and tight integration into Windows or GNOME is really irrelevant, when for a fixed amount of effort they are able to capture the broadest audience
Has this company made any dent against commercial Windows packages? Doesn't look like it.
So, what are they supposed to do, dump all the potential Windows or Mac users just so they can dot every 'i' and cross every 't' in GNOME?
If they want to ship on Gnome, they should do a high-quality job. Otherwise, by shipping poorly integrated software and violating UI conventions, they are harming the Gnome desktop by reducing its usability.
Just to address package management by your standards, for example, they would have to release Solaris packages, RPMs, BSD packages, zip files, gzipped tarballs, Debs, and dozens more. Just this task would grind their development to a halt.
Well, if they can't stand the heat, they should get out of the kitchen. Overall, it sounds like the people developing Moneydance simply aren't up to doing what it takes to create professional software, so they are tinkering around with poorly packaged cross-platform stuff.
IMAP allows synchronization between many different servers and clients.
Mailbox and maildir both are open formats. Maildir uses one file per message, which makes management a little easier but some less advanced file systems have trouble with so many files in a directory. Mailbox is a reliable standby. Either way, I keep annual archives.
I think it's inappropriate to keep permanent records of IM conversations. IM is more like a face-to-face talk and people don't stick a tape recorder into each other's faces when they talk either.
I do wonder who is actually gonna buy this board in place of their usual favorite
I suspect this isn't aimed at DIY types. Instead, it lets manufacturers and stores offer a range of configurations in both AMD and Intel without having to create two separate PC lines and without having to increase their inventory.
The thing that is most disturbing about this is not that people can get extradited for copyright violations, it is that the US can get someone to be extradited for this, but that hell would freeze over before the US would extradite a US citizen for this kind of offense to another nation.
You would have a point if this were actually valuable trade secret information, but in this case, this whole "secrecy" thing is just a marketing and branding gimmick. What this ruling means is that a company can declare complete nonsense to be a "trade secret" and then compel the public and the courts to go out of its way to do intrusive investigations on the company's behalf.
Before something as extraordinary happens as curtailing anonymous speech, a company should have to meet a stringent test that the information that was disclosed was actually valuable, that the company took meticulous care to protect that information, and that the company was significantly damaged by the disclosure.
None of that has happened in this case. In fact, the information wasn't valuable at all, there is no indication that Apple took particular care to protect it other than generic employee agreements, and, if anything, Apple's sales have probably been helped by the publicity.
We can't change the judge's decision, but we can keep in mind how Apple has behaved towards its biggest fans next time we think about buying one of their products.
Is there much written in gcj/gnome? On my Debian system, when I remove all libgcj* packages, no actual applications are affected, and I have a pretty complete Gnome installation.
In any case, in terms of license and as a GUI platform, I think gcj/gnome is OK. But I still think C# is a significantly better language. What I'd really like to see is gcc#...
and it'll work on Windows and Mac OS without recompilation as a bonus
And you pay for that in lousy desktop integration.
For example, there is a personal finance manager called Moneydance that is written in Java. I just unpacked it and it ran. The only configuration was installing the license key to unlock the "demo mode".
And that's supposed to be good? The documentation isn't in the system documentation files, the package isn't part of the package system, you can't install it using the regular uninstaller, the look-and-feel likely differs from that of native applications, the menus don't conform to platform conventions, etc. It may get the job done, but it's not the way to get a high-quality application. OSX and Windows users would reject that sort of junk, and so should Linux users.
What about other non-proprietary platforms? So, for starters, there's Linux, of course, but also OpenBSD, FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenSolaris, soon, and many others that are useful but less publicised (meaning I don't recall their names).
I wouldn't call a toolkit that runs on all of those systems "cross-platform": all of them have pretty much the same UNIX core APIs, the same namespaces, and the same window/graphics system. The differences between them are about like the differences between Windows NT and XP.
BTW, Java works on pretty much all of the above with little or no porting effort.
So do all major native X11 toolkits and applications using them; you don't need Java for that.
Give an option for the metadata to be transmitted separately
There is no such option in FTP, or in most other protocols.
XML of course, cuz it's 2005, or tacked onto the end of the file, in some cases, ala id3 tags, or whatever.
Well, if you "tack it on", it's part of the file.
Second, corp intranets, which is what this is primarily aimed at, probably aren't doing a whole lot of FTPing of internal documents.
Corporate intranets are using CMS, document management systems, P2P, instant messaging, E-mail attachments, etc. None of those have provisions for transmitting, storing, or indexing separate metadata forks.
Third, the existance of FTP and the like haven't stopped Apple's file system, or NTFS itself, from having things like resource streams.
NTFS has resource streams, but they are rarely used and they are actually kind of a security problem (viruses like to hide there, and even AV products often don't look there).
Apple's resource streams have led to a decade of incompatibility and usability problems for no appreciable gain in functionality over single-file multi-stream solutions based on standards like ZIP.
Proponents of hacking up the file system to add all these complicated features have failed to make a sound engineering argument for why the functionality justifies the complexity or why it needs to be in the kernel. And they have failed to do so for several decades (because these ideas are not new). At this point, when Apple and Microsoft are pushing this sort of thing, it looks like they are doing it out of proprietary interests, not out of any engineering considerations.
Linux already has the technologies that comprise WinFS: generic metadata (e.g., ReiserFS 4), file alternation monitoring (e.g., FAM, dnotify), and higher level functionality being built on it (e.g., rlocate, Beagle, Dashboard, etc.).
Which of these "stick" on the Linux platform in the end will be decided by users. I think indexing and search will be popular, but more complex metadata schemes won't be.
It beats me why it is taking Microsoft so long to get their act together on this one.
Choosing something like AltiVec involves a bunch of trade-offs:
-- How much work do I need to do in order to take advantage of it? Some BLAS implementations may support it and some Fortran 95 compilers may generate code for it for some primitives, but other than that, it's a lot of manual work to tune code for it. (My own experience with using the AltiVec instructions can only be described as "painful", among other things because the C interface to them is poorly defined and causes name conflicts.)
-- What range of hardware can I choose from? Well, there is mainly one Apple rack-mount that runs OS X, a bunch of big Apple desktops in fancy cases, and a bunch of expensive IBM workstations. That's pretty limited.
-- What's the bang for the buck? There are actually two parts to this: what's the bang for the buck for code not specifically hacked to take advantage of AltiVec, and what's the bang for the buck for code specifically hacked for AltiVec. For code not specifically tuned for AltiVec, the bang for the buck is not so great with either Apple or IBM. For the rest, it may be reasonable.
Considering these issues, I continue to find AltiVec pretty unpersuasive. I think AltiVec won't take off until Intel and AMD's SIMD instructions are equally good; until then, there is simply not enough incentive for software writers to incorporate support into their software for it consistently. And then, frankly, we first need a market in commodity Linux PowerPC boxes until that really gets interesting. I wouldn't hold my breath.
I think UNIX, BSD, and Linux have more consistency among themselves than Microsoft's Windows offerings. The areas where they differ are product differentiators and new technologies, and that's a good thing. Eventually, when the market (rather than some pointy haired guy) decides that some particular piece of technology is really important, all vendors adopt it.
And history tells us that things that the marketing and engineering departments think are really important don't seem to matter in practice. For example, ACLs, file system metadata, Sun's "advanced" threading models, etc. all have failed to catch on, even though they are actually available on Linux. Apparently, users don't want them (at least not yet).
The kind of people who think that it's good if everything comes from one company and that decisions about technology are made top-down by pointy haired bosses and slick marketing dudes will never be satisfied with UNIX or Linux, so there is no point in catering to them. If, after trying both UNIX/Linux and Windows you think that the grass is greener on the Windows side, please don't hesitate to go with Windows and leave us with our creative chaos. We like it that way.
In what ways does C Sharp look "much nicer" than Java, given their practically identical syntax?
C# has some crucial differences in its functionality and semantics.
Also, would you care to estimate the ratio of FOSS and Linux code written in Java to that written in C Sharp?
Well, what matters to me is not how much FOSS there is that runs on proprietary Java implementations, but how much FOSS there is that runs on FOSS Java implementations, and the answer is: not much.
The best bet for an open source Java environment would be gcj with SWT, but having looked at that, I think it's far less appealing of a platform than Mono/Gnome.
That might be ironic, but it would also be quite good. C# is a good language and it is just what a modern desktop platform needs. It would remove any remaining confusion about the relationship between Mono and.NET, and it would make Mono/Gnome the clear winner and future strategy for Linux and the clear winner for application development on any platform: a native GUI with an easy-to-use programming language and runtime behind it.
Unfortunately, we should be so lucky. Microsoft is going to push this because otherwise their platform is in complete shambles: their existing C++-based solutions just don't cut it anymore.
If it's not.NET, they would have to find a complete, high-quality C++ solution to replace what they have right now. Either they would have to have a secret internal project, or they would have to buy an external company (Troll Tech?). That's not something they can do overnight.
The software industry has many different jobs. Most of them are the same whether you run open source software or Microsoft software (support, documentation, etc.). In fact, software development itself is usually paid, and paid about equally, whether it is open source or proprietary.
The big difference between Microsoft and open source is the extra profits. Microsoft is making huge profits on their software. But if companies don't have to pay for those profits anymore, that means more money, not less money, for hiring people.
Altogether, open source makes the economy more efficient, and that's a good thing. And by reducing the amount of money companies pay above the true cost of producing software when they buy Microsoft software, the job situation is actually helped.
Of course, all the Microsoft experts will have to learn something new. Well, that's unfortunate, but that's what you need in a market economy: flexibility.
This notion that platform independence is a value we should all aspire to is an idea pushed by Sun. The idea was kind of attractive 10 years ago when there was no usable X11 toolkit other than Motif (and that was barely usable), Macintosh was in shambles, and it looked like the only way to get any GUI software for UNIX/Linux was to piggy-back onto Windows.
That's not the situation today anymore. Whether you like them or not, UNIX and Linux have two powerful and complete desktop environments and half a dozen excellent toolkits. There is no need anymore to piggy-back on Windows. When people develop for Linux, they should do the best job they can for the Linux environment, not worry about whether it can be ported to other, proprietary platforms. Windows has enough software as it is, and if we ham-string Linux software development with worrying about cross-platform issues, we will always be behind
The "infrastructure" for flying consists of airports, which are highly government regulated, so it's probably only fair that they should be subsidized.
Just because something is regulated doesn't mean it has a right to be subsidized. Airports are businesses that impose costs on the surrounding areas: they devalue properties, increase medical costs, and reduce quality of life. Regulations are an attempt to prevent airports from imposing costs that are too high. Even the existing regulations are incomplete. If airports can't operate efficiently and without subsidies without, effectively, taking other people's private property, then they shouldn't be in business. But, right now, unfortunately, that's not the way it works: even though airports are inefficient businesses and even though they still impose substantial costs on others, we still subsidize them.
you just don't know the difference between Light rail (used for transporting passengers) and Heavy Rail (used for transporting cargo)
No, you don't know the difference. Light rail is a term used for technology for local train service (within cities or metropolitan areas). It is not synonymous with passenger trains at all.
Long distance passenger trains use the same system as long-distance cargo trains. In fact, one problem with the US train system is that it doesn't have enough capacity: the lucrative cargo train service is so popular for shipping that passenger trains don't get enough time slots for regular service, making the passenger train system less attractive.
Lets see, the fastest bullet trains travel a bit over 100 mph,
They already travel at more than twice that speed.
Well, okay. Plans and cars are doing great right now, so it's not wasted money.
Your reasoning is circular: planes and cars are doing well because they are heavily subsidized.
Not really, advances in aircraft control technology has lead airlines to believe that it is possible to run more direct fights. They want to use smaller, faster planes to run direct flights, and replace the slow and annoying hub-based system they use now. It's hard to imagine that a light rail [passenger train] system would be able to compete with that on speed, or price.
You keep misusing the term "light rail". But be that as it may, a passenger train system has a higher up-front cost (tracks) and far lower operating costs. Furthermore, trains can go from city center to city center and allow nearly instantaneous boarding without lengthy security checks.
If you add trips to/from the airport and airline security checks, you have an average of about 4h of travel time overhead even for the shortest trip, and unproductive time at that. A modern high speed train can travel 800 miles during that time.
Trains are always more resource-efficient means of mass transportation than planes for any distance of travel; the only reason to use a plane is because above a certain distance, travel time becomes too high to be acceptable to people (although any trip within the continental US should still take less than 24h with a modern system).
The size of the US is no obstacle to their use--a nationwide rail system used to exist that reached lots of towns and cities, until it was systematically dismantled.
Being able to see someone mark your bug as "WONTFIX" or "NOTABUG" doesn't mean you're any more likely to get the code changed.
No, but it does mean that you know where the project stands and can plan accordingly. And usually, WONTFIX or NOTABUG comes with a brief explanation that gives you information about other ways of doing what you want to do.
In fact, you're probably right that Microsoft would add features if enough people request them. The problem is that they would do it even if it didn't make much sense. This willingness to give the customer what the customer wants and add items to their feature list is why they are popular, and that's also why their software has such serious problems.
[Export Excel to LaTeX] Sure you can, and in fact one of my peers did exactly that while typesetting his masters thesis years ago. The macros required must have taken him at least 15 minutes to write, though.
His point was that the feature was built-in and supported by Gnumeric. Does MS Excel have it built in? No. And the fact that you and your buddy are such Excel jockeys that you can hack this up in 15 minutes shows pretty clearly where your allegiances are.
The fact that you choose to believe that Microsoft staff never listen does not make it so. The fact that you haven't gotten involved in any of their more direct attempts to deal with their customer base doesn't mean they don't exist.
I "choose" to believe no such thing. I'm just pointing out that it is simply impossible for Microsoft to pay the kind of attention to all of their customers that they paid to you--they just don't have enough people or time.
And by the way, you can check out the various blogs, Usenet forums, etc. Microsoft host, many of which are linked directly from the home page for Visual Studio on MSDN, if you want to see people interacting directly with Microsoft reps as a matter of routine.
Yes, Microsoft has discovered that it is valuable and useful for them to collect other people's feature ideas and incorporate them into their proprietary products. That still doesn't translate into a sound support policy, which would mean that they reliably and predictably fix bugs that their customers submit. I'm sorry if you don't understand the difference between the two, but they are very different.
I had an extensive discussion with a Microsoft developer
So, for some random reason, a Microsoft developer talked to you personally and actually listened. Given the hundreds of millions of customers Microsoft has, that's about as lucky as winning the lottery. Most people have to talk to tech "support".
Now, let's talk about bugs in major OSS applications with dozens of votes and/or dozens of duplicate reports that haven't been addressed more than a year after first being filed, shall we?
Yes, let's. Microsoft, of course, doesn't air their dirty laundry in public, so we just don't know how bad it is with them (but it seems pretty bad). Sun, however, does publish their bug tracker for Java. Have a look at their bug parade some time.
"Thanks, but I'll go use [CSS alternative] instead then" is a perfectly valid conclusion from the user.
Don't let the door hit you on your way out.
If I'm going to be abused by tech support and developers at all, at least I don't want to have to pay hundreds of dollars for that privilege every year.
From my experience it is just a direct recreation of MS Office.
And MS Office was a nearly direct recreation of various other office suites and components.
Is the fact that it is free the only innovation?
Who cares? It's useful, it works, it's cross-platform, it's free, it uses open standards, and it uses a user interface that MS Office users seem to feel comfortale with. That's good enough for most people. Not every piece of software needs to "innovate".
Fonts look excellent to me. I don't know what your setup is, but I run OOo under Gnome under Debian. The default install makes it all work correctly (including font smoothing, original MS fonts, etc.).
If you want to change the default font for the entire document, you have to change it in the default style. It's the same in most other word processors.
If this feature weren't there, it would be a pain to try to revert to the default style at the end of the text.
Changint the default style and saving it as the default document means that you'll always have your preferred font when you start up OOo. Isn't that nice?
As opposed to the options you get with commercial software:
1. No Reponse
2. Automated Response Thank you for your communication. We will look at it as soon as possible [i.e., when hell freezes over].
3. Human Response Thank you for your message. We are sorry that you are having problems running our product. In order to run our product, please click on the "Start" button, then select the "Bloatware Inc" entry, and finally select "Program". Our software is easy to use and self-explanatory from that point on.
Frankly, even the responses you call "insulting" are more informative than the kind of drivel that comes back from corporate response teams: at least I know where the project stands.
Slashdot Mirror
and tight integration into Windows or GNOME is really irrelevant, when for a fixed amount of effort they are able to capture the broadest audience
Has this company made any dent against commercial Windows packages? Doesn't look like it.
So, what are they supposed to do, dump all the potential Windows or Mac users just so they can dot every 'i' and cross every 't' in GNOME?
If they want to ship on Gnome, they should do a high-quality job. Otherwise, by shipping poorly integrated software and violating UI conventions, they are harming the Gnome desktop by reducing its usability.
Just to address package management by your standards, for example, they would have to release Solaris packages, RPMs, BSD packages, zip files, gzipped tarballs, Debs, and dozens more. Just this task would grind their development to a halt.
Well, if they can't stand the heat, they should get out of the kitchen. Overall, it sounds like the people developing Moneydance simply aren't up to doing what it takes to create professional software, so they are tinkering around with poorly packaged cross-platform stuff.
I use IMAP and mailbox/maildir.
IMAP allows synchronization between many different servers and clients.
Mailbox and maildir both are open formats. Maildir uses one file per message, which makes management a little easier but some less advanced file systems have trouble with so many files in a directory. Mailbox is a reliable standby. Either way, I keep annual archives.
I think it's inappropriate to keep permanent records of IM conversations. IM is more like a face-to-face talk and people don't stick a tape recorder into each other's faces when they talk either.
I do wonder who is actually gonna buy this board in place of their usual favorite
I suspect this isn't aimed at DIY types. Instead, it lets manufacturers and stores offer a range of configurations in both AMD and Intel without having to create two separate PC lines and without having to increase their inventory.
The thing that is most disturbing about this is not that people can get extradited for copyright violations, it is that the US can get someone to be extradited for this, but that hell would freeze over before the US would extradite a US citizen for this kind of offense to another nation.
You would have a point if this were actually valuable trade secret information, but in this case, this whole "secrecy" thing is just a marketing and branding gimmick. What this ruling means is that a company can declare complete nonsense to be a "trade secret" and then compel the public and the courts to go out of its way to do intrusive investigations on the company's behalf.
Before something as extraordinary happens as curtailing anonymous speech, a company should have to meet a stringent test that the information that was disclosed was actually valuable, that the company took meticulous care to protect that information, and that the company was significantly damaged by the disclosure.
None of that has happened in this case. In fact, the information wasn't valuable at all, there is no indication that Apple took particular care to protect it other than generic employee agreements, and, if anything, Apple's sales have probably been helped by the publicity.
We can't change the judge's decision, but we can keep in mind how Apple has behaved towards its biggest fans next time we think about buying one of their products.
Is there much written in gcj/gnome? On my Debian system, when I remove all libgcj* packages, no actual applications are affected, and I have a pretty complete Gnome installation.
In any case, in terms of license and as a GUI platform, I think gcj/gnome is OK. But I still think C# is a significantly better language. What I'd really like to see is gcc#...
and it'll work on Windows and Mac OS without recompilation as a bonus
And you pay for that in lousy desktop integration.
For example, there is a personal finance manager called Moneydance that is written in Java. I just unpacked it and it ran. The only configuration was installing the license key to unlock the "demo mode".
And that's supposed to be good? The documentation isn't in the system documentation files, the package isn't part of the package system, you can't install it using the regular uninstaller, the look-and-feel likely differs from that of native applications, the menus don't conform to platform conventions, etc. It may get the job done, but it's not the way to get a high-quality application. OSX and Windows users would reject that sort of junk, and so should Linux users.
What about other non-proprietary platforms? So, for starters, there's Linux, of course, but also OpenBSD, FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenSolaris, soon, and many others that are useful but less publicised (meaning I don't recall their names).
I wouldn't call a toolkit that runs on all of those systems "cross-platform": all of them have pretty much the same UNIX core APIs, the same namespaces, and the same window/graphics system. The differences between them are about like the differences between Windows NT and XP.
BTW, Java works on pretty much all of the above with little or no porting effort.
So do all major native X11 toolkits and applications using them; you don't need Java for that.
Give an option for the metadata to be transmitted separately
There is no such option in FTP, or in most other protocols.
XML of course, cuz it's 2005, or tacked onto the end of the file, in some cases, ala id3 tags, or whatever.
Well, if you "tack it on", it's part of the file.
Second, corp intranets, which is what this is primarily aimed at, probably aren't doing a whole lot of FTPing of internal documents.
Corporate intranets are using CMS, document management systems, P2P, instant messaging, E-mail attachments, etc. None of those have provisions for transmitting, storing, or indexing separate metadata forks.
Third, the existance of FTP and the like haven't stopped Apple's file system, or NTFS itself, from having things like resource streams.
NTFS has resource streams, but they are rarely used and they are actually kind of a security problem (viruses like to hide there, and even AV products often don't look there).
Apple's resource streams have led to a decade of incompatibility and usability problems for no appreciable gain in functionality over single-file multi-stream solutions based on standards like ZIP.
Proponents of hacking up the file system to add all these complicated features have failed to make a sound engineering argument for why the functionality justifies the complexity or why it needs to be in the kernel. And they have failed to do so for several decades (because these ideas are not new). At this point, when Apple and Microsoft are pushing this sort of thing, it looks like they are doing it out of proprietary interests, not out of any engineering considerations.
Why? So that the first time you FTP a file, all the metadata is lost?
Metadata belongs into the file, nowhere else.
Linux already has the technologies that comprise WinFS: generic metadata (e.g., ReiserFS 4), file alternation monitoring (e.g., FAM, dnotify), and higher level functionality being built on it (e.g., rlocate, Beagle, Dashboard, etc.).
Which of these "stick" on the Linux platform in the end will be decided by users. I think indexing and search will be popular, but more complex metadata schemes won't be.
It beats me why it is taking Microsoft so long to get their act together on this one.
Choosing something like AltiVec involves a bunch of trade-offs:
-- How much work do I need to do in order to take advantage of it? Some BLAS implementations may support it and some Fortran 95 compilers may generate code for it for some primitives, but other than that, it's a lot of manual work to tune code for it. (My own experience with using the AltiVec instructions can only be described as "painful", among other things because the C interface to them is poorly defined and causes name conflicts.)
-- What range of hardware can I choose from? Well, there is mainly one Apple rack-mount that runs OS X, a bunch of big Apple desktops in fancy cases, and a bunch of expensive IBM workstations. That's pretty limited.
-- What's the bang for the buck? There are actually two parts to this: what's the bang for the buck for code not specifically hacked to take advantage of AltiVec, and what's the bang for the buck for code specifically hacked for AltiVec. For code not specifically tuned for AltiVec, the bang for the buck is not so great with either Apple or IBM. For the rest, it may be reasonable.
Considering these issues, I continue to find AltiVec pretty unpersuasive. I think AltiVec won't take off until Intel and AMD's SIMD instructions are equally good; until then, there is simply not enough incentive for software writers to incorporate support into their software for it consistently. And then, frankly, we first need a market in commodity Linux PowerPC boxes until that really gets interesting. I wouldn't hold my breath.
I think UNIX, BSD, and Linux have more consistency among themselves than Microsoft's Windows offerings. The areas where they differ are product differentiators and new technologies, and that's a good thing. Eventually, when the market (rather than some pointy haired guy) decides that some particular piece of technology is really important, all vendors adopt it.
And history tells us that things that the marketing and engineering departments think are really important don't seem to matter in practice. For example, ACLs, file system metadata, Sun's "advanced" threading models, etc. all have failed to catch on, even though they are actually available on Linux. Apparently, users don't want them (at least not yet).
The kind of people who think that it's good if everything comes from one company and that decisions about technology are made top-down by pointy haired bosses and slick marketing dudes will never be satisfied with UNIX or Linux, so there is no point in catering to them. If, after trying both UNIX/Linux and Windows you think that the grass is greener on the Windows side, please don't hesitate to go with Windows and leave us with our creative chaos. We like it that way.
In what ways does C Sharp look "much nicer" than Java, given their practically identical syntax?
C# has some crucial differences in its functionality and semantics.
Also, would you care to estimate the ratio of FOSS and Linux code written in Java to that written in C Sharp?
Well, what matters to me is not how much FOSS there is that runs on proprietary Java implementations, but how much FOSS there is that runs on FOSS Java implementations, and the answer is: not much.
The best bet for an open source Java environment would be gcj with SWT, but having looked at that, I think it's far less appealing of a platform than Mono/Gnome.
That might be ironic, but it would also be quite good. C# is a good language and it is just what a modern desktop platform needs. It would remove any remaining confusion about the relationship between Mono and .NET, and it would make Mono/Gnome the clear winner and future strategy for Linux and the clear winner for application development on any platform: a native GUI with an easy-to-use programming language and runtime behind it.
.NET, they would have to find a complete, high-quality C++ solution to replace what they have right now. Either they would have to have a secret internal project, or they would have to buy an external company (Troll Tech?). That's not something they can do overnight.
Unfortunately, we should be so lucky. Microsoft is going to push this because otherwise their platform is in complete shambles: their existing C++-based solutions just don't cut it anymore.
If it's not
The software industry has many different jobs. Most of them are the same whether you run open source software or Microsoft software (support, documentation, etc.). In fact, software development itself is usually paid, and paid about equally, whether it is open source or proprietary.
The big difference between Microsoft and open source is the extra profits. Microsoft is making huge profits on their software. But if companies don't have to pay for those profits anymore, that means more money, not less money, for hiring people.
Altogether, open source makes the economy more efficient, and that's a good thing. And by reducing the amount of money companies pay above the true cost of producing software when they buy Microsoft software, the job situation is actually helped.
Of course, all the Microsoft experts will have to learn something new. Well, that's unfortunate, but that's what you need in a market economy: flexibility.
This notion that platform independence is a value we should all aspire to is an idea pushed by Sun. The idea was kind of attractive 10 years ago when there was no usable X11 toolkit other than Motif (and that was barely usable), Macintosh was in shambles, and it looked like the only way to get any GUI software for UNIX/Linux was to piggy-back onto Windows.
That's not the situation today anymore. Whether you like them or not, UNIX and Linux have two powerful and complete desktop environments and half a dozen excellent toolkits. There is no need anymore to piggy-back on Windows. When people develop for Linux, they should do the best job they can for the Linux environment, not worry about whether it can be ported to other, proprietary platforms. Windows has enough software as it is, and if we ham-string Linux software development with worrying about cross-platform issues, we will always be behind
The "infrastructure" for flying consists of airports, which are highly government regulated, so it's probably only fair that they should be subsidized.
Just because something is regulated doesn't mean it has a right to be subsidized. Airports are businesses that impose costs on the surrounding areas: they devalue properties, increase medical costs, and reduce quality of life. Regulations are an attempt to prevent airports from imposing costs that are too high. Even the existing regulations are incomplete. If airports can't operate efficiently and without subsidies without, effectively, taking other people's private property, then they shouldn't be in business. But, right now, unfortunately, that's not the way it works: even though airports are inefficient businesses and even though they still impose substantial costs on others, we still subsidize them.
you just don't know the difference between Light rail (used for transporting passengers) and Heavy Rail (used for transporting cargo)
No, you don't know the difference. Light rail is a term used for technology for local train service (within cities or metropolitan areas). It is not synonymous with passenger trains at all.
Long distance passenger trains use the same system as long-distance cargo trains. In fact, one problem with the US train system is that it doesn't have enough capacity: the lucrative cargo train service is so popular for shipping that passenger trains don't get enough time slots for regular service, making the passenger train system less attractive.
Lets see, the fastest bullet trains travel a bit over 100 mph,
They already travel at more than twice that speed.
Well, okay. Plans and cars are doing great right now, so it's not wasted money.
Your reasoning is circular: planes and cars are doing well because they are heavily subsidized.
Not really, advances in aircraft control technology has lead airlines to believe that it is possible to run more direct fights. They want to use smaller, faster planes to run direct flights, and replace the slow and annoying hub-based system they use now. It's hard to imagine that a light rail [passenger train] system would be able to compete with that on speed, or price.
You keep misusing the term "light rail". But be that as it may, a passenger train system has a higher up-front cost (tracks) and far lower operating costs. Furthermore, trains can go from city center to city center and allow nearly instantaneous boarding without lengthy security checks.
If you add trips to/from the airport and airline security checks, you have an average of about 4h of travel time overhead even for the shortest trip, and unproductive time at that. A modern high speed train can travel 800 miles during that time.
Trains are always more resource-efficient means of mass transportation than planes for any distance of travel; the only reason to use a plane is because above a certain distance, travel time becomes too high to be acceptable to people (although any trip within the continental US should still take less than 24h with a modern system).
The size of the US is no obstacle to their use--a nationwide rail system used to exist that reached lots of towns and cities, until it was systematically dismantled.
Being able to see someone mark your bug as "WONTFIX" or "NOTABUG" doesn't mean you're any more likely to get the code changed.
No, but it does mean that you know where the project stands and can plan accordingly. And usually, WONTFIX or NOTABUG comes with a brief explanation that gives you information about other ways of doing what you want to do.
In fact, you're probably right that Microsoft would add features if enough people request them. The problem is that they would do it even if it didn't make much sense. This willingness to give the customer what the customer wants and add items to their feature list is why they are popular, and that's also why their software has such serious problems.
[Export Excel to LaTeX] Sure you can, and in fact one of my peers did exactly that while typesetting his masters thesis years ago. The macros required must have taken him at least 15 minutes to write, though.
His point was that the feature was built-in and supported by Gnumeric. Does MS Excel have it built in? No. And the fact that you and your buddy are such Excel jockeys that you can hack this up in 15 minutes shows pretty clearly where your allegiances are.
The fact that you choose to believe that Microsoft staff never listen does not make it so. The fact that you haven't gotten involved in any of their more direct attempts to deal with their customer base doesn't mean they don't exist.
I "choose" to believe no such thing. I'm just pointing out that it is simply impossible for Microsoft to pay the kind of attention to all of their customers that they paid to you--they just don't have enough people or time.
And by the way, you can check out the various blogs, Usenet forums, etc. Microsoft host, many of which are linked directly from the home page for Visual Studio on MSDN, if you want to see people interacting directly with Microsoft reps as a matter of routine.
Yes, Microsoft has discovered that it is valuable and useful for them to collect other people's feature ideas and incorporate them into their proprietary products. That still doesn't translate into a sound support policy, which would mean that they reliably and predictably fix bugs that their customers submit. I'm sorry if you don't understand the difference between the two, but they are very different.
I had an extensive discussion with a Microsoft developer
So, for some random reason, a Microsoft developer talked to you personally and actually listened. Given the hundreds of millions of customers Microsoft has, that's about as lucky as winning the lottery. Most people have to talk to tech "support".
Now, let's talk about bugs in major OSS applications with dozens of votes and/or dozens of duplicate reports that haven't been addressed more than a year after first being filed, shall we?
Yes, let's. Microsoft, of course, doesn't air their dirty laundry in public, so we just don't know how bad it is with them (but it seems pretty bad). Sun, however, does publish their bug tracker for Java. Have a look at their bug parade some time.
"Thanks, but I'll go use [CSS alternative] instead then" is a perfectly valid conclusion from the user.
Don't let the door hit you on your way out.
If I'm going to be abused by tech support and developers at all, at least I don't want to have to pay hundreds of dollars for that privilege every year.
From my experience it is just a direct recreation of MS Office.
And MS Office was a nearly direct recreation of various other office suites and components.
Is the fact that it is free the only innovation?
Who cares? It's useful, it works, it's cross-platform, it's free, it uses open standards, and it uses a user interface that MS Office users seem to feel comfortale with. That's good enough for most people. Not every piece of software needs to "innovate".
Fonts look excellent to me. I don't know what your setup is, but I run OOo under Gnome under Debian. The default install makes it all work correctly (including font smoothing, original MS fonts, etc.).
If you want to change the default font for the entire document, you have to change it in the default style. It's the same in most other word processors.
If this feature weren't there, it would be a pain to try to revert to the default style at the end of the text.
Changint the default style and saving it as the default document means that you'll always have your preferred font when you start up OOo. Isn't that nice?
Frankly, even the responses you call "insulting" are more informative than the kind of drivel that comes back from corporate response teams: at least I know where the project stands.