It's downloading now so I may end up eating crow...
Reading the New Features list, it looks like, except for custom properties, they've put all their efforts into the sizzle and neglected the steak.
I'll say it again--without sections and competent support for duplex printing, swriter can't play in the major leagues. I still haven't found one of my Word documents so trivial that swriter will display and print it as intended. In some cases, no amount of tweaking in swriter can fix the problem. (Hey Guys: odd-numbered pages always go on the right, and it needs to be possible to have new sections start on the next odd-numbered page.)
Also, to play in the big leagues, you need competent user documentation and Help. OOo gives the impression that the developers felt that users should be required to suffer to show they deserved to use the product (apparently a widespread attitude among FOSS developers, judging from the dearth of user documentation). I don't mind clicking at random to see what happens if I'm taking a few minutes off playing with Myst; it's another thing when I'm trying to get work done.
If I ever get the time and the passion to contribute to a FOSS project, it won't be code, it'll be user documentation.
Only 18 minutes to go and I'll be able to install the thing--like my third wife: a triumph of hope over experience.
Seriously though, he should try to get enterprises to contribute usable user documentation, not code. If he succeeded, in the fullness of time, using FOSS products wouldn't be a never-ending easter egg hunt.
Folk here tend to forget that MS' greatest asset is the millions of third-party developers producing software for Windows. GNU compatibility can only expand that community; more than a few are likely to be attracted by the prospect of tapping into the vast Windows market. MS has nothing to lose.
Of course, if anyone does anything really good that's useful to more than a handful of people, MS is likely to try to buy them out. But not to worry; FOSS developers abhor the idea of being independently wealthy.
command.com and cmd.exe were never meant to be heavy-duty shells. They do what they are supposed to do--run simple scripts that call applications to do the heavy lifting. Use wsh and VBScript or JScript for interesting scripts if you are too cheap to buy something stronger. Anyone who wants a big interactive shell can run one of the many third-party shells, including ports of ksh, csh, and bash.
Oh, yeah. command.com wasn't DOS and cmd.exe isn't.
TFA is so much bafflegab, there's no place to get a hold of it.
Revoking a certificate would result in some inconvenience, but it couldn't provide the means to hold anything for ransom.
In a corporate environment, an encrypted file on a laptop is almost certainly duplicated somewhere—usually in clear on a server. And if I just created or modified a file and haven't yet backed it up, I had to use the password to do it, so I'm unlikely to forget it over lunch.
Add to that the fact that all the mainstream encryption products come with key management systems to help avoid even that small risk, TFA suggests that either the "experts" aren't really experts or the reporter didn't understand them.
Slashdot needs an implementation of Godwin's Law that shuts down a thread the first time Microsoft is mentioned and the topic is something that involves neither Microsoft nor any of its products.
Thankfully, that would have put this thread out of our misery almost immediately, with no one any less informed as a result.
BC may have strong privacy legislation but, in common with the rest of Canada, it also has the most bizarre human rights legislation.
One human rights ruling after another, many ratified by the Supreme Court, has walked all over what we once considered our rights in a free dominion, especially freedom of speech and freedom of association. All you need is for someone to complain that something on the site has violated their right not to be offended and the law as you know it flies out the window and you find yourself facing fines, indenture or jail. What makes matters worse is that it is extremely rare for a Human Rights Commission to find for other than the complainant.
You don't want your site in or traceable to BC, or any other place in Canada.
Don't forget, we have known for ages that video games make us fat and mean.
In actuality there are a lot of well-controlled studies showing that kids on high-carb diets get fat whether they exercise or not (which explains why Americans on the whole are getting more obese at the same time that they are exercising more and eating less fat). The poison at McDonalds is not the fat but the sugar—an addictive drug.
"Fat makes you fat" is attractive because it's easy to understand. But it's dead wrong. The truth is more complicated than that—complicated enough to be beyond the ken of most journalists, politicians and health bureaucrats. So they keep telling us that fat is bad for us, not because it's true, but because it's simple, and they have to tell us something.
To put it into a familiar context, they're telling us to cure buffer overflows by eliminating buffers.
To learn more, search on insulin, adenosine, lipolysis, read the journal papers, follow the trail. You may want dictionary.com in another window—I did. The good news for most of us is that caffeine counteracts adenosine—not only keeping us alert but helping to keep us skinny.
The Elements of Typographic Style. Robert Bringhurst.
Anything and everything about use cases. Without good, non-technical use cases based on the user's intent and workflow, you don't know what you are trying to achieve.
Avoid the programmer's quest for efficiency. "A place for everything and everything in its place" makes an annoying interface. Redundancy is good; give me everything I want wherever it might be useful.
Good point. I look across my shelves, and I see improvements on AutoCAD, WordPerfect, VisiCalc, MaxThink, Paint, Dartmouth Basic, C, etc. Poser stands out, if only a little (BTW, is there an open source app like it?)
OS' don't count; The idea of an OS was innovative; the rest has been incremental improvement.
It seems that most of the software that defines the modern IT environment consists of elaborations on old ideas, the work of one visionary who may or may not have open sourced the result, or proprietary development which may or may not have been open sourced after its first release.
As for the last ten years, I can think of only Google Earth and Second Life (not for VR—that's old—but for the novel application.) Interesting that they are both VR applications. Does Skype rate?
None of them are innovative and Java wasn't developed in an open source context. Java is a poorly designed rehash of Pascal, MySQL is just another relational database, Qt is just a kit for building GUIs that have been around (though incrementally enhanced) since the seventies.
Back to the drawing board. Surely there's at least one white crow—some ground-breaking app that was conceived and implemented in open source? I can't think of one, and no one here seems to be able to either, but that doesn't mean none exist.
And just because it's called a server, that doesn't mean it has to be backed up. It's not what it's called that matters, it's how it's used.
The assumed environment is one where family members work on their own machines and back up to the Home Server. Backing up the backup seems a tad excessive.
And then, there is the issue of off-site backup...
It's not arrogant to present some of your best work as conjectures—a mathematician's term for "A wild-assed guess, but wouldn't it be interesting if it were true?"
Given that one of the implications of Wolfram's work is that you can do a lot of neat stuff with algorithms that are out of scope for conventional mathematics, many on Slashdot should enjoy reading ANKS. Among other things, committing some of his constructions to code is fun.
One hopes that "Friederike Range at the University of Vienna" lives at the University of Vienna—with his parents—who subsequently helped him understand the difference between research and parlour tricks. If not, standards at European universities must be a great deal lower than we've been told.
Without any training at all, my dog can recognise other dogs on TV, though she gives a little bark rather than pushing a switch with her paw. I'm going to guess that it has more to do with being a pack animal than any kind of "reasoning ability".
The FOSS system is great - probably the one thing that someone ten years ago would not have predicted.
(Chuckle)
Oh, to be that young again!
Back around the time of the dinosaurs (1969 or so) SDS shipped the OS source code with the hardware. SDS wasn't alone; this was common practice. I don't know how the other guys did it, but SDS had a SIDR (Software Improvement or Difficulty Report) system that gave anyone working on our systems a channel for submitting patches or, on occasion, whole modules for inclusion in the next version. I was a lowly analyst at a remote branch, but a lot of my code ended up in BTM and UTS. We had customers donating drivers for peripherals they needed but that we had not got around to supporting. Hell, one of our clients contributed what may have been the fastest APL implementation of all time.
The point (apologies if that was long-winded) is that FOSS is not a new idea. It was once so common that it didn't have a name until somebody coined the term "shareware". It has been around continuously since the beginning. It's only since the US Government forced IBM to sell its software that the commercial model took hold. Thank goodness it did—can you imagine how crappy PC games if no one was willing to pay for software?
Slashdot Mirror
It's downloading now so I may end up eating crow...
Reading the New Features list, it looks like, except for custom properties, they've put all their efforts into the sizzle and neglected the steak.
I'll say it again--without sections and competent support for duplex printing, swriter can't play in the major leagues. I still haven't found one of my Word documents so trivial that swriter will display and print it as intended. In some cases, no amount of tweaking in swriter can fix the problem. (Hey Guys: odd-numbered pages always go on the right, and it needs to be possible to have new sections start on the next odd-numbered page.)
Also, to play in the big leagues, you need competent user documentation and Help. OOo gives the impression that the developers felt that users should be required to suffer to show they deserved to use the product (apparently a widespread attitude among FOSS developers, judging from the dearth of user documentation). I don't mind clicking at random to see what happens if I'm taking a few minutes off playing with Myst; it's another thing when I'm trying to get work done.
If I ever get the time and the passion to contribute to a FOSS project, it won't be code, it'll be user documentation.
Only 18 minutes to go and I'll be able to install the thing--like my third wife: a triumph of hope over experience.
Am I permitted a chuckle?
Seriously though, he should try to get enterprises to contribute usable user documentation, not code. If he succeeded, in the fullness of time, using FOSS products wouldn't be a never-ending easter egg hunt.
Folk here tend to forget that MS' greatest asset is the millions of third-party developers producing software for Windows. GNU compatibility can only expand that community; more than a few are likely to be attracted by the prospect of tapping into the vast Windows market. MS has nothing to lose.
Of course, if anyone does anything really good that's useful to more than a handful of people, MS is likely to try to buy them out. But not to worry; FOSS developers abhor the idea of being independently wealthy.
command.com and cmd.exe were never meant to be heavy-duty shells. They do what they are supposed to do--run simple scripts that call applications to do the heavy lifting. Use wsh and VBScript or JScript for interesting scripts if you are too cheap to buy something stronger. Anyone who wants a big interactive shell can run one of the many third-party shells, including ports of ksh, csh, and bash.
Oh, yeah. command.com wasn't DOS and cmd.exe isn't.
since in the future everyone's basic needs will be met
Absolutely. Right after I invent and patent the replicator and the transporter.
Actually, the plan is to use it to finally get a three-day weather forecast that's more reliable than rolling dice.
When they've got that figured out, they plan to go to work on a five-year climate forecast.
TFA is so much bafflegab, there's no place to get a hold of it.
Revoking a certificate would result in some inconvenience, but it couldn't provide the means to hold anything for ransom.
In a corporate environment, an encrypted file on a laptop is almost certainly duplicated somewhere—usually in clear on a server. And if I just created or modified a file and haven't yet backed it up, I had to use the password to do it, so I'm unlikely to forget it over lunch.
Add to that the fact that all the mainstream encryption products come with key management systems to help avoid even that small risk, TFA suggests that either the "experts" aren't really experts or the reporter didn't understand them.
Slashdot needs an implementation of Godwin's Law that shuts down a thread the first time Microsoft is mentioned and the topic is something that involves neither Microsoft nor any of its products.
Thankfully, that would have put this thread out of our misery almost immediately, with no one any less informed as a result.
I imagine he was looking forward to meeting someone who understood him so well.
BC may have strong privacy legislation but, in common with the rest of Canada, it also has the most bizarre human rights legislation.
One human rights ruling after another, many ratified by the Supreme Court, has walked all over what we once considered our rights in a free dominion, especially freedom of speech and freedom of association. All you need is for someone to complain that something on the site has violated their right not to be offended and the law as you know it flies out the window and you find yourself facing fines, indenture or jail. What makes matters worse is that it is extremely rare for a Human Rights Commission to find for other than the complainant.
You don't want your site in or traceable to BC, or any other place in Canada.
Show me a jurisdiction where an owner of a highway can put up a toll ...
Ontario, Canada, the 407. Recently raised tolls to thin out the traffic. It worked.
Funny, no; childish, yes.
It's a shame spanking is no longer deemed appropriate.
If the calories eaten outweigh the calories burned then weight is gained
Not even wrong. The body is not a thermodynamically closed system—something you should be aware of every time you sit on the toilet.
Don't forget, we have known for ages that video games make us fat and mean.
In actuality there are a lot of well-controlled studies showing that kids on high-carb diets get fat whether they exercise or not (which explains why Americans on the whole are getting more obese at the same time that they are exercising more and eating less fat). The poison at McDonalds is not the fat but the sugar—an addictive drug.
"Fat makes you fat" is attractive because it's easy to understand. But it's dead wrong. The truth is more complicated than that—complicated enough to be beyond the ken of most journalists, politicians and health bureaucrats. So they keep telling us that fat is bad for us, not because it's true, but because it's simple, and they have to tell us something.
To put it into a familiar context, they're telling us to cure buffer overflows by eliminating buffers.
To learn more, search on insulin, adenosine, lipolysis, read the journal papers, follow the trail. You may want dictionary.com in another window—I did. The good news for most of us is that caffeine counteracts adenosine—not only keeping us alert but helping to keep us skinny.
Sorry. What could I have been thinking?
Good point. I look across my shelves, and I see improvements on AutoCAD, WordPerfect, VisiCalc, MaxThink, Paint, Dartmouth Basic, C, etc. Poser stands out, if only a little (BTW, is there an open source app like it?)
OS' don't count; The idea of an OS was innovative; the rest has been incremental improvement.
It seems that most of the software that defines the modern IT environment consists of elaborations on old ideas, the work of one visionary who may or may not have open sourced the result, or proprietary development which may or may not have been open sourced after its first release.
As for the last ten years, I can think of only Google Earth and Second Life (not for VR—that's old—but for the novel application.) Interesting that they are both VR applications. Does Skype rate?
Java. MySQL. Qt.
None of them are innovative and Java wasn't developed in an open source context. Java is a poorly designed rehash of Pascal, MySQL is just another relational database, Qt is just a kit for building GUIs that have been around (though incrementally enhanced) since the seventies.
Back to the drawing board. Surely there's at least one white crow—some ground-breaking app that was conceived and implemented in open source? I can't think of one, and no one here seems to be able to either, but that doesn't mean none exist.
Does that mean free beer for everyone?
And just because it's called a server, that doesn't mean it has to be backed up. It's not what it's called that matters, it's how it's used.
The assumed environment is one where family members work on their own machines and back up to the Home Server. Backing up the backup seems a tad excessive.
And then, there is the issue of off-site backup...
that's the price to pay for depending on proprietary solutions.
And the open-source replacement for Flash would be...?
I have no love for Flash, but the sky is blue in the world where I live.
Obviously someone who hasn't read the book...
It's not arrogant to present some of your best work as conjectures—a mathematician's term for "A wild-assed guess, but wouldn't it be interesting if it were true?"
Given that one of the implications of Wolfram's work is that you can do a lot of neat stuff with algorithms that are out of scope for conventional mathematics, many on Slashdot should enjoy reading ANKS. Among other things, committing some of his constructions to code is fun.
And an apt signature—given my committing a Nesmanism.
One hopes that "Friederike Range at the University of Vienna" lives at the University of Vienna—with his parents—who subsequently helped him understand the difference between research and parlour tricks. If not, standards at European universities must be a great deal lower than we've been told.
Without any training at all, my dog can recognise other dogs on TV, though she gives a little bark rather than pushing a switch with her paw. I'm going to guess that it has more to do with being a pack animal than any kind of "reasoning ability".
Anyone suspect Friedrike is a member of PITA?
The FOSS system is great - probably the one thing that someone ten years ago would not have predicted.
(Chuckle)
Oh, to be that young again!
Back around the time of the dinosaurs (1969 or so) SDS shipped the OS source code with the hardware. SDS wasn't alone; this was common practice. I don't know how the other guys did it, but SDS had a SIDR (Software Improvement or Difficulty Report) system that gave anyone working on our systems a channel for submitting patches or, on occasion, whole modules for inclusion in the next version. I was a lowly analyst at a remote branch, but a lot of my code ended up in BTM and UTS. We had customers donating drivers for peripherals they needed but that we had not got around to supporting. Hell, one of our clients contributed what may have been the fastest APL implementation of all time.
The point (apologies if that was long-winded) is that FOSS is not a new idea. It was once so common that it didn't have a name until somebody coined the term "shareware". It has been around continuously since the beginning. It's only since the US Government forced IBM to sell its software that the commercial model took hold. Thank goodness it did—can you imagine how crappy PC games if no one was willing to pay for software?