Yeah, it has a spreadsheet. Woo hoo. Everyone has a spreadsheet. That's not what I was talking about.
You ever worked on an extremely complex spreadsheet? The type that has twenty worksheets and is full of calculations, has pivot tables, and does your entire payroll?
Are you going to trust converting it to an openoffice format via a filter? Running it as an excel document under openoffice?
I wouldn't.
Spreadsheets get used all the time for stuff that you should really be using databases for. These become part of the mission critical infastructure, and they're not easily replacable. I've seen tons of them. They're hacks, but companies aren't going to give them up, and they're not going to trust them in anything but excel.
So try thinking a little bit deeper before you just go blurting out, "oh, it's got a spreadsheet". Compatability is the issue, not functionality.
I think another reason why MS Office isn't going away anytime soon is that the format of the word processing document is only a small part of an office suite.
What you're not seeing is a standard for the other parts of the office suites - spreadsheets and slide documents tend to get passed around quite a bit.
Granted, most slide documents (talkin' powerpoint here) are pointless and stupid, but the execs just love 'em (nothing like getting an email with an attached powerpoint document to tell you the softball team is meeting at 3pm in conference room B - meanwhile the IT department is going on about email abuse from the lower ranks...). PDF can mostly take the place of these, so it's not that big a deal, especially with openoffice's PDF export capability.
I think spreadsheets are next large point of incompatability. CSV files are all right for table-based data, but they won't do crap for calculations and pivot tables and such. Businesses share these all the time, either standalone or embedded in other documents. Graphs and charts are similar - especially dynamic ones that change with the data. It's not unusual for businesses to have a number of spreadsheets that are amazingly complicated and can't be replaced easily - hell, there's still quite a few businesses around who still use Lotus documents for this reason. Filters aren't perfect, but the data needs to be.
Access is bad about supporting its own files from version to version, so I won't include that here. Hopefully openoffice will do better on this point than Microsoft has.
We won't be rid of Microsoft until someone forces at least spreadsheets to be open. Until then, Excel will be the de facto standard and there's not much that can be done about it.
> > I understand that in the union, the Federal government can overrule > > a state's authority.
> You do not understand correctly.
If only that were true...
The feds have multiple ways of overriding a state's authority. Foremost, the vague clause in the constitution that gives the feds the power over anything (article I, section 8, clause 18) tends to be abused quite a bit.
This used to be a major difference in the parties - traditionally, one party supported use of clause 18 while the other opposed it. That's no longer the case - pretty much both parties are gung-ho in their support of large central government. It's a shame, since we lose a lot of the benefits of running under a federal system. Since the tenth amendment says "all other powers are reserved...", the feds can use that clause to undermine the states since it's not an "other" power.
Note this allows some beneficial agencies that could not be foreseen - the FCC, FDA, etc. So it's not a bad clause, it's just prone to abuse.
The feds have also been known to use such things as highway funds to force the states into passing laws (notice that the drinking age is 21 in _all_ states? That's why. Louisiana was the last holdout.). There are no checks on this sort of power. It would have been nice if the states had had the balls enough to take this to the supreme court.
As far as the extensions comment goes, more than likely Massachusetts would just let it slide. Someone with enough power to make it an issue would have to care, and personally I'm surprised this has gone as far as it has. Personally, by not "embracing and extending" the standard, Microsoft is making a big mistake, IMO. Basic human nature and a little political play would have let them succeed. I wouldn't be surprised if this is their next tactic.
She was 18 and wanted to play pool (you gotta be 21 to get into a bar in this state). It might not have been all that romantic, but we had a lot of fun.
Maybe you need a garage if you live in the north and your car breaks down in the winter. I'd hate to replace a serpentine belt in a blizzard.
I've worked on cars quite a bit, bein' as how I'll gladly spend the time to save me $200 in labor for something simple. Can't say I've ever worked on a car in a garage, though. I'm from Oklahoma, so nine months out of the year the weather is fine for working outside. I'd imagine most of the southern U.S. is that way.
I agree though, these newfangled cars often require specialty tools that the older cars didn't (and even the older cars required custom tools for certain things, like pulling CV joints or compressing springs). Replacing a alternator or wheel bearing though - why pay for it?
You want the exegesis and apocalypse articles for that. They're the ones that go into details about the language (apocalypse more about design and big picture stuff, exegesis more about implementation and how it actually works, IIRC). State of the Onion is more about the perl community.
Just bear in mind that perl 6 is a lot different than perl 5 (which is what you're probably learning). The syntax is similar, but object handling will be different, some of the data types are changing (I think), and a few of the operators will change (the biggest example, "." will be replaced by "_").
Perl 5 development continues, of course, but there's not going to be any major changes to it from here on out, so you won't see many articles about the language itself anymore. Most of what you'll find is cookbook style articles and documentation.
We're going to build it on the equator, most likely on a floating platform (so it can be moved if need be - to avoid things like debris in low orbit).
I agree about the terrorist thing though. Terrorists have been blowing up planes for decades, but we still build airports and planes. I'd imagine anything bigger than a toy sailboat or paper airplane that gets within 100 miles of this thing will be blown to smithereens.
Spam is spam, it doesn't matter where it comes from.
I've gotten this sort of thing before. I'm never happy about it. When a so-called "friend" gives someone my email address, it's a good time to have a nice little "chat" with that friend.
I've got an IBM type M and I'm not afraid of beating someone about the head with it if needs be.
Slavery's a long, long tradition that predates history. The Egyptians had slaves. The Assyrians had slaves.
One of the epistles in the Bible (probably written in the first or second century A.D.) gives advice on the proper handling of a runaway slave.
You can't blame Europeans or the Americans for it; it's been part of human culture around the globe for thousands of years. If you had lived in those times, you probably would have just accepted it as the status quo, just like most of the world did.
My college is 15 miles (or 24km, if you prefer) away. Next semester I'll drive to the state university, 40 miles (64km) away. My girlfriend lives 50 miles (80km) away. I've got family in Arkansas - I don't know the distance, but it takes five hours to drive there.
I'm in farm country. This county has less than 50,000 people in it. This state has about three and a half million people spread across 181,047 square kilometers. The U.K. has 244,820 square kilometers - Oklahoma is over half the size of the U.K. You've got public transport; I've got a truck - there's no way public transport is feasible with the population density here. It's driving or walking, and I sure as hell ain't walkin'.
Also remember all the goods you buy have to be shipped. What happens to the price of goods when the price of transport goes up? What about wages? What about services? What are your heating bills going to look like this winter?
So go wait in line at the bus stop or train station and STFU yourself. A lot of us over here don't have a choice on buying gas.
But most of win98's instability problems _were_ due to the underlying OS. It's hard to separate the OS from the GUI in windows - especially 9x.
In any event, you get the standard UNIXy goodness - if an app crashes, it doesn't take down the window manager or GUI, etc. (with the exception of 3D programs locking up the system with a buggy video driver - rare, but it happens). Gnome applications don't seem to have a crashing problem related to gnome itself.
X, of course, runs beneath gnome's level and doesn't care what happens either way.
I've used it, have it installed, and was generally unimpressed. I didn't like the interface, and it didn't read a lot of the documents xpdf wouldn't read, making it useless for me since I prefer xpdf. I do like it better than gpdf though.
But I'm stuck in the old school mindset that you use one viewer for one type of document - image viewer for images, browser for webpages, and a viewer for printer-agnostic documents like pdf and postscript. Being able to view everything under the sun with one viewer just isn't appealing to me.
So... I ended up going back to xpdf, and acrobat when I'm working with something that confuses the hell out of xpdf. I f*%#ing hate acrobat, but at least it's a good fallback for those documents xpdf won't read.
Yep, I do, on my laptop and my workstation. No themes, but I write my own.fvwm2rc files.
I do it on my laptop because it's a pentium 133. Gnome would kill it.
As far as my workstation goes, it's not because of gnome per se - it's because of metacity. I really, really hated metacity (haven't used it in a while so I dunno what it's like now) so I switched to fvwm... then I kinda quit giving a crap about gnome compliance and all that.
FVWM is a pain in the ass to configure - just like it was back when I first started playing with it in '97. I use it because of how flexible it is - once it's configured, it can do damn near anything look-and-feel wise.
Anyone else using my machines is driven insane because the way I've set it up to operate is completely unique - and I like it that way.
I hope there remains a free version of AVG. That's what I install on the few windows machines I maintain for people. It's a lot easier to convince people to run antivirus software when they don't have to pay for it.
If microsoft had stuck with the ideas and simplicity of windows 3.1, I'd probably be using it. 95 being such a piece of crap is what drove me to linux in the first place.
Microsoft hasn't shown me any real reason to go back yet. Of course, I might be a bit biased since the only time I sit down at a windows machine is to fix it.
It's consistant with all other source code releases from id - you get the engine, but you don't get the art.
I'm not sure with this particular release, but with quake 1 and 2 you could download the demo version and use the files from that. If you can't, then it's only a matter of time before someone makes it so that you can.
For quake 2, there have been projects to create completely original art for the engine - openquartz is a good example of this. There's a good chance someone will start a project like that for quake 3.
Of course, the point of all this is so that people can make their own GPL games using this engine.
Only if enough energy is supplied to start the reaction. Hydrogen and oxygen won't combine spontaneously at room temperature and pressure.
I'm basing this off personal experience. When I was a kid, I did this as a cool way to launch milk jugs 50 feet in the air. Put both electrodes under the same jug, let the jug fill with gas, then cap it, take it outside, shake it a bit, take the lid off and light it quickly. BOOM! You now have a spherical milk jug flying through the air.
Dangerous, yes, but it doesn't recombine immediately. I'm not sure about efficiency of using AC vs. DC (I've done both with this method), but I have my doubts that it changes much.
I've got "Internetworking with TCP/IP Vol. 3 (Sockets)" that I picked up in a used bookstore for a dollar. It was written in '93 and deals with 4.3BSD - all the code examples are in K&R-style C and the API's are old, but the algorithms are there and the advice on design is very relevant.
It's a really good book. My first network-aware programs were written using this book. There's examples for several different protocols and a deep discussion of Sun RPC. Concurrency takes a couple of chapters and ideas on server design appear throughout the book. It doesn't cover STREAMS (there was an alternate book for that) or deal with threading, but it's more than enough for most new network programmers.
I'd highly reccommend Stevens if his other books are as useful as this one.
That's the U.S. for you. You can have all kinds of violence and drug use and whatnot, but sex is a big no-no.
Personally, I'd find it funny if I didn't live in the U.S. The people in government were there for the '60's and '70's during the sexual revolution. Maybe the ones in politics are the ones that didn't get laid?
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Yeah, it has a spreadsheet. Woo hoo. Everyone has a spreadsheet. That's not what I was talking about.
You ever worked on an extremely complex spreadsheet? The type that has twenty worksheets and is full of calculations, has pivot tables, and does your entire payroll?
Are you going to trust converting it to an openoffice format via a filter? Running it as an excel document under openoffice?
I wouldn't.
Spreadsheets get used all the time for stuff that you should really be using databases for. These become part of the mission critical infastructure, and they're not easily replacable. I've seen tons of them. They're hacks, but companies aren't going to give them up, and they're not going to trust them in anything but excel.
So try thinking a little bit deeper before you just go blurting out, "oh, it's got a spreadsheet". Compatability is the issue, not functionality.
I think another reason why MS Office isn't going away anytime soon is that the format of the word processing document is only a small part of an office suite.
What you're not seeing is a standard for the other parts of the office suites - spreadsheets and slide documents tend to get passed around quite a bit.
Granted, most slide documents (talkin' powerpoint here) are pointless and stupid, but the execs just love 'em (nothing like getting an email with an attached powerpoint document to tell you the softball team is meeting at 3pm in conference room B - meanwhile the IT department is going on about email abuse from the lower ranks...). PDF can mostly take the place of these, so it's not that big a deal, especially with openoffice's PDF export capability.
I think spreadsheets are next large point of incompatability. CSV files are all right for table-based data, but they won't do crap for calculations and pivot tables and such. Businesses share these all the time, either standalone or embedded in other documents. Graphs and charts are similar - especially dynamic ones that change with the data. It's not unusual for businesses to have a number of spreadsheets that are amazingly complicated and can't be replaced easily - hell, there's still quite a few businesses around who still use Lotus documents for this reason. Filters aren't perfect, but the data needs to be.
Access is bad about supporting its own files from version to version, so I won't include that here. Hopefully openoffice will do better on this point than Microsoft has.
We won't be rid of Microsoft until someone forces at least spreadsheets to be open. Until then, Excel will be the de facto standard and there's not much that can be done about it.
> > I understand that in the union, the Federal government can overrule
> > a state's authority.
> You do not understand correctly.
If only that were true...
The feds have multiple ways of overriding a state's authority. Foremost, the vague clause in the constitution that gives the feds the power over anything (article I, section 8, clause 18) tends to be abused quite a bit.
This used to be a major difference in the parties - traditionally, one party supported use of clause 18 while the other opposed it. That's no longer the case - pretty much both parties are gung-ho in their support of large central government. It's a shame, since we lose a lot of the benefits of running under a federal system. Since the tenth amendment says "all other powers are reserved...", the feds can use that clause to undermine the states since it's not an "other" power.
Note this allows some beneficial agencies that could not be foreseen - the FCC, FDA, etc. So it's not a bad clause, it's just prone to abuse.
The feds have also been known to use such things as highway funds to force the states into passing laws (notice that the drinking age is 21 in _all_ states? That's why. Louisiana was the last holdout.). There are no checks on this sort of power. It would have been nice if the states had had the balls enough to take this to the supreme court.
As far as the extensions comment goes, more than likely Massachusetts would just let it slide. Someone with enough power to make it an issue would have to care, and personally I'm surprised this has gone as far as it has. Personally, by not "embracing and extending" the standard, Microsoft is making a big mistake, IMO. Basic human nature and a little political play would have let them succeed. I wouldn't be surprised if this is their next tactic.
I dunno, I've taken a date to a bowling alley.
She was 18 and wanted to play pool (you gotta be 21 to get into a bar in this state). It might not have been all that romantic, but we had a lot of fun.
Maybe you need a garage if you live in the north and your car breaks down in the winter. I'd hate to replace a serpentine belt in a blizzard.
I've worked on cars quite a bit, bein' as how I'll gladly spend the time to save me $200 in labor for something simple. Can't say I've ever worked on a car in a garage, though. I'm from Oklahoma, so nine months out of the year the weather is fine for working outside. I'd imagine most of the southern U.S. is that way.
I agree though, these newfangled cars often require specialty tools that the older cars didn't (and even the older cars required custom tools for certain things, like pulling CV joints or compressing springs). Replacing a alternator or wheel bearing though - why pay for it?
It's like Vietnam - we just start with advisors to keep the chinese out of it...
You want the exegesis and apocalypse articles for that. They're the ones that go into details about the language (apocalypse more about design and big picture stuff, exegesis more about implementation and how it actually works, IIRC). State of the Onion is more about the perl community.
Look here for the articles.
Just bear in mind that perl 6 is a lot different than perl 5 (which is what you're probably learning). The syntax is similar, but object handling will be different, some of the data types are changing (I think), and a few of the operators will change (the biggest example, "." will be replaced by "_").
Perl 5 development continues, of course, but there's not going to be any major changes to it from here on out, so you won't see many articles about the language itself anymore. Most of what you'll find is cookbook style articles and documentation.
We're going to build it on the equator, most likely on a floating platform (so it can be moved if need be - to avoid things like debris in low orbit).
I agree about the terrorist thing though. Terrorists have been blowing up planes for decades, but we still build airports and planes. I'd imagine anything bigger than a toy sailboat or paper airplane that gets within 100 miles of this thing will be blown to smithereens.
Spam is spam, it doesn't matter where it comes from.
I've gotten this sort of thing before. I'm never happy about it. When a so-called "friend" gives someone my email address, it's a good time to have a nice little "chat" with that friend.
I've got an IBM type M and I'm not afraid of beating someone about the head with it if needs be.
Here's a sample.
The sentence was confusing, but if you reread it, it makes perfect since.
It won't read the documents xpdf won't read.
In other words, they both fail on the same documents.
Since I prefer xpdf, I use it instead. When it (and evince) doesn't work, I use acrobat.
Slavery's a long, long tradition that predates history. The Egyptians had slaves. The Assyrians had slaves.
One of the epistles in the Bible (probably written in the first or second century A.D.) gives advice on the proper handling of a runaway slave.
You can't blame Europeans or the Americans for it; it's been part of human culture around the globe for thousands of years. If you had lived in those times, you probably would have just accepted it as the status quo, just like most of the world did.
My college is 15 miles (or 24km, if you prefer) away. Next semester I'll drive to the state university, 40 miles (64km) away. My girlfriend lives 50 miles (80km) away. I've got family in Arkansas - I don't know the distance, but it takes five hours to drive there.
I'm in farm country. This county has less than 50,000 people in it. This state has about three and a half million people spread across 181,047 square kilometers. The U.K. has 244,820 square kilometers - Oklahoma is over half the size of the U.K. You've got public transport; I've got a truck - there's no way public transport is feasible with the population density here. It's driving or walking, and I sure as hell ain't walkin'.
Also remember all the goods you buy have to be shipped. What happens to the price of goods when the price of transport goes up? What about wages? What about services? What are your heating bills going to look like this winter?
So go wait in line at the bus stop or train station and STFU yourself. A lot of us over here don't have a choice on buying gas.
The window titles look a lot like 12pt Adobe Helvetica Bold.
Dunno about the application fonts, but probably something similar - i.e. something in the default X fonts.
Yes. Quite a bit so.
But most of win98's instability problems _were_ due to the underlying OS. It's hard to separate the OS from the GUI in windows - especially 9x.
In any event, you get the standard UNIXy goodness - if an app crashes, it doesn't take down the window manager or GUI, etc. (with the exception of 3D programs locking up the system with a buggy video driver - rare, but it happens). Gnome applications don't seem to have a crashing problem related to gnome itself.
X, of course, runs beneath gnome's level and doesn't care what happens either way.
I've used it, have it installed, and was generally unimpressed. I didn't like the interface, and it didn't read a lot of the documents xpdf wouldn't read, making it useless for me since I prefer xpdf. I do like it better than gpdf though.
But I'm stuck in the old school mindset that you use one viewer for one type of document - image viewer for images, browser for webpages, and a viewer for printer-agnostic documents like pdf and postscript. Being able to view everything under the sun with one viewer just isn't appealing to me.
So... I ended up going back to xpdf, and acrobat when I'm working with something that confuses the hell out of xpdf. I f*%#ing hate acrobat, but at least it's a good fallback for those documents xpdf won't read.
Yep, I do, on my laptop and my workstation. No themes, but I write my own .fvwm2rc files.
I do it on my laptop because it's a pentium 133. Gnome would kill it.
As far as my workstation goes, it's not because of gnome per se - it's because of metacity. I really, really hated metacity (haven't used it in a while so I dunno what it's like now) so I switched to fvwm... then I kinda quit giving a crap about gnome compliance and all that.
FVWM is a pain in the ass to configure - just like it was back when I first started playing with it in '97. I use it because of how flexible it is - once it's configured, it can do damn near anything look-and-feel wise.
Anyone else using my machines is driven insane because the way I've set it up to operate is completely unique - and I like it that way.
I hope there remains a free version of AVG. That's what I install on the few windows machines I maintain for people. It's a lot easier to convince people to run antivirus software when they don't have to pay for it.
If microsoft had stuck with the ideas and simplicity of windows 3.1, I'd probably be using it. 95 being such a piece of crap is what drove me to linux in the first place.
Microsoft hasn't shown me any real reason to go back yet. Of course, I might be a bit biased since the only time I sit down at a windows machine is to fix it.
It's consistant with all other source code releases from id - you get the engine, but you don't get the art.
I'm not sure with this particular release, but with quake 1 and 2 you could download the demo version and use the files from that. If you can't, then it's only a matter of time before someone makes it so that you can.
For quake 2, there have been projects to create completely original art for the engine - openquartz is a good example of this. There's a good chance someone will start a project like that for quake 3.
Of course, the point of all this is so that people can make their own GPL games using this engine.
Notice that smoke is black?
That's where the dark goes with candles.
Only if enough energy is supplied to start the reaction. Hydrogen and oxygen won't combine spontaneously at room temperature and pressure.
I'm basing this off personal experience. When I was a kid, I did this as a cool way to launch milk jugs 50 feet in the air. Put both electrodes under the same jug, let the jug fill with gas, then cap it, take it outside, shake it a bit, take the lid off and light it quickly. BOOM! You now have a spherical milk jug flying through the air.
Dangerous, yes, but it doesn't recombine immediately. I'm not sure about efficiency of using AC vs. DC (I've done both with this method), but I have my doubts that it changes much.
Ack, ok. It's actually written by Comer and "David L. Stevens". I didn't double-check it before posting, my bad.
I've got "Internetworking with TCP/IP Vol. 3 (Sockets)" that I picked up in a used bookstore for a dollar. It was written in '93 and deals with 4.3BSD - all the code examples are in K&R-style C and the API's are old, but the algorithms are there and the advice on design is very relevant.
It's a really good book. My first network-aware programs were written using this book. There's examples for several different protocols and a deep discussion of Sun RPC. Concurrency takes a couple of chapters and ideas on server design appear throughout the book. It doesn't cover STREAMS (there was an alternate book for that) or deal with threading, but it's more than enough for most new network programmers.
I'd highly reccommend Stevens if his other books are as useful as this one.
That's the U.S. for you. You can have all kinds of violence and drug use and whatnot, but sex is a big no-no.
Personally, I'd find it funny if I didn't live in the U.S. The people in government were there for the '60's and '70's during the sexual revolution. Maybe the ones in politics are the ones that didn't get laid?