest), yet has no requirement to make changes public.
This is basically the difference between a nonprofit and a business. FreeBSD asks for charity and sometimes companies give them code, because it gets them goodwill and is occasionally beneficial for the companies to make sure others have what they're giving away.
The GPL is not a charity. They offer code in exchange for the promise of other code. If you want to use their code, you have to pay by releasing any changes.
So by analogy, your argument boils down to a belief that people will give to charity, so there's no reason to run a business in order to make enough money to get by. We can all close up our shops and live on charity provided to us by others. Why there's a soup kitchen just down the street, it pretty much obviates the need for the diner. And why should I work to make money for food when I can get it free at the soup kitchen?
Oh it MUST matter you say - it's the PRINCIPLE.
Some people work because they do support working for money in principal and are believers in capitalism. Most, however, work because they want the money to buy clothing and eat and have shelter and buy nonessentials. Most companies and individuals who contribute code under the GPL don't do it because they support the principal, but because they want the practical benefits, the free code from others going forward so they can use an ever better product. Do you seriously think companies pay full time coders to work on the linux kernel because they support the principal of the GPL over BSD? They do it because it will make them more money in the long term.
Those who keep IE mostly do it for two reasons: 1) it's a corporate policy and their business apps need it, and 2) they don't know any better.
So for group one some of them can install this plug-in and render the pages they want with the faster frame, while still using the IE engine for the pages that require it, without having to run two whole browsers and interfaces and windows.
For the second group, a significant portion are used to installing pug-ins for every Web page under the sun. They install one more and suddenly Google Web apps run fast enough to be usable. Some of them would be happy to install and run Chrome, if they knew what that was and if it launched from then on when they clicked the blue 'e' one their desktop, but they have a tenuous grasp of the connection between starting the internet by clicking the blue 'e' and getting to the internet by some other method. That's why a lot of people end up installing Firefox or Chrome and replacing the icon with that of IE when they install a browser at a less than competent relative's home.
The only dividents[sic] to be had from this project appear to be political.
On the contrary, it lowers the barrier to entry in getting users to open Google Web applications using a functional, fast, and compliant browser.
Last time some competition showed up for IE, Microsoft put vast resources in order to catch up and create IE7 and 8.
If this gets MS to make IE faster and more compliant with new standards, that's a good thing isn't it?
If Google were to do something like this with Safari, would Apple allow it? Or will the next update break it?
Why would Apple care? They allow Java and Silverlight and a bunch of other plug-ins. I don't see why they'd care at all. They might like it for testing Google's JS engine without leaving Safari. Now they wouldn't allow it on the iPhone, but that's just the no interpreted code stuff they do for security, control, and to keep their phone company partners happy.
This isn't about creating a good Browser design. It's about creating a technological work around to a human engineering problem, working around MS's anticompetitive bundling and intentional noncompliance and poor performance with IE. This lets Google create standards compliant Web applications that need new standards and good performance, while at the same time supporting those users still using the broken IE browser. Getting people to switch browsers when MS is leveraging their desktop OS monopoly is very hard. Getting people to install a plug-in is a lot less so. They're not trying to create the best browser here, they're trying to enable and motivate the creation of the best Web. They're not making IE the best browser, just a less significant roadblock to progress.
I've seen several people mention this in the last mention of Google's plug-in as well. I don't understand and I have to wonder if the people saying this know what the strategy they're referring to is. The concept of "embrace, extend, extinguish" is to comply with a standard interoperably until you are popular. Then extend the standard in a non-interoperable way, counting on your popularity and the new functionality to drive adoption. Then, extinguish the competition by utilizing the standard ubiquitously and in a non-interoperable fashion so that anyone who does not have access to the proprietary extensions you added, is removed from the market.
So for IE the strategy was to implement HTML and other technologies interoperably until IE was very popular, then extend HTML with nonstandard elements and rendering and add ActiveX for more functionality no one else could use. Then extinguish competition by building lots of tools and that rely upon the proprietary version and relying on Web developers to target IE's broken version of HTML instead of the actual standard.
So I'm trying to understand how people think Google is employing this strategy. They are embracing IE, sort of by implementing Web standards within it. How do people think Google is going to extend those Web standards in a proprietary way? Do they mean by building proprietary Web applications that use the standards? Do people actually think Google's strategy is to make Google apps really popular and then break compatibility with non-chrome browsers by making them no longer use Web standards? Won't that be hard while maintaining backwards compatibility especially since they're using an OSS browser? I suppose this is possible, but I don't see why people would assume it is Google's strategy.
So basically, while I see that Google is extending IE to use Web standards, I don't see this as a likely part of an "embrace, extend, extinguish" strategy. Nothing stops Microsoft from creating a better implementation of Web standards in IE's rendering engine and out competing Google's plug-in and they have a lot of advantages if they do decide to compete. Rather, this is Google managing to chip away at MS's anti-competitive use of IE and make MS actually compete fairly a little more, pretty much the opposite of Google trying to kill fair competition which is what the EEE strategy is all about.
The problem is if the needed feature is in front of the user and determining what is needed where. If a menu system is more than three levels deep, you've failed as a UI designer.
Excuse me, but that sounds wildly arbitrary.
It isn't. It's the result of a lot of testing and experience. Having a few items fall into a third level menu can still have okay usability, if it is rare. If you're more than three levels deep, nested menus are not an interface choice that is going to provide decent usability, at least not in any case I've ever been involved in or seen a case study of.
However, there are some rather complex professional programs out there (i.e. CAD and IDEs) which have a very large set of commands, all or most of which make sense to experts who have learned to use the software as part of their chosen profession. In such cases menus, command consoles, keyboard shortcuts or some combination thereof are basically unavoidable.
Obviously, even using loose guidelines for menu development say you have 10 top level menus each with 20 items all of which nest another 20 in some mythical perfect storm. That gives you 4000 executable commands. Complex programs can surpass that. The solution is to provide only a subset of commands in the menu system and move the rest to an alternative interface, like a console, palette, or workflow chart. My assertion is that if you're 4 deep in menus, your usability testing will show alternative interfaces tested as superior and if they don't you need to be presenting your case study at a conference because a lot of people will want to see it.
This is actually a point of contention among usability engineers.
No its not. They can not argue this.
Usability engineers and UI designers have a natural curiosity about design processes. It's a normal topic of discussion if UI started out as a way to improve usability or if some guy in marketing wanted shnazzy looking changes that had nothing to do with usability. While the end result can be tested independent of this information (and should be).
You're entire argument is based on the concept that MS is lying about this.
I did not really make an argument, but I do make the assumption that marketing materials do not necessarily reflect facts in any way. Do you make any other assumption based upon the marketing you've seen? The prevailing theory, which I presented, is that MS tried to use a cool new interface idea, but ended up using the appearance of a cool new interface idea. The reasons for that and whether usability was a factor in the decision and the resultant usability was left as a big question mark.
I can tell you why the did it however. It was done so they could sell more copies of Office.
Will obviously that is the theoretical end goal of the company, but the specific working in the short term are never quite so simple. A lot of times an unprofitable change will be made because of internal politics or poor decision making. Anyone who has worked in interface design has probably seen one or more fairly decent interface replaced with interfaces with poor usability for one reason or another. It happens all the time and sometimes it makes money and sometimes it loses money.
In general, Citations are needed for your comments if you want people to by into it.
Please be specific. Is there some fact I mentioned you don't believe? I'm certainly not citing every fact I make in an informal discussion but I'm happy to back up any specific fact with a citation if an actual fact is in dispute.
Everything is a point of contention among usability engineers. Look at KDE vs Gnome...
I thought all usability engineers died when they looked at either... you know sort of like that video tape in "The Ring". Seriously though, there are some fairly well accepted concepts and methods. The real truism is simply, until it goes through formal usability testing with end-users, no one knows.
...or the difference in application interfaces between Mac and Windows.
Actually, that's not particularly contentious from my experience. I think a large majority of usability engineers agree that the Windows style of application interface runs afoul of several important design principals and testing has been pretty one sided for new users. Heck, textbooks reference Windows style application interface as a cautionary tale on a regular basis.
MS's ribbon will probably meets more than most because of vocal minorities and because the coupled it with a switch that temporarily eliminated some features.
It's not a vocal minority -- you haven't shown any data to support that assertion.
Sigh, does no one learn rhetoric anymore? My comment was a speculative opinion, not an assertion. You can tell because it began with the word "probably".
The people who actually like this interface are the minority, not the other way around!
Did you read the "studies" you cite? They're even less rigorous than the ones I referred to as "less than methodical" in my previous comments.
Even for advanced users, the majority don't like the ribbon.
Even for advanced users? The majority of the people who complain seem to be advanced users. New users and low end users who have time to get used to it seem to have less complaint according to all reports I've read.
That's not how monopolies are defined.
US case law would disagree with you. One of the criteria that the US looks in a every monopoly case is what constitutes a monopoly. Being the dominant player is only one criteria. Are there significant barriers to competition is another criteria.
I truly don't understand how you're interpreting US case law to come to this conclusion. Monopoly determination for any case is based upon effect upon the customers, but barriers to entry are not a defined characteristic and are usually only applied in cases where there is a small market share that is segregated from the larger market. In most per se cases, barriers to entry were never even discussed in rulings. You usually only find it discussed in rule of reason cases since it speaks to motivation.
If you had the only grocery store within a hundred square miles because the store is in a remote location, probably no one could sue for anti-trust. There exists significant barriers to competition in this market, but that barrier due to geography.
That's pretty much the exact opposite of what the courts have set as precedent. The Sherman act specifically states that is does not matter why a company has monopoly power and intentionally gaining a monopoly by any means was not even illegal until the Clayton act. Because having monopolies is not illegal under either act, they speak only to the illegality of taking anticompetitive actions when you do have one. Abusing a natural monopoly is just as illegal as abusing an intentionally gained monopoly and gaining a monopoly is only illegal more recently if conducted by certain methods such as mergers.
If there are no significant barriers to entry then the dominant company cannot be considered a monopoly. From US v Microsoft, III.B.
You can't cite the random bits of the Microsoft case as though it were a normal antitrust case. It was a bizarre aberration from the start as any legal expert will tell you.
Vogue magazine for the most part influences fashion in many parts of the world. Vogue can make or break designers and labels in a single issue.
Entirely true and this actually helps make my case.
But no one would consider Vogue to have monopoly power in fashion magazines.
Of course not because Vogue does not have 70% market share for fashion magazines, nor are they a gatekeeper for people looking to sell fashion articles. If they did, the courts might well reconsider that issue.
The fact that an artist could easily sell music without iTunes weakens your argument that Apple has monopoly power.
So because I can easily buy diamonds from a canadian mining company that means DeBeers does not have monopoly influence on the diamond market? Sorry, your argument does not hold water. But keep in mind, I never, ever said Apple does have monopoly power in the online digital music market. I merely said it is reasonable to think that the courts might decide it does after gathering better data than I have, since it is a close proposition based upon case law.
They are, but not with the same APIs Apple uses and without the same level of functionality. Don't you think if Palm could get the same level of functionality using a plug-in they would have done it?
Considering freeware plugins have been able to sync up 3rd party devices, there is a high probability that they could.
Freeware plug-ins and plug-ins supplied by hardware makers can and do synch with iTunes. They don't do so from within the iTunes interface automatically when you're purchasing music from the store, the way iPhones do. Nor do they support all of the rest of the synching features. Most third party smartphones end up writing an alternative application to manage their phones and then use a plug-in to get music from i