Yesterday I had a request from a client for a network diagram for a system I’m designing, and normally I create such drawings as a PNG file. But this client said “no, I need it in Visio, or similar style so we can edit it”. I have avoided Microsoft Visio in the past, mainly because of its price tag: $249.99 for the basic version, and a whopping $999.99 for the premium version!
That’s a lot of moolah for a simple drawing program. But I figured it was time to bite the bullet and just buy it. So I drove to my local Staples and was going to pick up a copy. I actually had it in hand…and then some serendipity happened.
I was passing the table where they have all the laptops, and this fellow was lifting up and looking over a familiar laptop, one that I had gotten for my lovely wife on her birthday and I commented as I was walking by him “That’s a good buy, I bought one for my wife.”. To which he responded. “That’s good to hear, but do you know if it has wireless 3G?”. I started to explain that such options are usually with add-ons, such as special USB wireless dongles sold by cellular companies, but it seemed to baffle him.
So, I explained the differences between WiFi and 3G/4G services and said, “that laptop is probably already connected to WiFi right here in the store, see that Starbucks next door? They have free WiFi”. He was amazed to discover this, even more amazed when I pointed out to him that every McDonald’s in the USA has free WiFi now also, as do most hotels, and some airports.
To which he replied “Well, I suppose I don’t need to pay for 3G then do I?” That struck me, because at that moment, I realized I might not have to pay for Visio either; not because I planned on shoplifting it from the store, but because I hadn’t checked for alternatives yet.
I said, here, let me show you. And I showed him how to connect to WiFi on the laptop, then proceeded to Google “Visio replacement”.
Some hits came up. Most were dead-ends…but one wasn’t, and that’s what I want to share with you today.
Since many WUWT readers are scientists, engineers and business people, they need something like Visio on occasion to map networks, processes, flowcharts, structure trees, etc.
So I want to share “Dia”, short for “Diagram”. Its detailed, open source, and most importantly, free. It also has a community springing up that is adding shape sets for various specialty designs.
From the Dia web page:
Dia is a GTK+ based diagram creation program for GNU/Linux, Unix and Windows released under the GPL license.
Dia is roughly inspired by the commercial Windows program ‘Visio’, though more geared towards informal diagrams for casual use. It can be used to draw many different kinds of diagrams. It currently has special objects to help draw entity relationship diagrams, UML diagrams, flowcharts, network diagrams, and many other diagrams. It is also possible to add support for new shapes by writing simple XML files, using a subset of SVG to draw the shape.
It can load and save diagrams to a custom XML format (gzipped by default, to save space), can export diagrams to a number of formats, including EPS, SVG, XFIG, WMF and PNG, and can print diagrams (including ones that span multiple pages).
We feel Dia is in a state where it can be actively used. Many features are implemented and the code is quite solid and mature. Try downloading Dia and tell us what you think of it. If you find any bugs, please report them with Gnome Bugzilla.
It seems pretty snazzy, and intuitive. I was able to doodle this up within seconds of opening the program:
So, for what I need to do, a networking flow diagram, it’s perfect, and free.
Some other examples for other venues are here.
My advice, get it. You’ve nothing to lose, everything to gain. While you are at it, if you want a simple and easy to use graphing program, may I suggest Dplot, which I also use. It’s a trial, and registration is cheap, and it has paid for itself many times over.
No this isn’t a commercial or paid plug, just stuff I thought I’d share this holiday season with thanks to the guy who needed some help understanding WiFi and 3G. It just goes to show that sometimes, good deeds are repaid.
From Albert Kallal on December 16, 2010 at 7:31 pm:
As amply demonstrated with your December 17, 2010 at 7:11 am post, using such software may lead to long-winded rambling diatribes of little notable substance. Amazingly long posts, indeed. As previous writers preferred pen and paper over typewriters for they yielded more thoughtful and concise prose, so shall I stay with the keyboard rather than use such voice diction software. Yields less mistakes as well, apparently.
Your car-to-software analogy is bad. Get over it.
From your December 17, 2010 at 7:11 am post:
Heh. You use Windoze and similar proprietary software in a non-human-readable form, like compiled binaries which could be machine code or perhaps bytecode. Sure, the machine can use that. You can look at that code with an editor, admire the pretty hexadecimal characters. But as it is not human-readable, it is, for all intents and purposes, encrypted.
If you attempt to make sense of the code, by decompiling or even just disassembilng, you have violated the EULA.
And yes, there is intent of keeping you from seeing the code. Not only do they keep you from seeing it in a human-understandable form by not allowing access to the source code, they work to prevent you from being able to convert it into one. This is done by the use of obfuscated code. Then there is what the latest versions of Windoze are notorious for, keeping their code hid away. There are hidden directories, hidden files, data hidden on the hard drive in a way that Windoze itself will refuse to alter or remove it, will prevent other programs from removing it, when you can get it to tell you the data is there at all… Getting at the code may require booting from another operating system. Those files may also be encrypted, contrary to what you said.
And with Windoze 7, it gets even worse. As mentioned here and elsewhere, Win 7 creates a “special” partition by default, in a non-standard fashion that makes it practically impossible to remove. If you would like to use that hard drive for something else, you may find that it is now permanently screwed up, a complete reformatting might not save it. How many people installing Win 7 realize the may be irrevocably sacrificing a hard drive for the OS?
Which brings us to another reason why people like open source. They can examine the source code and know what the software does. Windoze has already become infamous for “phoning home” and informing M$ about the machine it’s installed on, which can include information about other programs you’re using, and wonderful “tricks” like automatically installing “upgrades,” which have previously royally screwed up some systems, even when the users were certain they had automatic updates turned off.
Then there is a major issue that basically doomed Vista. The “grand upgrade” to XP turned out to be largely concerned with Digital Rights Management, always inspecting whatever media is accessed on the computer “just in case” it might be pirated, no matter how much system resources it had to hog to do so, checking with M$ to see what had been banned… A notable feature of the “not supported” hardware list was how many devices might be used for unauthorized copying, for which no other rational reason existed for not allowing their use.
Are we? I’ve been mentioning the benefits of open source and free software, and pointing out the fallacies and other problems with your arguments. I have no problem with respecting intellectual property rights, however I do note how software publishers can go too far in protecting them, even to the detriment of the user.
If you really are concerned about IP rights, then let’s see what think about the following. Open source also is licensed under certain terms, a major one being that derivative works are also open source. Companies like M$ regularly examine open source code to see if their IP rights are violated. But as M$ and other proprietary software vendors do not release their source code, open source developers cannot examine if their IP rights have been violated by having their code be incorporated into the proprietary product. That puts open source developers at a disadvantage that doesn’t exist with books, cars, anything else.
How can that be fair? Where’s the level playing field?
Please reference Stephan Kinsella’s work at
http://blog.mises.org/author/stephan_kinsella/ to understand that IP is NOT a type of property. It’s just a state-granted monopoly. Governments call it “property” to propagandize it, like so many other subjects.
Post your pro-IP arguments on any of his blog posts if you want to hash it out with someone who may cause you to think.
Here’s a sample of Stephan Kinsella’s work found at http://blog.mises.org/9499/there-are-no-good-arguments-for-intellectual-property/
There are No Good Arguments for Intellectual Property
There are some decent arguments out there that argue in favor of a state, welfare rights, war, democracy, drug laws, and so on. They are all flawed, since libertarianism is right, but there are coherent, honest arguments that we libertarians have to grapple with.
But it is striking that there are no decent arguments for IP–as Manuel Lora remarked to me, “You know, I haven’t seen a good pro IP article ever.” This is true. One sees the same incoherent or insincere claims made over and over, such as:
1. It’s in the constitution (argument from authority; legal positivism)
2. Intellectual property is called property! (argument by definition?)
3. No movies would be made and kids would die without medicine (artworks and medicine have been produced for ages without IP law; and where’s the evidence?)
4. If you “create” something you own it (despite all the exceptions, and despite the fact that creation is neither necessary nor sufficient for ownership; despite the fact that you either limit these rights in scope or time arbitrarily, or you extent them to infinity, choking off rights in real things and forcing life and commerce to a screeching halt)
5. It generates net wealth–more value than its cost (no evidence, ever, for this contention–just assumptions; not to mention the problem of utilitarian summing of values)
6. IP infringement is “theft” (even though the owner still has his property and ideas, and even though IP infringement is just learning and emulating)
7. People “could” create variants of IP via private contracts… therefore artifical patent granting bureaucracies legislated by a criminal state are … justified?)
There are other arguments, I suppose, but they are so incoherent as to defy description. They often involve crankish initial caps, like Property and Rights, the Internet equivalent of crayons.
I have truly never seen a coherent, good argument for IP. The advocates are either utilitarian, with all the problems that accompany that (not to mention they never have any evidence for their claims); or the advocate a more “principled”, rights-based type of IP that, if taken seriously, would completely undermine all real property rights and make life on earth impossible, so they retreat from this and impose arbitrary, senseless limits on it. What a kluge.
In a recent discussion, What’s Wrong With Theft?, one of the IP advocates, when pushed into a corner, ended up arguing that rights to own property include the right to control all “access to” and “interactions with” one’s property–and that “interactions” include observing or knowing about or learning facts about the things owned by someone, and that when you use this knowledge you are “interacting with” the property, and thus “stealing” it (even though the owner still has it). So here we have it: IP means “interaction rights.” Wow. This is how kooky all IP arguments ultimately are.
It’s quite interesting to see the arguments of people talking about the abolishment of property rights. There seems to be this big grasping at straws that somehow in our society were going to treat intellectual property rights differently.
Or land titles or legal agreements. In fact most legal agreements are in a fact an intellectual property right or agreement. (it call law!).
The fact that we talking about intellectual property rights is really a moot point here.
It is rather laughable to hear people talk about some state run monopoly, and there’s no good reason for private property rights. The socialists and Karl marx’s around the world were making EXACTLY the same arguments as those people here proposing abolishment of intellectual property rights! Yes sir, there is no good reason to have private property, because it just allows the rich get richer and allows those big land owners to buy even more land.
In terms of intellectual property rights with respect to book publishing, the concept in the granting of this kind of copyright as a personal work has been around for a considerable amount of time. In the 1960s a machine called Xerox came along and allowed you to press a button to copy those works. This did result in a whole bunch of challenges to intellectual property rights, and even things such as fair use were the result of some of these issues. Prior to that time, you likely needed a big factory, perhaps a big steam power printing press.
There seems to be an amazing confusion here over the concept of the ease of which you can take something away from somebody, as opposed to that of granting the right.
You can spend several $1,000,000 designing a new crankshaft for car, or several $1,000,000 designing some new software. In BOTH cases you could have designed and built the product and in both cases you NOT YET built a physical product. At this point in time, even without having built the physical product, you can get a patent for that new type of crankshaft you designed. It is purely an intellectual process up to this point and could be 100% designed on a CAD system. The fact that this IP is going result in something to be manufactured in a physical sense, or reproduced electronic as a book or instruction to other manufactures does not matter and DOES NOT change the fundamental concept in our society that we grant intellectual property rights. That is how our system works.
And we grant intellectual property rights because we want to build a better society just like we figured out that private ownership of land and businesses and other entities such as IP are to be granted to individuals. It is how one builds a great nation.
Because of the above, if you’re going to protect some intellectual property rights then when the ability occurs to copy those rights with greater ease, then you’ll have to have some greater restrictions. I mean we have trespassing laws for people’s property, but people doing the trespassing can be perfectly honest without intention to steal something or do any damage or ANY thing wrong.
However without such laws it becomes difficult if not impossible for people to assert the use of their own property rights, be they your business, your farm, or protecting your family.
It is rather laughable for the people the stand here and tell me there’s no intellectual reason for private property rights. And that includes that of IP rights! Our whole western society has been built on this for the last 1000+ years. It is only VERY recent we tossed these concepts of private rights and have given them over to our governments .
The socialists will gladly take away your rights and this ALLOWS them to redistribute wealth or property or your intellectual rights. You don’t think carbon taxing was a means to suck more money from you? And you have to sign away rights to allow this to occur!
I mean if you don’t assert your family rights, your rights for your city or your state or even your nation, then somebody else going to come along and take advantage of you.
I had kind of assumed with the whole global warming debate and this connection of the likes of Al Gore promoting socialism here would click. You don’t think Gore at his old game on this issue? Here is a video of Al Gore pushing Free Trade 17 years ago:
It was the same old garbage back then, the only thing that nipped and stopped this whole global warming fiasco was the great people like our host Watts here and the fact that the Internet came along at exactly the right time. Without the Internet, your bunch of people and sheep, or is my term I like to say sheeple.
By the way folks, how are those rounds of government stimulus package is going? All they result in is a boat load of money going out to China. We seen stimulus package after package for about the last two administrations. We are seeing RECORD profits and yet virtually NO jobs being created. You think these people are gonna create jobs out of the goodness of your heart unless you don’t force the issue by restricting trade in making deals that they must manufacture here ?
If a nation does NOT exercise their sovereign rights, and wiling signs away their rights with free trade agreements, then the result is EXACTLY the case we have now. And the same goes for IP rights.
Large companies are free to move goods, jobs and money out, but not have to build any factories or jobs here! You have to have people over a barrel ELSE THEY WILL NOT play ball.
In Canada we used to have a provincial law that said if you’re going to sell beer here, you have to build me a brewery., I actually think that was a great law. All of the tax revenues, the accounts, people sweeping the floors, people buying the wheat and barley locally, it was really fantastic. Right now, the way North America is headed, not only are hair Care Products coming from China, we’re probably pretty close to seeing things like beer coming from China.
Even more tragic and sad, if you look at the thousands of people sleeping in the streets of California without jobs or work, I read an article that the government handout food packages actually included tins of fruit from China! Imagine that, even government handouts of fruit in California is sending money to China! It is a tragedy of galactic proportions. So i was joking about beer from china, but if your hair Care Products and tins of fruit are coming from China, what’s next?
Do you not have any pride and self worth any more, to control the destiny of your own nation?
As I stated, you think China would pay for the Intel chip if they did not have to? You give away the rights, they not be purchasing from us anymore. We done that with free trade and we tried this failed experiment for 20 years, and it’s been an absolute disaster .
Even a change in Government does not (and likely can not) recind so many of these open trade agreements that they have signed. And once again just like intellectual property rights, these are sovereign rights of a nation that you people are signing away. For those of did not look, do view the video of Lord Monckton and how he talks about sovereignty and the nation signing away its rights here:
There seems to be this idea that it’s something is easier to take away from someone, then it justifies the taking away. I mentioned the trespassing laws, and there’s also things such as people possessing devices to pick locks. They are restricted not because the person is necessarily consider to be a criminal, but if we allow this then we CAN NOT preserve and assert and grant people the means to protect their property rights,. And as I noted this also includes concepts of intellectual property rights.
In fact what no one has accomplished here is given ANY intellectual reason for removal of private property rights, or that of intellectual property rights (they not made the case for distinguishing these concepts on an intellectual level.
The only arguments given to remove intellectual property rights also applies equally well to physical property rights, and they’re the same arguments that it been rehashed over and over again.
I mean, you can feel free to leave the keys in your car and see how long it lasts. On the other hand if everybody’s was given an vehicle that was owned and run and maintained by the government, then I guess we would not need those locks anymore would we? We could even get rid of the car theft laws!
If we invented a small great lightweight powerful personal helicopter, it might allow you to fly out to any farmers field and steal a cow. As a result, we might have to make some laws that don’t allow people to do low flying over people’s property. It not a great solution, but the end of the day we have to protect those people’s rights .
As I pointed out, you can disassemble a car, but why? The answer been given here is that because then you want to see how it works. The problem is you still can’t use the intellectual property rights and designs that you witness! You can NOT go and build another car or USE ANY of the designs you witness that had intellectual property rights on them without reimbursing and paying the owers of those rights.
In the case of software and you disassembling that software, then what is the purpose of doing that? You can’t utilize that design in other works NO MORE then you can take someone else’s book and reproduce that creative work, and thus it not allowed as per agreements.
At the end of day any society with strong property rights, including intellectual rights, is a society that has more freedoms and is a society that fights socialism .
Albert D. Kallal
Edmonton, Alberta Canada
It is interesting that composers in the Classical Period, and even later, had no right to the music they wrote, no copyright. They could charge only for attendance at concerts they conducted personally. They had to resort to VERY tight control of all copies of their scores, collecting them from the musicians after each rehearsal and performance, else they would be swiftly duplicated and performed by others. That is why so many depended on noble or royal patronage for their livelihoods; they were salaried employees, or perhaps court pets and ornaments.
It led to strange results; it is told that after his death JS Bach had so many works stored in his residence that the family used them for wrapping trees etc. Musicologists and music lovers almost cry when they think of all that was lost.
P.S. Yes, I know that Bach was late Baroque; I meant to write “up till the Classical Period and even later”. Actually, Beethoven was in the same situation. It wasn’t until the late 19th C that anything much like copyright for music was established.
From Albert Kallal on December 21, 2010 at 11:44 am :
Why do car manufacturers take apart competitors’ vehicles? To see if their own intellectual property rights have been violated! If Nissan was caught infringing on a Ford patent, that’d make some noise in the car industry.
Likewise in the publishing industry, books and other print media are dissected. Music industry, similar.
But the software industry enjoys a benefit not found elsewhere. While books and cars can be freely dissected and examined, because source code need not be revealed then it is not open for examination of IP rights violations. By allowing software to remain closed source, other publishers and developers are denied the ability to determine if their IP rights are violated.
And that’s denied, period, absolute. If you had read the linked info in my previous post, you should have noticed how decompiling and disassembling does not reveal the actual source code, just a possible version, with the use of obfuscated code further complicating things. M$ Windoze could be violating the IP rights of hundreds of non-M$ programmers and publishers, yet without a release of their source code such theft remains undetected.
For equal protection under the law of IP rights, all software should be open source. This does not require the giving up of any IP rights, publishers are still free to use whatever terms they want in their licensing, provided the source code is released so others may determine if their rights have been violated.
BTW, people still take apart cars to see how they work, for legitimate reasons. It’s part of the learning process in learning how to repair cars. There’s also lots of ideas and designs present that are not under any sort of IP protection that may be used in developing other vehicles. Also, in keeping with the original concept behind patents and their protection, that such designs and concepts are publicly revealed to spur innovation for the public good, knowing what is in use is a primary step in designing something new and better.
This is not promoting socialism. It is promoting competition, capitalism, by the conferring of IP rights. Of which a main component is the knowing of what is being protected by those IP rights. Without the release of source code, protection is a one-sided affair. Giants like M$ are free to bury potential competition and crush them financially with lawsuits claiming patent infringement, eliminating them before the crucial “put up or shut up” phase where they’d have to reveal the code that they are claiming is being infringed on. Potential competitors do not know what is in closed source code, thus they do not know if software they are developing could be infringing on those IP rights, so all their work could be for naught. Thus many don’t even try.
Thus allowing closed source stifles innovation and competition, does not allow for equal protection of IP rights under the law, and is ultimately anti-capitalism. All software should be open source.
KD;
persuasive. Administered as you suggest, I’d agree with your conclusion.
@ur momisugly kadaka (KD Knoebel) wrote:
>For equal protection under the law of IP rights, all software should be open source. This does not require the giving up of any IP rights, publishers are still free to use whatever terms they want in their licensing, provided the source code is released so others may determine if their rights have been violated.
Oh yes it does!
That’s the same kind of argument as saying that I can’t put a lock and key and my door to protect by property because you need the right to look to see if I’m a crook and I stole something and I’m harboring stolen property?
This is the same thing that the government and National Security is proposing on the people of the country. They want the right to walk into your house based on the idea that you might be a terrorist or supposedly your are dishonest person. In other words to see if I’m being dishonest, you’re proposing to take away all my rights.
So the solution and suggestion you are proposing is to take away all rights of me to have any personal privacy in society. In other words I can’t hide anything in my computer and prevent you from looking at it because you need the right to check if I took something of yours? That pretty much sounds like the communist and socialist society that I been speaking about.
In fact the whole issue of searches and seizures of individual property rights and you being searched and your personal information being looked at WITHOUT protection is EXACTLY what you’re proposing in terms of you being in to look at my property rights because you want to know if I stole something.
There’s absolutely no question that you’ll have to live with the fact that I have private property and I might have some stolen goods on the private property, and you don’t have the right to come on to the property until you have good justified reason. And I also have the right to put up fences and walls and locks and keys to prevent you from going on to my property or looking at information that is my property in my computer.
The solution is not to remove all my rights because you want a look at what I have and assume that I’m a criminal or that I’m using some intellectual properties that I don’t have a right to. Private property HAS NEVER worked this way.
Only in a totalitarian society WOULD WE ASSUME that everybody needs the right to look at my private property or into my private affairs to see if I’ve done something dishonest or am using someone else’s intellectual rights.
The reason why we do at the above way, is the need to grant and protect my property rights without you having the right to look at am is a greater need than the downsides of not being able to do so.
>>But the software industry enjoys a benefit not found elsewhere.
That’s not so, when you purchase music on your iPod, it’s digitally encrypted and there’s digital rights management on it. That is ridiculous to stand here and tell me that such kind of privacy is only granted to the software industry. This right of general privacy of people’s intellectual property rights such as my personal affairs or accounting is MY intellectual information of mine. You DO NOT have this right to go into my private affairs.
You can purchase an automobile, but you do not have a right to all of the private information used to create the mobile, be it certain designs of the camshaft, how it was made or even the accounting practices used to create that car, and a whole bunch of other intellectual property rights are not yours for the taking or your right to view and see these things. And there’s a huge good deal of things in that car that you cannot discover by disassembling.
As noted, the reason why we do things as above, because the reverse means that is not practical nor possible to grant anybody any kind of privacy or intellectual rights to their property. If you have the right to come into my property to look at anything because you think I’m a criminal, then you not granting me any real rights worth keeping and you ALSO making the assumption that I’m dishonest without due process.
If I have to provide a source code to my software, I have no reasonable means of exercising my intellectual property rights and thus you’re not granting me any rights real rights of ownership worth keeping.
Albert D. Kallal
Edmonton, Alberta Canada
Maybe mxgraph.com? No login/registration/even any web site. Just straight on the site, draw, export your PNG, save it locally or to your Google Docs account/Dropbox, etc. Done