FrameMaker, meanwhile, is simply too much a niche and too well entrenched to see any serious competitor take it out
Not so.
When Framemaker originally came out on Sun workstations, dozens of licenses for it were purchased at MyCorp. It was used, people liked it.
Then, 2 things happen.
First, the Borg use Word, so WYSIWYG writers moved to that format as they could, especially if they didn't want/need/appreciate the Framemaker features. Every corporation buys site licenses for Word, but Frame means you have to buy it special, support it special, contend with translating into and out of Word, etc. Putting your word processing product up head to head with Word on Windows is like putting your new TV show up against the March NCAA playoff games.
Second, Linux boxes start replacing SPARC stations. No native Framemaker is available for Linux, so anyone still wanting to use it must ssh lastsunbox maker. As if the overhead of an encrypted networked X connection to an outdated Sun processor makes their product look good. They had a Linux beta they could have deployed, but choose to discontinue.
Effectively, Adobe has been making all the right moves to actively discourage use of Framemaker.
The many nonzealots can and will change their word processing application every 5-10 years. They've been changing away from Framemaker.
I'm running Fedora Core 3 on x86_64 with kernel
2.6.10-1.766_FC3smp
and the nVidia 6629 driver works, sort of.
But repaint events are slow, there are horizontal rastering artifacts on occassion, and I get errors in dmesg like
mtrr: type mismatch for f0000000,4000000 old: write-back new: write-combining
NVRM: AGPGART: unable to set MTRR write-combining
NVRM: not using NVAGP, AGPGART is loaded!!
With exposed GPL'd code, there would be constant pressure from the dual user communities to have "their branch" get the best incorporated features merged in from the "other branch".
Ultimately, the core developers of both branches would get tired of supporting some ego feature in the face of practicalities of constant mergers of "other branch" features and bug fixes.
I have to smile when I see a Republican senator sponsoring government legislation to mandate decency in the media.
Usually, the GOP supports the action of the free marketplace to sort things out in preference to heavy handed government regulation. If people don't like indecency, then they won't pay for it and it should wither away by itself.
Normally, a dictate on decent behavior would be the function of the church, but with a blurring of distinction in roles between church and state, the state just picks up where church authority leaves off.
It's a computer - it should be the job of the operating system to protect itself. It isn't, but it should be.
You silly idealist!
Explain how, then, in your world would users be so naturally encouraged to go out and buy a new computer with a new, more secure, pre-installed operating system every several years, hmmm?
In your experience, can managers with little technical knowledge successfully run a technically-oriented company?" What qualities would such a manager need to keep a tech company healthy?
Good managers don't need to be full of in-depth technical knowledge.
They should have people like that working for them.
They should be intelligent, quick-learners and able to delegate to their good people where they need technical expertise that they themselves do not have.
Unfortunately, many managers and many technical people consider it a Badge of Failure if they do not know the latest trivia about any technical subject that is asked. Good managers aren't held hostage to feeling insecure about their lack of technical knowledge, but they are intelligent enough to know if their people are good, concise, have axes to grind, are unnecessarily long-winded, are trying to make co-workers look bad, whatever.
The Gov. has no law disallowing the use of SS#'s for anything but SS type transactions.
IIRC, U.S. government agencies asking for your SSN must really need it and provide a good reason for asking you for this number. This has been tested numerous times on the U.S. Federal Income Tax form.
Meanwhile, private entities have been asking for the SSN willy nilly, without being encumbered to provide good reasons why. A few people object, most don't, and sometimes the business just refuses to complete a transaction without this information.
The solution is begging to present itself: use the formidable armada of legistlation protecting the holders of copyrights. Aggregate personal information should be copyright by the individual and no unauthorized distribution or use in derivative works should be permitted without the expressed consent of the copyright holder.
But you can see why direct marketing database owners would be loath to see that solution:)
And the politicians on both sides of the aisle that accept their largess will just keep the issue quiet while they use that money to buy the advertising they require to get re-elected.
What has become obvious is that the community of developers is what drives the evolution of a system. Either can stagnate, either can advance quickly.
True, but a plausible argument can be made that BSD style freedom permits a great derived work to appear only in closed source code that can achieve success in broad binary distributions. The improved source code base is unavailable.
That will tend to sustain and keep alive the closed source company and encourage their behavior of keeping great innovations on BSD common work to themselves because it is profitable to do so.
The GPL also allows great closed source innovations on common work, except that it can only be used internally because binary distribution of improved code would require the source also be made available. In some sense, this makes a ratcheting of improvements in the GPL code built-in. But it says nothing about the pace of those innovations to GPL code.
There are different social dynamics involved in each license and it's not immediately obvious how things will play out in the long term.
Handicapping the GPL is that companies are less inclined to improve too much upon basic GPL work rather than BSD license common work; but the GPL has less chance of its improvements going into a wormhole that will never be reexposed to the commons. It's hard to know which force will prove to motivate the greatest progression of software.
Perhaps the best license would be a hybrid, something where you distribute your closed-source binary derivative work for a limited term no longer than a couple of years, whereupon the conventional GPL kicks into effect.
As a software developer, I kind of like the dual license approach of Trolltech.
Learning of learning's sake is great, but you won't have the spare time to learn in the rest of your life if you're struggling to make ends meet.
All the more reason for kids to learn how to think critically, to reason, and to be exposed to the greatest ideas of philosophy, history, literature and pure mathematics before they have to do the sink or swim thing in the real world.
And, yes, I think kids should be taught about practical things in middle school, such as balancing checkbooks, home mortgages, car loans, raising kids properly, etc.
But once they have to work, raise a family and pay a mortgage, they aren't going to have the time, money or energy to go out and pay to listen to lectures in philosophy when it's so much easier to sit in front of the tube and take recreational drugs.
Just an artifact that corporations own most of the resources.
Society and government has always contended with the issue that
"Those who control most of the resources and benefit most from the status quo don't want things to change, be it by democratic processes or otherwise."
Talk of democracy, freedom and free enterprise all notwithstanding.
Actually, being open source, it's had far more attention paid to it than IE has.
As an open source fan, I support the development model of Mozilla and Firefox.
But am I the only Mozilla/FF user that hasn't looked at the code base lately?
Given the large number of programmers at Microsoft (not all of them focussed on IE, to be certain, especially the last 5 years), I'd bet that the number of experience C++ programmers looking at the IE source code is not as different from the number looking at the Mozilla/Firefox code as I'd like to think.
If the passport held a unique ID number and nothing else, then sensitive data could be stored somewhere safe off-site, rather than in the back pocket of a potential terrorist.
Passports still need some low tech means for border guards to perform a cursory check of people passing through national boundaries that, believe it or not, may not have internet connectivity.
I'd guess that the majority of international border crossings have little more than unreliable telephones and military radios.
How are you supposed to know about a secret law ? It doesn't fit in the system
The previous poster has the answer: it's not a secret law, rather it is a secret administrative order.
You'd hope the built-in system of checks and balances in the U.S. government would help to prevent an administrative order from, say, infringing upon constitutionally-guaranteed protections (4th, in this case) for very long.
OTOH, the wheels of justice grind slowly, while the executive and legislative branches of government are controlled by the same party, making it less likely for the legislative branch to challenge administrative orders. It will have to be the courts, so it will take years for the challenges to be made, cases brought and the rulings to occur.
If you're out of compressed gas or batteries in the middle of nowhere it's hard to replenish your cell phone. Turning a hand crank would make use of cheap, available human power.
These are all good ideas, the unit testing, the automated frequent testing, etc.
Having experience a few crashes of bleeding edge versions of evolution and firefox with the automated calling back to the developers about the crash symptoms got me to thinking that having actual use (and abuse) be automatically incorporated into test suites might really abet the development of less crash prone code.
Despite the capability of automated testing to test many more features than can be done by hand, new applications have so much context and so many options that we need to test for what the users are actually doing with the application. Not just what we think they're doing, what we hope they're doing, but what they're really doing.
The most important bugs would be the ones that happen to the greatest number of people the most times.
Harvesting application interactions and sending them back to the test suite has a lot of value, but it's up to the developers to do this in ways that are sensitive to the user's need for privacy, too.
....all make my car heavier, and this considerably slower and less fuel efficient. And yet, by and large, that's another load of creeping featurism that I don't seem to mind about.
Stay tuned. Imminent increases in the price of fuel will focus your attention on eliminating the less valuable pieces of vehicle feature bloat.
shows the server @ $5945, which imho is quite a reasonable price for this kind of heavy hitting hardware.
I've always had a thing for sun hardware. It's just... sexy.
Sun hardware has traditionally been through a more rigorous design and testing phase than most PC hardware.
I have to wonder if those quality standards have been maintained on their Opteron system.
For eons, AMD has been trying to overcome an image of offering cheaper x86 hardware that is built into shoddy white boxes with bad power supplies and fans that whine at a premature age.
Sun's high quality hardware reputation would be a great way for AMD to make inroads into the lucrative corporate market. But AMD could sabotage that improved reputation for quality by selling Opterons to system builders that are willing to cut corners that would cast their product in a poor light.
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FrameMaker, meanwhile, is simply too much a niche and too well entrenched to see any serious competitor take it out
Not so.
When Framemaker originally came out on Sun workstations, dozens of licenses for it were purchased at MyCorp. It was used, people liked it.
Then, 2 things happen.
First, the Borg use Word, so WYSIWYG writers moved to that format as they could, especially if they didn't want/need/appreciate the Framemaker features. Every corporation buys site licenses for Word, but Frame means you have to buy it special, support it special, contend with translating into and out of Word, etc. Putting your word processing product up head to head with Word on Windows is like putting your new TV show up against the March NCAA playoff games.
Second, Linux boxes start replacing SPARC stations. No native Framemaker is available for Linux, so anyone still wanting to use it must ssh lastsunbox maker . As if the overhead of an encrypted networked X connection to an outdated Sun processor makes their product look good. They had a Linux beta they could have deployed, but choose to discontinue.
Effectively, Adobe has been making all the right moves to actively discourage use of Framemaker.
The many nonzealots can and will change their word processing application every 5-10 years. They've been changing away from Framemaker.
Most windows users couldn't handle Linux if their life depended on it
Good Windows users could.
Those that remember their DOS heritage and just make a mental note that "/" replaces "\" in path specifications.
Conversely, I've been able to do things in a DOS shell that are "intuitive", like
I'm running Fedora Core 3 on x86_64 with kernel 2.6.10-1.766_FC3smp and the nVidia 6629 driver works, sort of.
But repaint events are slow, there are horizontal rastering artifacts on occassion, and I get errors in dmesg like
If 2.6.11 can help, I'll try it out.
could start their own branch,
With exposed GPL'd code, there would be constant pressure from the dual user communities to have "their branch" get the best incorporated features merged in from the "other branch".
Ultimately, the core developers of both branches would get tired of supporting some ego feature in the face of practicalities of constant mergers of "other branch" features and bug fixes.
Can someone who knows say how OGRE compares and contrasts with vtk as a 3D engine?
I have to smile when I see a Republican senator sponsoring government legislation to mandate decency in the media.
Usually, the GOP supports the action of the free marketplace to sort things out in preference to heavy handed government regulation. If people don't like indecency, then they won't pay for it and it should wither away by itself.
Normally, a dictate on decent behavior would be the function of the church, but with a blurring of distinction in roles between church and state, the state just picks up where church authority leaves off.
So I'd like
- the most useful multitool, that also
- is not so large that it chafes when you carry it, and, that
- you can carry onto an airplane without it being considered a lethal weapon
.It's a computer - it should be the job of the operating system to protect itself. It isn't, but it should be.
You silly idealist!
Explain how, then, in your world would users be so naturally encouraged to go out and buy a new computer with a new, more secure, pre-installed operating system every several years, hmmm?
Sincerely,
Your computer vendor.
In your experience, can managers with little technical knowledge successfully run a technically-oriented company?" What qualities would such a manager need to keep a tech company healthy?
Good managers don't need to be full of in-depth technical knowledge.
They should have people like that working for them.
They should be intelligent, quick-learners and able to delegate to their good people where they need technical expertise that they themselves do not have.
Unfortunately, many managers and many technical people consider it a Badge of Failure if they do not know the latest trivia about any technical subject that is asked. Good managers aren't held hostage to feeling insecure about their lack of technical knowledge, but they are intelligent enough to know if their people are good, concise, have axes to grind, are unnecessarily long-winded, are trying to make co-workers look bad, whatever.
The Gov. has no law disallowing the use of SS#'s for anything but SS type transactions.
IIRC, U.S. government agencies asking for your SSN must really need it and provide a good reason for asking you for this number. This has been tested numerous times on the U.S. Federal Income Tax form.
Meanwhile, private entities have been asking for the SSN willy nilly, without being encumbered to provide good reasons why. A few people object, most don't, and sometimes the business just refuses to complete a transaction without this information.
The solution is begging to present itself: use the formidable armada of legistlation protecting the holders of copyrights. Aggregate personal information should be copyright by the individual and no unauthorized distribution or use in derivative works should be permitted without the expressed consent of the copyright holder.
But you can see why direct marketing database owners would be loath to see that solution:)
The next time China wants to buy (import) some goods, they have all this extra supply of dollars.
Like, for example, petroleum:)
This American is expecting some serious stagflation, where the price of almost everything, including credit, will increase.
The only price that will not increase in the U.S. is that of labor.
Here in the UK we use the PRINCE2 methodology
There's a sequel?!?
Everyone wants cheap prescription medicine.
No, almost everyone.
The pharmaceutical companies do not.
And their lobbyists do not.
And the politicians on both sides of the aisle that accept their largess will just keep the issue quiet while they use that money to buy the advertising they require to get re-elected.
What has become obvious is that the community of developers is what drives the evolution of a system. Either can stagnate, either can advance quickly.
True, but a plausible argument can be made that BSD style freedom permits a great derived work to appear only in closed source code that can achieve success in broad binary distributions. The improved source code base is unavailable.
That will tend to sustain and keep alive the closed source company and encourage their behavior of keeping great innovations on BSD common work to themselves because it is profitable to do so.
The GPL also allows great closed source innovations on common work, except that it can only be used internally because binary distribution of improved code would require the source also be made available. In some sense, this makes a ratcheting of improvements in the GPL code built-in. But it says nothing about the pace of those innovations to GPL code.
There are different social dynamics involved in each license and it's not immediately obvious how things will play out in the long term.
Handicapping the GPL is that companies are less inclined to improve too much upon basic GPL work rather than BSD license common work; but the GPL has less chance of its improvements going into a wormhole that will never be reexposed to the commons. It's hard to know which force will prove to motivate the greatest progression of software.
Perhaps the best license would be a hybrid, something where you distribute your closed-source binary derivative work for a limited term no longer than a couple of years, whereupon the conventional GPL kicks into effect.
As a software developer, I kind of like the dual license approach of Trolltech.
Learning of learning's sake is great, but you won't have the spare time to learn in the rest of your life if you're struggling to make ends meet.
All the more reason for kids to learn how to think critically, to reason, and to be exposed to the greatest ideas of philosophy, history, literature and pure mathematics before they have to do the sink or swim thing in the real world.
And, yes, I think kids should be taught about practical things in middle school, such as balancing checkbooks, home mortgages, car loans, raising kids properly, etc.
But once they have to work, raise a family and pay a mortgage, they aren't going to have the time, money or energy to go out and pay to listen to lectures in philosophy when it's so much easier to sit in front of the tube and take recreational drugs.
Just an artifact that corporations own most of the resources.
Society and government has always contended with the issue that
Talk of democracy, freedom and free enterprise all notwithstanding.
Actually, being open source, it's had far more attention paid to it than IE has.
As an open source fan, I support the development model of Mozilla and Firefox.
But am I the only Mozilla/FF user that hasn't looked at the code base lately?
Given the large number of programmers at Microsoft (not all of them focussed on IE, to be certain, especially the last 5 years), I'd bet that the number of experience C++ programmers looking at the IE source code is not as different from the number looking at the Mozilla/Firefox code as I'd like to think.
If the passport held a unique ID number and nothing else, then sensitive data could be stored somewhere safe off-site, rather than in the back pocket of a potential terrorist.
Passports still need some low tech means for border guards to perform a cursory check of people passing through national boundaries that, believe it or not, may not have internet connectivity.
I'd guess that the majority of international border crossings have little more than unreliable telephones and military radios.
How are you supposed to know about a secret law ? It doesn't fit in the system
The previous poster has the answer: it's not a secret law, rather it is a secret administrative order.
You'd hope the built-in system of checks and balances in the U.S. government would help to prevent an administrative order from, say, infringing upon constitutionally-guaranteed protections (4th, in this case) for very long.
OTOH, the wheels of justice grind slowly, while the executive and legislative branches of government are controlled by the same party, making it less likely for the legislative branch to challenge administrative orders. It will have to be the courts, so it will take years for the challenges to be made, cases brought and the rulings to occur.
Compressed air is an interesting idea for storing energy.
But I have to wonder how it compares to the alternatives.
How about a capacitor bank and a hand-crank generator?
If you're out of compressed gas or batteries in the middle of nowhere it's hard to replenish your cell phone. Turning a hand crank would make use of cheap, available human power.
These are all good ideas, the unit testing, the automated frequent testing, etc.
Having experience a few crashes of bleeding edge versions of evolution and firefox with the automated calling back to the developers about the crash symptoms got me to thinking that having actual use (and abuse) be automatically incorporated into test suites might really abet the development of less crash prone code.
Despite the capability of automated testing to test many more features than can be done by hand, new applications have so much context and so many options that we need to test for what the users are actually doing with the application. Not just what we think they're doing, what we hope they're doing, but what they're really doing.
The most important bugs would be the ones that happen to the greatest number of people the most times.
Harvesting application interactions and sending them back to the test suite has a lot of value, but it's up to the developers to do this in ways that are sensitive to the user's need for privacy, too.
Stay tuned. Imminent increases in the price of fuel will focus your attention on eliminating the less valuable pieces of vehicle feature bloat.
What will finally put an end to this madness?
Legal method patents.
Even worse, many of them claim they can be changed without notice and at any time
Arrrgh!
It sounds like the legal department has been getting polluted by bad advice from the programmers of "features".
Next thing you know, the EULA will be something like
shows the server @ $5945, which imho is quite a reasonable price for this kind of heavy hitting hardware.
I've always had a thing for sun hardware. It's just... sexy.
Sun hardware has traditionally been through a more rigorous design and testing phase than most PC hardware.
I have to wonder if those quality standards have been maintained on their Opteron system.
For eons, AMD has been trying to overcome an image of offering cheaper x86 hardware that is built into shoddy white boxes with bad power supplies and fans that whine at a premature age.
Sun's high quality hardware reputation would be a great way for AMD to make inroads into the lucrative corporate market. But AMD could sabotage that improved reputation for quality by selling Opterons to system builders that are willing to cut corners that would cast their product in a poor light.