I looked at the gnumeric developpement version and nothing is done to support ODF but everything is done to support Microsoft OpenXML. It's a shame this software was a great one!
Yer, and do you know why they claim that OOXML is easier to work with?
Because they've already done a lot to reverse engineer Microsoft's existing God-awful format, so working with OOXML is easier! What kind of silly logic is that? Not also, that this is an extremely basic example in that that basically does nothing. This has also been used by Microsoft to promote alternative implementations of OOXML that have very rich support ( http://blogs.msdn.com/brian_jones/archive/2007/08/07/iwork-08-supports-the-open-xml-formats.aspx ). Obviously, that's a complete lie:
The.NET platform is now controlled by Microsoft, but, as I understand it, it's more free than Java used to be a while back:
Java is soon to be fully open sourced, and at least there was a full specification if you wanted to create your own version. With.Net, no such luck. What is in the ECMA stuff is exceptionally limited, and will not give you a working, compatible CLR. Indeed, much has had to be reverse engineered.
I've written GTK applications in C#, and it was a very pleasant experience. It allowed me to be productive in writing Linux applications. So just how is that "following Microsoft's latest programming fad"?
Because recreating the.Net framework should not be a requirement for writing GTK applications in a nicer way.
Mono, as it is right now, is a very capable development environment even for Unix-only apps.
I fail to see how recreating a Windows-oriented, Microsoft developed development environment should be needed in order to create a capable environment for Unix/Linux only applications. Would it not have been better to come up with something original, with some new ideas?
it's certainly not slower than KDE (just the opposite in my experience).
GTK, Pango and Gnome performance problems are well known about by an awful lot of people who have used it. It's the reason why Frederico is employed by Novell basically.
And no, KDE's not "pulling away" from gnome. Indeed, from what I've seen, gnome is more popular.
In every survey that there has ever been in the last few years, KDE is more popular. This is over a number of years. Hell, about 70% of OpenSuse users use KDE according to their own survey, and Novell still doesn't want to listen.
And you're complaining that someone is working to bring all the applications developed on the.Net framework, and the.Net development environment itself, to Linux?
WTF is your problem?
Because it's not possible to do that, and it's a fool's errand. All it's doing is following Microsoft's latest programming fad.
How many people do you think would use Linux at ALL if Samba didn't allow communication to Windows boxes? Or what if there was no way to read/write an NTFS partition?
Samba certainly isn't ideal, and neither is Wine. The problem is, there is a massive installed base where it can be used. No so with.Net and Mono at the moment.
Interoperability is key, and the task Miguel has undertaken is a good one. Quit complaining that someone's working to make Linux a more competitive OS.
Interoperability is done on Microsoft's terms. In order to make Linux a 'competitive OS', it has to be offering something unique itself. Following other people is not a good idea.
One cool thing about mono is that they're using MS' strategy right back at em: Embrace and Extend. In some ways, Mono has more features than.NET, and in some cases (Silverlight 1.1) is ahead of Microsoft.
The problem is, they're not embracing and extending anything because they're not doing so from a position of any kind of power or authority. Microsoft's version is the reference version of.Net, owing to the fact that it is what is installed on Windows machines and the installed based of Windows. If it works on Mono then it's a bonus, and if it doesn't work on Mono then it's tough luck. End of story. Being a sheep is never a good idea. Sheep get slaughtered.
That should make quite a few open source lovers cackle with glee more than anything:)
No, because you don't understand how embracing and extending works.
I'm not defending SanDisk, but given that they were dubiously halted from showing a bunch of MP3 players in Germany not too long ago, it's probably not unreasonable for them (and their lawyers) to think "Well, maybe it could work for us as well!":
"Our goal is to resolve these matters by offering the defendants the opportunity to participate in our patent licensing program for card and system technology," said E. Earle Thompson, chief intellectual property counsel at SanDisk, in a statement.
I also find it humorously ironic that if this works, it could result in the US missing out and not being able to get certain products, or at least needlessly paying more for them.
This issue is a whole lot more complex because of Exchange. They're going to need this Outlook replacement to function with Exchange properly, and then to ensure that it has a reliable and working future, they're going to have to come up with an Exchange server replacement with the ability to migrate people off.
Additionally, I would add that because EFI is supposedly defining interfaces (if only it were that simple), Intel has crazy ideas of implementing drivers and shit - in EFI and the hardware! Just think of the bloody hassle we have today with drivers and hardware. Intel is crazy when it comes to these things.
Because EFI is very much proprietary, and the subject of this article is Linux and Open BIOS.
EFI is also pretty broken. It tries to look better than BIOS, but really it isn't. Think of ACPI (Intel brain damage, as Linus Torvalds calls it) which looked good and looked like we'd get some standard interfaces.........and we didn't because hardware was too complex, it had quirks and everybody ended up doing variations on a different theme. EFI is the same, because of course, everybody's intellectual property has to be protected. I mean, we can't just have manufacturers downloading, installing and contributing to a standard Linux or OpenBIOS, because that would be too easy, it would make things work far too well and everyone would have wonderful boot times;-). Maybe a motherboard manufacturer will bite the bullet and implement Linux or OpenBIOS when they realise how much better it will make their hardware, and how much cheaper it is without umpteen updates.
EFI is also an awful lot more complex than BIOS, which adds to the list of things to go wrong in terms of different implementations. At least the BIOS we have today is a boot loader - and it doesn't really pretend to be anything else (hell, you'd be crazy to try anything else with it!). Now think about how many BIOS updates we have for various boards today to fix lots of broken things, and then extrapolate that out........... It's not a pretty picture.
Why can't Linux be more like OS X? If the open-source development model is so great, why did it take Apple a couple of years to do what Linux has failed to do for almost 15 years?
What have Apple managed to achieve with OS X exactly? Their market share isn't exactly fantastic, and this has been going on for twenty odd years now.
I take exception to Moldy binaries being the vendors fault. Its the OS's damn fault. I can write a windows program that worked 15 or more years ago on windows and it still executes just fine today.
With linux thats impossible because distributions don't care about backwards compatibility...
I have games that were released for Linux seven or eight years ago that still work, Motif applications written over a decade ago that still work and there is COBOL code written twenty or thirty years ago that still works. Within the open source world itself there are breakages, but that's to be expected. I'd still take a CUPS printer driver over anything a third-party ships any day of the week, and it means that I never have to muck about installing lots of third-party software.
WTF is with the 30-60 second Bios boot time? It takes 5 seconds to start booting windows on my notebook, my PC is the same.
BS. Sweetheart, the only time Windows ever booted in 5 seconds for me was when I installed a Linux distribution to dual boot and the installer resized the NTFS partition to something much, much, much smaller. That's the only time that phenomenon has ever happened to me, so no, you are not getting 5 second boot times with Windows.
Samsungs rootkit is my favorite:)
Because Samsung wrote shit code, which is pretty much the point of the article. If you install any third-party code on any system you have, you have to accept that people who wrote it might simply be fucking incompetent. Install Zonelarm on Windows and look at the bizarre things that does, not to mention the 75% speed reduction.
I know you hate Linux, but I'm afraid that's no reflection on Linux at all.
Indeed? Well, I don't know to how many CIOs of large companies you have talked, but I have talked to some and ALL OF THEM are asking for that.
That's because you're doing what men do with women. You believe what they actually say, when in reality you should be looking at what they're actually doing and asking yourself why. Interoperability with Microsoft software is impossible to give Novell what they need, and Microsoft are not going to help them. There is no interoperability at all coming out of that deal.
Also look for instance at Gartner's or Forrester's research studies and they will say the same
Gartner and Forrester eh? Well, if you have your own company you should really be basing your company strategy off them.
Again, agree. Now, if you were the CEO of a billion dolar a year company as Novell and your customers were asking you to interoperate with MS products, what will you do?
Because that's not what they're asking for. They're asking for things to work and a completely viable alternative from someone who knows what they're doing. They're not demanding Microsoft interoperability at all, because we have all we're going to get in the open source world and it has to come off the bat of your own work. Why the hell do you think Microsoft is going to help a competitor to interoperate?
Do you really think that "throw away all your investment in IT and switch all you software to open source" would be welcome as an answer?
How do you think they came to be using Microsoft software in the first place? What they want is something that competes with Microsoft software, does a certain amount of interoperability to get the off Microsoft software, something that gives them a serious and full alternative and gives them something to think about. They're not looking for some company like Novell to be a wuss and start trying to run after Microsoft.
Pardon? you do realise that EVERYONE infringes on EVERYONE elses patents. Almost every damn thing immaginable has been patented.
What Novell have done with this deal is do what Microsoft wanted. Admit to their customers and to the corporate world that Linux and open source software infringes on Microsoft's property. You can slice it and dice it all you want, but that's what Novell have done.
Simply signing a patent agreement with Microsoft is no more an admission on Novells part than on Microsofts part regarding who is infridging what
That, however, is not the impression that the people Microsoft have wanted to get to have of the deal. What may or may not actually be a part of the deal is quite irrelevant, and to Novell and others that seems to have gone completely over their heads.
We include schemas in the appendix but it seems that the clients like the 'readability' of the raw XML over other approaches we've tried. I'm wondering what everyone else is doing in the world of XML documentation.
Having as little to do with it as possible. Everybody just grabs any raw XML they can find in order to try and understand it, and they fly by the seat of their pants. Not much you can say will change that.
For four years, I've been covering a lawsuit for Forbes.com, and my early predictions on this case have turned out to be so profoundly wrong that I am writing this mea culpa. What can I say? I grew up Roman Catholic. The habit stays with you........In June 2003, a few months after SCO Group sued IBM over the Linux operating system, I wrote an article that bore the headline: "What SCO Wants, SCO Gets." The article contained some critical stuff about SCO but also warned that SCO stood a chance of winning the lawsuit.........But I still thought it would be foolish to predict how this lawsuit (or any lawsuit) would play out. I even wrote an article called "Revenge of the Nerds," which poked fun at the pack of amateur sleuths who were following the case on a Web site called Groklaw and who claimed to know for sure that SCO was going to lose. Turns out those amateur sleuths were right. Now some of them are writing to me asking how I'd like my crow cooked, and where I'd like it delivered.
If you use Gnome, you'd do well to try Epiphany. Firefox doesn't follow any of the Gnome conventions: it looks completely out of place in a Gnome desktop.
I wonder why that is, because Firefox looks OK on my Windows machine.
Naturally the poster focuses on Linux, but in fact GNOME has become a standard desktop for many Unix vendors.
It counts for very, very little. Those Linux and Unix vendors haven't made too much headway on the desktop, people still complain about Gnome's lack of functionality and people still seem to be talking about KDE 4. Things are the same as they ever were.
GNOME has many flaws, but it's far superior to CDE. IMHO, that's because CDE is a child of politics and bureaucracy, while GNOME grew up organically, with various developers exercising their intelligence, insight, and creativity in order to make it a better product.
Arguably, the former is exactly what Gnome has become. Too many corporate companies pushing different agendas, from Mono to some internet based desktop, and with a usability focus on 'ordinary users' where these users are not defined, nor are they representative of the people actually using Unix/Linux desktops.
I don't get magical VFS access just by including some KDE header file; I have to use the library.
Yes you do. KDE has one library called kdelibs, and IOslaves are always there for you. If you create a menu and toolbar structure for your application, it's the same as everyone else is using. That's called a desktop environment.
Its just the same with GTK+/GNOME. If you decide not to use the libraries (and some "purebred" GTK+ programmer chose to to just that for their programs (say "Thunar") then they are not integrated.
I don't think you understand the concepts of layered programming and code reuse. If you want it, it's there. If you don't want it, it's still there, but it doesn't cost you anything.
While some kinds of preferences make total sense, some do not and too many are generally a bad thing. To paraphrase a wise hacker, those extra preferences are just way for lazy developers to avoid making hard decisions.
Cutting preferences is also an excuse for lazy developers who don't have a development platform underneath them to stop putting features in that every other desktop environment has, in the name of usability;-).
Every desktop environment I have seen can configure screensavers. Every desktop I have seen gives you a simple option to run an application as another user without having to configure anything. I see no reason at all why those things should be cut, and judging from Gnome's Bugzilla, neither do many users.
And that's of course where you're missing the point. GNOME, XFCE and MacOSX attempt to be usable by default.
To attempt to be usable, you have to identify who you are being usable for and identify those users and the people who actually use your desktop, and then identify what they need and how to go about doing it.
Saying that you are doing things and not adding features for the sake of usability, does not make you usable. Evidently, from Gnome's Bugzilla, there are plenty of people who find it less than usable.
The fact that you had to hunt around and make changes to make the desktop simple and sane enough to use means that KDE failed to get it right in the first place.
I went through KDE's first-run wizard once, and then never configured anything fundamental again. If I want to make my life easier every now and again, the power to do certain things is there.
But if that's the case you're an outlier (no offence - rejoice in your point of difference!)
And here we see a perfect example of Gnome's new found disease. Get this. Gnome is a Unix/Linux desktop, and it is used by an awful lot more people who lean towards wanting it to do traditional Unix desktop kinds of things (they expect their middle mouse button to actually do something). The basic, kiddy users that the Gnome developers seem to think exist and actually use their desktop (I've never seen these users defined anywhere) are simply few and far between.
Where's the sense in using a Unix desktop when it doesn't do the traditional kinds of things that Unix desktops have always done, and where it is even less functional and has less options than Windows or OS X and where it is an inferior OS X knock-off? I don't see that being useful, or usable.
Slashdot Mirror
http://blogs.gnome.org/jody/2007/09/10/odf-vs-oox-asking-the-wrong-questions/
Because they've already done a lot to reverse engineer Microsoft's existing God-awful format, so working with OOXML is easier! What kind of silly logic is that? Not also, that this is an extremely basic example in that that basically does nothing. This has also been used by Microsoft to promote alternative implementations of OOXML that have very rich support ( http://blogs.msdn.com/brian_jones/archive/2007/08/07/iwork-08-supports-the-open-xml-formats.aspx ). Obviously, that's a complete lie:
http://blogs.msdn.com/brian_jones/archive/2007/08/15/why-there-s-no-microsoft-in-open-xml.aspx
I fail to see how recreating a Windows-oriented, Microsoft developed development environment should be needed in order to create a capable environment for Unix/Linux only applications. Would it not have been better to come up with something original, with some new ideas?
In every survey that there has ever been in the last few years, KDE is more popular. This is over a number of years. Hell, about 70% of OpenSuse users use KDE according to their own survey, and Novell still doesn't want to listen.
Alas, being the default does not mean popular.
Samba certainly isn't ideal, and neither is Wine. The problem is, there is a massive installed base where it can be used. No so with
Interoperability is done on Microsoft's terms. In order to make Linux a 'competitive OS', it has to be offering something unique itself. Following other people is not a good idea.
No, because you don't understand how embracing and extending works.
I also find it humorously ironic that if this works, it could result in the US missing out and not being able to get certain products, or at least needlessly paying more for them.
This issue is a whole lot more complex because of Exchange. They're going to need this Outlook replacement to function with Exchange properly, and then to ensure that it has a reliable and working future, they're going to have to come up with an Exchange server replacement with the ability to migrate people off.
Additionally, I would add that because EFI is supposedly defining interfaces (if only it were that simple), Intel has crazy ideas of implementing drivers and shit - in EFI and the hardware! Just think of the bloody hassle we have today with drivers and hardware. Intel is crazy when it comes to these things.
Because EFI is very much proprietary, and the subject of this article is Linux and Open BIOS.
;-). Maybe a motherboard manufacturer will bite the bullet and implement Linux or OpenBIOS when they realise how much better it will make their hardware, and how much cheaper it is without umpteen updates.
EFI is also pretty broken. It tries to look better than BIOS, but really it isn't. Think of ACPI (Intel brain damage, as Linus Torvalds calls it) which looked good and looked like we'd get some standard interfaces.........and we didn't because hardware was too complex, it had quirks and everybody ended up doing variations on a different theme. EFI is the same, because of course, everybody's intellectual property has to be protected. I mean, we can't just have manufacturers downloading, installing and contributing to a standard Linux or OpenBIOS, because that would be too easy, it would make things work far too well and everyone would have wonderful boot times
EFI is also an awful lot more complex than BIOS, which adds to the list of things to go wrong in terms of different implementations. At least the BIOS we have today is a boot loader - and it doesn't really pretend to be anything else (hell, you'd be crazy to try anything else with it!). Now think about how many BIOS updates we have for various boards today to fix lots of broken things, and then extrapolate that out........... It's not a pretty picture.
People talk about there being a breakthrough, but no one has ever defined what that is. How will we know when it happens?
BS. Sweetheart, the only time Windows ever booted in 5 seconds for me was when I installed a Linux distribution to dual boot and the installer resized the NTFS partition to something much, much, much smaller. That's the only time that phenomenon has ever happened to me, so no, you are not getting 5 second boot times with Windows.
Because Samsung wrote shit code, which is pretty much the point of the article. If you install any third-party code on any system you have, you have to accept that people who wrote it might simply be fucking incompetent. Install Zonelarm on Windows and look at the bizarre things that does, not to mention the 75% speed reduction.
I know you hate Linux, but I'm afraid that's no reflection on Linux at all.
Gartner and Forrester eh? Well, if you have your own company you should really be basing your company strategy off them.
How do you think they came to be using Microsoft software in the first place? What they want is something that competes with Microsoft software, does a certain amount of interoperability to get the off Microsoft software, something that gives them a serious and full alternative and gives them something to think about. They're not looking for some company like Novell to be a wuss and start trying to run after Microsoft.
That, however, is not the impression that the people Microsoft have wanted to get to have of the deal. What may or may not actually be a part of the deal is quite irrelevant, and to Novell and others that seems to have gone completely over their heads.
You pulled all that off Top, right? ;-)
Arguably, the former is exactly what Gnome has become. Too many corporate companies pushing different agendas, from Mono to some internet based desktop, and with a usability focus on 'ordinary users' where these users are not defined, nor are they representative of the people actually using Unix/Linux desktops.
I don't think you understand the concepts of layered programming and code reuse. If you want it, it's there. If you don't want it, it's still there, but it doesn't cost you anything.
Every desktop environment I have seen can configure screensavers. Every desktop I have seen gives you a simple option to run an application as another user without having to configure anything. I see no reason at all why those things should be cut, and judging from Gnome's Bugzilla, neither do many users.
Saying that you are doing things and not adding features for the sake of usability, does not make you usable. Evidently, from Gnome's Bugzilla, there are plenty of people who find it less than usable.
I went through KDE's first-run wizard once, and then never configured anything fundamental again. If I want to make my life easier every now and again, the power to do certain things is there.
And here we see a perfect example of Gnome's new found disease. Get this. Gnome is a Unix/Linux desktop, and it is used by an awful lot more people who lean towards wanting it to do traditional Unix desktop kinds of things (they expect their middle mouse button to actually do something). The basic, kiddy users that the Gnome developers seem to think exist and actually use their desktop (I've never seen these users defined anywhere) are simply few and far between.
Where's the sense in using a Unix desktop when it doesn't do the traditional kinds of things that Unix desktops have always done, and where it is even less functional and has less options than Windows or OS X and where it is an inferior OS X knock-off? I don't see that being useful, or usable.