See, the original PowerBook was smaller than the competing portables. It set the standard for what a good notebook is
There have always been machines considerably smaller and lighter than PowerBooks throughout Apple's history. The NEC Ultralite, released in 1989, was 4.5 pounds. The Toshiba T100 was a different design, but even lighter and so successful that people swear by it even today.
But while PowerBooks didn't "set the standard" for anything, they were nicely designed notebooks and deservedly became very popular.
Today, it's the same thing: Powerbooks don't really set the standard for anything. There are other laptops that are lighter, have better screens, longer battery life, are faster, etc. But Powerbooks are all around nice designs that you can't really go wrong with.
It will be nice when Apple starts releasing x86 laptops: first of all, it will mean that they can make their machines smaller and lighter, and secondly, it will mean that users won't be forced to use Mac OS X in order to use the hardware.
There is no "breakthrough" here--these are just light-sensitive E coli growing on agar. It's essentially scum on top of jello and about as useful as a recording medium.
Bacteria may well eventually become useful as a storage medium in some form (people have thought about it and tried it), but this work isn't anywhere on the path to that goal.
That agrees with my experience: for general purpose desktop use, I find Ubuntu and SuSE to be the best distros. Both of them are easier to install and set up than either Windows or Macintosh. And both of them work great out of the box on a wide range of hardware.
E. Coli genetic engineering has been around for many years. Creating light sensitive strains, strains that make pigments, etc. is roughly appropriate for college level biology. I suppose it's kind of neat that engineers have taken notice, but it really is textbook stuff.
In fact, even more simply, since the pigment was present/absent based on whether the bacteria were growing in the light, you can repeat this experiment at home: use any organism using chlorophyll for photosynthesis and grow it in patterned light: you'll get a "photograph" in green/yellow. That's an experiment even elementary school students do.
You've got to give it to these people, though: they are excellent salespeople. Getting away with such trivialities as "engineering" and endowing bacteria with "new skills" takes both guts and skills.
Well, Friedman uses "flat earth" in a different sense. (As an aside, Thomas Friedman isn't a scientist. The fact that he won a Pulitzer just goes to show that writers prefer style over intellectual soundness and honesty.)
Microsoft's "new" RSS format will be XML based, it will turn out in six months that they have filed a patent on it, they will offer a RAND license, they'll submit it as an ECMA standard, and they'll proclaim that it's open. Microsoft will recruit Apple and Oracle to sign up for "free" licenses of their "standard" and proudly announce their adoption of it.
And then Microsoft will try to create FUD (through strategically placed speakers) within the open source community whether it is really possible for open source software to implement their "open" standard. They'll do this in an effort to scare away commercial users from adopting open source software based on the "open standard".
That way, they'll try to achieve the appearance and widespread adoption of an "open" standard while still interfering with its open source implementation.
There is as much of a "heated debate" between scientists and fundamentalists as there is a "heated debate" between scientists and flat earthers. Scientists may be annoyed at the idiocy of the "intelligent design" nonsense, but there is no debate.
Note that media and intelligence (aka spooks) are the only areas where "open source" had an established meaning before the FSF started using the term: "open source" referred to the use of published, generally available sources in intelligence gathering. Other kinds of sources were "covert sources", "anonymous sources", and "confidential sources".
Microsoft has applied for a patent on the XML format, so formally, you need a license from them. Of course, an ECMA submission doesn't change that issue one iota, nor does the ECMA submission guarantee that they'll not change the format.
If you think that patenting and XML-base word processing format is silly and can't possibly stand up to a legal challenge, you're probably right. But until someone actually takes on Microsoft in court, the patent stands.
And given that anybody with pockets deep enough to challenge Microsoft can just get a free-as-in-beer license, nobody may bother.
At least that's what Microsoft hopes. In practice, people will probably call their bluff and deliberately violate their patent, and Microsoft is damned if they do sue and damned if they don't.
First of all, it's unclear that you even need a license. It seems unlikely that the patent would actually hold up if seriously challenged.
But I suspect nobody will want to waste the time and money proving that. More likely, you'll see an entity (not for profit) formally established whose sole purpose in life is to take out one of these licenses and ensure distribution of an import/export tool that can then be used with a wide variety of other open source tools.
Hopefully, Microsoft will figure out sooner or later that they just shouldn't bother with all this legal hair splitting and bogus patents.
ECMA merely requires that companies disclose their patent interests, not that the formats are open and freely implementable. So, the ECMA submission really changes nothing: Microsoft's XML office formats are already publicly available; the concern about them is that Microsoft has patents on them.
Overall, Microsoft seems to use patents for FUD these days: they take out meaningless and probably unenforceable patents, like the patent on the.NET APIs and the patent on the MS Office formats. Then, they go to ECMA and make an "open" standard. Finally, they offer "free and non-discriminatory licensing", but in a non-transferable form.
Microsoft knows full well that this is quite alright for companies like Apple--those companies will get a license for free and can then ship their own proprietary products--while it does not work for open source software. Open source software does not just require a format or API to be published and free-as-in-beer, it needs to be sublicenseable by the recipient.
What you see at work in that strategy is what billions of dollars can buy you in terms of business and legal strategy. Microsoft ought to be congratulated on this strategy.
Of course, brilliant as it is, it still won't work. In the case of.NET, all they are achieving is that the FOSS community is creating its own alternatives. Furthermore, you may simply see a not-for-profit being created that takes out the necessary free license once and then distributes licensed versions of implementations like Mono (and if Microsoft refuses such a license, their bluff is called). And in the case of the MS Office XML formats, some third party will take out one of those free licenses and then simply distribute the result.
But Microsoft knows that they can't win in the long run. In the short run, every month that they delay the inevitable means a few more billion in their pockets, and that makes all the strategizing, FUD, and scheming that their highly-paid managers and lawyers engage in worth it.
Remember all those "yet another local root exploit in the linux kernel" advisories? Maybe you should actually upgrade when that happens. Suddenly linux isn't so perfect.
Most people don't have to upgrade when there are local root exploits. Local root exploits are primarily an issue on multiuser systems. With XP, people don't even bother reporting these because XP's userland is so insecure.
This attitude of "I'm not going to maintain my servers because I try to compensate for my tiny penis with a long uptime" seems common amoung linux admins
Perhaps. But women tend to prefer reliable small-dicked nice guys to self-destructive big-dicked jerks. And even if they don't, hosting services do.
Who do you think companies concerned about security hire? They hire "real, genuine-article computer security experts" like him. So, I'm not impressed: it's the current crop of "security experts" and "operating system experts" that have gotten us in the mess that we are in. The fact that these people may not like Linux and the way it's being developed is a recommendation, as far as I'm concerned.
Japan's Hayabusa asteroid sampling spacecraft made a pass at an asteroid today
However, it turned out that the asteroid was "date bait" and paid by match.com; hence, no contact was made. The Japanese space agency is considering sueing match.com for racketeering and the loss of its space "probe".
You are making your company dependent on the GOOD WILL of others.
Quite to the contrary: with OSS, you are not dependent on anybody.
The real thing you should worry about is that with closed source software, you are at the mercy of your vendor.
However it all functions perfectly under Windows and Mac OSX.
I'm typing this from a Mac OS X laptop--which I just had to reinstall because it was dying with a kernel panic during boot. Before that, it failed to read the xD cards from my new consumer digital camera. And among many problems, file associations are inconsistent under OS X, the green resize window button is unintuitive, and the Finder views switch haphazardly. The point is that even the best desktop operating systems have problems--Linux, OS X, and Windows are comparable in that respect. If you claim otherwise, you're simply trolling.
Yes, Apache 1.x is enormously popular. But that's not where the work in the Apache project has gone recently; recently, they have been working on Apache 2.x, XML-related projects, and lots of other projects. Are you using any of those more recent projects? How much impact have those projects actually had? And is the amount of effort that has gone into them justified by their impact?
The limit is the approach to editing used by both OOo and MS Office; it just doesn't scale very well, in particular for documents involving lots of authors, lots of revisions, data, graphs, multiple output formats,...
I mean I am a "home office" user of OO but totally satisfied by it
I'm totally satisfied with OOo as well--for home and office use: letters, memos, etc. That's what it was designed for.
If you really believe otherwise you really don't use word in a production environment day in and day out for formatting complex documents.
Well, if you say that you use Word in a "production environment", then it sounds like you have invested a lot of time to standardize versions and templates across your organization. That's probably why you aren't seeing as many compatibility problems.
Unfortunately, we have to use Word in a real-world environment where dozens of people all use different Word versions on different Windows versions. And I can tell you: we have more problems (usually with data loss) with going between different Word versions than going between OOo and Word.
The solution to all these problems is simple: KISS.
create their own one-page CV, and who have concluded from that OO.org is fine to use even on huge documents where problems in conversion to the MS formats might make your firm look stupid, zealotish and perhaps even lead to loss of business.
Being a card carrying OSS fanatic, I can tell you truthfully that OO.org is not fine to use on huge documents. But being a suffering MS Office user, I can tell you that MS Office is just as bad for huge documents.
The professional way of writing huge documents is with a markup language and a revision control system.
Different versions of MS Office also don't have "perfect compatibility" with each other. In my experience, using OOo is not much different from using a different version of MS Office.
Overall, it's probably best simply to avoid "complex Word and PowerPoint files" altogether.
Slashdot Mirror
See, the original PowerBook was smaller than the competing portables. It set the standard for what a good notebook is
There have always been machines considerably smaller and lighter than PowerBooks throughout Apple's history. The NEC Ultralite, released in 1989, was 4.5 pounds. The Toshiba T100 was a different design, but even lighter and so successful that people swear by it even today.
But while PowerBooks didn't "set the standard" for anything, they were nicely designed notebooks and deservedly became very popular.
Today, it's the same thing: Powerbooks don't really set the standard for anything. There are other laptops that are lighter, have better screens, longer battery life, are faster, etc. But Powerbooks are all around nice designs that you can't really go wrong with.
It will be nice when Apple starts releasing x86 laptops: first of all, it will mean that they can make their machines smaller and lighter, and secondly, it will mean that users won't be forced to use Mac OS X in order to use the hardware.
There is no "breakthrough" here--these are just light-sensitive E coli growing on agar. It's essentially scum on top of jello and about as useful as a recording medium.
Bacteria may well eventually become useful as a storage medium in some form (people have thought about it and tried it), but this work isn't anywhere on the path to that goal.
That agrees with my experience: for general purpose desktop use, I find Ubuntu and SuSE to be the best distros. Both of them are easier to install and set up than either Windows or Macintosh. And both of them work great out of the box on a wide range of hardware.
E. Coli genetic engineering has been around for many years. Creating light sensitive strains, strains that make pigments, etc. is roughly appropriate for college level biology. I suppose it's kind of neat that engineers have taken notice, but it really is textbook stuff.
In fact, even more simply, since the pigment was present/absent based on whether the bacteria were growing in the light, you can repeat this experiment at home: use any organism using chlorophyll for photosynthesis and grow it in patterned light: you'll get a "photograph" in green/yellow. That's an experiment even elementary school students do.
You've got to give it to these people, though: they are excellent salespeople. Getting away with such trivialities as "engineering" and endowing bacteria with "new skills" takes both guts and skills.
Just because the RSS part is XML-based doesn't mean the information it carries needs to be--Microsoft has already demonstrated that.
Well, Friedman uses "flat earth" in a different sense. (As an aside, Thomas Friedman isn't a scientist. The fact that he won a Pulitzer just goes to show that writers prefer style over intellectual soundness and honesty.)
Microsoft's "new" RSS format will be XML based, it will turn out in six months that they have filed a patent on it, they will offer a RAND license, they'll submit it as an ECMA standard, and they'll proclaim that it's open. Microsoft will recruit Apple and Oracle to sign up for "free" licenses of their "standard" and proudly announce their adoption of it.
And then Microsoft will try to create FUD (through strategically placed speakers) within the open source community whether it is really possible for open source software to implement their "open" standard. They'll do this in an effort to scare away commercial users from adopting open source software based on the "open standard".
That way, they'll try to achieve the appearance and widespread adoption of an "open" standard while still interfering with its open source implementation.
Where is the Doom 3 "Jack Thompson" mod? I think Thompson would be perfectly cast as an evil Nazi zombie.
There is as much of a "heated debate" between scientists and fundamentalists as there is a "heated debate" between scientists and flat earthers. Scientists may be annoyed at the idiocy of the "intelligent design" nonsense, but there is no debate.
I think that's code language for "Xbox 360 is still heavily subsidized and it still isn't all that great, but maybe the next release will be better".
Note that media and intelligence (aka spooks) are the only areas where "open source" had an established meaning before the FSF started using the term: "open source" referred to the use of published, generally available sources in intelligence gathering. Other kinds of sources were "covert sources", "anonymous sources", and "confidential sources".
Microsoft has applied for a patent on the XML format, so formally, you need a license from them. Of course, an ECMA submission doesn't change that issue one iota, nor does the ECMA submission guarantee that they'll not change the format.
If you think that patenting and XML-base word processing format is silly and can't possibly stand up to a legal challenge, you're probably right. But until someone actually takes on Microsoft in court, the patent stands.
And given that anybody with pockets deep enough to challenge Microsoft can just get a free-as-in-beer license, nobody may bother.
At least that's what Microsoft hopes. In practice, people will probably call their bluff and deliberately violate their patent, and Microsoft is damned if they do sue and damned if they don't.
However, the license is non-transferable.
In any case, it may not matter for open source.
First of all, it's unclear that you even need a license. It seems unlikely that the patent would actually hold up if seriously challenged.
But I suspect nobody will want to waste the time and money proving that. More likely, you'll see an entity (not for profit) formally established whose sole purpose in life is to take out one of these licenses and ensure distribution of an import/export tool that can then be used with a wide variety of other open source tools.
Hopefully, Microsoft will figure out sooner or later that they just shouldn't bother with all this legal hair splitting and bogus patents.
ECMA merely requires that companies disclose their patent interests, not that the formats are open and freely implementable. So, the ECMA submission really changes nothing: Microsoft's XML office formats are already publicly available; the concern about them is that Microsoft has patents on them.
.NET APIs and the patent on the MS Office formats. Then, they go to ECMA and make an "open" standard. Finally, they offer "free and non-discriminatory licensing", but in a non-transferable form.
.NET, all they are achieving is that the FOSS community is creating its own alternatives. Furthermore, you may simply see a not-for-profit being created that takes out the necessary free license once and then distributes licensed versions of implementations like Mono (and if Microsoft refuses such a license, their bluff is called). And in the case of the MS Office XML formats, some third party will take out one of those free licenses and then simply distribute the result.
Overall, Microsoft seems to use patents for FUD these days: they take out meaningless and probably unenforceable patents, like the patent on the
Microsoft knows full well that this is quite alright for companies like Apple--those companies will get a license for free and can then ship their own proprietary products--while it does not work for open source software. Open source software does not just require a format or API to be published and free-as-in-beer, it needs to be sublicenseable by the recipient.
What you see at work in that strategy is what billions of dollars can buy you in terms of business and legal strategy. Microsoft ought to be congratulated on this strategy.
Of course, brilliant as it is, it still won't work. In the case of
But Microsoft knows that they can't win in the long run. In the short run, every month that they delay the inevitable means a few more billion in their pockets, and that makes all the strategizing, FUD, and scheming that their highly-paid managers and lawyers engage in worth it.
Remember all those "yet another local root exploit in the linux kernel" advisories? Maybe you should actually upgrade when that happens. Suddenly linux isn't so perfect.
Most people don't have to upgrade when there are local root exploits. Local root exploits are primarily an issue on multiuser systems. With XP, people don't even bother reporting these because XP's userland is so insecure.
This attitude of "I'm not going to maintain my servers because I try to compensate for my tiny penis with a long uptime" seems common amoung linux admins
Perhaps. But women tend to prefer reliable small-dicked nice guys to self-destructive big-dicked jerks. And even if they don't, hosting services do.
Who do you think companies concerned about security hire? They hire "real, genuine-article computer security experts" like him. So, I'm not impressed: it's the current crop of "security experts" and "operating system experts" that have gotten us in the mess that we are in. The fact that these people may not like Linux and the way it's being developed is a recommendation, as far as I'm concerned.
However, it turned out that the asteroid was "date bait" and paid by match.com; hence, no contact was made. The Japanese space agency is considering sueing match.com for racketeering and the loss of its space "probe".
Speaking as a geek, at $30 a month, even fake dates may provide enough entertainment and possibilities to be worth it :-)
You are making your company dependent on the GOOD WILL of others.
Quite to the contrary: with OSS, you are not dependent on anybody.
The real thing you should worry about is that with closed source software, you are at the mercy of your vendor.
However it all functions perfectly under Windows and Mac OSX.
I'm typing this from a Mac OS X laptop--which I just had to reinstall because it was dying with a kernel panic during boot. Before that, it failed to read the xD cards from my new consumer digital camera. And among many problems, file associations are inconsistent under OS X, the green resize window button is unintuitive, and the Finder views switch haphazardly. The point is that even the best desktop operating systems have problems--Linux, OS X, and Windows are comparable in that respect. If you claim otherwise, you're simply trolling.
Yes, Apache 1.x is enormously popular. But that's not where the work in the Apache project has gone recently; recently, they have been working on Apache 2.x, XML-related projects, and lots of other projects. Are you using any of those more recent projects? How much impact have those projects actually had? And is the amount of effort that has gone into them justified by their impact?
"world-wide Internet penetration"
"Billions and billions of devices that will service these people."
Which is it--penetration or service? I mean, it's kind of difficult to get both at the same time.
I really wonder what is the limit
...
The limit is the approach to editing used by both OOo and MS Office; it just doesn't scale very well, in particular for documents involving lots of authors, lots of revisions, data, graphs, multiple output formats,
I mean I am a "home office" user of OO but totally satisfied by it
I'm totally satisfied with OOo as well--for home and office use: letters, memos, etc. That's what it was designed for.
If you really believe otherwise you really don't use word in a production environment day in and day out for formatting complex documents.
Well, if you say that you use Word in a "production environment", then it sounds like you have invested a lot of time to standardize versions and templates across your organization. That's probably why you aren't seeing as many compatibility problems.
Unfortunately, we have to use Word in a real-world environment where dozens of people all use different Word versions on different Windows versions. And I can tell you: we have more problems (usually with data loss) with going between different Word versions than going between OOo and Word.
The solution to all these problems is simple: KISS.
create their own one-page CV, and who have concluded from that OO.org is fine to use even on huge documents where problems in conversion to the MS formats might make your firm look stupid, zealotish and perhaps even lead to loss of business.
Being a card carrying OSS fanatic, I can tell you truthfully that OO.org is not fine to use on huge documents. But being a suffering MS Office user, I can tell you that MS Office is just as bad for huge documents.
The professional way of writing huge documents is with a markup language and a revision control system.
Different versions of MS Office also don't have "perfect compatibility" with each other. In my experience, using OOo is not much different from using a different version of MS Office. Overall, it's probably best simply to avoid "complex Word and PowerPoint files" altogether.