As a casual test, I tried opening Mac Word documents starting with version 3.0 on the following apps:
OOo 1.1.4, Windows Office XP, Windows Office 2004, OS X
First result: nothing could read the 3.0 documents, not even Office 2004 for OS X.
Second result: Word 4.0 documents opened more reliably in Office XP than Office 2004.
Third result: OOo was helpless with *all* Mac Word files.
I'm no fan of Microsoft, but they put more work into detecting versions and compensating for idiosyncrasies in their import module than OOo did. It's not perfect, but it's still better than OOo's effort.
And OOo essentially ignoring OS X ports is really, really fucking stupid, even if it means keeping it an X11 app (not a dealbreaker for me if it means free software). NeoOffice is a nice idea but an irresponsible solution when I can get freaking Scribus and FontForge working. For the most part, Mac users don't have problems with PC-created Word docs (clip art, that's a different kettle of fish).
Massachusetts is staring down The Mother Of All batch conversion projects if they expect to make this transition work with their legacy docs. If I were supervising it, I'd have a conversion project running in the background and a mandate that whenever an unconverted MS document is accessed, it get flagged for conversion and put at the top of the stack.
If Massachusetts is actually serious about future compatibility should MS go tits-up, all they have to do is negotiate getting the source code to the Office apps' import libraries. Australia was able to negotiate the entire source code of Windows; this should be considerably easier.
...and use CSS to reposition the sidebar/navbar content below it. Half the point to using CSS for accessibility is to avoid going through navlinks at the beginning of every page. I hear these guys managed it across their site without compromising performance in IE 6 or spectacular hacks (and yes, it was tested in IE, Safari, Firefox, Opera and Konqueror).
For the curious, the left and right navbars are absolutely positioned and the central content has left/right margins which mimic their width, to achieve the same liquid layout.
The HTML4.0 thing is bullshit, plain and simple. Authoring tools like Dreamweaver work better when working within XHTML spec, just lose the XML prolog until The Brave New World of XML-parsing UAs is here and we can stop serving text/html. XHTML1.0 Transitional plays nice with every UA I've tested, from Netscape 4.7 up.
Google's entire tech model, since they were grad students at Dartmouth publishing it as a thesis, is that Google as much as humanly possible, retrieves data indexed in RAM. That's right, in RAM. They buy petabytes of the stuff, and I'll go out on a limb to say their UPSes are top-notch.
No personal computer with a HD can set aside enough memory to carry a live index of all the files, and it would have to be a separate bank of nonvolatile memory to let you shut down the computer.
You thought I was going to say Linux. Seriously, interface isn't what made FF popular. If it was that simple, Opera would have crushed FF a long time ago.
It's customizability. One of Dreamweaver's most competitive features is the ability to write plugins for it in known languages -- JavaScript and XML. Guess what FF plugins are written in.
A product with a locked featureset is going to suffer against a product you can upgrade piece by piece for free. There are people out there who hate this, but they're slowly figuring out they're the minority.
Good luck improving IE 7. I'm a web designer and I welcome the adoption of standards. But even if FF is losing momentum, it's still going to be with us for some time -- or another cross-platform open-source alternative.
Yeah, it would be so much better if we were stuck with sodipodi instead of inkscape.
I use a commercial 3D modeling program called Poser. When version 5 came out, the company released a notoriously buggy piece of crap which came with draconian EULA and copy protection that guaranteed you couldn't reinstall it on a crashed/recovered HD without contacting the company. Speculation was wild that if the company went under (which it was dangerously close to doing) users would be screwed if a generic unlock code wasn't released to the public. Word of mouth sunk sales and upgrades.
What happened? Two things. Their chief commercial content vendor created a free (albeit crude) clone of Poser (to protect their own business). The parent company of Poser's owners fired the CEO, and ordered the offending EULA clauses and the copy protection removed.
We dodged a bullet. Narrowly. The parent company soon went bankrupt, but luckily found a prosperous Japanese 3D software house to sell Poser to. Poser 6 is a more stable product, now featuring subsurface scattering, radiosity, more sophisticated distance blur...
Had there been no competition, Poser might have died with 5.0. And it contains at least two externally licensed modeling technologies which would not have been trivial to blackbox (technically or legally). No one developer at Curious Labs had total claim of the codebase AFAIK, so they couldn't take their football like the Mambo team did. (FYI the clone, DAZ|Studio, doesn't support those features to this day)
Would the upcoming MS Office support XML of any kind if OpenOffice hadn't gained the mindshare it has?
Forking = competition = survival of the fittest. It's the most "free market" capitalistic philosophical aspect of FOSS.
IMHO the new CMS will in all likelihood be backwards compatible to all current instances of Mambo. Folks like you have a simple decision: go with the brand name and none of the core Mambo development team, or the as-yet-unnamed successor with the same exact features, same price tag, and the core development braintrust.
There will always be the risk of forking. OO.o users are up in arms about OO.o 2.0's dependence on Java, which poses a problem for unsupported platforms.
Ahem. I rebuilt our university's library website 3 years ago. The layout is roughly comparable to Slashdot's home page: 2 fixed-width, side-flush columns surrounding a central content section which expands to the browser window's width.
We work within IE's limitations, but we push the envelope where we can. CSS is about graceful degradation, not lowest-common-denominator features.
A site which depends on a central stylesheet loads faster because.css files are cached by browsers. Zen Garden's demonstrating technique, not an acid test for bandwidth.
I can't speak for other designers. We stress test our layouts for largest type size. Also understand that Verdana/Vera Sans are oversized compared to all other screen fonts, and its overuse on websites is contributing to the problem.
When I rebuilt our site, I did two things simultaneously. One, the layouts became CSS instead of tables (modularity of design). Two, the reused content became server-side includes (modularity of content).
Both serve the same goal: modularity = faster, better maintenance. Either by itself is inadequate. CMSes which burp out tables are actually more trouble to maintain in the long run.
IANAL, too. However, section 12 (interoperability) is worded clearly enough. The gist of it goes something like this: If Real reverse engineers Apple DRM to make iTunes AAC play in RealPlayer or convert.ram audio to iTunes AAC, ***but doesn't share or publish the cracked algorithm***, Apple isn't in a position to bitch. Their corporate secrets are being kept, and the reverse engineering is strictly within the context of interoperability. It reads pretty clearly that there's an acknowledgment of the fact that businesses will compete in the same arena and RE each others' formats to do so.
OTOH, if the VLC team does exactly the same thing and continues to distribute source, they're well and truly fucked.
Businesses will use DMCA like a mallet against each other for a while, but the real intent of its DRM context is to kill competition from open source applications. Remember that Unisys was trying to convince people that not only did you need a license to encode compressed LZW GIFs/PDFs/TIFFs, but they were spreading FUD about needing a license to decode that compression as well. No IP lawyer took it seriously. Unfortunately, DRM under DMCA is going to be constitutionally tested within 5 years, sent to a SCOTUS consisting of computer illiterate geezers and Bush appointees. Industry will insist that if DRM can't be constitutionally protected, the turrists have won already.
Seriously, the gist of TFA's conclusion is that Zeta's usefulness will only be proven by porting Linux software to it.
I hate to sound like David Spade, but I would be excited by this because...?
I had an early PowerPC Mac in the late 90s and was excited by the prospect of running BeOS on it... until Be announced that their binaries were platform specific, which essentially meant they'd have to decide on one architecture or another.
As it stands right now, even the reviewer is pointing out that all the useful multimedia software is *nix ports (which I'm betting are not optimized to Zeta's kernel).
Kudos to Be for making a lightweight OS. Unfortunately, at the same time Steve Jobs and Linus Torvalds were figuring out that their respective successes would come from pulling a Microsoft and putting a GUI to a vastly popular, proven CLI environment and getting to keep the multitudes of software already designed for UNIX.
Had Apple gone with Be, I think it would have lasted about three years before going tits-up. Five years of Classic compatibility ensured OS X's survival, and I strongly doubt Apple could have made BeOS and Classic coexist as peacefully without compromising one or both (witness Vista's back-and-forth on evolution v. backwards compatibility).
...finally get my hands on all that Japanese Country music I've been hearing about:
"The Corner Automat Stopped Selling Your Panties Today" "My Ecchi Breaky Heart" "You Took My Heart, My Dog And My Battlesuit" "She Said I Was Her First, But The Tentacle Marks Don't Lie" "I've Been Drowning In Sake Since Your Webcast Bukkake"
Dreamweaver does nothing of the sort to stylesheets... unless you're writing crap with syntax-based hacks in it (e.g. badly formed comments).
Assuming you write normal CSS, DW handles it like it handles HTML: a language with a particular syntax and structure.
About the only thing DWMX doesn't do well with CSS is handle nested sheets (supposedly fixed in MX04). Our site redesign relies on one sheet to manage CSS menus, and the core sheet imported by the pages imports the menu.css. This resulted in DW's Design Mode slowing to a crawl and refusing to display anything below the scroll area. We changed the menu.css' @import url to an absolute URL (which DW can't understand) and the problem was fixed.
But the only time I've ever seen DW mangle a sheet was when the sheet's code used 'hide from browser X' malformed comment hacks, typically the ones aimed at IE 5 and older versions of Opera. Can you point to posts on css-discuss supporting your position?
The grandparent poster never implied tables were acceptable formatting.
Production studios continued using Beta for quite a while, even startups after the "war" ended. There was a measurable technical superiority here. Your post conveniently ignores the fact that Sony wanted a lot of money to license Betamax as a format from vendors, and JVC remembered how ineffective this was for their parent corporation fifty years before with FM radio patents.
Sony has a history of losing battles not because their technology is inferior, but because they only value outsiders by what kind of revenue stream they might represent. They're the last bastion of Japanese xenophobic imperialism, and it shows.
Contrary to what ppl here are saying IMAX doesn't use liquid crystal shutter glasses everywhere. The 3D flick on the International Space Station they show at the National Air and Space Museum in DC hands out polarized sunglasses.
BION this is what most 50s 3D flicks used, not anaglyphic (red/green) glasses.
The trouble is that the polarized approach only works well on genuine silver screens. I saw "Parasite 3D" with Demi Moore when it came out, and the result of cineplexes projecting polarized 3D films on regular cheap matte screens is terrible headaches in the viewers.
Anaglyph's only advantage is that it can be projected on any surface, television included. The color quality suffers terribly, though.
Slashdot Mirror
As a casual test, I tried opening Mac Word documents starting with version 3.0 on the following apps:
OOo 1.1.4, Windows
Office XP, Windows
Office 2004, OS X
First result: nothing could read the 3.0 documents, not even Office 2004 for OS X.
Second result: Word 4.0 documents opened more reliably in Office XP than Office 2004.
Third result: OOo was helpless with *all* Mac Word files.
I'm no fan of Microsoft, but they put more work into detecting versions and compensating for idiosyncrasies in their import module than OOo did. It's not perfect, but it's still better than OOo's effort.
And OOo essentially ignoring OS X ports is really, really fucking stupid, even if it means keeping it an X11 app (not a dealbreaker for me if it means free software). NeoOffice is a nice idea but an irresponsible solution when I can get freaking Scribus and FontForge working. For the most part, Mac users don't have problems with PC-created Word docs (clip art, that's a different kettle of fish).
Massachusetts is staring down The Mother Of All batch conversion projects if they expect to make this transition work with their legacy docs. If I were supervising it, I'd have a conversion project running in the background and a mandate that whenever an unconverted MS document is accessed, it get flagged for conversion and put at the top of the stack.
If Massachusetts is actually serious about future compatibility should MS go tits-up, all they have to do is negotiate getting the source code to the Office apps' import libraries. Australia was able to negotiate the entire source code of Windows; this should be considerably easier.
...and use CSS to reposition the sidebar/navbar content below it. Half the point to using CSS for accessibility is to avoid going through navlinks at the beginning of every page. I hear these guys managed it across their site without compromising performance in IE 6 or spectacular hacks (and yes, it was tested in IE, Safari, Firefox, Opera and Konqueror).
For the curious, the left and right navbars are absolutely positioned and the central content has left/right margins which mimic their width, to achieve the same liquid layout.
The HTML4.0 thing is bullshit, plain and simple. Authoring tools like Dreamweaver work better when working within XHTML spec, just lose the XML prolog until The Brave New World of XML-parsing UAs is here and we can stop serving text/html. XHTML1.0 Transitional plays nice with every UA I've tested, from Netscape 4.7 up.
Where is Zonk and what have you done with him??!?!!11cranberries!
What is the sound of one hand slapping a forehead?
Google's entire tech model, since they were grad students at Dartmouth publishing it as a thesis, is that Google as much as humanly possible, retrieves data indexed in RAM. That's right, in RAM. They buy petabytes of the stuff, and I'll go out on a limb to say their UPSes are top-notch.
No personal computer with a HD can set aside enough memory to carry a live index of all the files, and it would have to be a separate bank of nonvolatile memory to let you shut down the computer.
You thought I was going to say Linux. Seriously, interface isn't what made FF popular. If it was that simple, Opera would have crushed FF a long time ago.
It's customizability. One of Dreamweaver's most competitive features is the ability to write plugins for it in known languages -- JavaScript and XML. Guess what FF plugins are written in.
A product with a locked featureset is going to suffer against a product you can upgrade piece by piece for free. There are people out there who hate this, but they're slowly figuring out they're the minority.
Good luck improving IE 7. I'm a web designer and I welcome the adoption of standards. But even if FF is losing momentum, it's still going to be with us for some time -- or another cross-platform open-source alternative.
Productivity:
OpenOffice 1.1.4 | jEdit 4.2 | Nvu 1.0 | PDFCreator 0.8Graphics:
GIMP | Inkscape | Blender | POV-RayMedia:
VLC | Audacity | JazzWareInternet:
Gaim | Firefox | Thunderbird | HTTrack | TightVNC | 7ZipSurvival Kit:
BurnAtOnce | Darik's Boot and NukeDevelopment:
Eclipse | Dev C++ | Cygwin | Bochs...so I can get my monthly sponsorship to TotalZombo.com.
Yeah, it would be so much better if we were stuck with sodipodi instead of inkscape.
I use a commercial 3D modeling program called Poser. When version 5 came out, the company released a notoriously buggy piece of crap which came with draconian EULA and copy protection that guaranteed you couldn't reinstall it on a crashed/recovered HD without contacting the company. Speculation was wild that if the company went under (which it was dangerously close to doing) users would be screwed if a generic unlock code wasn't released to the public. Word of mouth sunk sales and upgrades.
What happened? Two things. Their chief commercial content vendor created a free (albeit crude) clone of Poser (to protect their own business). The parent company of Poser's owners fired the CEO, and ordered the offending EULA clauses and the copy protection removed.
We dodged a bullet. Narrowly. The parent company soon went bankrupt, but luckily found a prosperous Japanese 3D software house to sell Poser to. Poser 6 is a more stable product, now featuring subsurface scattering, radiosity, more sophisticated distance blur...
Had there been no competition, Poser might have died with 5.0. And it contains at least two externally licensed modeling technologies which would not have been trivial to blackbox (technically or legally). No one developer at Curious Labs had total claim of the codebase AFAIK, so they couldn't take their football like the Mambo team did. (FYI the clone, DAZ|Studio, doesn't support those features to this day)
Would the upcoming MS Office support XML of any kind if OpenOffice hadn't gained the mindshare it has?
Forking = competition = survival of the fittest. It's the most "free market" capitalistic philosophical aspect of FOSS.
IMHO the new CMS will in all likelihood be backwards compatible to all current instances of Mambo. Folks like you have a simple decision: go with the brand name and none of the core Mambo development team, or the as-yet-unnamed successor with the same exact features, same price tag, and the core development braintrust.
There will always be the risk of forking. OO.o users are up in arms about OO.o 2.0's dependence on Java, which poses a problem for unsupported platforms.
I have a Polaroid of what the burglar did with my toothbrush that says different.
Kneel before ZOTOB!
And then it's gonna be the BEST PROM EVER!
Watch a movie of what happens to runaway fluids in zerogee and how astronauts usually "catch" them. There's your disincentive right there.
Schaedenfreude much?
Ahem. I rebuilt our university's library website 3 years ago. The layout is roughly comparable to Slashdot's home page: 2 fixed-width, side-flush columns surrounding a central content section which expands to the browser window's width.
When I rebuilt our site, I did two things simultaneously. One, the layouts became CSS instead of tables (modularity of design). Two, the reused content became server-side includes (modularity of content).
Both serve the same goal: modularity = faster, better maintenance. Either by itself is inadequate. CMSes which burp out tables are actually more trouble to maintain in the long run.
Trust me on this.
IANAL, too. However, section 12 (interoperability) is worded clearly enough. The gist of it goes something like this: If Real reverse engineers Apple DRM to make iTunes AAC play in RealPlayer or convert .ram audio to iTunes AAC, ***but doesn't share or publish the cracked algorithm***, Apple isn't in a position to bitch. Their corporate secrets are being kept, and the reverse engineering is strictly within the context of interoperability. It reads pretty clearly that there's an acknowledgment of the fact that businesses will compete in the same arena and RE each others' formats to do so.
OTOH, if the VLC team does exactly the same thing and continues to distribute source, they're well and truly fucked.
Businesses will use DMCA like a mallet against each other for a while, but the real intent of its DRM context is to kill competition from open source applications. Remember that Unisys was trying to convince people that not only did you need a license to encode compressed LZW GIFs/PDFs/TIFFs, but they were spreading FUD about needing a license to decode that compression as well. No IP lawyer took it seriously. Unfortunately, DRM under DMCA is going to be constitutionally tested within 5 years, sent to a SCOTUS consisting of computer illiterate geezers and Bush appointees. Industry will insist that if DRM can't be constitutionally protected, the turrists have won already.
...on Amigas.
Seriously, the gist of TFA's conclusion is that Zeta's usefulness will only be proven by porting Linux software to it.
I hate to sound like David Spade, but I would be excited by this because...?
I had an early PowerPC Mac in the late 90s and was excited by the prospect of running BeOS on it... until Be announced that their binaries were platform specific, which essentially meant they'd have to decide on one architecture or another.
As it stands right now, even the reviewer is pointing out that all the useful multimedia software is *nix ports (which I'm betting are not optimized to Zeta's kernel).
Kudos to Be for making a lightweight OS. Unfortunately, at the same time Steve Jobs and Linus Torvalds were figuring out that their respective successes would come from pulling a Microsoft and putting a GUI to a vastly popular, proven CLI environment and getting to keep the multitudes of software already designed for UNIX.
Had Apple gone with Be, I think it would have lasted about three years before going tits-up. Five years of Classic compatibility ensured OS X's survival, and I strongly doubt Apple could have made BeOS and Classic coexist as peacefully without compromising one or both (witness Vista's back-and-forth on evolution v. backwards compatibility).
...finally get my hands on all that Japanese Country music I've been hearing about:
"The Corner Automat Stopped Selling Your Panties Today"
"My Ecchi Breaky Heart"
"You Took My Heart, My Dog And My Battlesuit"
"She Said I Was Her First, But The Tentacle Marks Don't Lie"
"I've Been Drowning In Sake Since Your Webcast Bukkake"
Will it run Virtual PC?
Universal
Frequency
Identification
Access.
Dreamweaver does nothing of the sort to stylesheets... unless you're writing crap with syntax-based hacks in it (e.g. badly formed comments).
Assuming you write normal CSS, DW handles it like it handles HTML: a language with a particular syntax and structure.
About the only thing DWMX doesn't do well with CSS is handle nested sheets (supposedly fixed in MX04). Our site redesign relies on one sheet to manage CSS menus, and the core sheet imported by the pages imports the menu.css. This resulted in DW's Design Mode slowing to a crawl and refusing to display anything below the scroll area. We changed the menu.css' @import url to an absolute URL (which DW can't understand) and the problem was fixed.
But the only time I've ever seen DW mangle a sheet was when the sheet's code used 'hide from browser X' malformed comment hacks, typically the ones aimed at IE 5 and older versions of Opera. Can you point to posts on css-discuss supporting your position?
The grandparent poster never implied tables were acceptable formatting.
Production studios continued using Beta for quite a while, even startups after the "war" ended. There was a measurable technical superiority here. Your post conveniently ignores the fact that Sony wanted a lot of money to license Betamax as a format from vendors, and JVC remembered how ineffective this was for their parent corporation fifty years before with FM radio patents. Sony has a history of losing battles not because their technology is inferior, but because they only value outsiders by what kind of revenue stream they might represent. They're the last bastion of Japanese xenophobic imperialism, and it shows.
Check out this entry. Seems pretty stable.
Contrary to what ppl here are saying IMAX doesn't use liquid crystal shutter glasses everywhere. The 3D flick on the International Space Station they show at the National Air and Space Museum in DC hands out polarized sunglasses. BION this is what most 50s 3D flicks used, not anaglyphic (red/green) glasses. The trouble is that the polarized approach only works well on genuine silver screens. I saw "Parasite 3D" with Demi Moore when it came out, and the result of cineplexes projecting polarized 3D films on regular cheap matte screens is terrible headaches in the viewers. Anaglyph's only advantage is that it can be projected on any surface, television included. The color quality suffers terribly, though.