The.DOC file format is fully documented on MS's Techweb site (and is in XML for Office 2000).
This is completely false as far as I've seen. I actually was faced with parsing.DOC files from Word 2000 a few months ago, and they are not in XML but binary. And if MS has documented them, they sure hid it well.
Before giving up entirely and scraping the desired content directly from the web, I also tried using RTF, and I think it's illustrative of the problems with having MS simply document their formats: documentation rarely describes full implementation. It's analogous to writing a web browser to the W3C HTML spec -- this is simply not enough, not only for the proprietary tags you'll miss but also because the spec doesn't prepare you to handle trashy formatting (Word produces terrible RTF as well as HTML). In practice, Word is the only software that can properly read Word-produced RTF, despite the fact that the "spec" is documented and many well-funded pieces of software can nominally work with it.
Why is this moderated as "funny"? The fact is, this behavior is rampant in corporate America, and should be dealt with across the board.
Obviously the moderators can't taste the difference...
Re:Problem with Mozilla has nothing to do with ski
on
Suck On Skins And UI
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· Score: 1
So in the case of Mozilla you have absolutely no choice but to develop your own programming API from the ground up and implement it at the back end with your own widget set.
What I don't get is why you can't develop your own programming API and implement it with as much of the native widget set as you can. What's not there natively you do yourself, but wouldn't this still be less work than doing *everything* yourself?
In particular, what bothers me about Mozilla is not that it doesn't use my chosen GTK+ theme (although this is irksome) as much as that it just doesn't *work* as well. This is nothing against the Mozilla team's skills -- Gnome has involved many people working for years on just the windowing stuff -- but for them to think they could produce something anywhere near that quality as an afterthought to their primary development makes me wonder about their wisdom.
I think this is quite naive, but not entirely off the mark. The motivation for Gates was (IMO) never money, but control. That is, I think many people would like to have more money than they could ever spend, but not that many would want to alienate all of their peers and be hated by everyone not actually in their employ, just to be the one calling all the shots.
I mean, would you rather be Gates with $40 billion, or Jerry Yang with $1 billion?
But I don't want Linux to be the ONLY choice any more than I want Windoze or MacOS as the only choice.
I would really like to see more emphasis on the Mac (and/or Be) in these sort of discussions. The fact is, Linux *can't* compare with Windows in newbie ease-of-use. But, the Mac kicks its ass! The people who proclaim Windows' superiority because of its ease of use should be obligated to explain how this doesn't argue that the *Mac* should be the system for the technophobes.
Sherman act is akin to saying no tigers or lions, and it is wrong for one species to dominate or threaten another. Evolution rules
Methinks you don't understand evolution very well. What drives evolution is diversity; there is nothing quite so abhorrent as a monoculture. Microsoft is the equivalent of a cane toad or fire ant; they are in one sense extremely successful, but their success is largely due to the way they poison the land around them to other species. Although we haven't witnessed enough to say for sure, the general consensus is that, unless they're counteracted, these species eventually weaken their ecosystems to the point of collapse, at which point they go extinct while incurring massive collateral damage.
Another parallel is extremely virulent disease -- they are "too successful" and quickly wipe out all possible vectors to their own propagation.
I personally don't think much of the analogy, but, well, you brought it up.
I view the net fridge (or net almost anything) as rather useless, and I think it's hilarious to see the recipe thing come up again -- isn't that what our PCs were supposed to do way back in '82 or so?
What I think is *really* valuable about this is that it ports functionality from hardware to software. Almost all the things I've loved in products have been fundamentally software. My VCR has a neat feature where pressing the record button repeatedly will make it record for 30 minutes, 1 hour, 1:30, etc. I love microwaves with a +30 seconds button, or ones that will start cooking immediately if you press a numbered button without selecting a specific cooking mode.
What "smart" appliances allow is for you to keep the features you like when the underlying hardware changes. Now *that* I'll pay for.
That, and being able to set my thermostat to go on in the morning based on the time my alarm's going to go off.
I think coverage of the Win2000 release would have fit right into the "only bad things about Windows" paranoia. From what I read about it at other places (Salon, News.com) it sounded like a pretty sad affair.
Re:Reminds me of a good quote
on
A New DeCSS
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· Score: 1
Frankly I would think that most intelligent people would realize that it is better to fight another day.
An intelligent person may choose to fight another day. A coward *always* chooses to fight another day. There's a difference.
Re:Boy you people like living dangerously
on
A New DeCSS
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· Score: 1
Face it danger is not a good thing and I would rather have my pride/honor/respect/and freedom than play DVDs on unsupported OSs.
Oh, yeah, basing your actions on whatever looks safest is always the surest way to garner pride, honor and respect. Giordano Bruno, my ass! It's those torch-bearing Inquisitors who really deserve our praise. No imprisonment, no burnings, just a long and safe life in service to the biggest dog on the block. And see how they're venerated today! Brings a tear to my eye...
It [Microsoft] also argued some information should remain highly controlled, even if it seemed outdated, such as details of licensing deals that might offend other companies who negotiated with Microsoft. "Customers often have long memories," said Norman Tonina, a controller at Microsoft.
IOW, Microsoft wants a legal shield to prevent its customers from realizing how shafted they got. Typical.
I think if you promoted enough of this kind of behavior in genetic systems, you would end up with something much less robust. The strength of evolved systems (mainly biological, but you can see it most easily in genetic programming) is that the huge mess of largely unreadable information is far more robust and flexible than a straightforward human-coded version. Introduce an evolved system to a slightly different problem or environment, even one it's never seen before, and it is far more likely to deal gracefully than a "programmed" system.
You can't email a videotape to your friends -- that's the biggest difference. If you could dial the phone and have a VCR delivered for free, and there were big buckets of videotapes lining the streets, then despite the analog nature of VHS copies I'm sure the recording industry would be equally up in arms.
Slashdot Mirror
The .DOC file format is fully documented on MS's Techweb site (and is in XML for Office 2000).
.DOC files from Word 2000 a few months ago, and they are not in XML but binary. And if MS has documented them, they sure hid it well.
This is completely false as far as I've seen. I actually was faced with parsing
Before giving up entirely and scraping the desired content directly from the web, I also tried using RTF, and I think it's illustrative of the problems with having MS simply document their formats: documentation rarely describes full implementation. It's analogous to writing a web browser to the W3C HTML spec -- this is simply not enough, not only for the proprietary tags you'll miss but also because the spec doesn't prepare you to handle trashy formatting (Word produces terrible RTF as well as HTML). In practice, Word is the only software that can properly read Word-produced RTF, despite the fact that the "spec" is documented and many well-funded pieces of software can nominally work with it.
Why is this moderated as "funny"? The fact is, this behavior is rampant in corporate America, and should be dealt with across the board.
Obviously the moderators can't taste the difference...
So in the case of Mozilla you have absolutely no choice but to develop your own programming API from the ground up and implement it at the back end with your own widget set.
What I don't get is why you can't develop your own programming API and implement it with as much of the native widget set as you can. What's not there natively you do yourself, but wouldn't this still be less work than doing *everything* yourself?
In particular, what bothers me about Mozilla is not that it doesn't use my chosen GTK+ theme (although this is irksome) as much as that it just doesn't *work* as well. This is nothing against the Mozilla team's skills -- Gnome has involved many people working for years on just the windowing stuff -- but for them to think they could produce something anywhere near that quality as an afterthought to their primary development makes me wonder about their wisdom.
I think this is quite naive, but not entirely off the mark. The motivation for Gates was (IMO) never money, but control. That is, I think many people would like to have more money than they could ever spend, but not that many would want to alienate all of their peers and be hated by everyone not actually in their employ, just to be the one calling all the shots.
I mean, would you rather be Gates with $40 billion, or Jerry Yang with $1 billion?
But I don't want Linux to be the ONLY choice any more than I want Windoze or MacOS as the only choice.
I would really like to see more emphasis on the Mac (and/or Be) in these sort of discussions. The fact is, Linux *can't* compare with Windows in newbie ease-of-use. But, the Mac kicks its ass! The people who proclaim Windows' superiority because of its ease of use should be obligated to explain how this doesn't argue that the *Mac* should be the system for the technophobes.
Sherman act is akin to saying no tigers or lions, and it is wrong for one species to dominate or threaten another. Evolution rules
Methinks you don't understand evolution very well. What drives evolution is diversity; there is nothing quite so abhorrent as a monoculture. Microsoft is the equivalent of a cane toad or fire ant; they are in one sense extremely successful, but their success is largely due to the way they poison the land around them to other species. Although we haven't witnessed enough to say for sure, the general consensus is that, unless they're counteracted, these species eventually weaken their ecosystems to the point of collapse, at which point they go extinct while incurring massive collateral damage.
Another parallel is extremely virulent disease -- they are "too successful" and quickly wipe out all possible vectors to their own propagation.
I personally don't think much of the analogy, but, well, you brought it up.
I view the net fridge (or net almost anything) as rather useless, and I think it's hilarious to see the recipe thing come up again -- isn't that what our PCs were supposed to do way back in '82 or so?
What I think is *really* valuable about this is that it ports functionality from hardware to software. Almost all the things I've loved in products have been fundamentally software. My VCR has a neat feature where pressing the record button repeatedly will make it record for 30 minutes, 1 hour, 1:30, etc. I love microwaves with a +30 seconds button, or ones that will start cooking immediately if you press a numbered button without selecting a specific cooking mode.
What "smart" appliances allow is for you to keep the features you like when the underlying hardware changes. Now *that* I'll pay for.
That, and being able to set my thermostat to go on in the morning based on the time my alarm's going to go off.
I think coverage of the Win2000 release would have fit right into the "only bad things about Windows" paranoia. From what I read about it at other places (Salon, News.com) it sounded like a pretty sad affair.
Frankly I would think that most intelligent people would realize that it is better to fight another day.
An intelligent person may choose to fight another day. A coward *always* chooses to fight another day. There's a difference.
Face it danger is not a good thing and I would rather have my pride/honor/respect/and freedom than play DVDs on unsupported OSs.
Oh, yeah, basing your actions on whatever looks safest is always the surest way to garner pride, honor and respect. Giordano Bruno, my ass! It's those torch-bearing Inquisitors who really deserve our praise. No imprisonment, no burnings, just a long and safe life in service to the biggest dog on the block. And see how they're venerated today! Brings a tear to my eye...
At this point, I'm waiting expectantly for a reference to some atheist actually killing Christians because of their beliefs.
Or was the "abortion clinic bombers" quip just poetic license?
How could they have overlooked "I Can Change"?
I like to kill, I like to maim
Yes I'm insane but that's okay 'cause I'm Hussein!
Although to be fair, you really need to see Saddam breakdancing to get the full effect...
It [Microsoft] also argued some information should remain highly controlled, even if it seemed outdated, such as details of licensing deals that might offend other companies who negotiated with Microsoft. "Customers often have long memories," said Norman Tonina, a controller at Microsoft.
IOW, Microsoft wants a legal shield to prevent its customers from realizing how shafted they got. Typical.
I think if you promoted enough of this kind of behavior in genetic systems, you would end up with something much less robust. The strength of evolved systems (mainly biological, but you can see it most easily in genetic programming) is that the huge mess of largely unreadable information is far more robust and flexible than a straightforward human-coded version. Introduce an evolved system to a slightly different problem or environment, even one it's never seen before, and it is far more likely to deal gracefully than a "programmed" system.
You can't email a videotape to your friends -- that's the biggest difference. If you could dial the phone and have a VCR delivered for free, and there were big buckets of videotapes lining the streets, then despite the analog nature of VHS copies I'm sure the recording industry would be equally up in arms.