You are aware that your idea of ethics is not an objective standard, right?
Well, I suppose it is possible to re-define lying, coersion, theft, blocking competition, price fixing, impersonating law enforcement, and double-charging as actually being "ethical." They do say language is always changing.
I'm getting goddamn sick of this, and I'm a developer.
The answer you are looking for is the GNOME/OO.org/Mozilla desktops being developed by Sun, Novell, et. al. Yes, it took companies with profit motives to cherry-pick the FOSS software base and come up with a stable configuration to market against Microsoft.
This is probaby the best operating mode for FOSS, where a huge anarchic mass of developers creates seemingly random technology, which is then assimilated and digested by companies whose "value added approach" is merely adding sanity to the mix.
Sun even took it further and gave both Solaris and Linux the same user interface. Not coincidentally, that same user interface is compatible with the other GNOME/OO.org/Mozilla desktops out there. What is so important about this is that these companies are competing on something other than a file format, for a change. No more proprietary Office documents and IE-only HTML/JavaScript would be a great thing.
It is an opaque undocumented proprietary de facto standard that Microsoft maintains for the main purpose of customer lock-in and other monopolistic behavior. I guess the word 'standard' does fit in there.
I brought up standards documents as a common example of web collaboration. By 'standards' I mean the common case of ISO, IEEE, etc. standards being developed by broadly distributed groups of people. I've personally seen what happens when a large ISO document is managed by programs like Word/WordPerfect/etc. It becomes terribly unwieldy, the change tracking mechanisms break down, the formatting capabilities come up short, and it is just an overall unsatisfying experience. The tool of choice becomes such a limiting factor that people spend as much time working around the tool as they do creating content. As documents grow larger than the typical inter-office document or presentation, only tools like Latex and DocBook can scale adequately and be put under proper change management tools (perhaps I'll throw in FrameMaker, too, but that isn't as open or portable).
You just don't like Microsoft. This prejudice has clouded your judgment.
It is true that I do not like Microsoft. However it is very possible to not like Microsoft for purely objective reasons (e.g., by gauging their sense of ethics in dealing with competitors and even their own customers).
Furthermore, please stop lumping Mac OS X in with Unix. Mac OS X is an evolution of Unix; it is not Unix. That's why we've never sought the Unix trademark.
Apple's website makes a point of comparing Mac OS X to UNIX (all caps, even): "Mac OS X Tiger will change the way you use a computer. Breakthrough search technology, stunning graphics and media, unparalleled connectivity, an intuitive user interface and a virtual toolbox chock full of cleverly integrated features -- all atop a rock-solid UNIX foundation -- give you the most innovative, stable and compatible desktop operating system on the planet. Period." (emphasis mine)
At http://www.apple.com/macosx/overview/advancedtechn ology.html the word UNIX appears _nine_ times!
Apple's marketing people clearly want to preserve the association.
Also, if it weren't UNIX (TM or no), odds are the XServe servers wouldn't be seeing installation into big university clusters.
There are no other significant platforms. Sorry, I know you don't like hearing that, but that's how it is.
You trivialize things that you are not familar with, apparently. Linux and UNIX have a userbase comparable in size to the Mac userbase, enough so that a lot of ISVs are doing new UNIX ports. Even a number of popular games are ported to Linux, for example. Pretty much all the big engineering and analysis tools run on UNIX/Linux. Many people are also "rediscovering" UNIX via Mac OS X (increasing UNIX share two fold, in a sense).
In fact, UNIX' decades-long persistence shows its strength, which is reinforced by how Solaris 10 and Mac OS X can still push the state of the art. Add to that the fact that UNIX and Linux are now cheaper than anything Microsoft produces will bring about yet another "Windows NT revolution", but this time against Microsoft.
Sorry, I know you don't like hearing that, but that's how it is.
Documents posted to web pages really don't need multi-author support, a wiki or blog system is better suited to that. For someone seeking comments on a standards document at a website, using a non-standard word processor doesn't make sense (LaTeX, DocBook, or even plain text are much better suited to standards documents).
Except for intra-office communication, Word is practically never the best tool for the job. It may be convenient for the lazy, but that isn't an excuse.
you should use whatever works for yourself and your intended audience
This myopia can also alienate your _potential_ audience. If you were a business, would you want to avoide reaching the 10% of computer users who don't have MS Word installed and ready? Not all Mac users have Word, certainly not all UNIX and Linux users have Word.
Further, even within the intended audience, DOC format can break down quickly. What if someone has different fonts installed? What if someone is using an older or newer version of Office that doesn't display the document properly? PDF doesn't have these problems.
Even further, PDF is a widely understood format. In twenty years, my odds of being able to read an archived PDF are much better than being able to read an archived DOC file. Will MS Word 2020 have retained 15 years of compatibility to its own poorly documented binary format? Will anyone still have a copy of MS Word 2003 that works on any computer still around in 2020? Will Microsoft even be around in 2020? PDF is already implemented in free software, so it can't go bankrupt.
I understand perfectly what they are. The reason I put them side-by-side is that a lot of people use DOC files in a manner best served by PDF--putting documents on the web for people to download, view, and print. I cringe every time I see a.doc file posted to a website, because it is just so wrong.
Anti-Trust. So Microsoft would get PostScript and PDF, the main defenses against.doc propogation? They'd get the biggest chunk of desktop publishing _and_ website content creation? They'd get Flash, something whose success I'm sure Microsoft loathes?
Microsoft buying Adobe would be a dark day for the Internet.
PDF was great when web pages were static, but web pages aren't static anymore and PDFs are boring these days.
I don't understand this at all. Every form I download from my state government is PDF, for example, often the handy fill-in type. That isn't boring, it's damn useful. Most useful documentation on the web is also distributed as PDF.
As for Flash, I don't even have it installed, right now. The advertisements were driving me bonkers!
That's a terrible thing to say, considering that OO.org works pretty well. You try to be so pessimistic about OO.org, but the fact is that only Gnumeric is really a solid alternative (the others are nice but not as mature). Also, the.doc compatibility is a 100% must-have feature, there's no way around that.
Overall, the only problem with OO.org is that it is just freakin' huge. They just need to cut out the dead stuff, refactor the non-dead stuff, and go on from there.
It's good to hear X.org is stepping back and refactoring. I think all the major FOSS projects could use a breather, where new development is stalled for a few months while things like memory consumption are addressed, known performance bottlenecks are given a little more attention, etc.
GNOME, Mozilla, OO.org are all useful enough feature-wise, right now, that doing some serious polishing work would take them to the next level against Microsoft. I find GNOME, for example, to be very adequate in most every way except performance.
Higher-end RAID controllers have RAM on them, so perhaps a "trickle-down" effect could lead to more cache on individual drives. I agree that would be pretty neat, especially on UNIX servers where physical RAM is already used up for other things blocking the filesystem cache.
Sorry to reply to myself, but one other idea would be to dedicate a developer or two at just using 'lint' on the whole darned thing. Getting some of that bloat down always helps new developers.
OO.org is 10 million LOC, now. That's bigger than most developers ever touch let alone see. Hell, I used to work full time on a program that was only 100K LOC, and I couldn't imagine wrapping my head around 10 million.
As much as I love using StarOffice/OO.org, I'd be hard pressed to become a developer in my spare time. I think what would serve Sun best is to invest heavily in their dedicated OO.org devlopers--give them the best workstations, the best debugging tools, the best profilers, etc. No holds barred, just make their time well spent.
The disk busses are all faster than an indivual drive, now, but that didn't stop the authors of the review from hooking up a single drive to do their tests.
Seriously, folks, the only way your're going to saturate something like a Ultra320 SCSI bus is to use RAID, unless the drives start coming with rediculous cache sizes.
They are covering up the fact they were never trained (or forgot) how to not put SSNs into the system. I've come out of stores with famous names and random phone numbers on my receipts, because the clerk didn't know how to bypass their telemarketing system.
Given Ameritrade's brilliance on saying a *compressed* backup tape will require presumably rare and esoteric computing systems to read, I'd estimate you have 2 hours before the FBI is at your front door asking for that tape!
Mine, too. Also, all the major indices have broken support lines. I think the last six months of the government saying "Everything's fine! The economy is on track for a good year!" were there to pump false optimism--a sure way to boost the stock market...until reality kicks in.
"At least two companies have increased initial estimates of data loss by an order of magnitude, which means at least one incident does indeed involve between one to two million records."
Well, there are some freaky smart computer crackers out there--I'd say it's safe to assume everyone in the developed world has had some of their data stolen. Most of that data is probably of very little value, but imagine landing occasional record from some type of political enemy, such as a world leader or even a competing company.
Slashdot Mirror
Your prejudices are showing.
They were never hidden to begin with.
You are aware that your idea of ethics is not an objective standard, right?
Well, I suppose it is possible to re-define lying, coersion, theft, blocking competition, price fixing, impersonating law enforcement, and double-charging as actually being "ethical." They do say language is always changing.
I'm getting goddamn sick of this, and I'm a developer.
The answer you are looking for is the GNOME/OO.org/Mozilla desktops being developed by Sun, Novell, et. al. Yes, it took companies with profit motives to cherry-pick the FOSS software base and come up with a stable configuration to market against Microsoft.
This is probaby the best operating mode for FOSS, where a huge anarchic mass of developers creates seemingly random technology, which is then assimilated and digested by companies whose "value added approach" is merely adding sanity to the mix.
Sun even took it further and gave both Solaris and Linux the same user interface. Not coincidentally, that same user interface is compatible with the other GNOME/OO.org/Mozilla desktops out there. What is so important about this is that these companies are competing on something other than a file format, for a change. No more proprietary Office documents and IE-only HTML/JavaScript would be a great thing.
Microsoft Word is the standard.
It is an opaque undocumented proprietary de facto standard that Microsoft maintains for the main purpose of customer lock-in and other monopolistic behavior. I guess the word 'standard' does fit in there.
I brought up standards documents as a common example of web collaboration. By 'standards' I mean the common case of ISO, IEEE, etc. standards being developed by broadly distributed groups of people. I've personally seen what happens when a large ISO document is managed by programs like Word/WordPerfect/etc. It becomes terribly unwieldy, the change tracking mechanisms break down, the formatting capabilities come up short, and it is just an overall unsatisfying experience. The tool of choice becomes such a limiting factor that people spend as much time working around the tool as they do creating content. As documents grow larger than the typical inter-office document or presentation, only tools like Latex and DocBook can scale adequately and be put under proper change management tools (perhaps I'll throw in FrameMaker, too, but that isn't as open or portable).
You just don't like Microsoft. This prejudice has clouded your judgment.
It is true that I do not like Microsoft. However it is very possible to not like Microsoft for purely objective reasons (e.g., by gauging their sense of ethics in dealing with competitors and even their own customers).
Furthermore, please stop lumping Mac OS X in with Unix. Mac OS X is an evolution of Unix; it is not Unix. That's why we've never sought the Unix trademark.
n ology.html
Apple's website makes a point of comparing Mac OS X to UNIX (all caps, even): "Mac OS X Tiger will change the way you use a computer. Breakthrough search technology, stunning graphics and media, unparalleled connectivity, an intuitive user interface and a virtual toolbox chock full of cleverly integrated features -- all atop a rock-solid UNIX foundation -- give you the most innovative, stable and compatible desktop operating system on the planet. Period." (emphasis mine)
At http://www.apple.com/macosx/overview/advancedtech
the word UNIX appears _nine_ times!
Apple's marketing people clearly want to preserve the association.
Also, if it weren't UNIX (TM or no), odds are the XServe servers wouldn't be seeing installation into big university clusters.
There are no other significant platforms. Sorry, I know you don't like hearing that, but that's how it is.
You trivialize things that you are not familar with, apparently. Linux and UNIX have a userbase comparable in size to the Mac userbase, enough so that a lot of ISVs are doing new UNIX ports. Even a number of popular games are ported to Linux, for example. Pretty much all the big engineering and analysis tools run on UNIX/Linux. Many people are also "rediscovering" UNIX via Mac OS X (increasing UNIX share two fold, in a sense).
In fact, UNIX' decades-long persistence shows its strength, which is reinforced by how Solaris 10 and Mac OS X can still push the state of the art.
Add to that the fact that UNIX and Linux are now cheaper than anything Microsoft produces will bring about yet another "Windows NT revolution", but this time against Microsoft.
Sorry, I know you don't like hearing that, but that's how it is.
I guess I can say this, now.
Documents posted to web pages really don't need multi-author support, a wiki or blog system is better suited to that. For someone seeking comments on a standards document at a website, using a non-standard word processor doesn't make sense (LaTeX, DocBook, or even plain text are much better suited to standards documents).
Except for intra-office communication, Word is practically never the best tool for the job. It may be convenient for the lazy, but that isn't an excuse.
you should use whatever works for yourself and your intended audience
This myopia can also alienate your _potential_ audience. If you were a business, would you want to avoide reaching the 10% of computer users who don't have MS Word installed and ready? Not all Mac users have Word, certainly not all UNIX and Linux users have Word.
Further, even within the intended audience, DOC format can break down quickly. What if someone has different fonts installed? What if someone is using an older or newer version of Office that doesn't display the document properly? PDF doesn't have these problems.
Even further, PDF is a widely understood format. In twenty years, my odds of being able to read an archived PDF are much better than being able to read an archived DOC file. Will MS Word 2020 have retained 15 years of compatibility to its own poorly documented binary format? Will anyone still have a copy of MS Word 2003 that works on any computer still around in 2020? Will Microsoft even be around in 2020? PDF is already implemented in free software, so it can't go bankrupt.
I understand perfectly what they are. The reason I put them side-by-side is that a lot of people use DOC files in a manner best served by PDF--putting documents on the web for people to download, view, and print. I cringe every time I see a
When I worked as a programmer, that's like reading what the marketing people wrote about my program. The usual response: My program does that?!?
A tricycle in every garage, and a lollipop in every lunch box!
Or something like that...
Anti-Trust. So Microsoft would get PostScript and PDF, the main defenses against
Microsoft buying Adobe would be a dark day for the Internet.
PDF was great when web pages were static, but web pages aren't static anymore and PDFs are boring these days.
I don't understand this at all. Every form I download from my state government is PDF, for example, often the handy fill-in type. That isn't boring, it's damn useful. Most useful documentation on the web is also distributed as PDF.
As for Flash, I don't even have it installed, right now. The advertisements were driving me bonkers!
We'd be better off if OOo had never even existed.
.doc compatibility is a 100% must-have feature, there's no way around that.
That's a terrible thing to say, considering that OO.org works pretty well. You try to be so pessimistic about OO.org, but the fact is that only Gnumeric is really a solid alternative (the others are nice but not as mature). Also, the
Overall, the only problem with OO.org is that it is just freakin' huge. They just need to cut out the dead stuff, refactor the non-dead stuff, and go on from there.
It's good to hear X.org is stepping back and refactoring. I think all the major FOSS projects could use a breather, where new development is stalled for a few months while things like memory consumption are addressed, known performance bottlenecks are given a little more attention, etc.
GNOME, Mozilla, OO.org are all useful enough feature-wise, right now, that doing some serious polishing work would take them to the next level against Microsoft. I find GNOME, for example, to be very adequate in most every way except performance.
pop in a 512MB ram chip? that would be sweet!
Higher-end RAID controllers have RAM on them, so perhaps a "trickle-down" effect could lead to more cache on individual drives. I agree that would be pretty neat, especially on UNIX servers where physical RAM is already used up for other things blocking the filesystem cache.
I sincerly hope you don't have your SSN on your checks! All I have is my name and home address--if someone needs to complain, write me a letter.
Sorry to reply to myself, but one other idea would be to dedicate a developer or two at just using 'lint' on the whole darned thing. Getting some of that bloat down always helps new developers.
OO.org is 10 million LOC, now. That's bigger than most developers ever touch let alone see. Hell, I used to work full time on a program that was only 100K LOC, and I couldn't imagine wrapping my head around 10 million.
As much as I love using StarOffice/OO.org, I'd be hard pressed to become a developer in my spare time. I think what would serve Sun best is to invest heavily in their dedicated OO.org devlopers--give them the best workstations, the best debugging tools, the best profilers, etc. No holds barred, just make their time well spent.
The disk busses are all faster than an indivual drive, now, but that didn't stop the authors of the review from hooking up a single drive to do their tests.
Seriously, folks, the only way your're going to saturate something like a Ultra320 SCSI bus is to use RAID, unless the drives start coming with rediculous cache sizes.
The obvious solution is to mate the GNOME and KDE developers to come up with a hybrid race of super developers!
Even better: even though the data was 'stolen', in reality they still have it and can keep selling it!
as if I am trying to hide something.
They are covering up the fact they were never trained (or forgot) how to not put SSNs into the system. I've come out of stores with famous names and random phone numbers on my receipts, because the clerk didn't know how to bypass their telemarketing system.
Given Ameritrade's brilliance on saying a *compressed* backup tape will require presumably rare and esoteric computing systems to read, I'd estimate you have 2 hours before the FBI is at your front door asking for that tape!
Thankfully, all my tech stocks have tanked...
Mine, too. Also, all the major indices have broken support lines. I think the last six months of the government saying "Everything's fine! The economy is on track for a good year!" were there to pump false optimism--a sure way to boost the stock market...until reality kicks in.
"At least two companies have increased initial estimates of data loss by an order of magnitude, which means at least one incident does indeed involve between one to two million records."
Well, there are some freaky smart computer crackers out there--I'd say it's safe to assume everyone in the developed world has had some of their data stolen. Most of that data is probably of very little value, but imagine landing occasional record from some type of political enemy, such as a world leader or even a competing company.