The BBC is much more than a (relatively reputable IMO) news organization -- they've produced some of the best fiction and non-fiction to ever hit the boob tube.
Some of the tunes are 320 bit rate MP3s my daughter got somewhere (don't ask, don't tell)... I can hear the difference...
Not really a fair test if you don't know where they came from. They could have been DRMed iTunes AACs that were burned to CD from iTunes and then re-ripped with a crappy MP3 encoder. The end bitrate doesn't tell the whole story.
Personally, I can't detect the loss in quality from a CD to a LAME MP3 encoded with "-V0". (Tried it blind, with the same track randomly playing in one format or the other.) But that's with a so-so home stereo system, not a fancy car.
Tabletop asteroids at the local pizza joint. Monocrome vector graphics. Joystick to turn and thrust, button to fire. Can't remember if that rig had a shield button or not.
To this day, it still doesn't seem quite right to have a game without spaceships.
it was FILLED with a rocket fuel (Hydrogen) since the US wouldn't give them Helium.
To clarify, the US government (world's major helium producer) prohibited the sale of helium to the Zeppelin Company (generally referred to as a precautionary military embargo, though according to this guy it was directly related to the swastikas on the fins), so they revised the design to use hydrogen.
Re:Standardize RTF first
on
RTF Vs. OOXML
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· Score: 1
The worst part about this "standard" is the license: it is packed in a Windows-only executable package and is licensed for noncommercial use on Windows machines only.
Not that I want to sing their praises, but at least with version 1.9 they've stopped the idiotic practice of wrapping the spec in an.exe download. I haven't been able to spot the noncommecial restriction anywhere, but I wouldn't be surprised. There's certainly nothing akin to the royalty-free license grant that we have in writing for ODF.
Re:Standardize RTF first
on
RTF Vs. OOXML
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· Score: 3, Interesting
Microsoft's published RTF specs for a quite some time now -- the latest version of the spec is 1.9 and you can download it from Microsoft in your choice of binary.doc or MS-OOXML.docx, sorry no.rtf!
The spec is actually not bad, though the continued efforts to shoehorn in new features gets a little laughable. Here's an example of an RTF-reencoded XML tag from the spec:
As far as I know they've never tried to have RTF ratified by any standards body, but it's still very widely used. People have a lot of files named.doc around that are actually RTFs, and some word processors (AbiWord for one) actually use.doc-named RTFs as their "Word" format, since, having a spec, it's a lot easier to write than the binary.doc format. By design, old Word versions and non-Word software ignore any tags they don't understand, and I'd guess that most modern third-party RTF parsers and encoders are designed around the 2000 RTF spec (version 1.6) without all the new stuff.
Ubuntu just as good? No. Free software just isn't there yet. If it were, Dell, HP and Acer would have dumped Microsoft quite some time ago in the home market.
I agree with the thrust of your comment, but this bit doesn't hold water. The decisions made by the big OEMs "some time ago" reflect the quality of free software "some time ago" (in fact, probably several months back.) A free OS may reach that "good enough" sweet spot sometime later today, but there'll be a year or so lag time before big name OEMs offer it on their basic home systems -- and much longer before anyone even considers dumping Microsoft altogether, due to some customers' desire for something (vaguely) familiar.
I'm much more interested in WinXP SP3 or Win2k SP5...
Win2k SP5 will never happen because MS wants people to think that Win2k is obselete abadonware, even though they've promised to support it until summer of 2010. They refused, for instance, to make a public patch for Win2k's Daylight Saving rules. I doubt they'll even do another post-SP4 patch rollup -- probably just the same trickle of IE6 and DirectX patches we've seen for the last couple of years.
(Of course, you can make your own SP5 and use thirdparty time zone updates. There will probably be a lot of third-party patching as MS continues to drop the ball, pushing the new shiny stuff instead.)
Cheney was encumbered by a conflict of interest because, in classic Washington revolving-door style, he was re-entering politics having just served as CEO of Halliburton who ended up profiting heavily from the Iraq war.
The second O. It's "Office Open XML", though they also just say "Open XML". Putting the adjective after the noun feels so forced that it's embarrassingly sleazy; it's obviously intended to be confused with the deprecated OpenOffice.org XML format, which was often simply called "OpenOffice XML".
It's already confusing enough...
Office Open XML (MS-OOXML) text files have extension.docx and replace legacy blob files with extension.doc, all developed by Microsoft. MS-OOXML is natively supported in Office 2007, and MS offers plugins that add support to all versions back to Office 2000. It's supported by a couple of third-party applications such as NeoOffice and the "Novell Edition" of OpenOffice.org.
OpenDocument text files have extension.odt, and are based on the "OpenOffice.org XML" format developed by the OpenOffice.org project, based in turn on the StarOffice file format. Sun Microsystems is pretty much running this show. OpenOffice.org is considered a reference implementation for the OpenDocument format (aka ODF, aka OASIS OpenDocument.) Other products that support ODF include KOffice, AbiWord, IBM's new beta of Lotus Symphony, Google Docs, and, using any one of four different plugin projects, Microsoft Office.
And that's just the word processing text formats, there's also graphics, spreadsheet, presentation, etc.
Ubuntu's official names are the Year.Month "version" numbers. The adjective-animal thing is a project codename, and it's actually useful as a pre-release codename because the ship date may slip, as it did with last year's LTS release "Dapper Drake" which was originally slated to be 6.04 but eventually shipped as 6.06.
Post-release, the cute names are useless -- who feels like keeping track of them anyway? The fact that they are in sorta-but-not-really alphabetical order doesn't help either.
RTF itself supports the track-changes stuff. TextEdit won't support it of course, and I wouldn't be suprised if NeoOffice doesn't support it fully, so you may still be stuck typing in Word. But that's no reason to go sending things around in binary formats...
Send RTF files named as.doc -- 99% percent of people will never notice.
According to the features list it has full GPG support. In fact, the windows port is actually bundled with the Gpg4win project.
I'm considering moving "my people" to Claws -- Thunderbird at its best is an elegant and powerful creation, but it still hasn't really hit the sweet spot for us because of its various quirks, including difficult address book file format, awkward search interface, lousy wrapping, and reliance on the mbox format for mail storage (which results in the occasional quarantined inbox.) And now with this repeated organization reshuffling and loss of key personnel, I don't believe things will be getting better anytime soon. (Prove me wrong, folks!)
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Original CIV works great under DOSBox.
The BBC is much more than a (relatively reputable IMO) news organization -- they've produced some of the best fiction and non-fiction to ever hit the boob tube.
Nope... not with the standard EasyList filter subscription, anyway.
It was also easy to set up virtual folders (based on search criteria) to associate your e-mail according to several criteria.
Thunderbird can already do this, see kb.mozillazine.org/Saved_Search. And the searches are pretty damn fast.
Personally, I can't detect the loss in quality from a CD to a LAME MP3 encoded with "-V0". (Tried it blind, with the same track randomly playing in one format or the other.) But that's with a so-so home stereo system, not a fancy car.
Tabletop asteroids at the local pizza joint. Monocrome vector graphics. Joystick to turn and thrust, button to fire. Can't remember if that rig had a shield button or not. To this day, it still doesn't seem quite right to have a game without spaceships.
Microsoft's published RTF specs for a quite some time now -- the latest version of the spec is 1.9 and you can download it from Microsoft in your choice of binary .doc or MS-OOXML .docx, sorry no .rtf!
The spec is actually not bad, though the continued efforts to shoehorn in new features gets a little laughable. Here's an example of an RTF-reencoded XML tag from the spec:
As far as I know they've never tried to have RTF ratified by any standards body, but it's still very widely used. People have a lot of files named .doc around that are actually RTFs, and some word processors (AbiWord for one) actually use .doc-named RTFs as their "Word" format, since, having a spec, it's a lot easier to write than the binary .doc format. By design, old Word versions and non-Word software ignore any tags they don't understand, and I'd guess that most modern third-party RTF parsers and encoders are designed around the 2000 RTF spec (version 1.6) without all the new stuff.
My thoughts exactly. Sometimes I think there's a bug in slash that prevents intelligent users from posting when I have mod points.
And now someone's gone and marked it flamebait... good grief... (I know, I know, meta-moderate.)
Bravo to this -- enough with the 44.1Khz already!
Asian Massage Terminals used to be free? Man did I miss out...
I agree with the thrust of your comment, but this bit doesn't hold water. The decisions made by the big OEMs "some time ago" reflect the quality of free software "some time ago" (in fact, probably several months back.) A free OS may reach that "good enough" sweet spot sometime later today, but there'll be a year or so lag time before big name OEMs offer it on their basic home systems -- and much longer before anyone even considers dumping Microsoft altogether, due to some customers' desire for something (vaguely) familiar.
Win2k SP5 will never happen because MS wants people to think that Win2k is obselete abadonware, even though they've promised to support it until summer of 2010. They refused, for instance, to make a public patch for Win2k's Daylight Saving rules. I doubt they'll even do another post-SP4 patch rollup -- probably just the same trickle of IE6 and DirectX patches we've seen for the last couple of years.
(Of course, you can make your own SP5 and use third party time zone updates. There will probably be a lot of third-party patching as MS continues to drop the ball, pushing the new shiny stuff instead.)
The second O. It's "Office Open XML", though they also just say "Open XML". Putting the adjective after the noun feels so forced that it's embarrassingly sleazy; it's obviously intended to be confused with the deprecated OpenOffice.org XML format, which was often simply called "OpenOffice XML".
It's already confusing enough...
- Office Open XML (MS-OOXML) text files have extension
.docx and replace legacy blob files with extension .doc, all developed by Microsoft. MS-OOXML is natively supported in Office 2007, and MS offers plugins that add support to all versions back to Office 2000. It's supported by a couple of third-party applications such as NeoOffice and the "Novell Edition" of OpenOffice.org.
- OpenDocument text files have extension
.odt, and are based on the "OpenOffice.org XML" format developed by the OpenOffice.org project, based in turn on the StarOffice file format. Sun Microsystems is pretty much running this show. OpenOffice.org is considered a reference implementation for the OpenDocument format (aka ODF, aka OASIS OpenDocument.) Other products that support ODF include KOffice, AbiWord, IBM's new beta of Lotus Symphony, Google Docs, and, using any one of four different plugin projects, Microsoft Office.
And that's just the word processing text formats, there's also graphics, spreadsheet, presentation, etc.Frank Lloyd Wright also has a college campus that's falling apart, but at least it held together for a little longer than Gehry's.
Ubuntu's official names are the Year.Month "version" numbers. The adjective-animal thing is a project codename, and it's actually useful as a pre-release codename because the ship date may slip, as it did with last year's LTS release "Dapper Drake" which was originally slated to be 6.04 but eventually shipped as 6.06.
Post-release, the cute names are useless -- who feels like keeping track of them anyway? The fact that they are in sorta-but-not-really alphabetical order doesn't help either.
This headline needs a colon, not an dash.
RTF itself supports the track-changes stuff. TextEdit won't support it of course, and I wouldn't be suprised if NeoOffice doesn't support it fully, so you may still be stuck typing in Word. But that's no reason to go sending things around in binary formats...
Send RTF files named as .doc -- 99% percent of people will never notice.
According to the features list it has full GPG support. In fact, the windows port is actually bundled with the Gpg4win project.
I'm considering moving "my people" to Claws -- Thunderbird at its best is an elegant and powerful creation, but it still hasn't really hit the sweet spot for us because of its various quirks, including difficult address book file format, awkward search interface, lousy wrapping, and reliance on the mbox format for mail storage (which results in the occasional quarantined inbox.) And now with this repeated organization reshuffling and loss of key personnel, I don't believe things will be getting better anytime soon. (Prove me wrong, folks!)