In this neighborhood, at this moment, the richest and most deeply funded monopoly in the history of the world is beginning to fail. Within another few months, the causes of its failure will be apparent to everybody, as they are now largely apparent to the knowledgeable observers of the industry who expect trouble for Microsoft.
and even more amusing is the way he used wikipedia to look it up. little does he know, that the encyclopedia britannica has been editing wikipedia since 1964 to make it's own books look older and more authoritative.
interesting. "using there competitor's file format as their primary format is akin to being defeated".
the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) and the International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC) are obviously microsoft's competitors in your eyes.
secondly: microsoft word isn't "flawlessly compatible with prior versions". try opening an early word document with some unusual formatting in office 2007.
thirdly: if microsoft would fully document the format, i wouldn't complain as much. as it is, it is unimplementable by anyone apart from microsoft.
even if it were truly open it would be a hindrance because there already is one international standard (ODF). why a second one? microsoft can just implement that one.
not quite. i think it has to be a mob of angry men come to gang-bang your male guests. which sort of reminds me of a falcon film i saw while researching material for morality in media.
i call it the "demokratisierung der wissenschaftlichen wahrheitsfindung" (i find it sounds better in a foreign language).
basically it works like this: you want to know what the speed of light is? you take a bunch of laymen, sit them around a table and ask them what they think it is. you take the mean value and appeal to the democratic principle. voila! the speed of light.
as long as you have the source code and the external interfaces to other pieces of software are stable, there shouldn't be a problem. if you wrote the software yourself, i imagine you will have the source code...
and to be honest, how many packages do you want to use under ubuntu which aren't part of the ubuntu repositories or some repository somewhere?
well, sun sells everything from workstation upwards. they tend to use their own chips, their own connectors, their own file systems and their own operating systems, all of which are now open-source and so can be freely implemented by the "competition". by open-sourcing their intellectual property (what a wonderful oxymoron), sun is doing correctly what microsoft did wrongly in china. in china, microsoft gave windows away for free. the result? market domination but a mono-culture where computing goes from a growth market to a replacement market.
by allowing and encouraging competition and progress, sun is keeping computing a growth market for a long, long time. sun just has to have the intellectual clout to keep their head-start (i can give you the source code, but do you know what to do with it?). it's an interesting, very honest business strategy, and the free-software licenses used will keep it honest.
it probably would be better to send the blueprint to texas instruments than to sun directly. however taping out, testing and fabbing a single chip would probably make it cost more than an off-the-shelf core duo.
this is one of the great advantages of package management and repositories. if ubuntu wanted to change something critical about a program which would effect 20 others on the system, they can do this and offer all modified packages for download at the same time. granted, the download could become big if there was a huge change, but being open-source, they could just compile everything new for that and then offer a new install cd.
the only things tying linux to certain architectures are flash, nvidia, ati etc. in other words, the proprietary software companies are stifling innovation, just like they didn't allow intel to create a superior processor. however, the strength of the strangle hold on linux is a lot weaker.
being given money to do something should not effect your moral views. or should an employee really sell their morality so cheaply? in other words, it may not be your job to go on a crusade to change their minds, but you may sleep better at night, knowing that you are not strengthening the world of microsoft and proprietary software.
this is a social thing. it is about the free flow of knowledge. i do not envy people who can cut themselves off from the big picture and just do their job.
it hearkens back to the day when a company was just that, a company. nowadays, the most important thing about a company is that it is a legal entity, not that it consists of people. but i shouldn't get started on that...
i'm not sure if someone who earns minimal wage and once in a while orders number 53 (egg fried rice) can be compared with a man with 40,000,000,000 dollars on his bank account and an amount or political persuasive power you or i could only dream about
having said that, i don't think coward is the right word for gates and the like. the whole thing appears to be a game to him. it isn't about making life better for computer users, it's about making more money for the stockholders, and whatever helps him do that is just fine by him.
but for him it was always about making money. and as such no good can ever come of it.
i'm not sure how you built the bridge from microsoft inventing a new incompatible and unimplementable world-wide standard to compete with the world-wide standard they already knew existed and two regional standards developed without knowledge of each at different times and at different places on the globe.
as it is btw., america seems to be about 90% metric. the country uses things like volt and amp, nanometer and micrometer, watt and coulomb. how about blood-pressure being measured in mmHg? explosions measured in kiloTons? wine sold in 750ml bottles? 9mm caliber firearms? and did carl lewis run 100m or 110yards?
i don't have any real problem with america using inch, foot, yard, bushel, gallon, ounce (or even fluid ounce). just as long as it is aware that no one else in the world does. the conversion process is usually trivial anyway.
hello? we're talking about standards here. choice is the wrong things. choice is bad. let me explain why.
what happens if a large company suggests that we don't just measure capacitance in farrad but also in #madeUpNameOfNewUnit? what's the point? people would have to learn, adopt and support it, all of which costs money and muddies the issue.
odf is already the standard for document exchange. we don't need and shouldn't have a second one.
if you combine this with the fact that you are not free to support and implement microsoft's ooxml standard, the whole thing just becomes ridiculous. what would the electrics company be told if they went before a standards committee saying "yes, the #madeUpNameOfNewUnit is just as good as the farrad, and if people pay us so much money they will be allowed to use it. conversion to the farrad is however never going to work 100%"? they'd be laughed out and with good reason.
this whole debate is utterly pointless and just shows how corrupt the system it. it is really inexcusable.
nope. it's like having a rotary saw with blades you can't change yourself, a hack saw with blades you can't change yourself and go-faster stripes, and a chain saw with complete instructions about how to build a new one, but no shop stocks the blades for it.
Charles Stuart Rolls and Frederick Henry Royce. the car is called a rolls-royce motor car. henry royce was always adamant that "rolls-royce" was an adjective, by the way. and i have nothing against humouring him considering his contributions to winning the battle of britain.
i find it amusing that an article concludes that a product cobbled together by a few geeks for free in there spare time and running on hardware designed for (and with restrictions to make it only usable by) another operating system can compete with the best product of a multi-billion dollar company which has had total control over every stage of hardware and software design and production for nigh-on 30 years.
Slashdot Mirror
the next generation of einsteins and lawrences is however writing articles for wikipedia.
and even more amusing is the way he used wikipedia to look it up. little does he know, that the encyclopedia britannica has been editing wikipedia since 1964 to make it's own books look older and more authoritative.
interesting. "using there competitor's file format as their primary format is akin to being defeated".
the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) and the International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC) are obviously microsoft's competitors in your eyes.
secondly: microsoft word isn't "flawlessly compatible with prior versions". try opening an early word document with some unusual formatting in office 2007.
thirdly: if microsoft would fully document the format, i wouldn't complain as much. as it is, it is unimplementable by anyone apart from microsoft.
even if it were truly open it would be a hindrance because there already is one international standard (ODF). why a second one? microsoft can just implement that one.
oh, but there's enough evidence to call you spineless cowards for not doing anything about it.
not quite. i think it has to be a mob of angry men come to gang-bang your male guests. which sort of reminds me of a falcon film i saw while researching material for morality in media.
i call it the "demokratisierung der wissenschaftlichen wahrheitsfindung" (i find it sounds better in a foreign language).
basically it works like this: you want to know what the speed of light is? you take a bunch of laymen, sit them around a table and ask them what they think it is. you take the mean value and appeal to the democratic principle. voila! the speed of light.
i suppose it could be obfuscated, but i've never seen that in the source
as long as you have the source code and the external interfaces to other pieces of software are stable, there shouldn't be a problem. if you wrote the software yourself, i imagine you will have the source code... and to be honest, how many packages do you want to use under ubuntu which aren't part of the ubuntu repositories or some repository somewhere?
well, sun sells everything from workstation upwards. they tend to use their own chips, their own connectors, their own file systems and their own operating systems, all of which are now open-source and so can be freely implemented by the "competition". by open-sourcing their intellectual property (what a wonderful oxymoron), sun is doing correctly what microsoft did wrongly in china. in china, microsoft gave windows away for free. the result? market domination but a mono-culture where computing goes from a growth market to a replacement market.
by allowing and encouraging competition and progress, sun is keeping computing a growth market for a long, long time. sun just has to have the intellectual clout to keep their head-start (i can give you the source code, but do you know what to do with it?). it's an interesting, very honest business strategy, and the free-software licenses used will keep it honest.
it probably would be better to send the blueprint to texas instruments than to sun directly. however taping out, testing and fabbing a single chip would probably make it cost more than an off-the-shelf core duo.
this is one of the great advantages of package management and repositories. if ubuntu wanted to change something critical about a program which would effect 20 others on the system, they can do this and offer all modified packages for download at the same time. granted, the download could become big if there was a huge change, but being open-source, they could just compile everything new for that and then offer a new install cd.
the only things tying linux to certain architectures are flash, nvidia, ati etc. in other words, the proprietary software companies are stifling innovation, just like they didn't allow intel to create a superior processor. however, the strength of the strangle hold on linux is a lot weaker.
don't worry. the rock is on its way for simulation and rendering (and arguably desktop as well)
being given money to do something should not effect your moral views. or should an employee really sell their morality so cheaply? in other words, it may not be your job to go on a crusade to change their minds, but you may sleep better at night, knowing that you are not strengthening the world of microsoft and proprietary software.
this is a social thing. it is about the free flow of knowledge. i do not envy people who can cut themselves off from the big picture and just do their job.
cf. police
it hearkens back to the day when a company was just that, a company. nowadays, the most important thing about a company is that it is a legal entity, not that it consists of people. but i shouldn't get started on that...
i'm not sure if someone who earns minimal wage and once in a while orders number 53 (egg fried rice) can be compared with a man with 40,000,000,000 dollars on his bank account and an amount or political persuasive power you or i could only dream about
having said that, i don't think coward is the right word for gates and the like. the whole thing appears to be a game to him. it isn't about making life better for computer users, it's about making more money for the stockholders, and whatever helps him do that is just fine by him.
but for him it was always about making money. and as such no good can ever come of it.
well, odf is a documented and freely implementable standard. where it came from is not important.
no one is forcing microsoft to implement it. if microsoft wants to, i'm sure they are more than capable.
ooxml is not a documented and freely implementable standard. your argumentation is therefore in all cases false.
i'm not sure how you built the bridge from microsoft inventing a new incompatible and unimplementable world-wide standard to compete with the world-wide standard they already knew existed and two regional standards developed without knowledge of each at different times and at different places on the globe.
as it is btw., america seems to be about 90% metric. the country uses things like volt and amp, nanometer and micrometer, watt and coulomb. how about blood-pressure being measured in mmHg? explosions measured in kiloTons? wine sold in 750ml bottles? 9mm caliber firearms? and did carl lewis run 100m or 110yards?
i don't have any real problem with america using inch, foot, yard, bushel, gallon, ounce (or even fluid ounce). just as long as it is aware that no one else in the world does. the conversion process is usually trivial anyway.
you "believe"? this isn't a matter of faith or personal opinion. this is a matter of science.
hello? we're talking about standards here. choice is the wrong things. choice is bad. let me explain why.
what happens if a large company suggests that we don't just measure capacitance in farrad but also in #madeUpNameOfNewUnit? what's the point? people would have to learn, adopt and support it, all of which costs money and muddies the issue.
odf is already the standard for document exchange. we don't need and shouldn't have a second one.
if you combine this with the fact that you are not free to support and implement microsoft's ooxml standard, the whole thing just becomes ridiculous. what would the electrics company be told if they went before a standards committee saying "yes, the #madeUpNameOfNewUnit is just as good as the farrad, and if people pay us so much money they will be allowed to use it. conversion to the farrad is however never going to work 100%"? they'd be laughed out and with good reason.
this whole debate is utterly pointless and just shows how corrupt the system it. it is really inexcusable.
nope. it's like having a rotary saw with blades you can't change yourself, a hack saw with blades you can't change yourself and go-faster stripes, and a chain saw with complete instructions about how to build a new one, but no shop stocks the blades for it.
Charles Stuart Rolls and Frederick Henry Royce. the car is called a rolls-royce motor car. henry royce was always adamant that "rolls-royce" was an adjective, by the way. and i have nothing against humouring him considering his contributions to winning the battle of britain.
n dex.xml
a true rolls-royce computer would probably be more like this one anyway: http://www.sun.com/servers/highend/sunfire_e25k/i
i find it amusing that an article concludes that a product cobbled together by a few geeks for free in there spare time and running on hardware designed for (and with restrictions to make it only usable by) another operating system can compete with the best product of a multi-billion dollar company which has had total control over every stage of hardware and software design and production for nigh-on 30 years.
hang on. are you telling me you can't copy music off of an ipod using itunes?
:)
you just made my day