So it's likely they do require AV vendors to avoid finding them
What makes you believe that the feds are powerful enough to influence all AV vendors, including the few big ones located in europe ? I have hard time to buy that, but it also means that either the feds are clever enough to remain undetected, or the AV are dumb enough to miss them for a very long time. Strange indeed...
If OXML is the default format (in the dominant Office suite), people will view it as being the "serious" one and anything else as being "dumb."
Yes, and if as I suspect the ODF OXML conversion is not bijective (i.e. we lose stuff as we convert), not only people will feel like there is a "serious" format out there; they will also discover that they can't really use both formats on a single document. And because OXML will be the one that matches what office code implements, ODF won't help much aside for sending documents to other people. In other words, you still have to use OXML to create, change and backup your files.
in some instances the recompilation will drive the processor to 100% usage
No, kidding ? You mean the background task don't deliberately leave CPU cycles for the sake of increasing idle time ? Amazing. This kind of summary don't push me hard to RTFA.
Sheet music is readily available pretty cheaply; this is unrelated to the cost of lessons
I am a regular buyer of printed music, because they often have better quality and accuracy than enthusiasts versions from those sites. I would not say they're cheap though; from where I am, they cost around 20~40 each song book.
The free tabs are (use to be!) a great complement to professional printed music. One of the main reason is that a large part of what I'm looking for simply does not exist in publisher's catalogs, and won't any time soon due to lack of demand.
The music publishers are doing this because they want to launch their own ad-supported sites with tabs, lyrics, and sheet music
Where are those sites ? I also dislike to see "webmasters" making money on other's work, but I never read anywhere that publisher were about to create their own tablature online resource.
I'm not qualified to know if your parallel with the 1942-1957 period stands, but I have the feeling that the pressure (commercial and environmental) is much higher now to escape from oil (and now fission) that it used to be back at that time.
This plus -maybe- a more rapid and efficient research effort might make the 15 years period shorter. I hope so at least.
Greenpeace is not the one that ought to report it. Yes, the messenger does matter
Then don't stop at the slashdot headlines:) This is usually a poor messenger as well.
Greenpeace simply relayed it. It has been front news in France a few days ago. The research was conducted by a reputable peer review institution, and they basically said that they got access to raw data of the monsanto study (after a legal battle because those guys initially refused to open this data). From the raw data, -suprize- they got slightly different conclusions than Monsato's. Another study of the same kind (on rats too) from Italian research team was also silenced (cutting their budget) a while back.
What amazes me though is the fact that this maize was allowed for field production in EU simply based on biased/fake/arranged monsanto's conclusion on their own research. That's totally insane; something has to change in EU decision chain.
really surprised me to see there was a patent at all
Youmustbenewhere. The last link is the reason why Germany likely felt necessary to cleanup that particular junk patent. I don't think they are in a process to cleanup the whole insane system anytime soon:) I wonder why they have to though, knowing that EU don't recognize such patent (yet).
I'd much prefer if Dell, HP, etc. were to just provide a list of which of their models and hardware configurations include only hardware that is known to work well with Linux
Exactly.
Actually, I would love to see them going just a little further by working with chipset manufacturer _and_ the OSS community to make certain that all their machines work fine on linux. I don't think setting up a small entity in charge of that aspect would cost them a lot.
Virtualization good: Webservers, middle tier stuff, etc.
Virtualization *insanely* good: development !
It simply changed my programmer life entirely. How can I keep machines with any flavor and version of the linux boxes I'm working at which can be booted in seconds ? How can I have a (virtual) LAN with dozen machines communicating to each other when developping a failover/balanced service ? How can I multiply the number of machines by a cut'n'paste operation ? I do I rollback a damaging crash or a faulty operation (via snapshots) ? The whole thing even fit in my workstation and works beautifully.
VmWare is the most beautiful and useful piece of software I ever used I think, even with those stupid clock problems when running certain bsd/linux environements.
Jeez, I could not even think of working differently now. For me, this is more than a useful tool; this is a revolutionary tool that makes my job possible, which obvioulsy does not mean it's good and rosy for anything on the planet (who thought it was ?)
If I may make a supposition, this occurs most often because programmers think they know how to program in Javascript, but don't have the first clue. That's why we see lots of code like:
Well, sure, I'm with you on this one, but you have to admit that this is how most of those programmers are "teached" from javascript documentation sources (not even mentionning those "100 great javascripts" web sites). The diversity and absurdity of documentation surrounding JS and web development reached a dangerous level. If this book cleanup some of that mess, that'll be a very good news.
for(i=0; i<10; i++) doSomething(i); I hope you don't have a loop in doSomething, because you may accidently modify the global variable "i". The correct solution is to make it a local variable like this:
talking about that, having a global scope by default for variables is one of my top grief on javascript; it's just too easy to make a mistake. And the fact that variable scope is not bound to the containing bloc is really annoying too, even though less often problematic.
Aside from a few quircks like that, and despite the inherent difficulty to make anything working on all browsers (unrelated to JS), I really appreciate the flexibility and the power of this language.
Supply complete and accurate information: This is very vague and how would they even test whether the documentation is complete and accurate
If I was appointed to the evaluation, I would try to figure out if I am able to create a software able to communicate with windows's SMB (and friends) protocols from their spec. I don't see this as an impossible task really as long as I am given enough time, and it looks like they took some time for that since the issue with EU began. The formulation of the news report may sound vague to you, but the objective it represents does not need much more details I think.
Make that information available on resonable terms: Then specify the terms rather than going back and forth on telling MS, your royalty rates are high. If comission finds that the royalty rates are high, then specify the maximum that MS can charge on these kind of things. If comission determines it should be free and specify that
I've the feeling that it's more or less what they have done:
here reads: For both licences, Microsoft divided the protocols into Gold, Silver and Bronze price categories based on the claimed degree of innovation. Microsoft has already agreed that there is a fourth category of protocols, not necessarily innovative, for which there will be no royalty.
According to the trustee, there is no innovation in most of their protocols, which means there should be no royalty for them if I read that correctly. You may argue that the appointed trustee might not be in conditions to drive educated enough conclusions, but this is someone both EU and microsoft have agreed upon:
In accordance with the terms of the Decision, Microsoft submitted several candidates for the position of Monitoring Trustee
Hence, I see some substance in the today's development of the microsoft issue, and hope it's gonna go a lot further for once. This is a stupid games, and microsoft is wasting both EU's time and tax money on that one; I'll be glad if some of that cash come back as a fine they truly deserve.
Reading and understanding Pthreads code written by someone else is straightforward
I have to disagree with TFA. I think pthread is the most bloated API I have ever used; it is truly amazing how they managed to turn simplicity into messy useless complexity. Back in the dec/osf ages, my boss gave me a 300 pages book on pthread so that I could get started (there were not many examples at this time). This book was almost entirely dedicated to decypher this API, not even focusing much on multithread programming concepts. Even if you want to provide complex stuff (as pthread clearly does), you don't need to make every user paying the hard price, that's part of what a good API is, if you ask me.
Anyway, I think both are inadequate for direct use. I always write a small abstraction layer that fit my needs, and this layer is everything but concise on pthread, while it's quite small and elegant on windows. For once, windows API is properly designed, and that's rare enough to be said.
The people I'm refering too in my previous post can handle part of what you say, granted. They can get suspicious when they receive unknown attachments, and they usually don't run them anymore, sure.
When it comes to "not run random binaries", that's not such a trivial thing. A lot of people I know (parents, friends, etc) have a vague understanding of what means 'run a binary'. Very vague indeed. How do you recognize "a binary" afterall ? Which "icons" does it take ? Most often, they just "click icons" that found their way to their desktop or start menu. Okay, I could educate them a little, and that's what I do constantly, with modest rewards.
Now, "run as root/admin". With this one, you've lost most of them, sorry. And thanks M$, you can't always do that for them because they will need admin privilileges at some point for stupid reasons.
Frankly, I don't know the kind of people you are dealing with; maybe I'm in a somehow computer-retarded area, but something I'm really certain is that their computer problems (which rapidly become mine) have little to do with laziness and a lot with education. And I think better OS could drastically lower the impact of this lack of education, and that should be the normal way to use a computer. We'll need to way some more years for this to come.
When using a car, you don't need to know about engine internals (most don't). When using a computer, it's a bit like you are asked to know that stuff or face a rapid accident.
You take mandatory and lengthy courses to drive a car, not to use a computer; that's a _big_ difference. If you want to do the same for computers, I am afraid it would have to be even longer.
What i'm getting at is that you can't ask most people to act wisely when it comes to computer security, simply because they have no clue. It's a bias many people have when rejecting the fault on users, and it does not help much at the end of the day.
Dealing with computer security is hard for trained people; it's simply impossible for average user, period. What we need is better software, and from what I'm reading about vista, we are not there yet. Yes, microsoft did a great job to meet users for what is related to user interface & experience. They did a very poor job in security so far, that's sad and it really sucks.
My personal opinion is that there are far too many people out there that call themselves Wep Applicaton/PHP security experts and write books/give talks about PHP Security
That's because Vista uses a compatibility database and several heuristics to recognize installer executables and, every time the OS detects that an executable is a setup program, "it will only allow running it as administrator. This, in Rutkowska's mind, is a "very severe hole in the design of UAC."
And a very stupid thing to do in the first place ! What's the purpose of determining if an executable is "an installer" ? What is an installer anyway ? If you want to install non-privileged (and if possible sandboxed) programs (tetris), you need a _place_ for that. What you _don't_ want is run it as administrator for the stupid reason that it's the only known way to copy files in a place every user can reach, and flood the registry with stupid useless keys.
That's typicall Microsoft technology. By doing useless, half baked and complex stuff like that (heuristic for "installers"), they open the road to vulnerability discoveries on every corner. Good luck with vista.
Re:As a longtime(past tense) PHP developer I can s
on
PHP 5 in Practice
·
· Score: 1
I could not agree more. PHP has been a nighmare for me _because_ I've a strong programming background (>15y) in various other languages (C, perl, objc, c++, etc). Everything I could find in PHP was either "unconventional" (read: different for no good reason), buggy or simply horribly flawed. I wasted days understanding the (lack of) logic of the whole thing, not mentioning crashes and such.
I believe people hate php as much as they have experience in programming (and inversely, beginners usually enjoy it). Sure, we also have exceptions with large php projects that are well designed, and managed by good programmers.
As long as you don't want to give your code a good structure, use generic coding, rely on an efficient OO runtime, etc. php is okay. Not many tools are available to beginners ; perl, ruby and python are certainly much more demanding.
Except that's a readonly media and what they want is student saving their files in the key. Don't forget that this key will be distributed in schools, and students will _need_ this tool when at school, as part of the educational means. Sure, they could remove the software and move their MP3s in this key, but that would be as useful as burning schoolbooks to start a fire.
I think it covers a real need, and the solution seems good. Also, teaching students that there is a world beside microsoft is not a bad idea either, in addition to be cost effective.
yes, you're right, we now have something great... in firefox. It just won't help you to troubleshoot cross browser issues, which to date takes a hell of js programmer's time. But that's a fantastic help for common JS coding.
Beside the lack of a good way to debug your javascript code (using traces, not the infamous alert method), I really miss printf like functions. Why was this not available in the base language is beyond my understanding.
Anyway, if you're like me, you can use my own implementation of printf functions here.
PHP IMHO is a nice toy but nothing I would use in a commercial project. A soon to be totally OS sollution is of course JAVA with Apache and Servlets/JSP
I doubt people enjoying PHP would actually find their way into JAVA; not those I know at least. I really dislike PHP, but I recognize it has vertues: it is something that a *lot* of people can use, like VB for example. Unlike JAVA. Unlike perl. Unlike many (most?) other things.
Saddly, it's something that also give unexperienced programmers very bad habbits, such as accomodating broken and unorganized APIs (not surprizingly, their code looks as broken and unorganized as the API they're using). Not even mentionning the configuration and troubleshooting hell.
I find that the most ugly aspect of PHP is the way it sometimes approaches standard programming concepts in a very "exotic" way. This cause a lot of problem to me because I've strong references in other language/platforms, but seems to be okay to those unexperienced users who usually don't realize there's something odd/strange.
For simple documents, the reverse conversion works quite fine, allowing users to manipulate OpenDocument text files directly in Word. Our main concern is now to make the process of opening an ODT file and saving it back to ODT as accurate as possible
Everything is said here: "works quite fine"... "as accurate as possible". We need much more than that.
If this plugin provides a good enough working editor for "simple" odt files, it's gonna be next to useless. I doubt it can do better because sticking with standard at this level of data complexity is a hell of a challenge and would take much more than this team working on a plugin.
Maybe I'm missing something here, but if we are going to loose information or get irreversible alterations when exchanging files between word and OO, I fail to see how this pluging could be more useful than current OOword converters, which to me does not offer a way to work on a document with both software. That will be just good enough to say "hey, look, word can also edit OO files !", which may pretty much be what they're looking for.
Personally I wish we (the US and its allies) would formulate a common long term plan (good or bad) and just stick to it.
I wish the US and the rest of the world would formulate a *good* common long term plan and just stick to it. US has done enough sticking with bad plans, don't you think ?
Slashdot Mirror
So it's likely they do require AV vendors to avoid finding them
What makes you believe that the feds are powerful enough to influence all AV vendors, including the few big ones located in europe ? I have hard time to buy that, but it also means that either the feds are clever enough to remain undetected, or the AV are dumb enough to miss them for a very long time. Strange indeed...
If OXML is the default format (in the dominant Office suite), people will view it as being the "serious" one and anything else as being "dumb."
Yes, and if as I suspect the ODF OXML conversion is not bijective (i.e. we lose stuff as we convert), not only people will feel like there is a "serious" format out there; they will also discover that they can't really use both formats on a single document. And because OXML will be the one that matches what office code implements, ODF won't help much aside for sending documents to other people. In other words, you still have to use OXML to create, change and backup your files.
Am I missing something here ?
in some instances the recompilation will drive the processor to 100% usage
No, kidding ? You mean the background task don't deliberately leave CPU cycles for the sake of increasing idle time ? Amazing.
This kind of summary don't push me hard to RTFA.
Sheet music is readily available pretty cheaply; this is unrelated to the cost of lessons
I am a regular buyer of printed music, because they often have better quality and accuracy than enthusiasts versions from those sites. I would not say they're cheap though; from where I am, they cost around 20~40 each song book.
The free tabs are (use to be!) a great complement to professional printed music. One of the main reason is that a large part of what I'm looking for simply does not exist in publisher's catalogs, and won't any time soon due to lack of demand.
The music publishers are doing this because they want to launch their own ad-supported sites with tabs, lyrics, and sheet music
Where are those sites ? I also dislike to see "webmasters" making money on other's work, but I never read anywhere that publisher were about to create their own tablature online resource.
I'm not qualified to know if your parallel with the 1942-1957 period stands, but I have the feeling that the pressure (commercial and environmental) is much higher now to escape from oil (and now fission) that it used to be back at that time.
This plus -maybe- a more rapid and efficient research effort might make the 15 years period shorter. I hope so at least.
Greenpeace is not the one that ought to report it. Yes, the messenger does matter
:) This is usually a poor messenger as well.
Then don't stop at the slashdot headlines
Greenpeace simply relayed it. It has been front news in France a few days ago. The research was conducted by a reputable peer review institution, and they basically said that they got access to raw data of the monsanto study (after a legal battle because those guys initially refused to open this data). From the raw data, -suprize- they got slightly different conclusions than Monsato's. Another study of the same kind (on rats too) from Italian research team was also silenced (cutting their budget) a while back.
What amazes me though is the fact that this maize was allowed for field production in EU simply based on biased/fake/arranged monsanto's conclusion on their own research. That's totally insane; something has to change in EU decision chain.
really surprised me to see there was a patent at all
:) I wonder why they have to though, knowing that EU don't recognize such patent (yet).
You must be new here. The last link is the reason why Germany likely felt necessary to cleanup that particular junk patent. I don't think they are in a process to cleanup the whole insane system anytime soon
I'd much prefer if Dell, HP, etc. were to just provide a list of which of their models and hardware configurations include only hardware that is known to work well with Linux
Exactly.
Actually, I would love to see them going just a little further by working with chipset manufacturer _and_ the OSS community to make certain that all their machines work fine on linux. I don't think setting up a small entity in charge of that aspect would cost them a lot.
Virtualization good: Webservers, middle tier stuff, etc.
Virtualization *insanely* good: development !
It simply changed my programmer life entirely. How can I keep machines with any flavor and version of the linux boxes I'm working at which can be booted in seconds ? How can I have a (virtual) LAN with dozen machines communicating to each other when developping a failover/balanced service ? How can I multiply the number of machines by a cut'n'paste operation ? I do I rollback a damaging crash or a faulty operation (via snapshots) ? The whole thing even fit in my workstation and works beautifully.
VmWare is the most beautiful and useful piece of software I ever used I think, even with those stupid clock problems when running certain bsd/linux environements.
Jeez, I could not even think of working differently now. For me, this is more than a useful tool; this is a revolutionary tool that makes my job possible, which obvioulsy does not mean it's good and rosy for anything on the planet (who thought it was ?)
If I may make a supposition, this occurs most often because programmers think they know how to program in Javascript, but don't have the first clue. That's why we see lots of code like:
Well, sure, I'm with you on this one, but you have to admit that this is how most of those programmers are "teached" from javascript documentation sources (not even mentionning those "100 great javascripts" web sites). The diversity and absurdity of documentation surrounding JS and web development reached a dangerous level. If this book cleanup some of that mess, that'll be a very good news.
for(i=0; i<10; i++) doSomething(i);
I hope you don't have a loop in doSomething, because you may accidently modify the global variable "i". The correct solution is to make it a local variable like this:
talking about that, having a global scope by default for variables is one of my top grief on javascript; it's just too easy to make a mistake. And the fact that variable scope is not bound to the containing bloc is really annoying too, even though less often problematic.
Aside from a few quircks like that, and despite the inherent difficulty to make anything working on all browsers (unrelated to JS), I really appreciate the flexibility and the power of this language.
Supply complete and accurate information: This is very vague and how would they even test whether the documentation is complete and accurate
If I was appointed to the evaluation, I would try to figure out if I am able to create a software able to communicate with windows's SMB (and friends) protocols from their spec. I don't see this as an impossible task really as long as I am given enough time, and it looks like they took some time for that since the issue with EU began. The formulation of the news report may sound vague to you, but the objective it represents does not need much more details I think.
Make that information available on resonable terms: Then specify the terms rather than going back and forth on telling MS, your royalty rates are high. If comission finds that the royalty rates are high, then specify the maximum that MS can charge on these kind of things. If comission determines it should be free and specify that
I've the feeling that it's more or less what they have done:
here reads:
For both licences, Microsoft divided the protocols into Gold, Silver and Bronze price categories based on the claimed degree of innovation. Microsoft has already agreed that there is a fourth category of protocols, not necessarily innovative, for which there will be no royalty.
According to the trustee, there is no innovation in most of their protocols, which means there should be no royalty for them if I read that correctly. You may argue that the appointed trustee might not be in conditions to drive educated enough conclusions, but this is someone both EU and microsoft have agreed upon:
In accordance with the terms of the Decision, Microsoft submitted several candidates for the position of Monitoring Trustee
Hence, I see some substance in the today's development of the microsoft issue, and hope it's gonna go a lot further for once. This is a stupid games, and microsoft is wasting both EU's time and tax money on that one; I'll be glad if some of that cash come back as a fine they truly deserve.
Reading and understanding Pthreads code written by someone else is straightforward
I have to disagree with TFA. I think pthread is the most bloated API I have ever used; it is truly amazing how they managed to turn simplicity into messy useless complexity. Back in the dec/osf ages, my boss gave me a 300 pages book on pthread so that I could get started (there were not many examples at this time). This book was almost entirely dedicated to decypher this API, not even focusing much on multithread programming concepts. Even if you want to provide complex stuff (as pthread clearly does), you don't need to make every user paying the hard price, that's part of what a good API is, if you ask me.
Anyway, I think both are inadequate for direct use. I always write a small abstraction layer that fit my needs, and this layer is everything but concise on pthread, while it's quite small and elegant on windows. For once, windows API is properly designed, and that's rare enough to be said.
The people I'm refering too in my previous post can handle part of what you say, granted. They can get suspicious when they receive unknown attachments, and they usually don't run them anymore, sure.
When it comes to "not run random binaries", that's not such a trivial thing. A lot of people I know (parents, friends, etc) have a vague understanding of what means 'run a binary'. Very vague indeed. How do you recognize "a binary" afterall ? Which "icons" does it take ? Most often, they just "click icons" that found their way to their desktop or start menu. Okay, I could educate them a little, and that's what I do constantly, with modest rewards.
Now, "run as root/admin". With this one, you've lost most of them, sorry. And thanks M$, you can't always do that for them because they will need admin privilileges at some point for stupid reasons.
Frankly, I don't know the kind of people you are dealing with; maybe I'm in a somehow computer-retarded area, but something I'm really certain is that their computer problems (which rapidly become mine) have little to do with laziness and a lot with education. And I think better OS could drastically lower the impact of this lack of education, and that should be the normal way to use a computer. We'll need to way some more years for this to come.
When using a car, you don't need to know about engine internals (most don't). When using a computer, it's a bit like you are asked to know that stuff or face a rapid accident.
You take mandatory and lengthy courses to drive a car, not to use a computer; that's a _big_ difference. If you want to do the same for computers, I am afraid it would have to be even longer.
What i'm getting at is that you can't ask most people to act wisely when it comes to computer security, simply because they have no clue. It's a bias many people have when rejecting the fault on users, and it does not help much at the end of the day.
Dealing with computer security is hard for trained people; it's simply impossible for average user, period. What we need is better software, and from what I'm reading about vista, we are not there yet. Yes, microsoft did a great job to meet users for what is related to user interface & experience. They did a very poor job in security so far, that's sad and it really sucks.
My personal opinion is that there are far too many people out there that call themselves Wep Applicaton/PHP security experts and write books/give talks about PHP Security
No, kidding?
That's because Vista uses a compatibility database and several heuristics to recognize installer executables and, every time the OS detects that an executable is a setup program, "it will only allow running it as administrator. This, in Rutkowska's mind, is a "very severe hole in the design of UAC."
And a very stupid thing to do in the first place ! What's the purpose of determining if an executable is "an installer" ? What is an installer anyway ? If you want to install non-privileged (and if possible sandboxed) programs (tetris), you need a _place_ for that. What you _don't_ want is run it as administrator for the stupid reason that it's the only known way to copy files in a place every user can reach, and flood the registry with stupid useless keys.
That's typicall Microsoft technology. By doing useless, half baked and complex stuff like that (heuristic for "installers"), they open the road to vulnerability discoveries on every corner. Good luck with vista.
I could not agree more. PHP has been a nighmare for me _because_ I've a strong programming background (>15y) in various other languages (C, perl, objc, c++, etc). Everything I could find in PHP was either "unconventional" (read: different for no good reason), buggy or simply horribly flawed. I wasted days understanding the (lack of) logic of the whole thing, not mentioning crashes and such.
I believe people hate php as much as they have experience in programming (and inversely, beginners usually enjoy it). Sure, we also have exceptions with large php projects that are well designed, and managed by good programmers.
As long as you don't want to give your code a good structure, use generic coding, rely on an efficient OO runtime, etc. php is okay. Not many tools are available to beginners ; perl, ruby and python are certainly much more demanding.
a live CD or DVD might have been a better idea
Except that's a readonly media and what they want is student saving their files in the key. Don't forget that this key will be distributed in schools, and students will _need_ this tool when at school, as part of the educational means. Sure, they could remove the software and move their MP3s in this key, but that would be as useful as burning schoolbooks to start a fire.
I think it covers a real need, and the solution seems good. Also, teaching students that there is a world beside microsoft is not a bad idea either, in addition to be cost effective.
yes, you're right, we now have something great ... in firefox. It just won't help you to troubleshoot cross browser issues, which to date takes a hell of js programmer's time. But that's a fantastic help for common JS coding.
I agree that javascript is not *the* problem of web development, but it has itw own bag of oddities.
// Did you really expect the 'i' variable to contain 20 here ?
Here is one: variable scope:
function MyFunc()
{
var i=0;
{
var i=20;
}
}
Beside the lack of a good way to debug your javascript code (using traces, not the infamous alert method), I really miss printf like functions. Why was this not available in the base language is beyond my understanding.
Anyway, if you're like me, you can use my own implementation of printf functions here.
Job #1 is to take the current RPM codebase and clean it up
$ rm -r rpmsrcdir
is a good start.
PHP IMHO is a nice toy but nothing I would use in a commercial project.
A soon to be totally OS sollution is of course JAVA with Apache and Servlets/JSP
I doubt people enjoying PHP would actually find their way into JAVA; not those I know at least. I really dislike PHP, but I recognize it has vertues: it is something that a *lot* of people can use, like VB for example. Unlike JAVA. Unlike perl. Unlike many (most?) other things.
Saddly, it's something that also give unexperienced programmers very bad habbits, such as accomodating broken and unorganized APIs (not surprizingly, their code looks as broken and unorganized as the API they're using). Not even mentionning the configuration and troubleshooting hell.
I find that the most ugly aspect of PHP is the way it sometimes approaches standard programming concepts in a very "exotic" way.
This cause a lot of problem to me because I've strong references in other language/platforms, but seems to be okay to those unexperienced users who usually don't realize there's something odd/strange.
For simple documents, the reverse conversion works quite fine, allowing users to manipulate OpenDocument text files directly in Word. Our main concern is now to make the process of opening an ODT file and saving it back to ODT as accurate as possible
... "as accurate as possible". We need much more than that.
Everything is said here: "works quite fine"
If this plugin provides a good enough working editor for "simple" odt files, it's gonna be next to useless. I doubt it can do better because sticking with standard at this level of data complexity is a hell of a challenge and would take much more than this team working on a plugin.
Maybe I'm missing something here, but if we are going to loose information or get irreversible alterations when exchanging files between word and OO, I fail to see how this pluging could be more useful than current OOword converters, which to me does not offer a way to work on a document with both software. That will be just good enough to say "hey, look, word can also edit OO files !", which may pretty much be what they're looking for.
Personally I wish we (the US and its allies) would formulate a common long term plan (good or bad) and just stick to it.
I wish the US and the rest of the world would formulate a *good* common long term plan and just stick to it. US has done enough sticking with bad plans, don't you think ?