Possibly - personally though I can't stand applications like KOffice, KPilot, rhn-applet etc etc that require either KDE/gnome (or their libs/devel libs)... why on earth would I want to tie an application to only users of kde/gnome or force people who only want to use one K' application to install tons of libs? OK with something as large as KOffice you may save enough space in the actual package that installing the libs would be irrelevant - but for smaller apps, a prime example being KPilot, why would you want to install 200MB of libs for a 1.5MB app?
At least if the effort had gone in to KOffice there might be a windows version by now I suppose. Not that I run windows, but for any Office project to suceed it's a vital part of the market.
"The open source community today [is a] subcontractor of American multinationals."
To be fair, although the multinationals do have a lot to thank the OSS community for, I think the OSS community has a lot to thank the multinationals for in return. Take Open Office, where would that project be without Sun buying StarDivision in 1999 and open sourcing StarOffice 5.2 in 2000?
Personally I feel that the current relationship is symbiotic and works well. Sure in the future the OSS community should probably become less reliant on the multinationals, as long as they don't bite the hand that's fed them.
"You've never worked on localizing a non-trivial application, have you?"
Well lets have a look at a Mozilla source file, a simple shell script could be created like the following pseudo code:
for each line in file;
if "DONT_TRANSLATE" appears in line: skip to this line + 2;
else: translateViaGoogle(What's in between the dirks);
goto next line;
OK - it might not work straight out of the google box, but fixing the errors would more than likely be a lot quicker than manually translating a full project!
This sounds very interesting... imagine the possibilities for localization of applications - I'm sure a simple script could be created to extract strings from source, parse them through the translator and substitute them in your chosen language, this could save a LOT of time!!!
"If it's always-on, the tantalizingly familiar yet incomprehensible waterfall of voices can be equally annoying."
There was a study a while ago regarding mobile's on trains. Apparently the annoyance is not actually to do with the noise, it's the fact that you can only hear one side of the conversation. Taking this in to consideration, if this device turns a conversation in to an 'incomprehensible waterfall of voices' I can see a lot of frustrated office workers around.
Mr. Otellini didn't actually say "you should buy Mac", he said "If you want to fix it tomorrow, maybe you should buy something else", that isn't specifying Mac at all - he's simply saying "not windows". Therefore Linux would be included in his suggestion.
If it runs a cut down version of Win 2k, perhaps MS should've made an x-box version of Office. In hardware terms all you'd need is a compatible keyboard/mouse and printer and your off - not sure how 'cut down the OS is though and wheter they'd need to put a bit back in.
MS might lose a bit in OS sales, but surely they'd easily make up for that with x-box & x-printer sales? Office sales might even benefit slighlty aswell considering the amount of non-chipped (non-copy compliant) x-boxes out there versus the amount of people that have pirated copies for their PC.
Haydn.
Re:Same keyboard but with text
on
Blank Keyboard
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· Score: 1
It's got a whole in the bottom so you can use your feet;P
ohhhh... just saw "after a software upgrade it will be VOIP compatible" in the specs and assumed it must have a speaker/microphone, hence assumed it was also a phone - it's true what they say, it's the mother of all........
Same keyboard but with text
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Blank Keyboard
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· Score: 1
So they're effectively trying to market a product which is cheaper to make (i.e: they don't have to print the text) but charge more for it?? Good Plan!
Anybody want a Ferrari without an engine? It's a lighter car so the power to weight ratio rocks! Only £25,000 more than a standard Ferarri!
"Microsoft is looking for true stories about people using Windows computers to pursue a passion or hobby."
Dear Bill Gates,
I have a passion for computer security, part of this passion involves finding exploits in software - thank you ever so much for making my hobby so frickin easy!
Yours,
Script Kiddie
Correct me if I'm wrong, but I'm sure one of the chucky movies got banned as a pair of kids we're dangerously copying it - they killed someone by tieing him to a railway line iirc.
Does this mean they're going to ban star wars movies?
Man, if only Bill Gates had a nickel for everytime Windows crashed, he could pay his way out...
Well in 2003 there were 593,085,000 PC's. There were 42.8 million PC's sold in Q2 2004, for simplicity lets assume that these sales remain stable for the period Q1 2004 to the end of Q2 2005 - this would equal 256,800,000 PC's baught in this period. I don't have any figures showing how many of these purchases will be replacements rather than new users, therefore I shall be conservative and say 50% are replacements giving a total number of PC's in the world at a very rough estimate by the end of Q2 2005 to be 721,485,000. About 95% of PC's run Windows, therefore the number of Window's PC's in the world at the end of Q2 2005 would equal approximately 685,410,750.
Let us assume that each Window's PC crashes twice per week, worldwide that's 1,370,821,500 windows crashes per week which equals 71,529,465,870 worldwide windows crashes per year.
A Nickel is worth 5 cents, so the amount of money you would receive per crash per year (pcpy) if you had a Nickel for every time Windows crashed would be $3,576,473,293.5, or $3.58 Billion. Windows was released in 1985 so if we assumed that there were a constant number of PC's from 1985 to 2005 that would be $71.53 billion. Of course there weren't as many PC's in 1985 so that figure would actually be a lot lot less.
As Billy No Gates has a personal wealth of over $61 billion it is safe to say that your argument has been proved!
It's a shame that the rhn-applet (which alerts you when there are updates for those that don't know) only works in Gnome though... I keep meaning to write a dockapp version but haven't got around to it yet.
Haydn.
Slashdot Mirror
Possibly - personally though I can't stand applications like KOffice, KPilot, rhn-applet etc etc that require either KDE/gnome (or their libs/devel libs)... why on earth would I want to tie an application to only users of kde/gnome or force people who only want to use one K' application to install tons of libs? OK with something as large as KOffice you may save enough space in the actual package that installing the libs would be irrelevant - but for smaller apps, a prime example being KPilot, why would you want to install 200MB of libs for a 1.5MB app?
At least if the effort had gone in to KOffice there might be a windows version by now I suppose. Not that I run windows, but for any Office project to suceed it's a vital part of the market.
"The open source community today [is a] subcontractor of American multinationals."
To be fair, although the multinationals do have a lot to thank the OSS community for, I think the OSS community has a lot to thank the multinationals for in return. Take Open Office, where would that project be without Sun buying StarDivision in 1999 and open sourcing StarOffice 5.2 in 2000?
Personally I feel that the current relationship is symbiotic and works well. Sure in the future the OSS community should probably become less reliant on the multinationals, as long as they don't bite the hand that's fed them.
"You've never worked on localizing a non-trivial application, have you?"
Well lets have a look at a Mozilla source file, a simple shell script could be created like the following pseudo code:
for each line in file;
if "DONT_TRANSLATE" appears in line: skip to this line + 2;
else: translateViaGoogle(What's in between the dirks);
goto next line;
OK - it might not work straight out of the google box, but fixing the errors would more than likely be a lot quicker than manually translating a full project!
Yes, it should... but it doesn't.
This sounds very interesting... imagine the possibilities for localization of applications - I'm sure a simple script could be created to extract strings from source, parse them through the translator and substitute them in your chosen language, this could save a LOT of time!!!
I can't wait for a Welsh version of firefox =P
"If it's always-on, the tantalizingly familiar yet incomprehensible waterfall of voices can be equally annoying."
There was a study a while ago regarding mobile's on trains. Apparently the annoyance is not actually to do with the noise, it's the fact that you can only hear one side of the conversation. Taking this in to consideration, if this device turns a conversation in to an 'incomprehensible waterfall of voices' I can see a lot of frustrated office workers around.
Mr. Otellini didn't actually say "you should buy Mac", he said "If you want to fix it tomorrow, maybe you should buy something else", that isn't specifying Mac at all - he's simply saying "not windows". Therefore Linux would be included in his suggestion.
Haydn.
If it runs a cut down version of Win 2k, perhaps MS should've made an x-box version of Office. In hardware terms all you'd need is a compatible keyboard/mouse and printer and your off - not sure how 'cut down the OS is though and wheter they'd need to put a bit back in.
MS might lose a bit in OS sales, but surely they'd easily make up for that with x-box & x-printer sales? Office sales might even benefit slighlty aswell considering the amount of non-chipped (non-copy compliant) x-boxes out there versus the amount of people that have pirated copies for their PC.
Haydn.
It's got a whole in the bottom so you can use your feet ;P
ohhhh... just saw "after a software upgrade it will be VOIP compatible" in the specs and assumed it must have a speaker/microphone, hence assumed it was also a phone - it's true what they say, it's the mother of all ........
So they're effectively trying to market a product which is cheaper to make (i.e: they don't have to print the text) but charge more for it?? Good Plan!
Anybody want a Ferrari without an engine? It's a lighter car so the power to weight ratio rocks! Only £25,000 more than a standard Ferarri!
2 days after I baught a Treo 650 on a 2 year contract... bugger!
Did anybody else notice that the "next page" buttons in the article didn't work and you have to click the text below it?
How wank!
"Microsoft is looking for true stories about people using Windows computers to pursue a passion or hobby." Dear Bill Gates, I have a passion for computer security, part of this passion involves finding exploits in software - thank you ever so much for making my hobby so frickin easy! Yours, Script Kiddie
It could also depend on 'those people' being lucky/unlucky when rolling their 20 sided dice...
Correct me if I'm wrong, but I'm sure one of the chucky movies got banned as a pair of kids we're dangerously copying it - they killed someone by tieing him to a railway line iirc. Does this mean they're going to ban star wars movies?
"Where did I leave my tinfoil hat?"
Ahhhh... we've found the owner of the tin foil house from earlier!!!
Either way I'm sure catbert evil HR director is behind it!!
OSDL cuts, IBM cuts... is the start of another .com bubble burst??? *runs off and sells shares*
...they should call it SimEarth
Man, if only Bill Gates had a nickel for everytime Windows crashed, he could pay his way out...
Well in 2003 there were 593,085,000 PC's. There were 42.8 million PC's sold in Q2 2004, for simplicity lets assume that these sales remain stable for the period Q1 2004 to the end of Q2 2005 - this would equal 256,800,000 PC's baught in this period. I don't have any figures showing how many of these purchases will be replacements rather than new users, therefore I shall be conservative and say 50% are replacements giving a total number of PC's in the world at a very rough estimate by the end of Q2 2005 to be 721,485,000. About 95% of PC's run Windows, therefore the number of Window's PC's in the world at the end of Q2 2005 would equal approximately 685,410,750.
Let us assume that each Window's PC crashes twice per week, worldwide that's 1,370,821,500 windows crashes per week which equals 71,529,465,870 worldwide windows crashes per year.
A Nickel is worth 5 cents, so the amount of money you would receive per crash per year (pcpy) if you had a Nickel for every time Windows crashed would be $3,576,473,293.5, or $3.58 Billion. Windows was released in 1985 so if we assumed that there were a constant number of PC's from 1985 to 2005 that would be $71.53 billion. Of course there weren't as many PC's in 1985 so that figure would actually be a lot lot less.
As Billy No Gates has a personal wealth of over $61 billion it is safe to say that your argument has been proved!
It's been around for ages but the onlt time I've heard of anyone doing it was when it first came out as a novelty, that quickly died off.
Haydn.
It's a shame that the rhn-applet (which alerts you when there are updates for those that don't know) only works in Gnome though... I keep meaning to write a dockapp version but haven't got around to it yet. Haydn.
From the MS summary of the article
- The annual costs of patching the security vulnerabilities of individual Windows-based and similar OSS-based systems are roughly comparable.
- On a per-patching event basis, Windows-based systems require less effort than similar OSS systems.
So it costs less per patch to use MS, but about the same per year as OSS... So MS are saying they have way more patches?? Now thats a surprise!!
Haydn.
...Or there's Up2Date for Redhat/Fedora...