I think a better approach is do unto others as you think they would want done to them
Ah, so as long as I think women really want to be slapped around, dominated, and treated as second class citizens, then you think that's the better approach? No thanks. (Hint: The original was not "Do unto others as you think you'd want done unto you if you were them...")
I like how you reference a random opinion on another discussion site as fact. Nice.
OK, fair enough. Let's see what
Aaron J Seigo,
"one of KDE's lead developers, and best known personality",
has to say.
With the 4.0.0 release we were addressing three audiences:
The device integrators like ASUS;
third-party application developers who won't do anything until there is a stable release; and
our user base that is into bleeding-edge technology.
That's the classic role of a beta release, no? I trust this is an adequate source, and suitable support rather than my first, admittedly non-authoritative link?
I didn't take the time in the first post to find a better link because I thought KDE 4's current state of development would be well-known to/. readers. And again, I wasn't attempting to denigrate KDE 4 in any way - I have great admiration for the technology, and look forward to trying it out at the 4.1 release.
Ah. Très bon. The French people have been uniformly wonderful to my family during our visits - probably amused at my weak but enthusiastic attempts at the language, actually.:-D
And some of my best friends have been atheists.;-)
Precisely. My wife doesn't use Compiz, and has experienced zero crashes in the past 9 months. I use Compiz in spite of its instability relative to the rest of Linux, which is rock solid.
I've worked in the computer industry for 30 years, and have never encountered a desktop Windows machine that survived a month (under heavy load) without a crash, although most desktop Linux machines I've seen stay up for many months with no crashes. Current desktop Windows XP seems to be good for about a week at a time under heavy load, which I consider acceptable - but the AC is right, Linux is just expected to be more stable than Windows - and in my experience it always is. Well, except with Compiz enabled.;-)
As always, YMMV - and especially your definition of "heavy load"!
Well, to join in the general astonishment at your misconception, you may be unaware that for much of our history, churches have played a central role in community life in the USA. "Dinner on the grounds" was a common event even in my childhood. Today, tournaments are held in the family life center at the Baptist church. And just this past month, homeowners in our city met at the local Catholic church to negotiate a gas drilling lease, and signed the contracts at the Bible church down the street.
I'm amused because a good British friend of mine used to chide me for being so "parochial" for not knowing details of life in other countries, particularly the UK. Methinks it's more of a two way street than he let on. Are you British, by chance?:-)
You're right - thanks for the improved link! Although the changes listed even there seem rather sparse (new wallpaper, a new printer dialog, GPL 3 licensing, "improved integration" and "many updated, new, and exciting applications". Since I haven't used KDE since September 2005, I'd appreciate a link with a little more detail in those last two categories if available.
I would cherish the day that software patents could be dismissed as a silly idea not worth worrying about. Unfortunately, they are the law of the land where I live, which also happens to be the largest economy in the world at the moment, so as a software professional I have to worry about them. If you underestimate Microsoft's ability to make them the law of the land where you live by dismissing them with
It's not really worth worrying about it
then you may wake up one day to find them the law of the land where you live as well.
I would encourage a somewhat more proactive stance against software patents - and meanwhile, a very conservative attitude toward software that is likely to infringe on dearly held (US) patents central to the strategy of the largest and one of the most aggressive corporations in the world. And by "aggressive", I don't mean anything positive in the slightest.:-/
This is the only distro I have ever seen that gets worse in terms of stability with each release.
I understand why that would frustrate you. My experiences were mixed - it's as stable as always on my desktop with Compiz disabled, but crashes about once a week with Compiz enabled. I enable it anyway - there's just something about people's reaction the first time I close a window and it burns up that makes me more tolerant.:-)
On the other hand, 7.10 is the first version that worked perfectly on my laptop with no tweaking (unless you count clicking on the network control and selecting my local network from the drop-down list). It was literally easier than setting up my daughter's new Vista-based laptop - and Vista was pre-installed. Go figure.
Kde 4.0 supposed to be a rapid improvement and Kubuntu is supposed to be alot more polished and integrated
Actually, KDE 4.0 is more of a beta quality release (like Mac OS/X 10.0 or pre-SP1 Vista) - it's 4.1 or so that'll really be ready for daily use by normal users. Unfortunately, Hardy falls at an awkward time with respect to 4.0 (or vice versa) - 4.0 isn't ready for long term support, but 3.5 isn't likely to be relevant for 3 long years. As a result, while Ubuntu 8.04 will be a Long Term Support (LTS) release, Kubuntu 8.04 will not be.
I agree with your opinion of Gnome (I use it myself), and with your assessment of KDE 4 (I look forward to trying it out - looks great so far!). And I'm very suspicious that Mono contains Microsoft-patented technology, and believe free software developers should avoid it until the title is clear. But that's just my $0.02 worth (and it seems to be worth less every day...) I don't believe any critical part of Gnome is dependent on Mono, however.
Strangely, I've yet to hear a kind word from the normals in the real world.
Y'know, the odd thing is that I have.
For instance, we hosted several young British missionaries (these were religious missionaries, mind you, not Linux missionaries;-) at our house last summer (I'm in North America), and they all had laptops (nat'chully). To my surprise, one of them was running Ubuntu. I asked him why he chose Ubuntu over Windows, and he replied with admirable British conciseness, "It doesn't crash so much."
I've run across several others in my church who were using Ubuntu when I met them (and that one Suse guy;-). Yes, it's a big church, but it's a church, not an engineering conference or engineering club. Nor is it a high-tech firm such as where I work, where Linux is a rather commonplace choice, even for the spouses.
I'm no longer surprised to meet "normals" using Linux. I'm more surprised nowadays to find someone like you who hasn't.:-)
BTW, is there anything known about diseases where people don't see tools as an extension of the body?
Oh, yes, you definitely should read
The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat. Dr. Sacks covers fascinating extreme dysfunctions of the brain (including a case where a woman couldn't recognize her entire body as her own, but considered it foreign and distasteful), yet all told compassionately and with an empathetic recognition of the humanitarian issues involved.
Hey, you try waking up the next morning a foot taller and 150 pounds heavier, and lets see how well you take your first steps, Mister!;-)
That sounds like exactly what my wife experienced during pregnancy. Her center of gravity shifted significantly forward rather rapidly, so that all of the balance she had learned over the years worked against her instead of for her. It's the only time since I've known her that she's moved with less than elegant grace. Once the baby was born, she quickly reverted to her "normal" balance. I mean (ahem) physical balance.
Video Editing software, for example; you'd be far better off using one of the many commercial programs than one of the few open source ones.
Interesting choice of example, given yesterday's events. They mean nothing, nothing at'all. But I can't resist a quick recount anyway.
My daughter is in Winter Guard, and my wife volunteered to videotape yesterday's competition for the director using her handy new JVC MG-130U camcorder (with hard disk!:-). On the way home (in our car), we decided it would be cool to drop off a video CD with the director when we picked up my daughter (who rode home on the bus). The camera came with a CD of video editing software for Windows (my wife's laptop dual-boots), so we decided on a friendly little competition - she would use the provided Windows software, I'd use whatever Ubuntu would provide, and the first to hold up a burned CD was the winner. Neither of us had ever fooled with video files before; this would be a good novice-to-novice test of user-friendliness.
She installed the included software from CD on Windows while I browsed my options using Ubuntu's Applications -> Add/Remove... I finally settled on and installed Kino. By the time I was ready, she had already connected the video camera to her computer. Unfortunately, the software didn't want to download the file - selecting "Download" would stream the video to the screen, while "Advanced Download" would crash the software. After about 10 minutes of working together, we managed to do some type of backup thingy that got the file off the camcorder (though the download was a leisurely 15 minutes!). We couldn't find any way to safely disconnect the camcorder (the app insists on running full screen, and apparently lacks an option to remove the camcorder), so I just unplugged it and headed back to my computer.
A few seconds after plug-in, Nautilus popped up with the camcorder's hard drive mounted. I copied the file (.MOD, never saw THAT extension before) to my local drive in under two minutes, selected "Unmount Volume", and returned the camcorder to my wife. She was arguing verbally with her Windows software - now that the file was off the camcorder, the included video editing software no longer wanted to play the video even though the file was clearly there (right number of bytes and everything).
Kino refused to load the.MOD file (not very elegantly - it just hung), so I googled something like "MOD video Ubuntu" and was presented with instructions for transcoding to DV format. That worked well, but took about 15 minutes (just under 10k frames). Once in Kino, I explored the transitions a bit until I had something I liked, wrote out an MPEG-4 file (which had a.AVI extension, to my surprise), played it in Movie Player to make sure it worked completely, then burned the original MOD and the new AVI to a CD using GnomeBaker.
I held the CD in the air - a quite pointless gesture, since my wife was still in the other room. I went to gloat^H^H^H^H^H see how she was doing.
She was near tears. She finally had the video playing, but now it wouldn't create a CD. As luck would have it, my daughter called just then to let us know the bus was back, so my wife took the Linux-produced CD to the director (who was much impressed by our turn-around time). Thanks, Ubuntu!;-)
My wife is in the den now, trying to get the Windows software to burn a $%@&^& CD. I'm sure she can do it; she's one smart cookie. She mastered PageMaker and Office, I'm sure she can master an entry level video program, too.
Neither of these programs is vaguely comparable to professional video editing software, and this test is purely anecdotal. But what the heck - I love happy endings.;-);-);-)
OK, I'll try one more time, too. Bush v Gore was decided on the basis that elections results are calculated using the rules established prior to the election, not after the election. "Clear intent of the voter" was not (and is not) the established precedent in Florida, but rather "how the voter voted".
Feel free to advocate changing the standard, but only between elections.
(BTW, "clear intent of the voter" sounds suspiciously like "how those with power think the voter intended to vote". I believe that's an incredibly dangerous standard for any election.)
"More than three months after Democrat Al Gore conceded the hotly contested 2000 election, an independent hand recount of Florida's ballots released today says he would have lost anyway, even if officials would have allowed the hand count he requested."
I'm sorry your preferred candidate lost - but he lost. Bill Clinton won in 1992 with a mere 43% of the popular vote - but he won. You need to learn to let go.
Until a media consortium hired independent assessors to evaluate the ballots, and found that the Gore got more than Bush votes in Florida in 2000.
Cheesedog clearly addresses the Media Consortium examination of 175,101 ballots against 9 scenarios (Bush won 4, Gore 5). Better known are the Miami Herald and USA Today recounts, which concluded "...that Bush would have won in all legally requested recount scenarios, and in all other scenarios." Quote is from here. While you might hate the end results, the post-election recounts are nowhere near as clear, or as favorable to Gore, as you represent them.
As for Ohio, people went to jail for rigging the recount.
Based on the link you yourself provide, this is at best disingenuous. The link references the opening statements of a trial in which three people are accused of violating election laws (the story is dated 6 days earlier than your post). Apparently, "innocent until proven guilty" isn't a concept to which you subscribe. I hope that few others here are so filled with hatred for Bush that they toss out basic due process for election workers as you have done.
And they use the (r) here plain as day. Mea culpa - it would have been so easy to look first. *blush*
The rest of my statements were accurate, however, despite my lapse of memory. Microsoft's initial request for a trademark on Windows was rejected as generic, but they succeeded in overturning that ruling on appeal. Lindows sought to have the trademark invalidated as generic as part of their countersuit. Microsoft launched a blitz of lawsuits worldwide to (I believe) drive Lindows into financial distress and force a settlement rather than litigate on the merits of their case. And Microsoft did pay Lindows $20 million to end the lawsuit and change their name (to Linspire) - which looks less like a victory to me than a payoff. You can read the details here and here.
Perhaps I was wishfully thinking. I believe the original rejection of the trademark was proper. That and $5 will get you a coffee at Starbucks, of course.
You probably mean Windows. If so, then note that Microsoft uses (tm) and not (r) - because it hasn't been successfully registered. Also remember that they paid Lindows $20 million to drop the countersuit alleging that Windows is an improper trademark (and of course, changed Lindows to Linspire). Being a rich monopolist has its privileges.
Shell is a generic term.
For gasoline? You honestly say, "Honey, we need to stop for some shell"???
Word is a genric word.
Yes, for a short collection of characters - but not for a word processing program. A trademark can certainly be a generic word or phrase, just not the generic word or phrase for the product being offered. If I created a word processor and named it "Word Processor", then that would be a generic term.
Saddam Hussein was smacked down when he attacked his neighbors (well, not quite, Mr Rumsfeld and Co. were quite pleased when he attacked Iran).
Well, to be clear, he was smacked down when he attacked (and conquered) our ally, Kuwait. We were invited to intervene when the ousted Kuwait government was joined by the Saudis in requesting our help. Iran, needless to say, never asked for our help.:-)
Nor was Saddam's army some wimpy third world force back then. To paraphrase Jay Leno, his army went from being the fourth largest in the world to the fifth largest... in Iraq.:-)
He was contained to his borders and was harming nobody but his people
Well, he was actually firing surface to air missiles at allied aircraft on a fairly regular basis, which was itself a violation of the cease fire from the first Gulf War. But since he was firing in impotence with little chance of hitting anything, a snicker would have been a more appropriate response than another smack down. Which is probably why "violation of the cease fire" wasn't the justification used for the second Gulf War.
Wouldn't it be possible, at the corporate level, to do quite a bit of customization, more than possible for mere humans on MS Office.
I'm not all corporations, but I've been around a few decades. Here's my 2 cents worth.
All of the OOo code is licensed under the LGPL, and can be freely downloaded, built and customized. So yes, it's possible. The sky's the limit; it's just software.:-) Several factors make it less likely that a corporation would take this approach, however.
One is that such a customization would very likely be deemed a "derivative work" by Legal, in which case if it were distributed (e.g., to suppliers for a given project, or even arguably to contractors working for the corporation), then the source must be made available as well. Non-software corporations tend to be allergic to releasing their source code, in my experience, because their lawyers tend to be very conservative. Some manager somewhere will likely have to bet his career by accepting legal liability for the corporation. Will the risk to his career if Something Bad Happens justify the benefit he perceives?
The issue of support will also likely be raised. What if the customized version breaks - who will "support" it? Yes, yes, we all know the internal team of developers will - assuming they weren't laid off in the last "shareholder value" improvement exercise (a constant risk in corporate America). But IT directors tend to go the other direction, from what I've seen - they want to outsource support (and legal indemnification) for open source software, so it can be treated as if it were proprietary. Proprietary means comfort; a target at which the finger can point if Something Bad Happens. This tendency is likely the foundation of IBM's business case for Symphony, by the way.
Finally, if a support team were to be established in a corporation to produce a custom version of OOo, they would need to have some type of development environment. As much fun as bashing Microsoft may be, Visual Studio and.NET are not technically inferior products. So a corporation is unlikely to consider that an inferior option to, say, Eclipse technology. Sure, it costs a lot more - but it's a small number of licenses. They probably wouldn't hesitate.
But in the end, I suspect a lot of corporations just want to write scripts and such without mucking around in the source code proper. The issues most likely to resonate are: (1) How do you efficiently distribute the customizations? (2) How hard are they to develop and maintain? and (3) Can we use them on all of our platforms as is, or do we have to port or (ack!) redevelop for each platform? The third is where Microsoft's "Windows Everywhere" bias may hurt them with this decision to abandon VBA. (Gee, now I'm sure glad we chose to use Python as the scripting language in our internal applications!:-)
However, OOo defines a Universal Developer's Kit that allows development of scripts in any supported language. The one's we have written are in Basic, though our current choice would be Java or Python (we us a lot of both).
My current version of OOo (2.3 in Ubuntu Gutsy) lists Basic, Python, Javascript, and Beanshell as available by default. I'd have to check to verify that these same options are available on 2.3 on Windows and Unix.
This could be good news! We currently have to support MS Office versions of our customizations for Windows, and OOo versions for Linux / Unix. Since Microsoft is forcing us to go back and rewrite the MS Office versions if we upgrade our Windows apps - why not just upgrade to OOo on all platforms, avoid the rewrite cost, and maintain just one set of customizations going forward!
Yes, yes, I see a great "employee suggestion" fattening my wallet this year...
Slashdot Mirror
Ah, so as long as I think women really want to be slapped around, dominated, and treated as second class citizens, then you think that's the better approach? No thanks. (Hint: The original was not "Do unto others as you think you'd want done unto you if you were them...")
OK, fair enough. Let's see what Aaron J Seigo, "one of KDE's lead developers, and best known personality", has to say.
That's the classic role of a beta release, no? I trust this is an adequate source, and suitable support rather than my first, admittedly non-authoritative link?
I didn't take the time in the first post to find a better link because I thought KDE 4's current state of development would be well-known to /. readers. And again, I wasn't attempting to denigrate KDE 4 in any way - I have great admiration for the technology, and look forward to trying it out at the 4.1 release.
Ah. Très bon. The French people have been uniformly wonderful to my family during our visits - probably amused at my weak but enthusiastic attempts at the language, actually. :-D
And some of my best friends have been atheists. ;-)
Precisely. My wife doesn't use Compiz, and has experienced zero crashes in the past 9 months. I use Compiz in spite of its instability relative to the rest of Linux, which is rock solid.
I've worked in the computer industry for 30 years, and have never encountered a desktop Windows machine that survived a month (under heavy load) without a crash, although most desktop Linux machines I've seen stay up for many months with no crashes. Current desktop Windows XP seems to be good for about a week at a time under heavy load, which I consider acceptable - but the AC is right, Linux is just expected to be more stable than Windows - and in my experience it always is. Well, except with Compiz enabled. ;-)
As always, YMMV - and especially your definition of "heavy load"!
Well, to join in the general astonishment at your misconception, you may be unaware that for much of our history, churches have played a central role in community life in the USA. "Dinner on the grounds" was a common event even in my childhood. Today, tournaments are held in the family life center at the Baptist church. And just this past month, homeowners in our city met at the local Catholic church to negotiate a gas drilling lease, and signed the contracts at the Bible church down the street.
I'm amused because a good British friend of mine used to chide me for being so "parochial" for not knowing details of life in other countries, particularly the UK. Methinks it's more of a two way street than he let on. Are you British, by chance? :-)
You're right - thanks for the improved link! Although the changes listed even there seem rather sparse (new wallpaper, a new printer dialog, GPL 3 licensing, "improved integration" and "many updated, new, and exciting applications". Since I haven't used KDE since September 2005, I'd appreciate a link with a little more detail in those last two categories if available.
I would cherish the day that software patents could be dismissed as a silly idea not worth worrying about. Unfortunately, they are the law of the land where I live, which also happens to be the largest economy in the world at the moment, so as a software professional I have to worry about them. If you underestimate Microsoft's ability to make them the law of the land where you live by dismissing them with
then you may wake up one day to find them the law of the land where you live as well.
I would encourage a somewhat more proactive stance against software patents - and meanwhile, a very conservative attitude toward software that is likely to infringe on dearly held (US) patents central to the strategy of the largest and one of the most aggressive corporations in the world. And by "aggressive", I don't mean anything positive in the slightest. :-/
I understand why that would frustrate you. My experiences were mixed - it's as stable as always on my desktop with Compiz disabled, but crashes about once a week with Compiz enabled. I enable it anyway - there's just something about people's reaction the first time I close a window and it burns up that makes me more tolerant. :-)
On the other hand, 7.10 is the first version that worked perfectly on my laptop with no tweaking (unless you count clicking on the network control and selecting my local network from the drop-down list). It was literally easier than setting up my daughter's new Vista-based laptop - and Vista was pre-installed. Go figure.
Actually, KDE 4.0 is more of a beta quality release (like Mac OS/X 10.0 or pre-SP1 Vista) - it's 4.1 or so that'll really be ready for daily use by normal users. Unfortunately, Hardy falls at an awkward time with respect to 4.0 (or vice versa) - 4.0 isn't ready for long term support, but 3.5 isn't likely to be relevant for 3 long years. As a result, while Ubuntu 8.04 will be a Long Term Support (LTS) release, Kubuntu 8.04 will not be.
I agree with your opinion of Gnome (I use it myself), and with your assessment of KDE 4 (I look forward to trying it out - looks great so far!). And I'm very suspicious that Mono contains Microsoft-patented technology, and believe free software developers should avoid it until the title is clear. But that's just my $0.02 worth (and it seems to be worth less every day...) I don't believe any critical part of Gnome is dependent on Mono, however.
Rather oddly, the Kubuntu Alpha 4 site talks only about Gnome applications as well. Go figure.
Well, there's your problem (with apologies to Jamie Hyneman). If it's "them" you're giving to instead of "us", you're in the wrong church! :-)
I live in Texas, Bub - Christians are normals here. :-)
Y'know, the odd thing is that I have.
For instance, we hosted several young British missionaries (these were religious missionaries, mind you, not Linux missionaries ;-) at our house last summer (I'm in North America), and they all had laptops (nat'chully). To my surprise, one of them was running Ubuntu. I asked him why he chose Ubuntu over Windows, and he replied with admirable British conciseness, "It doesn't crash so much."
I've run across several others in my church who were using Ubuntu when I met them (and that one Suse guy ;-). Yes, it's a big church, but it's a church, not an engineering conference or engineering club. Nor is it a high-tech firm such as where I work, where Linux is a rather commonplace choice, even for the spouses.
I'm no longer surprised to meet "normals" using Linux. I'm more surprised nowadays to find someone like you who hasn't. :-)
Oh, yes, you definitely should read The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat. Dr. Sacks covers fascinating extreme dysfunctions of the brain (including a case where a woman couldn't recognize her entire body as her own, but considered it foreign and distasteful), yet all told compassionately and with an empathetic recognition of the humanitarian issues involved.
That sounds like exactly what my wife experienced during pregnancy. Her center of gravity shifted significantly forward rather rapidly, so that all of the balance she had learned over the years worked against her instead of for her. It's the only time since I've known her that she's moved with less than elegant grace. Once the baby was born, she quickly reverted to her "normal" balance. I mean (ahem) physical balance.
Interesting choice of example, given yesterday's events. They mean nothing, nothing at'all. But I can't resist a quick recount anyway.
My daughter is in Winter Guard, and my wife volunteered to videotape yesterday's competition for the director using her handy new JVC MG-130U camcorder (with hard disk! :-). On the way home (in our car), we decided it would be cool to drop off a video CD with the director when we picked up my daughter (who rode home on the bus). The camera came with a CD of video editing software for Windows (my wife's laptop dual-boots), so we decided on a friendly little competition - she would use the provided Windows software, I'd use whatever Ubuntu would provide, and the first to hold up a burned CD was the winner. Neither of us had ever fooled with video files before; this would be a good novice-to-novice test of user-friendliness.
She installed the included software from CD on Windows while I browsed my options using Ubuntu's Applications -> Add/Remove... I finally settled on and installed Kino. By the time I was ready, she had already connected the video camera to her computer. Unfortunately, the software didn't want to download the file - selecting "Download" would stream the video to the screen, while "Advanced Download" would crash the software. After about 10 minutes of working together, we managed to do some type of backup thingy that got the file off the camcorder (though the download was a leisurely 15 minutes!). We couldn't find any way to safely disconnect the camcorder (the app insists on running full screen, and apparently lacks an option to remove the camcorder), so I just unplugged it and headed back to my computer.
A few seconds after plug-in, Nautilus popped up with the camcorder's hard drive mounted. I copied the file (.MOD, never saw THAT extension before) to my local drive in under two minutes, selected "Unmount Volume", and returned the camcorder to my wife. She was arguing verbally with her Windows software - now that the file was off the camcorder, the included video editing software no longer wanted to play the video even though the file was clearly there (right number of bytes and everything).
Kino refused to load the .MOD file (not very elegantly - it just hung), so I googled something like "MOD video Ubuntu" and was presented with instructions for transcoding to DV format. That worked well, but took about 15 minutes (just under 10k frames). Once in Kino, I explored the transitions a bit until I had something I liked, wrote out an MPEG-4 file (which had a .AVI extension, to my surprise), played it in Movie Player to make sure it worked completely, then burned the original MOD and the new AVI to a CD using GnomeBaker.
I held the CD in the air - a quite pointless gesture, since my wife was still in the other room. I went to gloat^H^H^H^H^H see how she was doing.
She was near tears. She finally had the video playing, but now it wouldn't create a CD. As luck would have it, my daughter called just then to let us know the bus was back, so my wife took the Linux-produced CD to the director (who was much impressed by our turn-around time). Thanks, Ubuntu! ;-)
My wife is in the den now, trying to get the Windows software to burn a $%@&^& CD. I'm sure she can do it; she's one smart cookie. She mastered PageMaker and Office, I'm sure she can master an entry level video program, too.
Neither of these programs is vaguely comparable to professional video editing software, and this test is purely anecdotal. But what the heck - I love happy endings. ;-) ;-) ;-)
OK, I'll try one more time, too. Bush v Gore was decided on the basis that elections results are calculated using the rules established prior to the election, not after the election. "Clear intent of the voter" was not (and is not) the established precedent in Florida, but rather "how the voter voted".
Feel free to advocate changing the standard, but only between elections.
(BTW, "clear intent of the voter" sounds suspiciously like "how those with power think the voter intended to vote". I believe that's an incredibly dangerous standard for any election.)
Again quoting from your link (first sentence):
"More than three months after Democrat Al Gore conceded the hotly contested 2000 election, an independent hand recount of Florida's ballots released today says he would have lost anyway, even if officials would have allowed the hand count he requested."
I'm sorry your preferred candidate lost - but he lost. Bill Clinton won in 1992 with a mere 43% of the popular vote - but he won. You need to learn to let go.
Best wishes.
"Mr. Slippery", indeed.
Cheesedog clearly addresses the Media Consortium examination of 175,101 ballots against 9 scenarios (Bush won 4, Gore 5). Better known are the Miami Herald and USA Today recounts, which concluded "...that Bush would have won in all legally requested recount scenarios, and in all other scenarios." Quote is from here. While you might hate the end results, the post-election recounts are nowhere near as clear, or as favorable to Gore, as you represent them.
Based on the link you yourself provide, this is at best disingenuous. The link references the opening statements of a trial in which three people are accused of violating election laws (the story is dated 6 days earlier than your post). Apparently, "innocent until proven guilty" isn't a concept to which you subscribe. I hope that few others here are so filled with hatred for Bush that they toss out basic due process for election workers as you have done.
And they use the (r) here plain as day. Mea culpa - it would have been so easy to look first. *blush*
The rest of my statements were accurate, however, despite my lapse of memory. Microsoft's initial request for a trademark on Windows was rejected as generic, but they succeeded in overturning that ruling on appeal. Lindows sought to have the trademark invalidated as generic as part of their countersuit. Microsoft launched a blitz of lawsuits worldwide to (I believe) drive Lindows into financial distress and force a settlement rather than litigate on the merits of their case. And Microsoft did pay Lindows $20 million to end the lawsuit and change their name (to Linspire) - which looks less like a victory to me than a payoff. You can read the details here and here.
Perhaps I was wishfully thinking. I believe the original rejection of the trademark was proper. That and $5 will get you a coffee at Starbucks, of course.
You probably mean Windows. If so, then note that Microsoft uses (tm) and not (r) - because it hasn't been successfully registered. Also remember that they paid Lindows $20 million to drop the countersuit alleging that Windows is an improper trademark (and of course, changed Lindows to Linspire). Being a rich monopolist has its privileges.
For gasoline? You honestly say, "Honey, we need to stop for some shell"???
Yes, for a short collection of characters - but not for a word processing program. A trademark can certainly be a generic word or phrase, just not the generic word or phrase for the product being offered. If I created a word processor and named it "Word Processor", then that would be a generic term.
Well, to be clear, he was smacked down when he attacked (and conquered) our ally, Kuwait. We were invited to intervene when the ousted Kuwait government was joined by the Saudis in requesting our help. Iran, needless to say, never asked for our help. :-)
Nor was Saddam's army some wimpy third world force back then. To paraphrase Jay Leno, his army went from being the fourth largest in the world to the fifth largest... in Iraq. :-)
Well, he was actually firing surface to air missiles at allied aircraft on a fairly regular basis, which was itself a violation of the cease fire from the first Gulf War. But since he was firing in impotence with little chance of hitting anything, a snicker would have been a more appropriate response than another smack down. Which is probably why "violation of the cease fire" wasn't the justification used for the second Gulf War.
I'm not all corporations, but I've been around a few decades. Here's my 2 cents worth.
All of the OOo code is licensed under the LGPL, and can be freely downloaded, built and customized. So yes, it's possible. The sky's the limit; it's just software. :-) Several factors make it less likely that a corporation would take this approach, however.
One is that such a customization would very likely be deemed a "derivative work" by Legal, in which case if it were distributed (e.g., to suppliers for a given project, or even arguably to contractors working for the corporation), then the source must be made available as well. Non-software corporations tend to be allergic to releasing their source code, in my experience, because their lawyers tend to be very conservative. Some manager somewhere will likely have to bet his career by accepting legal liability for the corporation. Will the risk to his career if Something Bad Happens justify the benefit he perceives?
The issue of support will also likely be raised. What if the customized version breaks - who will "support" it? Yes, yes, we all know the internal team of developers will - assuming they weren't laid off in the last "shareholder value" improvement exercise (a constant risk in corporate America). But IT directors tend to go the other direction, from what I've seen - they want to outsource support (and legal indemnification) for open source software, so it can be treated as if it were proprietary. Proprietary means comfort; a target at which the finger can point if Something Bad Happens. This tendency is likely the foundation of IBM's business case for Symphony, by the way.
Finally, if a support team were to be established in a corporation to produce a custom version of OOo, they would need to have some type of development environment. As much fun as bashing Microsoft may be, Visual Studio and .NET are not technically inferior products. So a corporation is unlikely to consider that an inferior option to, say, Eclipse technology. Sure, it costs a lot more - but it's a small number of licenses. They probably wouldn't hesitate.
But in the end, I suspect a lot of corporations just want to write scripts and such without mucking around in the source code proper. The issues most likely to resonate are: (1) How do you efficiently distribute the customizations? (2) How hard are they to develop and maintain? and (3) Can we use them on all of our platforms as is, or do we have to port or (ack!) redevelop for each platform? The third is where Microsoft's "Windows Everywhere" bias may hurt them with this decision to abandon VBA. (Gee, now I'm sure glad we chose to use Python as the scripting language in our internal applications! :-)
"There is no macro language specified in ODF. Users and developers differ on whether inclusion of a standard scripting language would be desirable." So, I'm afraid not.
However, OOo defines a Universal Developer's Kit that allows development of scripts in any supported language. The one's we have written are in Basic, though our current choice would be Java or Python (we us a lot of both).
My current version of OOo (2.3 in Ubuntu Gutsy) lists Basic, Python, Javascript, and Beanshell as available by default. I'd have to check to verify that these same options are available on 2.3 on Windows and Unix.
This could be good news! We currently have to support MS Office versions of our customizations for Windows, and OOo versions for Linux / Unix. Since Microsoft is forcing us to go back and rewrite the MS Office versions if we upgrade our Windows apps - why not just upgrade to OOo on all platforms, avoid the rewrite cost, and maintain just one set of customizations going forward!
Yes, yes, I see a great "employee suggestion" fattening my wallet this year...