I'll take you at your word that nothing you have would help you. Depending on what you're trying to accomplish, you may never even need to have multiple machines (physical or virtual) to give yourself the refresher you want. Even if you do, there's probably no good reason to invest in a "monster" machine, unless you have special needs you didn't mention. Absent those special needs, you can probably do just fine with a mid-level dual core machine and a close eye on your RAM needs. Also absent special needs, there's no good reason to invest in multiple new boxes just to teach yourself a few things. Virtualization is your friend, if you even need it.
But you know... ask a generic question, get generic advice.
Computers in schools have a bit of a checkered history. My knowledge is probably a bit out of date, but I think the first step needs to be laying out exactly why you think this is a good idea in the first place. I would suggest writing a very specific description of the subject areas with which you think the computers will help and a run-down of why and how you believe computers can improve on how these subjects are taught without them. From this will flow some obvious questions about what other resources might be needed to make it work, and how best to provide these resources perpetually, which is also important. But I think in general it's pointless to ask questions about how to deploy computers in schools in general, without a more concrete idea of how they fit into teaching exactly which subjects (and by subjects I mean something a little more specific than "history," "english," etc.).
I didn't think this story was so bad compared to many I've read. Maybe my standards have been beaten down to nothing by the state of science reporting. But we can expect a lot of poorly written and misleading stories about neuroscience this week, due to SfN (the Society for Neuroscience annual meeting, taking place right now in DC).
Okay, I freely admit I haven't read all the relevant materials, but since it's easy to get some misinformation from the out-of-context quote, I may as well correct that.
A half percent population effect is potentially quite a large and meaningful effect. First, while it's possible it's a half percent effect in everyone, it's also possible it's a huge effect in some people but negligible in most. A video game that created one serial killer in every city and suburb in the US would probably have a small population effect, but it would still be very consequential by most standards. Second, even if violent video games cause exactly half a percent increase in agression (or whatever) in everyone who plays them, that could still be socially meaningful if violent video games are widely played. For example, suppose that you have to reach a threshold of violent feelings before actually doing anything, and people are distributed across a wide range of their pre-game level of aggressive thought. That half percent increase could easily cause a marked increase in consequentially violent acts, even though it's a small number by some standards.
On the whole I don't believe violent video games cause much if any harm, but it's still important to understand these effects and their consequences in a little more context.
This isn't the evening news. Unless the only goal of posting this story is to drive traffic to the site with the project, how hard would it have been to put the phrase "gel packs" into the Slashdot story?
we dont do training courses or setting up networks. wtf does that have to do with legal work ?
As an organization devoted to promoting free software, they quite reasonably wanted to offer training courses on legal matters. Who would you have teaching courses on legal matters if not lawyers?
Exactly what kind of analysis is this that doesn't actually provide any specific information, in which the analyzer is not looking for any particular information, and which if performed by a police officer would not be considered a "search" with regards to the 4th Amendment? The only distinction between "analysis" and "search" of a disk would be algorithmic -- as in you're limiting "search" to mean only those items of information acquired by some form of item-by-item comparison between a prescribed value and data on the disk selected through various means. Yes, that is the correct comp-sci definition. It is not a relevant legal or lay-person definition. It is a useless distinction for these purposes.
Hashes have lots of uses, most of which I probably don't even know about. I would imagine it would be a useful police procedure to calculate hashes on a hard drive confiscated as evidence to help rule out the possibility of tampering. I would also imagine that backup software might calculate hashes. Neither of these processes is well described as search, except probably in legal terms. Those are just the two I could think of, I'm sure someone who knows something about computer science could come up with many more. Incidentally, this is the second time in this thread you've accused me of using some term in a technical sense only applicable in computer science or engineering. Since I don't have any education in either area, this seems pretty unlikely. In any case, if it turns out I am, it's not because I have some pedantic attachment to correct technical definitions of which I'm unaware.
Of course I read it, and I'm saying that is a pedantic engineering definition of the term that is not used anywhere outside of your slashdot posting.
Okay, well I acknowledge that you may have read my original post, but your comment on how I "restricted" the definition of the word "search" seems like at best a willful misconstrual. I don't know anything about engineering or computer science, and if it's a meaning used only in my posting, then obviously it's not an engineering definition. But I don't really care if what seems to me a patently obvious distinction turns out to be an engineering concept as well. If you're really claiming that defining "search" as a process by which something could be found (or not found) is a pedantic definition that has meaning only in engineering, then I'm willing to leave it at that.
Your example of the policeman again demonstrates my point (and the fact that you didn't understand it) perfectly. That process results in finding stuff. Therefore it's a search process. Hashing a hard drive may or may not, depending on what the hash is used for. If the hash is carried out as part of some kind of disk verification process, backup process, or some other process that doesn't tell you anything about the nature or contents of the files on the disk, then I fail to see how it meets the commonsense definition of search. In the case of the original article here, it was clearly used for searching, so it's a moot point. But that doesn't demonstrate that hashing=searching, as the original article would lead you to believe. That only demonstrates that searching=searching.
The only difference is the word "particular", which I'm sure makes a huge difference if you use the most narrow definition not that this was the intent. An instance of information is a particular piece of information, not necessarily one decided in advance to be found.
Get rid of the word particular, my point still holds. If nothing can be found by the process, it's not search.
"The police looking at your personal effects" and "the police searching your personal effects" are the same to a lay person. That is of course the context in which we're discussing these terms, the context of your 4th Amendment rights, is it not? This is exactly what I expect from a Slashdot pedant -- limiting words to only the most narrow of several definitions, chosen not by the intent of their usage but by how well they serve the pedant, while ignoring the context in which they are used. It is truly the most useless form of reasoning I've ever seen.
Let me turn this around. I'm limiting the use of the word to its actual meaning. You are trying to expand it to encompass things it does not mean, just because they happen to coincide in the single case at hand. You've broadened the meaning of the word "search" to meaninglessness, just because of the fact that it often implies search in the context that's meaningful to you right this moment.
Anyway, long story short, the court disagrees with you. Bring your pedantic argument to them, and perhaps they'll realize they've been misusing the word "search"! I'm sure some dictionary.com links, perhaps highlighting exactly what definition you've chosen as the "right" one, would help them see the light.
As I'm sure you know from having read my previous postings, I was not trying to provide a legal definition of "search." The fact that the legal definition does not agree with mine is unrelated to anything I've written on the subject, but I guess it made a good lead-in for your gag about dictionary.com. However, since you've made this claim and called me a pedant, I may as well press the issue. Could you please provide a link to a court case in which hashing used for a purpose that doesn't involve finding anything was found to constitute search?
Got a little lost in my previous reply, and forgot to reiterate the point I was making. Obviously the analogy to police searches is just silly. But just to be a little more explicit about what I'm claiming hashing is not equivalent to searching.
Hashing can be used for many purposes. Some of them would only be described as searching if you're trying to confuse people. Hashing isn't searching, and it doesn't inevitably entail searching. If someone hashes something, even if you can't think of any other conceivable use for the information, it's not searching unless actual searching is done. Just like if I run chasing after someone with a baseball bat, and there's no conceivable other purpose for it than hitting them with it. I'm pretty sure that unless someone actually gets hit with the bat, I'm not guilty of whacking (in the legal sense). I may be guilty of other things in that case.
As a practical matter, it's quite easy to imagine this coming up if someone accidentally hashes a whole disk in the process of some kind of analysis, even though they don't mean to search for anything.
Obviously you didn't read my previous messages in which I pointed out that a searching process is one by which something could conceivably be found. So be it.
Your analysis is ridiculous and obviously incorrect. A process by which nothing can be found is not searching in any meaningful sense whatsoever. The police coming into your house of course can never meet this definition because no human being can force themselves not to see things that they look at. A computer hashing your files can.
Even a careless and superficial reading of my earlier post could not possibly lead to the interpretation that I think searching means trying to find a particular piece of information. If you truly believe that "looking at" and "searching" are equivalent in lay terms, then you simply don't know the meaning of one of those three terms.
In lay terms, the police hashing every file on a person's hard drive won't occur if they're not searching for something. I highly doubt they do it for funsies.... Essentially, I think you're making a worthless distinction between a computerized methodology and a human one.
First of all, you're assuming that the sole conceivable purpose of hashing files is to facilitate searching. That's just not true. Hashing is also useful for, for example, detecting corruption (or tampering). I'm not a lawyer, but perhaps having verified hashes of the entire drive and of each file would be useful for some legal purpose. Even if it isn't, even if searching is the only conceivable use for hash results on a hard drive's files, that doesn't mean hashing = searching. Similarly, if you buy a gun for the purpose of killing your neighbor, and then think the better of it, you're not guilty of murder.
My only point being that the Slashdot headline was silly. It's a search if it's a search (not speaking legally of course, lawyers have their own ideas). If someone hashes your hard drive just in case, then thinks the better of it and discards the hashes, it's not a search in any meaningful sense. They never initiated a process by which anything could be found. It's not at all like a police dog, because the two parts -- the hash and the use of the hashes for search -- are quite easily separated. Hashing is only the first part. If you have a police dog that can be dropped into a room and asked later to bark (under oath) if he smelled drugs, then I'd make the same argument for dogs. Although it's a little different, because the dog already knows if the smell is in his database.
To calculate the hash values they had to read the contents of the drive. That is a search of a person's effects without a warrant.
That may or may not pass legal muster, but in lay terms it's just silly. If the hash is used to find something (or fail to find it), it's a search. If it's not, it's not a search. In this case, it was clearly a search, but not simply because some data were hashed.
Calculating hash values isn't search. Calculating them and comparing them to a database is. Not only is it quite clearly search (searching for files that match known MD5 signatures), it's hard to imagine another way to describe it without being deliberately obfuscatory.
You hit this problem frequently when doing the write-new-file-then-atomic-rename dance if you don't fsync the new file before the rename; most applications neglect that technically-required fsync because things just work on non-xfs filesystems.
I don't know much about filesystem design, but isn't this just a bug in the journalling? Does it apply equally to all of the reasonably recent versions of xfs?
As an application developer, I'm certainly sympathetic to anyone who avoids fsync in certain situations -- depending on the details, it can certainly make things more sluggish. How much responsiveness to trade for how much security is a pretty individual thing.
Ioannidis wrote a previous article, titled "Why Most Published Research Findings Are False." A very provocative title, one that practically begged the scientific community to read it just to accumulate a laundry list of holes in his argument. A good marketing maneuver. It may or may not be true that most published research findings are false, but the article certainly didn't demonstrate it. Within the context of the discourse he intiated, that would have to be viewed as a kind of willful stupidity, or perhaps marketing brilliance. After all, if the same journal received ten equally well argued articles with titles like "why most research is pretty good," they would still of course prefer to publish his. This truism seques nicely into the new article (on which he is not first author), which is titled, "Why Current Publication Practices May Distort Science." Use of the word "may" is quite helpful here. Does the article live up to its title? It may not be convincing, but it would be even less so without the word "may."
I think the point was that PDF ads make for a surprising juxtaposition, given that the most interesting content of the story is a feature that runs counter to the commercial purpose of the ads. The ads promote Adobe, the article is a stake in Adobe's heart (sort of). Maybe not a textbook example of irony, but certainly not its opposite. Then again, I have the ads blocked -- if they were along the lines of "Adobe congratulates OpenOffice" then you're right.
Either way, I can't believe people are devoting energy to arguing about version numbers. As an OpenOffice user, I'm glad for the new features, I still want more, and I'd feel no differently if they called it version 2.8, version 6, or whatever.
Like any other piece of software, there are things you feel like you couldn't live without and things you have to get used to. I remember it felt clunky when I first started using it, but that went away very quickly. Some things are more elegant than in MSOffice, some less. I've been using v3.0 for a while now (beta and fc releases), and I like it quite a bit. One of the big clunkinesses, the graphical depiction of comments/notes, is now very nice. There are still some screen rendering oddities that don't get in my way but do contribute to the impression of clunkiness. On the whole, I imagine it's still clunkier than its commercial counterpart, but the gap is narrowing. However, I rarely edit documents that are more than a few hundred pages long, and I know many of OO's critics say that its shortcomings are especially obvious if you work on long documents. So I can't comment on that.
How has MSOffice come along in the same time? Is pdf writing integrated now? Do files still bloat to ridiculous sizes on repeated editing?
The PPC version is hidden away with one of the openoffice "Projects" -- click on the projects tab, and then you're on your own, but eventually you get to an ftp site. I've found it to be very stable in light use (I mostly use the Linux version).
Contrast that to what the defendant in a suit brought by the holder of a bogus patent faces: between $3 and $5 million dollars in legal fees per case. Without the beneficent legal team that came to Jacobsen's aid, winning such a case is so expensive that it's really losing.
While Perens is right to be excited about this baby step, bogus lawsuits are still a pretty worrisome problem. In most cases, no beneficent legal team will come to your aid. Broadly, this has little to do with software -- Microsoft could sue some random person out of the phone book if they wanted exclusive use of his name for their next product. But the risk is obviously much greater if you develop software (free or otherwise). The shallower your pockets, the greater the risk.
I hope you're not referring to me. I know precisely why many scientists like to use Excel. The two biggest reasons are that it's easy and familiar. Prioritizing those at the cost of scientific rigor is just laziness. The next biggest reason is inertia.
Slashdot Mirror
I'll take you at your word that nothing you have would help you. Depending on what you're trying to accomplish, you may never even need to have multiple machines (physical or virtual) to give yourself the refresher you want. Even if you do, there's probably no good reason to invest in a "monster" machine, unless you have special needs you didn't mention. Absent those special needs, you can probably do just fine with a mid-level dual core machine and a close eye on your RAM needs. Also absent special needs, there's no good reason to invest in multiple new boxes just to teach yourself a few things. Virtualization is your friend, if you even need it.
But you know... ask a generic question, get generic advice.
Computers in schools have a bit of a checkered history. My knowledge is probably a bit out of date, but I think the first step needs to be laying out exactly why you think this is a good idea in the first place. I would suggest writing a very specific description of the subject areas with which you think the computers will help and a run-down of why and how you believe computers can improve on how these subjects are taught without them. From this will flow some obvious questions about what other resources might be needed to make it work, and how best to provide these resources perpetually, which is also important. But I think in general it's pointless to ask questions about how to deploy computers in schools in general, without a more concrete idea of how they fit into teaching exactly which subjects (and by subjects I mean something a little more specific than "history," "english," etc.).
I didn't think this story was so bad compared to many I've read. Maybe my standards have been beaten down to nothing by the state of science reporting. But we can expect a lot of poorly written and misleading stories about neuroscience this week, due to SfN (the Society for Neuroscience annual meeting, taking place right now in DC).
Can someone explain what an "object" is?
Including most enlighteningly: "How to pay for concert tickets with grant money and not get caught."
Okay, I freely admit I haven't read all the relevant materials, but since it's easy to get some misinformation from the out-of-context quote, I may as well correct that.
A half percent population effect is potentially quite a large and meaningful effect. First, while it's possible it's a half percent effect in everyone, it's also possible it's a huge effect in some people but negligible in most. A video game that created one serial killer in every city and suburb in the US would probably have a small population effect, but it would still be very consequential by most standards. Second, even if violent video games cause exactly half a percent increase in agression (or whatever) in everyone who plays them, that could still be socially meaningful if violent video games are widely played. For example, suppose that you have to reach a threshold of violent feelings before actually doing anything, and people are distributed across a wide range of their pre-game level of aggressive thought. That half percent increase could easily cause a marked increase in consequentially violent acts, even though it's a small number by some standards.
On the whole I don't believe violent video games cause much if any harm, but it's still important to understand these effects and their consequences in a little more context.
This isn't the evening news. Unless the only goal of posting this story is to drive traffic to the site with the project, how hard would it have been to put the phrase "gel packs" into the Slashdot story?
we dont do training courses or setting up networks. wtf does that have to do with legal work ?
As an organization devoted to promoting free software, they quite reasonably wanted to offer training courses on legal matters. Who would you have teaching courses on legal matters if not lawyers?
Exactly what kind of analysis is this that doesn't actually provide any specific information, in which the analyzer is not looking for any particular information, and which if performed by a police officer would not be considered a "search" with regards to the 4th Amendment? The only distinction between "analysis" and "search" of a disk would be algorithmic -- as in you're limiting "search" to mean only those items of information acquired by some form of item-by-item comparison between a prescribed value and data on the disk selected through various means. Yes, that is the correct comp-sci definition. It is not a relevant legal or lay-person definition. It is a useless distinction for these purposes.
Hashes have lots of uses, most of which I probably don't even know about. I would imagine it would be a useful police procedure to calculate hashes on a hard drive confiscated as evidence to help rule out the possibility of tampering. I would also imagine that backup software might calculate hashes. Neither of these processes is well described as search, except probably in legal terms. Those are just the two I could think of, I'm sure someone who knows something about computer science could come up with many more. Incidentally, this is the second time in this thread you've accused me of using some term in a technical sense only applicable in computer science or engineering. Since I don't have any education in either area, this seems pretty unlikely. In any case, if it turns out I am, it's not because I have some pedantic attachment to correct technical definitions of which I'm unaware.
Of course I read it, and I'm saying that is a pedantic engineering definition of the term that is not used anywhere outside of your slashdot posting.
Okay, well I acknowledge that you may have read my original post, but
your comment on how I "restricted" the definition of the word "search"
seems like at best a willful misconstrual. I don't know anything
about engineering or computer science, and if it's a meaning used only
in my posting, then obviously it's not an engineering definition. But
I don't really care if what seems to me a patently obvious distinction
turns out to be an engineering concept as well. If you're really
claiming that defining "search" as a process by which something could
be found (or not found) is a pedantic definition that has meaning only
in engineering, then I'm willing to leave it at that.
Your example of the policeman again demonstrates my point (and the
fact that you didn't understand it) perfectly. That process results
in finding stuff. Therefore it's a search process. Hashing a hard
drive may or may not, depending on what the hash is used for. If the
hash is carried out as part of some kind of disk verification process,
backup process, or some other process that doesn't tell you anything
about the nature or contents of the files on the disk, then I fail to
see how it meets the commonsense definition of search. In the case of
the original article here, it was clearly used for searching, so it's
a moot point. But that doesn't demonstrate that hashing=searching, as
the original article would lead you to believe. That only
demonstrates that searching=searching.
The only difference is the word "particular", which I'm sure makes a huge difference if you use the most narrow definition not that this was the intent. An instance of information is a particular piece of information, not necessarily one decided in advance to be found.
Get rid of the word particular, my point still holds. If nothing can
be found by the process, it's not search.
"The police looking at your personal effects" and "the police searching your personal effects" are the same to a lay person. That is of course the context in which we're discussing these terms, the context of your 4th Amendment rights, is it not? This is exactly what I expect from a Slashdot pedant -- limiting words to only the most narrow of several definitions, chosen not by the intent of their usage but by how well they serve the pedant, while ignoring the context in which they are used. It is truly the most useless form of reasoning I've ever seen.
Let me turn this around. I'm limiting the use of the word to its
actual meaning. You are trying to expand it to encompass things it
does not mean, just because they happen to coincide in the single case
at hand. You've broadened the meaning of the word "search" to
meaninglessness, just because of the fact that it often implies search
in the context that's meaningful to you right this moment.
Anyway, long story short, the court disagrees with you. Bring your pedantic argument to them, and perhaps they'll realize they've been misusing the word "search"! I'm sure some dictionary.com links, perhaps highlighting exactly what definition you've chosen as the "right" one, would help them see the light.
As I'm sure you know from having read my previous postings, I was not
trying to provide a legal definition of "search." The fact that the
legal definition does not agree with mine is unrelated to anything
I've written on the subject, but I guess it made a good lead-in for
your gag about dictionary.com. However, since you've made this claim
and called me a pedant, I may as well press the issue. Could you
please provide a link to a court case in which hashing used for a
purpose that doesn't involve finding anything was found to constitute
search?
Got a little lost in my previous reply, and forgot to reiterate the point I was making. Obviously the analogy to police searches is just silly. But just to be a little more explicit about what I'm claiming hashing is not equivalent to searching.
Hashing can be used for many purposes. Some of them would only be described as searching if you're trying to confuse people. Hashing isn't searching, and it doesn't inevitably entail searching. If someone hashes something, even if you can't think of any other conceivable use for the information, it's not searching unless actual searching is done. Just like if I run chasing after someone with a baseball bat, and there's no conceivable other purpose for it than hitting them with it. I'm pretty sure that unless someone actually gets hit with the bat, I'm not guilty of whacking (in the legal sense). I may be guilty of other things in that case.
As a practical matter, it's quite easy to imagine this coming up if someone accidentally hashes a whole disk in the process of some kind of analysis, even though they don't mean to search for anything.
Obviously you didn't read my previous messages in which I pointed out that a searching process is one by which something could conceivably be found. So be it.
Your analysis is ridiculous and obviously incorrect. A process by which nothing can be found is not searching in any meaningful sense whatsoever. The police coming into your house of course can never meet this definition because no human being can force themselves not to see things that they look at. A computer hashing your files can.
Even a careless and superficial reading of my earlier post could not possibly lead to the interpretation that I think searching means trying to find a particular piece of information. If you truly believe that "looking at" and "searching" are equivalent in lay terms, then you simply don't know the meaning of one of those three terms.
In lay terms, the police hashing every file on a person's hard drive won't occur if they're not searching for something. I highly doubt they do it for funsies. ...
Essentially, I think you're making a worthless distinction between a computerized methodology and a human one.
First of all, you're assuming that the sole conceivable purpose of hashing files is to facilitate searching. That's just not true. Hashing is also useful for, for example, detecting corruption (or tampering). I'm not a lawyer, but perhaps having verified hashes of the entire drive and of each file would be useful for some legal purpose. Even if it isn't, even if searching is the only conceivable use for hash results on a hard drive's files, that doesn't mean hashing = searching. Similarly, if you buy a gun for the purpose of killing your neighbor, and then think the better of it, you're not guilty of murder.
My only point being that the Slashdot headline was silly. It's a search if it's a search (not speaking legally of course, lawyers have their own ideas). If someone hashes your hard drive just in case, then thinks the better of it and discards the hashes, it's not a search in any meaningful sense. They never initiated a process by which anything could be found. It's not at all like a police dog, because the two parts -- the hash and the use of the hashes for search -- are quite easily separated. Hashing is only the first part. If you have a police dog that can be dropped into a room and asked later to bark (under oath) if he smelled drugs, then I'd make the same argument for dogs. Although it's a little different, because the dog already knows if the smell is in his database.
To calculate the hash values they had to read the contents of the drive. That is a search of a person's effects without a warrant.
That may or may not pass legal muster, but in lay terms it's just silly. If the hash is used to find something (or fail to find it), it's a search. If it's not, it's not a search. In this case, it was clearly a search, but not simply because some data were hashed.
Calculating hash values isn't search. Calculating them and comparing them to a database is. Not only is it quite clearly search (searching for files that match known MD5 signatures), it's hard to imagine another way to describe it without being deliberately obfuscatory.
You hit this problem frequently when doing the write-new-file-then-atomic-rename dance if you don't fsync the new file before the rename; most applications neglect that technically-required fsync because things just work on non-xfs filesystems.
I don't know much about filesystem design, but isn't this just a bug in the journalling? Does it apply equally to all of the reasonably recent versions of xfs?
As an application developer, I'm certainly sympathetic to anyone who avoids fsync in certain situations -- depending on the details, it can certainly make things more sluggish. How much responsiveness to trade for how much security is a pretty individual thing.
Ioannidis wrote a previous article, titled "Why Most Published Research Findings Are False." A very provocative title, one that practically begged the scientific community to read it just to accumulate a laundry list of holes in his argument. A good marketing maneuver. It may or may not be true that most published research findings are false, but the article certainly didn't demonstrate it. Within the context of the discourse he intiated, that would have to be viewed as a kind of willful stupidity, or perhaps marketing brilliance. After all, if the same journal received ten equally well argued articles with titles like "why most research is pretty good," they would still of course prefer to publish his. This truism seques nicely into the new article (on which he is not first author), which is titled, "Why Current Publication Practices May Distort Science." Use of the word "may" is quite helpful here. Does the article live up to its title? It may not be convincing, but it would be even less so without the word "may."
You lawyers are all the same -- always defining big words I don't understand in terms of other big words I don't understand.
Typical lawyer letter -- pretends to genuinely believe youtube has no good reason to take down the videos, when in fact they do.
I don't know if any lawyers are reading this, but if so, can someone explain what the word "automatonically" means?
I think the point was that PDF ads make for a surprising juxtaposition, given that the most interesting content of the story is a feature that runs counter to the commercial purpose of the ads. The ads promote Adobe, the article is a stake in Adobe's heart (sort of). Maybe not a textbook example of irony, but certainly not its opposite. Then again, I have the ads blocked -- if they were along the lines of "Adobe congratulates OpenOffice" then you're right.
Either way, I can't believe people are devoting energy to arguing about version numbers. As an OpenOffice user, I'm glad for the new features, I still want more, and I'd feel no differently if they called it version 2.8, version 6, or whatever.
Like any other piece of software, there are things you feel like you couldn't live without and things you have to get used to. I remember it felt clunky when I first started using it, but that went away very quickly. Some things are more elegant than in MSOffice, some less. I've been using v3.0 for a while now (beta and fc releases), and I like it quite a bit. One of the big clunkinesses, the graphical depiction of comments/notes, is now very nice. There are still some screen rendering oddities that don't get in my way but do contribute to the impression of clunkiness. On the whole, I imagine it's still clunkier than its commercial counterpart, but the gap is narrowing. However, I rarely edit documents that are more than a few hundred pages long, and I know many of OO's critics say that its shortcomings are especially obvious if you work on long documents. So I can't comment on that.
How has MSOffice come along in the same time? Is pdf writing integrated now? Do files still bloat to ridiculous sizes on repeated editing?
The PPC version is hidden away with one of the openoffice "Projects" -- click on the projects tab, and then you're on your own, but eventually you get to an ftp site. I've found it to be very stable in light use (I mostly use the Linux version).
When I went to check this number, it appeared that the actual statistic is much lower.
That's ridiculous. I found corroboration for the 74% number on
this
web site. In the future, do a little research before posting.
From the article:
Contrast that to what the defendant in a suit brought by the holder of a bogus patent faces: between $3 and $5 million dollars in legal fees per case.
Without the beneficent legal team that came to Jacobsen's aid, winning such a case is so expensive that it's really losing.
While Perens is right to be excited about this baby step, bogus lawsuits are still a pretty worrisome problem. In most cases, no beneficent legal team will come to your aid. Broadly, this has little to do with software -- Microsoft could sue some random person out of the phone book if they wanted exclusive use of his name for their next product. But the risk is obviously much greater if you develop software (free or otherwise). The shallower your pockets, the greater the risk.
I hope you're not referring to me. I know precisely why many scientists like to use Excel. The two biggest reasons are that it's easy and familiar. Prioritizing those at the cost of scientific rigor is just laziness. The next biggest reason is inertia.