You know, the Kooky OSS Klub is such an awesome psychological case study that it's almost too perfect. People really do see only what they wish to see.
As opposed to the Fruity Mac Fanboi Klub? Hello Pot? This is kettle calling.
The Grub bootloader is meant to work on things like serial terminals if necessary. Fancy graphics that make Fruity Mac Fanbois drool on themselves would tend to complicate things. They aren't absolutely precluded but it would make a fairly small piece of code into a really grotty large piece of code. Since Apple's bootloader only has to support Apple's hardware, they can make it as fancy as they want and still keep the number of use cases to a minimum.
Before hurling insults at OSS users and developers, how about you grow half a clue? Incidentally, judging from the amount of OSS code in OS X it would seem that Apple has more of a clue about this than you do.
Speaking as a sysadmin, there is no such thing as ONLY a rootkit. That is why I will not spend money on Sony products until I see a more acceptable response to the issue. Making the execs involved run through the streets of Tokyo with Badges of Shame would be a good start.
This whole article and topic has been about trust. Sony's behaivor means *I* don't trust them enough to have their crap on my network.
So...the execs want to push a product back to 'get it right', but the employees themselves now wish to just throw it into production, quality be damned
I'm no fan of MS either but I think that statement unfair to their developers at least. I bet quite a few of them are frustrated because factors outside of their control often means they have to build things that suck. Like most of us, I think they want to make things that are cool, work well, and announce to the world how clever they are. It certainly has worked in Google's favor and led to the infamous chair-throwing.
Middle management types especially forget that the really talented ones aren't motivated solely by money. And MS these days seems to be infested with them. If any of their developers are wanting to just "throw it out there and quality be damned" then it is fatigue and despair talking. MS has plenty of good people working for them. Good people take pride in their work. The problem seems to be that MS also has an aristocracy of parasitic middle managers or maybe just a corp of yes-men at the very top. Whatever it is, those good developers don't have good leadership.
2. Is this related to ATI's continous botching of the Linux driver?
Botching of the Linux driver? Hell, the Windows drivers aren't so hot either. My workplace bought a bunch of machines with ATI cards in them last summer. We've had nothing but instability issues especially in the labs running duel head machines. Updated drivers, new firmware, flash the motherboards, nothing helps. We've replaced some of those cards with NVidia cards and lo and behold! The machines suddenly aren't flaky anymore.
The hardware in ATI's cards may well be killer. It may even be superior to NVidia's in every possible way. But their crap drivers mean I won't touch them with a 20,000 foot pole.
There have to be circumstances in which it is OK to break backward compatibility. FOSS as a whole may be an extreme but then so is Windows. A lot of the the problem MS is having is that they can't break backward compatibility and this forces some fixes to problems to be so long and involuted that they're problem sources themselves. For instance, Windows 95 contained special code that allowed the popular DOS based (at the time) Sim City to run. The NT printing subsystem had special code that allowed a certain model of Epson color ribbon printer to work correctly; it was popular in business at the time and HAD to be supported. It couldn't be removed easily from the printing system later because it touched one hell of a lot of the code. 99.999% of those printers have been retired or died by now. I can tell you that to this day one of my biggest irritations with Windows is stuck print queues and hosed printers. Maybe some of that crap is still in there. Who knows?
You eventually wind up with an unmaintainable mass of compatibility hack on top of compatibility hack because new features have to be supported without disturbing the rickety structures already in place. And it gets harder and harder to make major changes. There is a reason why BeOS' mantra was "No More Cruft!".
Apple handled this issue pretty well. OS 9 was a hopeless mess. There was no way things like protected memory, pre-emptive multitasking, bit/endian cleanliness, and multi-architecture capability were ever going to be added to it in a reasonable way in a reasonable amount of time. So a few years before OS X came out, they encouraged all new development be done against the Carbon API. The Carbon API and libraries were designed to be moved at least to OS X easily. Carbon insured that a sizable amount of the Macintosh application base would Just Run on OS X. For what wasn't developed against Carbon, they provided the Classic virtual machine. Classic was a source of various sorts of pain but between Carbon and Classic, most apps continued to run without disruption. There was a residue of things that either wouldn't run or wouldn't run well. Anything in Classic that relies on a fileshare for instance like Star Reader K-5 software is pretty painful to deal with. But Apple could not move forward and provide features people wanted without shaking lose from moldering mid eighties tech. Apple absolutely and unavoidably had to break some backward compatibility.
Even MS broke a few things (games mostly) transistioning from the Win9x base to the NT base operating systems. It had to be done. And here MS is again with decisions to make: make feature X clean and maintainable or make it backward compatible. I wouldn't be surprised if it isn't a major factor delaying Vista.
That you're still calling it NeoOffice/J shows you're using an older version of NeoOffice. They've dropped the "/J" and are just calling it NeoOffice. They recently released NeoOffice 1.2. The major change in it is that is uses JRE 1.4 instead of JRE 1.3. JRE 1.4 uses Cocoa to draw widgets where as 1.3 used or mostly used Carbon. The recent release is slightly faster on startup and quite a bit faster in use as they removed a lot of reliability hacks that were needed when they were using JRE 1.3. Menus and widgets in particular are quite a bit improved.
I think the recent release of NeoOffice will still irritate you but maybe not as badly.
(And how long until someone builds a FOSS PC-based system that is so inexpensive that MS can't hope to compete? I have a year-and-a-half-old D-Link Media Server, which is at heart an embedded Linux system, and it works just fine for anything I need, using my home PC network to store media and streaming it on my television).
MS is trying very hard to become the defacto DRM standard. iTunes seems to be monkeywrenching that a bit for now but there is still plenty of opportunity for them to do that, especially in video. Once MS gets all cozy-cozy with the MPAA, just how is the manufacturer of that Linux based media box going to get DRM tech licenses to play that Hollywood content? If it were just a matter a price and technology then no MS wouldn't be able to compete. They'll play dirty with lawyers, lobbyists, sooper-sekrit WMP DRM; it'll most likely work too.
The issue becomes this: If you bought a Mac a few years back, with Say 10.1, you have to either ration yourself, or pay the $100 for every point-release.
Operating systems aren't ends in and of themselves. You just need them to run apps. Features or not, if your OS X install is running acceptably and all the apps you want to run are supported then there is very little reason to shell out for a new iteration of OS X. As far as apps go OS X 10.0.x-10.2.8 is the first epoch of OS X and it lasted about three years. Think of it as Apple's Windows NT.
Many current apps won't run without at least OS X 10.3. This is even true of OSS apps. This makes 10.3 the first must purchase rev of the os. I've seen only one app that requires 10.4 and that is the current version of the FirstClass groupware server. For the most part, if it will run on 10.4 then it will run on 10.3. There doesn't seem to be enough of this going on to make 10.4 an absolute must have. 10.3 is roughly analogous to Windows 2000 and 10.4 roughly corresponds to XP as far as running applications go.
What all of this amounts to is that it is only really necessary to buy about every third release of OS X which happens every 3-4 years. Or whenever your security updates cut off if your apps aren't being updated.
>> I have no idea what you are talking about 'losing its flexibility' can you give me some examples?
MiniDisc would be one. Sony's idea of an "MP3 Player" was software that transcodes Atrac to MP3 in realtime for an MD player. In its time MiniDisc was a nicely engineered format. The physical media could hold quite a lot and the Atrac codecs weren't bad at all. But Sony was so petrified of piracy that they stymied the obvious PC applications. MD never succeeded in being more than a niche technology.
"MD drives" should have been out in the mid nineties. If Sony weren't totally myopic on the subject of piracy there never would have been SD and Zip disks, at least not successful ones. They also could have gotten one hell of a lot of the money that went to CD burners and blanks. Of course flash tech would have supplanted it too but it would have been a hell of a run. As it is, the market chose more flexible technologies.
I only knew one person who owned an MD player. He liked it but when technology moved on he did too.
Stephen R. Donaldson wrote the "Gap Series". At one part of the story, the "Data First" of a pirate vessel put a virus in the firmware of one of the pieces of hardware controlling the ship. Even if the ship's computer was reloaded from known good stores, the virus would re-infect the computer. The virus was rigged to totally wipe the ship's computers if a password wasn't entered at specified intervals. Since you couldn't navigate or operate equipment without the computers, this was effective extortion. Billions of miles from home, there was simply no getting back without functional computers.
The cure was to install known good hardware (itself tricky considering the circumstances) and to reload the ship's computer. The story also featured a kind of WORM device called a "datacore" that every ship had to carry by law. It was a combination flight-recorder and criminal evidence accumulator. Come to think of it, many IT issues were dealt with pretty well in this series. It's worth checking out. The IT issues are essential in certain parts of the story but they aren't the main point.
If in addition to being authoritarian, your higher-ups are stupid as well then do EVERYTHING EXACTLY like they tell you do to it. Document thoroughly and always be sure lines such as "TPS reports filed in quadruplicate as per J. Bossly's policy expressed in policy meeting of 3-2-06". Don't complain or whinge in this documentation. Simply make it clear that you were doing as you were told and who told you do it. It may not help but if a total asshole is making a mess of your department then chances are he's pissing off a bigger fish than he is. Hand those bigger fish every weapon they can use. You'll be fine because you were doing as your management instructed.
Also, keep whinging to co-workers to a minimum or non-existent. Smile brightly and act as though things are just peachy. Don't hand others weapons to use on YOU.
If none of this helps start quietly lining up another job; preferably at a smaller organization. Most management tomfoolery is a function of bureaucracy and bureaucracy is a function of size. Unless you yourself have pull then there is very little you can do when the management gets cute ideas.
J. Random FOSS developer isn't going to win patentnuclear warfare against MS. If KOffice IS superspiffy and MS copies features then I believe it would be more feasible to make sure the world knows that MS didn't invent those spiffy features.
It's not as good as OO.org at opening word docs, but I just tried one someone emailed me and it opened up fine and I could get at the content.
Even better, they're standardizing on the OpenDocument format. Hopefully, the more folks use opendocument the fewer issues exchanging files between different office apps.
If you don't mind having both OOO and Koffice installed then just use OOO to convert to OpenDocument if Koffice is your preferred suite. I've even seen scripts that use OOO as a batch converter.
Prior to the commoditization of computing we had the 5 Biggest Lies:
1. The check is in the Mail. 2. Some of our best friends are jewish. 3. Hi! I'm from the goverment and I'm here to help you. 4. It's only a cold sore. 5. I promise. I won't cum in your mouth.
Having worked in IT for a while I can see that the list needs an addition.
6. The latest version will solve all your problems.
Kword can import PDFs with embedded text and graphics; PDFs that are basically just images come in a image and would have to be OCRed first. What you wind up with doesn't preserve the layout very well but you do have a starting point for making a different version of the document. flpsed will let overlay text on a postscript file (PDFs can be easily converted to postscript) but won't let you alter existing text. You can then turn that altered postscript back into a PDF.
PDF is postscript with some markup and indexing. It's good for printers but isn't really designed to be edited. Even the full version of Acrobat is very limited in what manipulations can be done on a PDF.
So, while the current incarnation may seem ok, things are only a few steps from being really bad and invasive. Couple this with the DMCA, and half the things we take for granted with computers now could be taken away, and it will be illegal to 'break' things to get those abilities back.
Self-appointed self-righteous shills will come crawling out of the woodwork when getting around those restrictions is discussed. They'll castigate us most severely for having the temerity to tinker with our own property. When they use the phrase "business model", light will burst forth from the heavens and a chorus of angels will sing "aaaaaaaaaaaaah! AAAAAAAH! AHHHHHHHHHH! AHHHHHHHHH! AHHHHHHHHHH!" Even though there won't be any real choice at that point we'll hear things like, "If you didn't like the terms then you shouldn't have bought the device/software/widget."
I will use my own property in any way I see fit. I don't care how many politicians have been bought. I don't care how many times the phrase "business model" is dropped as though that is a definitive clincher. I most certainly am not going to argue about it.
How about holding your nose for a couple of election cycles and giving your fellow Republicans a wake-up call? I know a few conservative people who longer call themselves Republican. If the Republicans could kick their addiction to that reliable religious demographic and...oh I don't know... start actually espousing conservative ideals again then my conservative family and friends would return to them.
I can't help but notice that the Democrats today look a hell of a lot like the Republicans did 30 or 40 years ago. It is a side effect of the "Republicans-lite" strategy they seem to be using these days. When you have Rush Limbaugh decrying fiscal-conservatism as a Liberal value then you know that your party is in serious need of an attitude adjustment.
I suspect that once again more is being read into Google's actions than what they are really going to do. I recall their was quite a bit of speculation and excitement when Google and Sun announced a joint project. It turned out to be nothing more than an offer to install Google Toolbar when Java is installed on Windows. It is a good move for Google but nothing to write home about.
As long as speculation is allowed, perhaps they are going to release some sort of "Safe Browsing" system. If it were something like a VMPlayer image then it would require very little effort on end users' parts. A Google-branded replacement for VMware's "Browsing Appliance" is what I'm thinking of.
Even that is probably far more exotic than what they are really up to. Another possibility is a set of packages that easily installs on Ubuntu that gives quick access to things like GMail and perhaps a browser toolbar. Ubuntu probably has a enough mindshare that the minimum effort those packages would take would yield a decent return.
Whatever it is, I doubt it will be mind-blowingly fantastic or any sort of stick in MS' eye.
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You know, the Kooky OSS Klub is such an awesome psychological case study that it's almost too perfect. People really do see only what they wish to see.
As opposed to the Fruity Mac Fanboi Klub? Hello Pot? This is kettle calling.
The Grub bootloader is meant to work on things like serial terminals if necessary. Fancy graphics that make Fruity Mac Fanbois drool on themselves would tend to complicate things. They aren't absolutely precluded but it would make a fairly small piece of code into a really grotty large piece of code. Since Apple's bootloader only has to support Apple's hardware, they can make it as fancy as they want and still keep the number of use cases to a minimum.
Before hurling insults at OSS users and developers, how about you grow half a clue? Incidentally, judging from the amount of OSS code in OS X it would seem that Apple has more of a clue about this than you do.
At least we can demand the source for the rootkit. After all budding blackhats need something to learn from too.
It was ONLY a rootkit.
Speaking as a sysadmin, there is no such thing as ONLY a rootkit. That is why I will not spend money on Sony products until I see a more acceptable response to the issue. Making the execs involved run through the streets of Tokyo with Badges of Shame would be a good start.
This whole article and topic has been about trust. Sony's behaivor means *I* don't trust them enough to have their crap on my network.
I'm glad I already drank my coffee. I'dve sprayed it all over my monitor.
So...the execs want to push a product back to 'get it right', but the employees themselves now wish to just throw it into production, quality be damned
I'm no fan of MS either but I think that statement unfair to their developers at least. I bet quite a few of them are frustrated because factors outside of their control often means they have to build things that suck. Like most of us, I think they want to make things that are cool, work well, and announce to the world how clever they are. It certainly has worked in Google's favor and led to the infamous chair-throwing.
Middle management types especially forget that the really talented ones aren't motivated solely by money. And MS these days seems to be infested with them. If any of their developers are wanting to just "throw it out there and quality be damned" then it is fatigue and despair talking. MS has plenty of good people working for them. Good people take pride in their work. The problem seems to be that MS also has an aristocracy of parasitic middle managers or maybe just a corp of yes-men at the very top. Whatever it is, those good developers don't have good leadership.
2. Is this related to ATI's continous botching of the Linux driver?
Botching of the Linux driver? Hell, the Windows drivers aren't so hot either. My workplace bought a bunch of machines with ATI cards in them last summer. We've had nothing but instability issues especially in the labs running duel head machines. Updated drivers, new firmware, flash the motherboards, nothing helps. We've replaced some of those cards with NVidia cards and lo and behold! The machines suddenly aren't flaky anymore.
The hardware in ATI's cards may well be killer. It may even be superior to NVidia's in every possible way. But their crap drivers mean I won't touch them with a 20,000 foot pole.
There have to be circumstances in which it is OK to break backward compatibility. FOSS as a whole may be an extreme but then so is Windows. A lot of the the problem MS is having is that they can't break backward compatibility and this forces some fixes to problems to be so long and involuted that they're problem sources themselves. For instance, Windows 95 contained special code that allowed the popular DOS based (at the time) Sim City to run. The NT printing subsystem had special code that allowed a certain model of Epson color ribbon printer to work correctly; it was popular in business at the time and HAD to be supported. It couldn't be removed easily from the printing system later because it touched one hell of a lot of the code. 99.999% of those printers have been retired or died by now. I can tell you that to this day one of my biggest irritations with Windows is stuck print queues and hosed printers. Maybe some of that crap is still in there. Who knows?
You eventually wind up with an unmaintainable mass of compatibility hack on top of compatibility hack because new features have to be supported without disturbing the rickety structures already in place. And it gets harder and harder to make major changes. There is a reason why BeOS' mantra was "No More Cruft!".
Apple handled this issue pretty well. OS 9 was a hopeless mess. There was no way things like protected memory, pre-emptive multitasking, bit/endian cleanliness, and multi-architecture capability were ever going to be added to it in a reasonable way in a reasonable amount of time. So a few years before OS X came out, they encouraged all new development be done against the Carbon API. The Carbon API and libraries were designed to be moved at least to OS X easily. Carbon insured that a sizable amount of the Macintosh application base would Just Run on OS X. For what wasn't developed against Carbon, they provided the Classic virtual machine. Classic was a source of various sorts of pain but between Carbon and Classic, most apps continued to run without disruption. There was a residue of things that either wouldn't run or wouldn't run well. Anything in Classic that relies on a fileshare for instance like Star Reader K-5 software is pretty painful to deal with. But Apple could not move forward and provide features people wanted without shaking lose from moldering mid eighties tech. Apple absolutely and unavoidably had to break some backward compatibility.
Even MS broke a few things (games mostly) transistioning from the Win9x base to the NT base operating systems. It had to be done. And here MS is again with decisions to make: make feature X clean and maintainable or make it backward compatible. I wouldn't be surprised if it isn't a major factor delaying Vista.
It was a joke for crying out loud.
That you're still calling it NeoOffice/J shows you're using an older version of NeoOffice. They've dropped the "/J" and are just calling it NeoOffice. They recently released NeoOffice 1.2. The major change in it is that is uses JRE 1.4 instead of JRE 1.3. JRE 1.4 uses Cocoa to draw widgets where as 1.3 used or mostly used Carbon. The recent release is slightly faster on startup and quite a bit faster in use as they removed a lot of reliability hacks that were needed when they were using JRE 1.3. Menus and widgets in particular are quite a bit improved.
I think the recent release of NeoOffice will still irritate you but maybe not as badly.
(And how long until someone builds a FOSS PC-based system that is so inexpensive that MS can't hope to compete? I have a year-and-a-half-old D-Link Media Server, which is at heart an embedded Linux system, and it works just fine for anything I need, using my home PC network to store media and streaming it on my television).
MS is trying very hard to become the defacto DRM standard. iTunes seems to be monkeywrenching that a bit for now but there is still plenty of opportunity for them to do that, especially in video. Once MS gets all cozy-cozy with the MPAA, just how is the manufacturer of that Linux based media box going to get DRM tech licenses to play that Hollywood content? If it were just a matter a price and technology then no MS wouldn't be able to compete. They'll play dirty with lawyers, lobbyists, sooper-sekrit WMP DRM; it'll most likely work too.
The issue becomes this: If you bought a Mac a few years back, with Say 10.1, you have to either ration yourself, or pay the $100 for every point-release.
Operating systems aren't ends in and of themselves. You just need them to run apps. Features or not, if your OS X install is running acceptably and all the apps you want to run are supported then there is very little reason to shell out for a new iteration of OS X. As far as apps go OS X 10.0.x-10.2.8 is the first epoch of OS X and it lasted about three years. Think of it as Apple's Windows NT.
Many current apps won't run without at least OS X 10.3. This is even true of OSS apps. This makes 10.3 the first must purchase rev of the os. I've seen only one app that requires 10.4 and that is the current version of the FirstClass groupware server. For the most part, if it will run on 10.4 then it will run on 10.3. There doesn't seem to be enough of this going on to make 10.4 an absolute must have. 10.3 is roughly analogous to Windows 2000 and 10.4 roughly corresponds to XP as far as running applications go.
What all of this amounts to is that it is only really necessary to buy about every third release of OS X which happens every 3-4 years. Or whenever your security updates cut off if your apps aren't being updated.
So what was the design goal for WindowsME? Give the source code to 1000 monkeys, wait a year, then see what they came up with? :/
Don't you think that is unfair to monkeys?
>> I have no idea what you are talking about 'losing its flexibility' can you give me some examples?
MiniDisc would be one. Sony's idea of an "MP3 Player" was software that transcodes Atrac to MP3 in realtime for an MD player. In its time MiniDisc was a nicely engineered format. The physical media could hold quite a lot and the Atrac codecs weren't bad at all. But Sony was so petrified of piracy that they stymied the obvious PC applications. MD never succeeded in being more than a niche technology.
"MD drives" should have been out in the mid nineties. If Sony weren't totally myopic on the subject of piracy there never would have been SD and Zip disks, at least not successful ones. They also could have gotten one hell of a lot of the money that went to CD burners and blanks. Of course flash tech would have supplanted it too but it would have been a hell of a run. As it is, the market chose more flexible technologies.
I only knew one person who owned an MD player. He liked it but when technology moved on he did too.
In that I write computer programs, yes. I'm also an engineer. A real engineer, not a "software engineer".
If you actually have to go out of your way to point out your dick size.....
If I had mod points....
Stephen R. Donaldson wrote the "Gap Series". At one part of the story, the "Data First" of a pirate vessel put a virus in the firmware of one of the pieces of hardware controlling the ship. Even if the ship's computer was reloaded from known good stores, the virus would re-infect the computer. The virus was rigged to totally wipe the ship's computers if a password wasn't entered at specified intervals. Since you couldn't navigate or operate equipment without the computers, this was effective extortion. Billions of miles from home, there was simply no getting back without functional computers.
The cure was to install known good hardware (itself tricky considering the circumstances) and to reload the ship's computer. The story also featured a kind of WORM device called a "datacore" that every ship had to carry by law. It was a combination flight-recorder and criminal evidence accumulator. Come to think of it, many IT issues were dealt with pretty well in this series. It's worth checking out. The IT issues are essential in certain parts of the story but they aren't the main point.
If in addition to being authoritarian, your higher-ups are stupid as well then do EVERYTHING EXACTLY like they tell you do to it. Document thoroughly and always be sure lines such as "TPS reports filed in quadruplicate as per J. Bossly's policy expressed in policy meeting of 3-2-06". Don't complain or whinge in this documentation. Simply make it clear that you were doing as you were told and who told you do it. It may not help but if a total asshole is making a mess of your department then chances are he's pissing off a bigger fish than he is. Hand those bigger fish every weapon they can use. You'll be fine because you were doing as your management instructed.
Also, keep whinging to co-workers to a minimum or non-existent. Smile brightly and act as though things are just peachy. Don't hand others weapons to use on YOU.
If none of this helps start quietly lining up another job; preferably at a smaller organization. Most management tomfoolery is a function of bureaucracy and bureaucracy is a function of size. Unless you yourself have pull then there is very little you can do when the management gets cute ideas.
J. Random FOSS developer isn't going to win patentnuclear warfare against MS. If KOffice IS superspiffy and MS copies features then I believe it would be more feasible to make sure the world knows that MS didn't invent those spiffy features.
It's not as good as OO.org at opening word docs, but I just tried one someone emailed me and it opened up fine and I could get at the content.
Even better, they're standardizing on the OpenDocument format. Hopefully, the more folks use opendocument the fewer issues exchanging files between different office apps.
If you don't mind having both OOO and Koffice installed then just use OOO to convert to OpenDocument if Koffice is your preferred suite. I've even seen scripts that use OOO as a batch converter.
Prior to the commoditization of computing we had the 5 Biggest Lies:
1. The check is in the Mail.
2. Some of our best friends are jewish.
3. Hi! I'm from the goverment and I'm here to help you.
4. It's only a cold sore.
5. I promise. I won't cum in your mouth.
Having worked in IT for a while I can see that the list needs an addition.
6. The latest version will solve all your problems.
Here we go again folks.
Kword can import PDFs with embedded text and graphics; PDFs that are basically just images come in a image and would have to be OCRed first. What you wind up with doesn't preserve the layout very well but you do have a starting point for making a different version of the document. flpsed will let overlay text on a postscript file (PDFs can be easily converted to postscript) but won't let you alter existing text. You can then turn that altered postscript back into a PDF.
PDF is postscript with some markup and indexing. It's good for printers but isn't really designed to be edited. Even the full version of Acrobat is very limited in what manipulations can be done on a PDF.
So, while the current incarnation may seem ok, things are only a few steps from being really bad and invasive. Couple this with the DMCA, and half the things we take for granted with computers now could be taken away, and it will be illegal to 'break' things to get those abilities back.
Self-appointed self-righteous shills will come crawling out of the woodwork when getting around those restrictions is discussed. They'll castigate us most severely for having the temerity to tinker with our own property. When they use the phrase "business model", light will burst forth from the heavens and a chorus of angels will sing "aaaaaaaaaaaaah! AAAAAAAH! AHHHHHHHHHH! AHHHHHHHHH! AHHHHHHHHHH!" Even though there won't be any real choice at that point we'll hear things like, "If you didn't like the terms then you shouldn't have bought the device/software/widget."
I will use my own property in any way I see fit. I don't care how many politicians have been bought. I don't care how many times the phrase "business model" is dropped as though that is a definitive clincher. I most certainly am not going to argue about it.
How about holding your nose for a couple of election cycles and giving your fellow Republicans a wake-up call? I know a few conservative people who longer call themselves Republican. If the Republicans could kick their addiction to that reliable religious demographic and ...oh I don't know... start actually espousing conservative ideals again then my conservative family and friends would return to them.
I can't help but notice that the Democrats today look a hell of a lot like the Republicans did 30 or 40 years ago. It is a side effect of the "Republicans-lite" strategy they seem to be using these days. When you have Rush Limbaugh decrying fiscal-conservatism as a Liberal value then you know that your party is in serious need of an attitude adjustment.
You can try this right now:
http://www.jpct.net/paradroidz/
It can run standalone or in a browser.
I suspect that once again more is being read into Google's actions than what they are really going to do. I recall their was quite a bit of speculation and excitement when Google and Sun announced a joint project. It turned out to be nothing more than an offer to install Google Toolbar when Java is installed on Windows. It is a good move for Google but nothing to write home about.
As long as speculation is allowed, perhaps they are going to release some sort of "Safe Browsing" system. If it were something like a VMPlayer image then it would require very little effort on end users' parts. A Google-branded replacement for VMware's "Browsing Appliance" is what I'm thinking of.
Even that is probably far more exotic than what they are really up to. Another possibility is a set of packages that easily installs on Ubuntu that gives quick access to things like GMail and perhaps a browser toolbar. Ubuntu probably has a enough mindshare that the minimum effort those packages would take would yield a decent return.
Whatever it is, I doubt it will be mind-blowingly fantastic or any sort of stick in MS' eye.