Slashdot Mirror

How does evolution explain a four chambered heart?

A possible explanation is 3 to 4 chamber heart.

Whole organs systems can not be formed by random mutation, and they don't work without the entire system.

Behe's previous failed proposal, the bacterial flagellum, was a type III secretory system before it was a bacterial flagellum. It was a different thing entirely. Whole organs can evolve separately and then join to take on new roles as the above link proposes.

Evolution can explain one step at a time changes, but some changes have to come in sets or they never work. Evolution will never explain that.

Modern evolutionary theory already explains that and -- wait for it -- there are already lab tests by Professor Lenski where sets of changes occurred via evolution. Do remember that Behe disgraced himself in court and this was obvious to everyone.

I believe that I read once that Oddworld, Abe's Oddesey drew its themes from vegetarian ideas? Is that true?

There is no reason that the specifications should cost more than the cost of distribution.

1. We have had over 15 years of secret file-formats changing with every version of Microsoft Office in order to stifle competition and force annual upgrades to compatible software (the upgrade treadmill),
2. It's a principle of government that they should be vendor neutral. If a government said "All Ford trucks can drive 20 kilometres faster than all other cars" there would be outrage! In the late 1990s governments all around the world realized that web sites shouldn't favour Microsoft Internet Explorer, and that they must use vendor-neutral standards.
3. This argument is then extended to Office Suites and their secret file-formats. For vendor-neutrality/competition some governments propose moving away from Microsoft Office's format to a new standard called OpenDocument (ODF) which is used by OpenOffice.org, KOffice and many others. ODF was approved by ISO under the 'PAS' process.
4. Microsoft are concerned that they'll lose their government sales because their Office Suite doesn't use a standard. If government start using a competitor and putting money into them then maybe something like Firefox will spring up to take them on in Office Suites. Their Microsoft Office cash-cow that earns them (something like) 3.8 billion every 3 months is under threat!
5. Microsoft respond not by supporting ODF but by proposing a competing faux-standard, OOXML (Office Open XML). They hurriedly rush through some poorly written documentation with hundreds (if not thousands) of mistakes that can't be implemented in full. This is good enough for Ecma International, who approve it as a standard called ECMA-376. ECMA-376 is a complete mess -- inconsistent, buggy, inflexible, ugly (non-mixed content model, OLE, DEVMODE).
6. ECMA-376 is submitted to the ISO under the 'Fast Track' process, and is now given the name DIS-29500. It's not a normal process that allows time for improvement, it's a brief 9 month review of 6000 pages (that's a lot).
7. Lobbying begins internationally. To stereotype the process into two camps, it's the people who want to get out from the monopoly Vs those who benefit from the monopoly (Microsoft and business partners).
8. Every country gets a vote in the ISO, so New Zealand is as big as the United States, China, India ... and each country has 9 months to comment on OOXML. The proposed standard is soon recognized as being technically awful, broken, not-cross-platform, designed to confer the appearance of standardisation but without the detail necessary.
9. The ISO doesn't necessarily decide on technical merit, there's a lot of non-techies who are open to all kinds of arguments other than the quality of the standard. They're not the ITTF either, they don't need implementations to prove the standard. The 'Fast Track' can just approve stuff.
10. Process irregularities come out in favour of Microsoft. There are accusations of corruption. They're caught stuffing the ballot in Sweden. Lots of small African nations suddenly sign-up and favour Microsoft. Public perception is that the ISO process itself is quite hackable.
11. Microsoft lose the late 2007 vote, but there's another final chance.
12. Microsoft make some changes to OOXML in response to national comments, but a 9 month review has only touched the surface of the problems within OOXML.
13. They probably will win this current vote (March 2008) and gain ISO approval for OOXML.
14. A lot more accusations of process irregularities, some by people from within the process.
15. If OOXML gains approval then the ISOs reputation will be in tatters within the technical community.
16. The backlash against Microsoft and the ISO will be strong. This Slashdot post sumarises this well: Slashdot: Microsoft's Miscalculation.
17. But really we're just b

Hi,

They've either documented or removed those 'behaveLikeWW8' style flags. As engineering criteria however the documentation hasn't been reviewed to see whether it accurately describes Microsoft Office, and it was added late in the process (early 2008, I think).

What remains however are Microsoft OLE references without documentation or patent coverage, accessibility problems, and huge areas of OOXML entirely without documentation that mean that ISO OOXML promotes defacto standards.

Read my blog for a few posts on how no one voting on OOXML saw a final specification.

How about this?

There are two I can think of off the top of my head:
Lots of small African nations suddenly sign-up and favour Microsoft.
Some countries change their vote from "decline" to "abstain", for no good reason.
Also, see:
http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20080327231223154
http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=2008032913190768

As well, this is coming from the not-so-open-standards company of Microsoft. If they had produced a complete, clean, open standard that was truly better than the already-approved ODF (and not significantly worse), not many people would really be complaining. We'd probably be saying "wow, MS really did it up this time. Times change."

And, as for "fixed the technical problems", I'll just quote Holloway and say that it's "inconsistent, buggy, inflexible, ugly... technically awful, broken, not-cross-platform, designed to confer the appearance of standardisation but without the detail necessary."

I agree. We're back to where we were a year ago only now with a lot more awareness of the office monopoly and how much money is wasted.

Here are two reports on OOXML that I recently released, one (PDF, 0.9MB) and two (PDF, 0.8MB).

Get over yourself and your alternate reality: it is possible for something to be wrong, bad, inadequate or harmful. It's not all a spectrum of opinions. Look at the businesses that succeeded before, during and after the dot-bomb they work with facts not wishful thinking. Take a friggin look at the specs and compare ODF vs MSOOX yourself, or hire someone to do so. It's not a matter of opinion that one is hands down better, it's a reproduceable fact. There are many metrics to measure by, including third-party availability.

I would hope that someone in the position to make buying decsions should be able to figure out the difference between a format and an application. Let's apply the wirebrush of enlightenment to the foreskin of ignorance here:

• ODF
  • ODF is a format, not an application. It is not OSS
  • It is backed by industry, with one exception.
  • It has ISO standing thus backed by the world's nations, but even as just an OASIS standard, it has the backing of some 600 businesses and institutions.
• OSS
  • OSS is a development model. Like scholarly research which gives use things like the Internet and washed hands, it builds on past works.
  • OSS is also a licensing model. The goal is to promote collaboration and accelerate advancement.

Bzzzt. Sorry. Thanks for playing. Even an astroturfer is expected to produce better than that these days. While you are correct that MSOOX or what ever it is called this week, is a closed technology, it is incorrect to say that it works for significant portion of the population. Currently it is limited to MSO2007 users and that application has far less than MSO 2003 market share. MSO 2003 never even hit 15%. As it stands there are currently more applications deployed which support ODF.

However, let's try bending your quote back. Let's say as an individual in a position to make buying decisions based on this sort of thing you realize that it is possible for *everybody* except MSO2007 users to use ODF and that for them it is possible to install a helper application parallel to MSO2007. What then? Are you still going to have an axe to grind and force the latest, most-proprietary-todate MS format? Or will you go with the interoperability provided by an industry backed format?

I have taken the time and looked at both specs. I even found areas for improvement in ODF and have suggested them. Two are being folded into subsequent versions, though not as a result of my particular voice.

My conclusion back then? It's a travesty that any time is still wasted even discussing the MS format. The MS format is not only unimplementable technically, as others have also concluded seen in the link, being loaded with problem after problem and missing definition after definition. If that is not enough, there is a swarm of licensing and sw patent issues that are unlikely to ever be resolved in a positive manner. ODF in contrast has clearly benefited from a long and open development cycle.

Probably the best way to see for yourself, though, not to pore through the dozens of pages in the standard or through the 6000+ pages of MS vomit, but instead to simply look at the existing implementations. Even better, take a look at some of the ODF tools available and try a few of your own implementations.

Yes, the collective hive-mind of /. does care and in the latest newsletter there was the quote "we want this voted down!".

You see, a few years ago governments all around the world started realizing that when they send ".doc" files to the public they're asking people to go spend money with a particular company to read that file. Governments shouldn't say "People with FIRESTONE tyres get to stay on the road!" ...or.. "People with Microsoft Office can talk to the government!". So there's been a raising of consciousness around how file formats cost countries tens or hundreds of millions of dollars each year.

What Governments should do is say "People whose cars pass certain tests can stay on the road!" or "People with an Office Suite that uses a published standard can talk to us!". That way it encourages competition, "innovation", and cut-throat pricing.

Microsoft could tell where the wind was blowing, and they began trying to get the International Standards Organisation (ISO) to rubber-stamp their 6000 page proposed standard... a standard called OOXML. An Open Standard sounded like a great idea but the question was: Had Microsoft really told everyone their secret mix of herbs and spices? Well, no, because as it turned out many things in OOXML were left undefined and the only vendor capable of implementing OOXML was Microsoft.

(and even they're having problems ... let alone the problems other vendors have)

Now although ISO haven't announced anything it looks like it's going to go "No" for Microsoft.

This doesn't affect what software individuals or the private sector choose, but people who should use standards (government and government vendors) do care about this decision. Actually, individuals and the private sector probably should care because more competition in the office suite market may lower the cost of Microsoft Office.

A country's "no" can turn into a "yes" when an issue is addressed at the ballot resolution meeting (I think) so the more "no"s the better because otherwise a single country could just swing it in favour of OOXML. The more "no"s the larger the safety net, so it'll be interesting to see what the final vote is.

So I'd expect that in the coming days there'll be a lot of analysis of whether the actual comments in the "No, with comments" from each country are fundamental problems or superficial quirks. Can any particular country be swung to vote yes easily?

Still, it's a great start. The noooxml crowd are predicting 18 "no"s.

Can we get an update to the Bill Gates Borg icon please? Ballmer is in charge now and we should respect that

Ok, you have asked for it, but it is realy disgusting.

You could probably write a 3 line bash script to do this (unzip, extract the ODF content.xml, regex to remove all tags) but if you're wanting a conversion engine try Docvert

Abes-Oddesey.gif

If anyone's trying to write open source software that uses MS Word, here's a web service that uses OpenOffice.org to convert to Oasis OpenDocument 1.0 format, and then optionally runs the XML through an XSLT pipeline to make any XML/HTML.

I had about 100 test documents and I tried using Abiword, WVWare, but OpenOffice.org had the best reverse engineering of msword. Is there any other open source conversion software I should have used?

Gnome icons? I wish... :(

another openoffice 2.0 screenie

If an internet oddities book doesnt cover the basics like Little Stalker Boy, it's full of garbage I've seen 100 times and not worth purchasing, much less thumbing through. For the article author, some guy who claims he lives on the web, he sure seems "wowed" by some pretty tired crap.

I've done one large commercial site in Cocoon and it was a joy (well, aside from the technical problems, but the idea of Cocoon is great).

I took some photos, see Photos from ROTK premiere

I'm about 50M from the Embassy theatre, but they're also got all of Reading cinema booked for the event too (showing the movie in about 8 places, so that many of the people who worked on the film can see it at the same time and not just the celebs -- although it'll be the celebs at Embassy).

Awful photos's from the Australasia premiere last year

This is part of Raskin's interface project, but the main push is for a consumer ZUI.

The page here has topics covered.

I believe everything, and you should too

Disecting a website

Logo, and a part of that was Turtle Graphics

Seymour Pappert and his team at MIT made the first programming language for children.

I assume you meant here, buddy!

Ooooh... and LOGO for those not familiar with it's awesome power.

No, browsers can't do GUI. They can display pictures, but I surely hope you don't consider that a GUI. They have no sense of windows or workspace areas. What's more, the in-browser DHTML toys that simulate a GUI have to reinvent the wheel each and every time. I can't choose the most basic GUI settings (border width, if I want SDI windowing, what colour I prefer my title bars to be - and many other less cosmetic settings that most users and visually impaired monkeys alike would need to consider it a modern GUI). Nothing's native, which means no user control over anything.

Nope, mouseover doesn't qualify either.

Client Anorexia, excellent term! And yeah - the average client does have a fast CPU and large HDD - but most of them have cruddy dialup bandwidth. X can't travel over that. X is just used as a graphics buffer these days.

Granted, there are many wonderful things that browsers have (fallback font-familys/hypertext/a level of client control/future compatibility/well structured HTML being resolution independant/layers) but browsers*1 will only penetrate software markets that deal with simplistic text, and thats all.

Hell, Amiga Workbench was better than this GUI.

You can't edit images (palette at the side, click and draw), edit documents with varying fonts (a textbox with one font, one colour, one font-size, w00p) you can't play music (unless you have a pluggin - but more importantly there isn't a cross-browser way of playing music)

So no, browsers aren't nearly there as a GUI. They make Motif like powerful, elegant, and sexy.

Oh, and no - I'm not about to chat in the discussions of Internet C++ - but I will go see if there's a mailing list :)

(please excuse my bitching - being the king of the world - i'm expected to act this way ;)

Whoop, Logo

And, if you're particularly bored, my letter. It's wanky and tame, but that's what they're supposed to be ;)

====

Hi you crazy kids, you

We both know there isn't a legal standpoint for doing what you're doing when it comes to legal action about taking down the information pertaining to decoding DVDs on dvdutils.com. There are perfectly legal reasons for decoding legally purchased DVDs so as to view them on other operating systems not supported by vendors. You have no legal right - and in my eyes no moral right - to threaten these websites with legal action. These are small sites largely run by passionate unpaid people for the benefit of others. They probably haven't the resources to stand against your false claims - and with the cost involved are forced (albeit in a defacto kinda way) to bow under your legal weight of faulty claims. Discussing the merits and flaws in DVD encryption is not illegal and your actions degrace the legal profession.

Come on now, that's not cricket.

Matthew Cruickshank

http://www.holloway.co.nz/book/3/

SCOOP 1 2 3 4 5
Unofficial P.J. Online
Dave Dobbyn as Dobbo, the bard Hobbit and his merry band?
LOTR movie site by an apparent stalker (oh, excellent)
Official LOTR



==
remove pointy nose to email me
Little Stalker Boy (of websites and girls)

So you can't object for any health or comfort reasons, no religeous or cosmetic objections

There are religions that forbid non-traditional body markers of any kind. The numbers to form a legally recognised religion are pretty low. It's amazing how you can abuse the law from within the MattyFaith.

But if you're looking for paranoia, come read my piece (of shite).

In New Zealand the government said phoey at a Life Time Licence and brought in a digital driver licence mostly for the reasons of disqualified drivers using friends licences.

They're protecting us from them

Unfortunately the old licence had no photo (just name/address/DOB/eyecolour) so they had a perfect excuse for the photo (and thus the choice to record it in any media). Maurice is Minister of Transport and IT... we have a combined Police/Traffic force.

In my town i've seen the current police surveilance camera's, their resolution is scary. Some facial recognition and they could get all those bad guys.


9/9/99 and i'm moderating, huh.

I don't "frequent" art galleries, but I do spend time in cd stores, which have great art.

I would say this is IMHO, but I am speaking for the entire southern hemisphere. Really, No shit.

holloway soundtrack '98

Mozilla, eh?

It claims to have complete support for most W3 standards. The only problem is that the W3 don't go far enough in specifying how things should be rendered (especially with HTML, less so in CSS). Being a webdesigner (i'm sorry, ok) there are problems with how various browsers render things as default. Like if I don't specify CELLPADDING in my TABLE (but use lower-case everyone, for XML/EcmaScript compliance).... should the browser go and put in a default of 2pixels spacing? or 4, or nothing, or what, eh?

So I have to end up specifying CELLPADDING=0 and every other obscure attribute just to ensure cross-compatibility, bloat my code and make it all look just peachy.

With CSS1 the W3 realised and put in defaults, but HTML4.0's lack of default still cramps my style.

Mozilla isn't strictly W3 compliant, in that they step into areas the W3 hasn't exactly specified for HTML (the image width refered to as percent being one example), but they have done it in the most sensible, nicest, embrace-&-extend way.

Embrace and extend is good, if done openly, the W3 don't own language. They're spiffing and all, but they didn't finalise HTML Frames until HTML4 (don't heckle frames, they're overused but useful in some cases, especially IFrames)

Mozilla's XOOL (sp?) is sexy.


holloway.co.nz holloway.co.nz/mph oh this really sucks.

Mozilla, eh?

It claims to have complete support for most W3 standards. The only problem is that the W3 don't go far enough in specifying how things should be rendered (especially with HTML, less so in CSS). Being a webdesigner (i'm sorry, ok) there are problems with how various browsers render things as default. Like if I don't specify CELLPADDING in my TABLE (but use lower-case everyone, for XML/EcmaScript compliance).... should the browser go and put in a default of 2pixels spacing? or 4, or nothing, or what, eh?

So I have to end up specifying CELLPADDING=0 and every other obscure attribute just to ensure cross-compatibility, bloat my code and make it all look just peachy.

With CSS1 the W3 realised and put in defaults, but HTML4.0's lack of default still cramps my style.

Mozilla isn't strictly W3 compliant, in that they step into areas the W3 hasn't exactly specified for HTML (the image width refered to as percent being one example), but they have done it in the most sensible, nicest, embrace-&-extend way.

Embrace and extend is good, if done openly, the W3 don't own language. They're spiffing and all, but they didn't finalise HTML Frames until HTML4 (don't heckle frames, they're overused but useful in some cases, especially IFrames)

Mozilla's XOOL (sp?) is sexy.


holloway.co.nz holloway.co.nz/mph oh this really sucks.

me, I'm waiting for direct hardware-to-brain connections. I'll be the first to be really truly wired.