The scientific community has a strong theory of the Big Bang, but cannot prove it, nor find out what caused it. The religious community believe that the Universe was created by a Creator, but have no answer as to what created the Creator (if such a question has any meaning).
Until one community disproves the other, why not let both live together?
The argument in this debate seems to be caused by those who believe that science is correct, and believe that religion is incorrect.
Is it just me or does this have nothing to do with any scientific arguement?
No, it isn't just you and, yes, this has nothing to do with any scientific argument.
Whilst there's nothing wrong with scientific discussion (or argument, if you prefer), creationism is not dependant upon science. The onus is on science to disprove creationism.
Let's face it, the Flat Earth Society was a pretty easy one - I challenge the scientific community to prove that God did not create the Universe.
Do it, and I shall stand corrected.
It's that simple.
Until then, there's no debate... is there?
Why are such cock-sure "scientists" against the teaching of creation when it's as well proven (by scientific basis) as the Big Bang theory and the Evolution theory? Note the word "Theory" - they might be true, but neither have been proven scientifically.
Christianity proclaims that we were created by God.
Science has certain procedures and formalities, by which every detail must be checked until it can be declared as a fact.
So, in fact, it is science which declares that this detailed requirement is needed for Science (by which you presumably specifically mean the theory of evolution) to prove itself, and not the other way around at all.
Taking your argument (Science doesn't prove the Bible), I could take it from the other side and say that the Bible doesn't prove Science. However, the more archaeology is done, the more the Bible's historical accuracy is validated. So that's an unfair argument, because the Bible has the advantage.
science never ever said there _couldn't have been_ an Intelligent Designer. All science is saying is, "look, we can explain these things without resorting to a designer - whether there has been one or not, we dont _need_ him."
All an (intelligent) proponent of "ID" would say is that science has got a long way in explaining how things happen, but that whilst trivia like this (1934, for fsck's sake!) have been dealt with a long time ago, there are some things which are beyond us. For a non-trivial example, let's take - oh - the beginning of the Universe. The Bible says that it was created by God. Science says it was started with the Big Bang.
Neither answer the questions "Where did God come from?" or "What caused the Big Bang?".
Both questions have equal gravity.
Religion's tentative answer is somewhere between "that's beyond us to understand" and "that's not actually something we need to be bothered about - what matters is that God created us because he loves us" (and yes, Love is a big part of the religious argument, let's not forget this in the debate; Science hasn't yet begun to get into finding out anything about Love - I look forward to the time when we have more documented understanding about this)
Science's answer is "Well, it seems like we're not going to be able to get back to second 0.00000000(ad infinitum), let alone find out what happened before that to cause it, but you never know... have faith, we might find it given time".
Neither are conclusive.
I am a big follower of our scientific discoveries, and the more we learn, the better. But evolution is still just a theory. The scientific tradition is that hypotheses lead to theories, which lead to truth. Evolution is a theory. If/when scientists can prove the theory evolution, using scientific methods, with full explanation from creation to the world we see around us today, then I will stand up and listen. Until then, evolution is a theory which requires as much faith as religion requires.
So there you go - Evolution, Creation - two theories, with equal scientific standing.
That isn't even to say that the two cannot stand together - let's learn as much as we can discover... you never know, we might even (though theologically I find it unlikely) catch up and learn that the clues have been planted to let us work out that God created the Universe.
When science has undisputed, documented evidence of where we come from, how we are the way we are, and why we behave (presumably as robots with no free will, as it is scientifically documented), then please let me know by - oh, let's say, posting it on Slashdot. Until then, debunking ridiculous misinterpretations from the 1930s aren't exactly news.
I'm not in the American hysteria about "ID", but I am a Christian (did anyone see last night's Channel 4 programme by Richard Dawkins, "The Root of All Evil?"? I taped it because I was interested to see how he would argue the case; I'm glad I did, so I can blog all the holes in his argument. I have to admit to being disappointed at the number of holes; I was expecting a more coherent argument against religion. I actually think I could have done better myself!
Anyway; for example, http://www.paghat.com/beeflight.html :
The "science has proved that bees can't fly" urban myth originated in a 1934 book by entomologist Antoine Magnan, who discussed a mathematical equation by Andre Sainte-Lague, an engineer. The equation proved that the maximum lift for an aircraft's wings could not be achieved at equivalent speeds of a bee. I.e., an airplane the size of a bee, moving as slowly as a bee, could not fly. Although this did not mean a bee can't fly (which after all does not have stationary wings like the posited teency aircraft), nevertheless the idea that Magnan's book said bees oughtn't be able to fly began to spread.
If ID proponents are using arguments like that, they really need to get a cluestick. This is not news (for nerds or otherwise), and it certainly isn't stuff that matters.
As this post isn't getting into the Big Picture, I won't bother getting into details here (check my website in the near future for that kind of detail) but science is constantly moving on (as it should do) so a total belief in the current findings of science is, by definition, irrational.
If you trace back through your family tree for a few hundred years, and (I guess you don't know them all personally) assume that they had full belief in the scientific research of the time, your predecessors believed that the Sun revolved around the Earth, that the Earth was flat, that the West Indies were actually part of India, and so on.
Science has achieved a lot, and we are learning more every day, but only a fool would believe that our research has given us any definitive information about our environment.
Oh great, so more untested code (.NET in this case) is the new panacea?
When have I heard this before? Oh yeah, Win95, Win98, Win98SE, WinNT, WinNT4, Win2k, WinXP, Win2k3
(I would have gone further back, but Win3.1 was the original problem; 3.11 seemed to manage to add features without adding serious security problems, somehow)
Gates urged that new design approaches must "dramatically reduce" the number of security-related issues as well as make fixes easier to administer. "Eventually," he added, "our software should be so fundamentally secure that customers never even worry about it."
So, all technical arguments aside, Gates has failed to the achieve the managerial decision he has made.
We geeks can worry all we like about the minutiae; Gates, as a manager and businessman, has failed to deliver.
This isn't exactly representative - given flaws in IE and FireFox, assuming equal severity, the IE flaw would (and must) get more coverage as over 90% of internet users use IE.
He's not talking about corporate-maintained machines, but user machines.
A few months ago, I saw my Dad's PC, and it was dog slow. It's Win98 (ugh) with 64MB (not bad for Win98) but it was taking literallly minutes to open / close an application. My Mum's new WinXP laptop was nice and responsive, by contrast.
On the weekend, I helped my Mum out with her XP laptop, and it was just a slow as my Dad's desktop.
Ignorant users install all sorts of shit (my Mum had bought a disk-defragger, for fsck's sake, which constantly monitored the disk and refragged it! What charlatan came up with that idea?!)
I admit that I don't know shit about Windows (and was actually planning to write a similar article to the OP, having used Solaris and Linux as my desktop for the past 10 years, and now forced to use WinXP as my corporate laptop, with a new job), but it would take me well over one working day to get that laptop up to speed (I don't know Windows, but I know IT principles, and have been working with computers since the mid 1980s), if I could ever get it back to its original speed.
Compare that with a data-backup, format, install (ideally from an OEM CD/DVD), any other drivers, apps, etc - it would take a while, and be a PITA, but it would give a real result, without having to arse about with undocumented Registry entries, etc.
Why does everyone keep referring to this as a zero-day exploit? This is a long-standing vulnerability which has existed since 1990. It has only recently been publicised, granted, but it is a 15-yr-old vulnerability. Those running older versions of Windows, which MS has graciously declined to support, are still vulnerable to this "design flaw".
On the plus side, a zero-day exploit generally means an obvious hole - this hole has existed for years, and it's taken 15 years for it to be published. Is that really a Good Thing, though?
It's a fscking big design flaw, at that - if in doubt, execute randomly-supplied code. It is right that MS have been under pressure to produce a patch for Windows XP, but there must still be pressure to provide patches for all versions of Windows which are vulnerable to such a wide-open and so easy to exploit flaw.
It's not just about the risk - it's about the fundamentally poor design. Let's try the old, boring comparisons again (well, what else is there?) - if a car which has been sold over the past 15 years has a flaw (possibly known by "baddies" for the past 15 years) which means that the V5/pink-slip/ownership papers/call-it-what-you-will can be transferred remotely simply by driving through a bad neighbourhood, there would be an international outcry, and (even if that car was no longer on sale) the manufacturer would have to make a fix available, whatever the cost.
MS should be pulled up on this, and pulled hard. Some guy "discovered" this flaw (I've never looked at WMF before, I'm sure most of us haven't, but presumably enough people have looked at it for compatability (I see that the WINE guys implemented it without spotting the flaw)) but from what I read, it's a documented "feature" of WMF that if an error occurs, then you can provide your own code to deal with the error.
That must be tantamount to negligence - not in the original design, as it was written before MS realised that the internet existed, but in adding a TCP/IP stack to such code, without reviewing what code they were exposing to the internet. They spent however many $m on promoting Win95 and its internet features - what did they spend on ensuring that it was safe to put on the internet?
What I really find interesting, is what else the code which discovered this flaw, could possibly discover?
And who else has written similar software, but kept it to themselves for private reasons?
Steve.
I had a discussion with a colleague (we're both new to the company) today about a spreadsheet which must not be distributed out of our company. However, many people who work for us have accounts on the company network (i.e., they have a john.doe@ourfirm.com account, and a john.doe@theirfirm.com account). Some of those do work for ourfirm.com, but only use their theirfirm.com email account.
I had to point out that the policy basically means that it doesn't go outside our company, our network, anywhere in control of someone other than ourfirm.com. Seems obvious, really.
Of course, if I send it to john.doe@ourfirm.com and he forwards it to his john.doe@theirfirm.com address, that's beyond my control, but still (since I know that he has accounts on both networks) to a certain extent, my responsibility.
Makes their network traffic available seems more like it, from reading TFA.
You didn't miss anything. It's a fuss about very little. Not about nothing, but if you do anything through a proxy server out of your control, then you don't know what is transmitted. Of course, simply adding SSL should help:)
I'm no great fan of either Google nor MS, but this is not in the same category. This is a theoretical attack - if you control the proxy server between a user and Gmail (and make the decision to store all traffic), then yes, you can get into their email, but that's about it.
And oh bugger, your other stuff about the BBC now being a pipe for Labour spin doctors is not true either - seen The Late Edition, Have I Got News For You lately, or listened to The News Quiz on Radio 4?
Oh, and the Grandparent is not quite right, either - the TV license goes to the BBC, but the Government (i.e., the taxpayer) also pay the BBC. They have a charter which specifies that they must be politically unbiased, and also provide certain "public interest" (I forget the exact phrase) programming, e.g. Newsnight, Any Questions, etc.
Same here, except most of my code has always been GPL 2 without the suggested boilerplate text of "or later".
FWIW, the Linux kernel also avoids this "or later" suggestion.
As a later poster mentions, including the "or later" text could mean that your code ends up under any license known generally as "the GPL" - whether RMS goes insane (okay, some might want to argue the future tense, I'm not one of them), the FSF is bought-out by Microsoft, etc, etc - not likely, but you don't want to put work into code on the basis that "whoever calls themselves the administrator of GPL can control the license to my software retrospectively" really, would you?
http://steve-parker.org/speedtouchconf/
I used to use OO.o on Debian (1.8GHz, 512Mb). I now use MS Office on Windows XP (1.6GHz, 1024Mb). Word "starts" in moments, but then I have to go File / New, and select the type of document I want to create from a window which adds itself to the Word window.
I can open new documents in Word - often very quickly. Unless I've got more than about 3 docs already open, in which case I get no information at all (maybe an hourglass if I'm lucky) and the document might appear (or maybe it didn't register my click, in which case I have to wait 20 seconds or more to see if anything might happen, and I'll have to try again and wait another 20 seconds).
Obviously, having 6 documents open at a time is *ludicrous*!!! Only a nutter would do such a crazy thing - well, according to Microsoft and Dell, anyway. My laptop isn't cutting-edge, but it's better than was available when WinXP and Word 2003 were made available.
Shit, you're right... I'll pack up Linux, BIND, Apache, MySQL right now. Windows, IIS and MSSQL beat them hands-down.
Why didn't I spot this before?!
On the desktop, there's something to this argument, that geeks write software for geeks. OO.o has been run by Sun for about 5 years now, they started by removing that awful "desktop" thing in 5.1, opensourced it, took away that new-env-per-document thing, improved the interface, started a standardised document format, and did most of the accessibility stuff in GNOME at the same time (for the benefit of JDS).
"Go, Google!" comments seem rather odd here - Google have a good grasp on usability, but Sun have done a huge amount of the boring gruntwork on OOo (and GNOME, and tons of other stuff). If Google can add their KISS to office suites, that'd be a real boon, though.
I've been working for Sun for the past 6 years. Therefore, I've been using StarOffice. It's what I know, it's what I'm used to. Actually, most of that time I've been using OOo - no significant difference.
Now I have to use MS Office and MS Outlook. I took a simple 1-page Word document, removed the details from it, and emailed it to somebody saying "This is the format you need to use to make this request". That seemed pretty straightforward - give him the blank version of the document. Now, whenever he emails me an updated version of that document, something (Windows? Outlook? Word?) offers to merge his changes back into the original document. I tested it, and even if I remove the original document, it still offers to do the impossible.
I suspect that these are the collaboration features referred to. Personally, I'm capable enough to manage my own documents to live without such a feature. I can see the potential benefit if we were working on a shared document, but that's pretty rare in my experience. The use of macros to force me to view change-control on documents is a real PITA, the fact that something (who knows what?) makes changes to normal.dot every time I load Word, so I get a prompt to save changes (what changes? No idea - just a Yes/No dialog) whenever I close Word, it's half-written software. Ugh. Give me OpenOffice.org any day.
For the first time in many, many years, I've got to use Windows and MS Office.
I used to have a 256Mb 1.8Mhz Intel P4M with a 5400rpm HDD on which I ran various Linux distros, most recently Debian for the past year or so. I was using OOo to edit StarOffice Writer documents. It took maybe 2-3 seconds to load a relatively complex 30-50 page document.
I've now got a 1GB 1.6GHz Intel P4 Centrino running Windows XP, and I work with MS Office documents.
I find that initial load is pretty quick - the CPU is a bit slower, but it takes a similar amount of time to open a document - given certain conditions:
If the PC has only just booted up, I can log in and quickly see the desktop. However, any clicks in the first 10 seconds or so are apparently ignored. It looks like a PC ready to use, but it isn't.
If I have more than about 8 windows open (typically MS Outlook, MS Word (maybe 4 docs), MS Excel (1 or 2 docs), Jabber (1 or 2 chats)), then clicking on a.doc file takes a good 10 seconds to load. In the meantime, there is no indication whatsoever that the system has acknowledged my click and is making any attempt to open the document (at least OOo has an activity bar showing that it is processing the document) - not even the disk-activity indicator light on the laptop, so it's not that the HDD is slow (not sure of the speed, but can't be worse than 5400rpm), it's just sitting there, thinking about it.
Half the MS Office docs I view automatically show revision changes - I don't care, and there doesn't even seem to be a keyboard shortcut to kill it. I have to go to a menu or toolbar to view the fscking document itself.
Having stripped an example document of its detail, mailed the stripped-down version to someone else, and received his updated version, I can't open that document without it constantly asking me if I want to merge his changes back into the original document... even after I delete the original, it still asks me. No, I don't want to merge it. It's a new document. That was a fscking template. Leave me alone.
This may be more indicative of corporate documents, but most docs I receive ask me to enable macros, update external links, etc - I'm not stupid enough to automatically enable such things, but even in docs where I know they are not necessary, I still get asked. That's another meaningless question (no option to view the macros before enabling them, for example) which gets in the way between myself and the document.
Document views - this seems to be defined as part of the document itself, whether it's 100%, 75%, page-width, or 2-pages-per-screen, or even 4 pages per screen. Totally unintuitive. I'm sure there's a way to get the view you want, but it took me long enough to work out that "hover the mouse over the (alleged) pagebreak and click on "show whitespace" to view each page as a page.
So that's my "I've had 1 month with MS Office after 6 years with StarOffice" summary - most reviews seem to be the other way around. I'm sure I've missed out most of my favourite rants, but that's just a sample of the frustrations I've had so far. Bring back StarOffice - it's been working great for me for the past six years.
Both parties are behaving immorally (and probably illegally). The simple fact of being an individual, not a commercial software vendor, makes no difference to either the moral or the legal argument.
Illegally copying music (or any other copyrighted work) and breaking the GPL are equally abhorrent. Sorry to break the/. line here, but I'm coming at this from a moral perspective, not a legal or "what works for me" perspective.
Fair enough, we all do that. MIME is a particular PITA. How about spelling Boundary correctly in your code though?
I've worked in a place where Category was spelled Catagory in the database, so that misspelling was propagated through the entire codebase and even into URLs; such typos normally have no relevance, but you never know when it will come to bite you...
Just my 2p
I've just had to start connecting to an Exchange server using MS Outlook (I'm used to Exim and Thunderbird). It's handy to receive appointments directly into my calendar by email, but is it really "by email" then? It's another use of the same desktop application.
And it seems rather strange that I receive an email about an appointment, but when I click "Accept", it stops being an email, and becomes an appointment - so I can't forward the agenda to a colleague who didn't receive the email, being one example I came across today.
I'm still new to Exchange and Outlook, but it strikes me that these functions should (in principle) be reasonably straight-forward to break down into multiple applications (from the client-side and/or the server-side) but it's an ugly mess of functionality.
First impressions (since I last met Exchange in 1998): Ugh. Horrid.
Search functionality compared to Thunderbird... well, I can't find it! Certainly noting as straightforward as Thunderbird - just grope through search options (once I found them!) and even with the "Advanced" search options, I can't find anything like Thunderbird (let alone Evolution, if I could tolerate it, which I can't) power of searching and sorting emails.
So there you go - a new-user's guide to Microsoft.
Slashdot Mirror
The scientific community has a strong theory of the Big Bang, but cannot prove it, nor find out what caused it. The religious community believe that the Universe was created by a Creator, but have no answer as to what created the Creator (if such a question has any meaning).
Until one community disproves the other, why not let both live together?
The argument in this debate seems to be caused by those who believe that science is correct, and believe that religion is incorrect.
Whilst there's nothing wrong with scientific discussion (or argument, if you prefer), creationism is not dependant upon science. The onus is on science to disprove creationism.
Let's face it, the Flat Earth Society was a pretty easy one - I challenge the scientific community to prove that God did not create the Universe.
Do it, and I shall stand corrected.
It's that simple.
Until then, there's no debate ... is there?
Why are such cock-sure "scientists" against the teaching of creation when it's as well proven (by scientific basis) as the Big Bang theory and the Evolution theory? Note the word "Theory" - they might be true, but neither have been proven scientifically.
Christianity proclaims that we were created by God.
Science has certain procedures and formalities, by which every detail must be checked until it can be declared as a fact.
So, in fact, it is science which declares that this detailed requirement is needed for Science (by which you presumably specifically mean the theory of evolution) to prove itself, and not the other way around at all.
Taking your argument (Science doesn't prove the Bible), I could take it from the other side and say that the Bible doesn't prove Science. However, the more archaeology is done, the more the Bible's historical accuracy is validated. So that's an unfair argument, because the Bible has the advantage.
All an (intelligent) proponent of "ID" would say is that science has got a long way in explaining how things happen, but that whilst trivia like this (1934, for fsck's sake!) have been dealt with a long time ago, there are some things which are beyond us. For a non-trivial example, let's take - oh - the beginning of the Universe. The Bible says that it was created by God. Science says it was started with the Big Bang.
Neither answer the questions "Where did God come from?" or "What caused the Big Bang?".
Both questions have equal gravity.
Religion's tentative answer is somewhere between "that's beyond us to understand" and "that's not actually something we need to be bothered about - what matters is that God created us because he loves us" (and yes, Love is a big part of the religious argument, let's not forget this in the debate; Science hasn't yet begun to get into finding out anything about Love - I look forward to the time when we have more documented understanding about this)
Science's answer is "Well, it seems like we're not going to be able to get back to second 0.00000000(ad infinitum), let alone find out what happened before that to cause it, but you never know ... have faith, we might find it given time".
Neither are conclusive.
I am a big follower of our scientific discoveries, and the more we learn, the better. But evolution is still just a theory. The scientific tradition is that hypotheses lead to theories, which lead to truth. Evolution is a theory. If/when scientists can prove the theory evolution, using scientific methods, with full explanation from creation to the world we see around us today, then I will stand up and listen. Until then, evolution is a theory which requires as much faith as religion requires.
So there you go - Evolution, Creation - two theories, with equal scientific standing.
That isn't even to say that the two cannot stand together - let's learn as much as we can discover ... you never know, we might even (though theologically I find it unlikely) catch up and learn that the clues have been planted to let us work out that God created the Universe.
When science has undisputed, documented evidence of where we come from, how we are the way we are, and why we behave (presumably as robots with no free will, as it is scientifically documented), then please let me know by - oh, let's say, posting it on Slashdot. Until then, debunking ridiculous misinterpretations from the 1930s aren't exactly news.
As this post isn't getting into the Big Picture, I won't bother getting into details here (check my website in the near future for that kind of detail) but science is constantly moving on (as it should do) so a total belief in the current findings of science is, by definition, irrational.
If you trace back through your family tree for a few hundred years, and (I guess you don't know them all personally) assume that they had full belief in the scientific research of the time, your predecessors believed that the Sun revolved around the Earth, that the Earth was flat, that the West Indies were actually part of India, and so on.
Science has achieved a lot, and we are learning more every day, but only a fool would believe that our research has given us any definitive information about our environment.
When have I heard this before? Oh yeah, Win95, Win98, Win98SE, WinNT, WinNT4, Win2k, WinXP, Win2k3
(I would have gone further back, but Win3.1 was the original problem; 3.11 seemed to manage to add features without adding serious security problems, somehow)
So, all technical arguments aside, Gates has failed to the achieve the managerial decision he has made.
We geeks can worry all we like about the minutiae; Gates, as a manager and businessman, has failed to deliver.
This isn't exactly representative - given flaws in IE and FireFox, assuming equal severity, the IE flaw would (and must) get more coverage as over 90% of internet users use IE.
A few months ago, I saw my Dad's PC, and it was dog slow. It's Win98 (ugh) with 64MB (not bad for Win98) but it was taking literallly minutes to open / close an application. My Mum's new WinXP laptop was nice and responsive, by contrast.
On the weekend, I helped my Mum out with her XP laptop, and it was just a slow as my Dad's desktop.
Ignorant users install all sorts of shit (my Mum had bought a disk-defragger, for fsck's sake, which constantly monitored the disk and refragged it! What charlatan came up with that idea?!)
I admit that I don't know shit about Windows (and was actually planning to write a similar article to the OP, having used Solaris and Linux as my desktop for the past 10 years, and now forced to use WinXP as my corporate laptop, with a new job), but it would take me well over one working day to get that laptop up to speed (I don't know Windows, but I know IT principles, and have been working with computers since the mid 1980s), if I could ever get it back to its original speed.
Compare that with a data-backup, format, install (ideally from an OEM CD/DVD), any other drivers, apps, etc - it would take a while, and be a PITA, but it would give a real result, without having to arse about with undocumented Registry entries, etc.
Why does everyone keep referring to this as a zero-day exploit? This is a long-standing vulnerability which has existed since 1990. It has only recently been publicised, granted, but it is a 15-yr-old vulnerability. Those running older versions of Windows, which MS has graciously declined to support, are still vulnerable to this "design flaw". On the plus side, a zero-day exploit generally means an obvious hole - this hole has existed for years, and it's taken 15 years for it to be published. Is that really a Good Thing, though? It's a fscking big design flaw, at that - if in doubt, execute randomly-supplied code. It is right that MS have been under pressure to produce a patch for Windows XP, but there must still be pressure to provide patches for all versions of Windows which are vulnerable to such a wide-open and so easy to exploit flaw. It's not just about the risk - it's about the fundamentally poor design. Let's try the old, boring comparisons again (well, what else is there?) - if a car which has been sold over the past 15 years has a flaw (possibly known by "baddies" for the past 15 years) which means that the V5/pink-slip/ownership papers/call-it-what-you-will can be transferred remotely simply by driving through a bad neighbourhood, there would be an international outcry, and (even if that car was no longer on sale) the manufacturer would have to make a fix available, whatever the cost. MS should be pulled up on this, and pulled hard. Some guy "discovered" this flaw (I've never looked at WMF before, I'm sure most of us haven't, but presumably enough people have looked at it for compatability (I see that the WINE guys implemented it without spotting the flaw)) but from what I read, it's a documented "feature" of WMF that if an error occurs, then you can provide your own code to deal with the error. That must be tantamount to negligence - not in the original design, as it was written before MS realised that the internet existed, but in adding a TCP/IP stack to such code, without reviewing what code they were exposing to the internet. They spent however many $m on promoting Win95 and its internet features - what did they spend on ensuring that it was safe to put on the internet? What I really find interesting, is what else the code which discovered this flaw, could possibly discover? And who else has written similar software, but kept it to themselves for private reasons? Steve.
No, 100 millimetre-dollars. That's a lot of - er - expensive but short length???
Oh come on, he can't count that high. It's 12321
I had to point out that the policy basically means that it doesn't go outside our company, our network, anywhere in control of someone other than ourfirm.com. Seems obvious, really.
Of course, if I send it to john.doe@ourfirm.com and he forwards it to his john.doe@theirfirm.com address, that's beyond my control, but still (since I know that he has accounts on both networks) to a certain extent, my responsibility.
You didn't miss anything. It's a fuss about very little. Not about nothing, but if you do anything through a proxy server out of your control, then you don't know what is transmitted. Of course, simply adding SSL should help :)
I'm no great fan of either Google nor MS, but this is not in the same category. This is a theoretical attack - if you control the proxy server between a user and Gmail (and make the decision to store all traffic), then yes, you can get into their email, but that's about it.
Oh, and the Grandparent is not quite right, either - the TV license goes to the BBC, but the Government (i.e., the taxpayer) also pay the BBC. They have a charter which specifies that they must be politically unbiased, and also provide certain "public interest" (I forget the exact phrase) programming, e.g. Newsnight, Any Questions, etc.
I agree, mainly.
If I want a truly stable system, I would go for a 2.4 kernel these days, though there are a good number of desirable features in 2.6.
I see 2.6 as a "very stable development kernel" - as if the followon from 2.5 was 2.7, but somebody made a mistake in the admin and called it 2.6
Same here, except most of my code has always been GPL 2 without the suggested boilerplate text of "or later". FWIW, the Linux kernel also avoids this "or later" suggestion. As a later poster mentions, including the "or later" text could mean that your code ends up under any license known generally as "the GPL" - whether RMS goes insane (okay, some might want to argue the future tense, I'm not one of them), the FSF is bought-out by Microsoft, etc, etc - not likely, but you don't want to put work into code on the basis that "whoever calls themselves the administrator of GPL can control the license to my software retrospectively" really, would you? http://steve-parker.org/speedtouchconf/
That's enough startup speed posts as I'll take.
I used to use OO.o on Debian (1.8GHz, 512Mb). I now use MS Office on Windows XP (1.6GHz, 1024Mb). Word "starts" in moments, but then I have to go File / New, and select the type of document I want to create from a window which adds itself to the Word window.
I can open new documents in Word - often very quickly. Unless I've got more than about 3 docs already open, in which case I get no information at all (maybe an hourglass if I'm lucky) and the document might appear (or maybe it didn't register my click, in which case I have to wait 20 seconds or more to see if anything might happen, and I'll have to try again and wait another 20 seconds).
Obviously, having 6 documents open at a time is *ludicrous*!!! Only a nutter would do such a crazy thing - well, according to Microsoft and Dell, anyway. My laptop isn't cutting-edge, but it's better than was available when WinXP and Word 2003 were made available.
Why didn't I spot this before?!
On the desktop, there's something to this argument, that geeks write software for geeks. OO.o has been run by Sun for about 5 years now, they started by removing that awful "desktop" thing in 5.1, opensourced it, took away that new-env-per-document thing, improved the interface, started a standardised document format, and did most of the accessibility stuff in GNOME at the same time (for the benefit of JDS).
"Go, Google!" comments seem rather odd here - Google have a good grasp on usability, but Sun have done a huge amount of the boring gruntwork on OOo (and GNOME, and tons of other stuff). If Google can add their KISS to office suites, that'd be a real boon, though.
I've been working for Sun for the past 6 years. Therefore, I've been using StarOffice. It's what I know, it's what I'm used to.
Actually, most of that time I've been using OOo - no significant difference.
Now I have to use MS Office and MS Outlook. I took a simple 1-page Word document, removed the details from it, and emailed it to somebody saying "This is the format you need to use to make this request".
That seemed pretty straightforward - give him the blank version of the document.
Now, whenever he emails me an updated version of that document, something (Windows? Outlook? Word?) offers to merge his changes back into the original document. I tested it, and even if I remove the original document, it still offers to do the impossible.
I suspect that these are the collaboration features referred to. Personally, I'm capable enough to manage my own documents to live without such a feature. I can see the potential benefit if we were working on a shared document, but that's pretty rare in my experience. The use of macros to force me to view change-control on documents is a real PITA, the fact that something (who knows what?) makes changes to normal.dot every time I load Word, so I get a prompt to save changes (what changes? No idea - just a Yes/No dialog) whenever I close Word, it's half-written software. Ugh. Give me OpenOffice.org any day.
I used to have a 256Mb 1.8Mhz Intel P4M with a 5400rpm HDD on which I ran various Linux distros, most recently Debian for the past year or so. I was using OOo to edit StarOffice Writer documents. It took maybe 2-3 seconds to load a relatively complex 30-50 page document.
I've now got a 1GB 1.6GHz Intel P4 Centrino running Windows XP, and I work with MS Office documents. I find that initial load is pretty quick - the CPU is a bit slower, but it takes a similar amount of time to open a document - given certain conditions:
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If the PC has only just booted up, I can log in and quickly see the desktop. However, any clicks in the first 10 seconds or so are apparently ignored. It looks like a PC ready to use, but it isn't.
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If I have more than about 8 windows open (typically MS Outlook, MS Word (maybe 4 docs), MS Excel (1 or 2 docs), Jabber (1 or 2 chats)), then clicking on a
.doc file takes a good 10 seconds to load. In the meantime, there is no indication whatsoever that the system has acknowledged my click and is making any attempt to open the document (at least OOo has an activity bar showing that it is processing the document) - not even the disk-activity indicator light on the laptop, so it's not that the HDD is slow (not sure of the speed, but can't be worse than 5400rpm), it's just sitting there, thinking about it.
- Half the MS Office docs I view automatically show revision changes - I don't care, and there doesn't even seem to be a keyboard shortcut to kill it. I have to go to a menu or toolbar to view the fscking document itself.
- Having stripped an example document of its detail, mailed the stripped-down version to someone else, and received his updated version, I can't open that document without it constantly asking me if I want to merge his changes back into the original document
... even after I delete the original, it still asks me. No, I don't want to merge it. It's a new document. That was a fscking template. Leave me alone.
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This may be more indicative of corporate documents, but most docs I receive ask me to enable macros, update external links, etc - I'm not stupid enough to automatically enable such things, but even in docs where I know they are not necessary, I still get asked. That's another meaningless question (no option to view the macros before enabling them, for example) which gets in the way between myself and the document.
- Document views - this seems to be defined as part of the document itself, whether it's 100%, 75%, page-width, or 2-pages-per-screen, or even 4 pages per screen. Totally unintuitive. I'm sure there's a way to get the view you want, but it took me long enough to work out that "hover the mouse over the (alleged) pagebreak and click on "show whitespace" to view each page as a page.
So that's my "I've had 1 month with MS Office after 6 years with StarOffice" summary - most reviews seem to be the other way around. I'm sure I've missed out most of my favourite rants, but that's just a sample of the frustrations I've had so far. Bring back StarOffice - it's been working great for me for the past six years.Both parties are behaving immorally (and probably illegally). The simple fact of being an individual, not a commercial software vendor, makes no difference to either the moral or the legal argument.
Illegally copying music (or any other copyrighted work) and breaking the GPL are equally abhorrent. Sorry to break the /. line here, but I'm coming at this from a moral perspective, not a legal or "what works for me" perspective.
Think about it.
Fair enough, we all do that. MIME is a particular PITA. How about spelling Boundary correctly in your code though?
I've worked in a place where Category was spelled Catagory in the database, so that misspelling was propagated through the entire codebase and even into URLs; such typos normally have no relevance, but you never know when it will come to bite you...
Just my 2p
I've just had to start connecting to an Exchange server using MS Outlook (I'm used to Exim and Thunderbird). It's handy to receive appointments directly into my calendar by email, but is it really "by email" then? It's another use of the same desktop application. And it seems rather strange that I receive an email about an appointment, but when I click "Accept", it stops being an email, and becomes an appointment - so I can't forward the agenda to a colleague who didn't receive the email, being one example I came across today. I'm still new to Exchange and Outlook, but it strikes me that these functions should (in principle) be reasonably straight-forward to break down into multiple applications (from the client-side and/or the server-side) but it's an ugly mess of functionality. First impressions (since I last met Exchange in 1998): Ugh. Horrid. Search functionality compared to Thunderbird ... well, I can't find it! Certainly noting as straightforward as Thunderbird - just grope through search options (once I found them!) and even with the "Advanced" search options, I can't find anything like Thunderbird (let alone Evolution, if I could tolerate it, which I can't) power of searching and sorting emails.
So there you go - a new-user's guide to Microsoft.