I once signed up for a University Extension class on Visual Basic. At the first session, the instructor kept telling us over and over again to make sure our homework projects worked before turning them in. I kept thinking "WTF is he harping on this?" Finally it emerged that he didn't have a lot of time to sit around reading our source code, and intended to grade our homework solely on the basis of whether the program did what it was supposed to do. Needless to say, I didn't come back for a second session.
This was one of several Extension classes I took that were run by teachers who were teaching just to earn a little extra money, and didn't feel compelled to put a lot of time into it. One guy was in such a hurry that he'd grade quizzes by subtracting 10 points from a possible 100 for each "wrong" answer, no matter how subjective the question or how many questions were actually on the test! Other people have told me that they've had good experience with Extension teachers who are serious and dedicated. I'm sure they're out there, but I haven't encountered any.
I agree that ink cartridges are too expensive and that gasoline is too cheap. But comparing the two is stupid. Printer ink is a complicated formulation, is used in very small quantities, and has to be packaged in a cartridge that is not only a container, but also a print head. Gasoline is just a commodity item, except for minor variations in additives.
You've got your facts right, but your inferences are out there. MS doesn't need for its format to become an ISO standard. As you point out, anything they do is a de facto standard. But for whatever reason, they do want this format to be an actual standard. If not, they've put a hell of a lot of effort into something they don't want.
And now that I think about it, they do need this ISO standard. A lot of big organizations are beginning to balk at being dependent on Microsoft-proprietary technology. It's a bad idea for them to be so thoroughly dependent on a single vendor. And, in the case of some governmental organizations, it's actually illegal. (Some municipal bureaucrats in the city where I live recently lost their jobs because they wrote a contract for new phones in such a way that only Cisco IP phones could possibly be considered.) If their product is "compliant with ISO 666-666" or whatever, they can claim that it isn't proprietary anymore.
I doubt if even a big ISP can afford to develop its own office suite. Very likely this is a rebranded version of software that they've licensed from somebody else. It probably won't be too long until every ISP has something similar.
Why is this news? Because it's an important move by a major ISP, a blow to Open Office, and a milestone on the road from local applications to web hosted applications.
Why should we be up in arms about this? Nobody said we should be. There are other reasons to care about events, believe it or not.
Dude, this black hole destroyed a whole galaxy. If that happened in our galaxy, having colonized a few extra planets would do nothing to ensure the survival of the species. Let's focus on the threats we can do something about. Which are mostly the threats we ourselves created!
One of the school officials was nice enough to contact us and let us know this is a hoax. If you are planning on calling the school please refrain from doing so, I'm sure they have had enough excitement for one day.
Well, now I know what to do with the phone numbers in Craigslist spam.
It's no different in the real world. If an IT director tells you shut down Cain&Able, you can get fired if you don't.
It is different in the real world. If an IT department wants to control what gets run, it locks down the system. It's true that there are still things you can do that might get you fired, but it's not like a school, where you have your teacher always looking over your shoulder.
This is a situation that was around long before there were computers: a stupid teacher issuing stupid orders and expecting a student (an adolescent!) to obey without question. You think that makes sense, because the stupid teacher is a teacher. Good luck with that!
I don't want a guy dressed as an elephant. I want an actual elephant. Also, I don't want modern features kludged into an ancient protocol. I was a protocol that supports these features directly.
Memory Alpha is a fan site. A useful resource, to be sure (every time I google some Trek Trivia I end up there), but it doesn't serve the purpose of startrek.com, which is to help sell the franchise. Problem is, the franchise is pretty much dead, which is why startrek.com is shutting down.
I can't resist the chance for some finger pointing. The most popular pointee is Rick Bermann, who ran the franchise during its worst shark-jumping days. But the sad fact is, all that went wrong with ST originates with the same guy who started it Gene Roddenbery. He probably invented the basic concept, but beyond that there's all kinds of stuff he managed to take credit for that really belonged to other people. (If you can find the pre-Trekkie book The Making of Star Trek, you'll find it an eye-opener.) Worst of all, he consistently screwed over his writers (this recent interview with David Gerrold is revealing). When Star Trek was really good, it was mainly due to the writing. Yet Roddenberry and Bermann both made it a policy to antagonize the people who did the actual writing.
If you wanted a Starbucks coffee, and it was one street down, and someone told you you had to go through the in-between building, climb up and down its twenty flights of stairs just to get to the next street for you coffee, and you knew you could just walk around the building on the sidewalk, what would you do? Now, if the building were only two stories high, and the block to walk around were 600 ft each side, it might be a different choice.
Well, what if somebody told you that if you didn't start doing that there'd eventually be no coffee for anybody?
That's a contorted metaphor, but so is yours. You're not going and buy an consumer good that somebody else grows, processes, and distributes. You're part of a network of people providing IP service not just to your own users, but to everybody they connect to. In order to make that service continue to work, we have to stop kludging around obsolete technology. Yeah, it's difficult. So what?
Let's drag Starbucks back into the story. Suppose you're a Starbucks manager, and you're told that you have to make sure there's no rat droppings in the beans. Now, there might be any number of reasons this is hard to do. But it doesn't matter how difficult it is, you have to do it.
But screw Starbucks. Their beans are not particularly high quality, and they roast them too long. Even Safeway's house brand French Roast is better! Their coffee is only good for adding to sugared beverages, which I guess is most of their business. I only go there when I desperately need a caffeine fix and there's nothing else around. A classic demonstration of how good marketing and branding can move a worthless product.
Even though I'm a Solaris partisan, I think you're being a little unfair to Linux. The Linux the NYSE uses isn't something they downloaded from a torrent and hacked up to do what they wanted. It's a serious OS that they got from a major Linux vendor.
As for virtualization: with on without its latency issues, it's hard the see its benefit for a huge transaction application like the NYSE has. Virtualization is useful mainly for compartmentalization, so your SQL server crash doesn't bring down your email server.
We don't want to be closely aligned with proprietary Unix. No offense to HP-UX, but we feel the same way about [IBM's] AIX, and we feel the same way to some extent about Solaris.
Is this guy aware that Solaris is now open source? HP, IBM, and Dell all sell systems running it.
Well, if "Democrat" is a brand, then its fatal moment came a long time ago, when Ronald Reagan ridiculed their core ideologies into political oblivion. And thus founded the politics of Nya Nya Na Nya Nya, probably his biggest contribution to posterity.
But if the Democratic brand is defunct, how is it that the DP has been in and out of power since then? Because not everything is about brands. When people go to the polls they vote for a person, not a party. Thus the Demos held on to the House of Representative during the 80s, even as a resoundingly popular Republican occupied the White House. Then during the 90s the Demos recaptured the White House and lost Congress.
2006 is the exception that proves the rule. People who voted party line didn't vote for the Democrats, they voted against the Republicans. Not because they didn't believe in the politics of the GOP anymore, but because they felt the need to send a nasty message.
As long as we're discussing Soviet Irony, how about the Permanent Republican Majority attempt to turn the U.S. into a single-party system? This from the same folks who claim credit for taking down the USSR in the first place!
Heck, the spec has a SD Flash card slot doesn't it? That's plenty of space for me to load some e-books be it pdf, txt, or rtf and use it as a cheap e-book reader. It seems that everyone that sells ebook readers wants to sell them around $400-500. If I'm going to spend that much, I'm getting real laptop. Not something that can only read formats from one vendor and maybe not even the standard file formats.
You make a good point, but it's worth mentioning why the new ebook readers are so expensive: they use the new electronic paper technology. Epaper has a big advantage over LCD displays: it only draws power when the display changes. So where laptops can only be used for a few hours without recharging, ebook devices can go without charging for weeks or even months. The Sony reader doesn't even have an off switch, because it doesn't use the battery when its just sitting there displaying a page. The Amazon Kindle does have some features that drain power when it's turned on, but it still has a very long battery life.
The OLPC XO is designed to minimize power consumption, but it still doesn't have a really good power solution. It works with an ordinary power supply, but the solutions designed for its off-grid target customers are less than ideal. If its main goal were to be an ebook reader, this would be a major design flaw. But of course it's meant to be a lot more than that.
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I once signed up for a University Extension class on Visual Basic. At the first session, the instructor kept telling us over and over again to make sure our homework projects worked before turning them in. I kept thinking "WTF is he harping on this?" Finally it emerged that he didn't have a lot of time to sit around reading our source code, and intended to grade our homework solely on the basis of whether the program did what it was supposed to do. Needless to say, I didn't come back for a second session.
This was one of several Extension classes I took that were run by teachers who were teaching just to earn a little extra money, and didn't feel compelled to put a lot of time into it. One guy was in such a hurry that he'd grade quizzes by subtracting 10 points from a possible 100 for each "wrong" answer, no matter how subjective the question or how many questions were actually on the test! Other people have told me that they've had good experience with Extension teachers who are serious and dedicated. I'm sure they're out there, but I haven't encountered any.
Harlan Ellison perhaps.
I agree that ink cartridges are too expensive and that gasoline is too cheap. But comparing the two is stupid. Printer ink is a complicated formulation, is used in very small quantities, and has to be packaged in a cartridge that is not only a container, but also a print head. Gasoline is just a commodity item, except for minor variations in additives.
Next, you'll be complaining that ordinary aspirin costs $242 a pound!
Mandatory reading on this subject: How to Lie with Statistics. A must read: the author an illustrator have a combined age of 85 years!
If that's the main issue, than this is a local story.
You've got your facts right, but your inferences are out there. MS doesn't need for its format to become an ISO standard. As you point out, anything they do is a de facto standard. But for whatever reason, they do want this format to be an actual standard. If not, they've put a hell of a lot of effort into something they don't want.
And now that I think about it, they do need this ISO standard. A lot of big organizations are beginning to balk at being dependent on Microsoft-proprietary technology. It's a bad idea for them to be so thoroughly dependent on a single vendor. And, in the case of some governmental organizations, it's actually illegal. (Some municipal bureaucrats in the city where I live recently lost their jobs because they wrote a contract for new phones in such a way that only Cisco IP phones could possibly be considered.) If their product is "compliant with ISO 666-666" or whatever, they can claim that it isn't proprietary anymore.
I doubt if even a big ISP can afford to develop its own office suite. Very likely this is a rebranded version of software that they've licensed from somebody else. It probably won't be too long until every ISP has something similar.
Why is this news? Because it's an important move by a major ISP, a blow to Open Office, and a milestone on the road from local applications to web hosted applications.
Why should we be up in arms about this? Nobody said we should be. There are other reasons to care about events, believe it or not.
Yes it does! "Troll" means "STFU!" I thought everybody knew that!
The truth is, I'm proud to be modded down. If you're not pissing people off, you're not saying anything that really matters.
Dude, this black hole destroyed a whole galaxy. If that happened in our galaxy, having colonized a few extra planets would do nothing to ensure the survival of the species. Let's focus on the threats we can do something about. Which are mostly the threats we ourselves created!
This is a situation that was around long before there were computers: a stupid teacher issuing stupid orders and expecting a student (an adolescent!) to obey without question. You think that makes sense, because the stupid teacher is a teacher. Good luck with that!
I don't want a guy dressed as an elephant. I want an actual elephant. Also, I don't want modern features kludged into an ancient protocol. I was a protocol that supports these features directly.
Really? How do you do jumbograms on IPv4?
There's a lot more to IPv6 than a bigger address space.
Memory Alpha is a fan site. A useful resource, to be sure (every time I google some Trek Trivia I end up there), but it doesn't serve the purpose of startrek.com, which is to help sell the franchise. Problem is, the franchise is pretty much dead, which is why startrek.com is shutting down.
I can't resist the chance for some finger pointing. The most popular pointee is Rick Bermann, who ran the franchise during its worst shark-jumping days. But the sad fact is, all that went wrong with ST originates with the same guy who started it Gene Roddenbery. He probably invented the basic concept, but beyond that there's all kinds of stuff he managed to take credit for that really belonged to other people. (If you can find the pre-Trekkie book The Making of Star Trek, you'll find it an eye-opener.) Worst of all, he consistently screwed over his writers (this recent interview with David Gerrold is revealing). When Star Trek was really good, it was mainly due to the writing. Yet Roddenberry and Bermann both made it a policy to antagonize the people who did the actual writing.
Good buy, good riddance.
That's a contorted metaphor, but so is yours. You're not going and buy an consumer good that somebody else grows, processes, and distributes. You're part of a network of people providing IP service not just to your own users, but to everybody they connect to. In order to make that service continue to work, we have to stop kludging around obsolete technology. Yeah, it's difficult. So what?
Let's drag Starbucks back into the story. Suppose you're a Starbucks manager, and you're told that you have to make sure there's no rat droppings in the beans. Now, there might be any number of reasons this is hard to do. But it doesn't matter how difficult it is, you have to do it.
But screw Starbucks. Their beans are not particularly high quality, and they roast them too long. Even Safeway's house brand French Roast is better! Their coffee is only good for adding to sugared beverages, which I guess is most of their business. I only go there when I desperately need a caffeine fix and there's nothing else around. A classic demonstration of how good marketing and branding can move a worthless product.
Even though I'm a Solaris partisan, I think you're being a little unfair to Linux. The Linux the NYSE uses isn't something they downloaded from a torrent and hacked up to do what they wanted. It's a serious OS that they got from a major Linux vendor.
As for virtualization: with on without its latency issues, it's hard the see its benefit for a huge transaction application like the NYSE has. Virtualization is useful mainly for compartmentalization, so your SQL server crash doesn't bring down your email server.
Well, if "Democrat" is a brand, then its fatal moment came a long time ago, when Ronald Reagan ridiculed their core ideologies into political oblivion. And thus founded the politics of Nya Nya Na Nya Nya, probably his biggest contribution to posterity.
But if the Democratic brand is defunct, how is it that the DP has been in and out of power since then? Because not everything is about brands. When people go to the polls they vote for a person, not a party. Thus the Demos held on to the House of Representative during the 80s, even as a resoundingly popular Republican occupied the White House. Then during the 90s the Demos recaptured the White House and lost Congress.
2006 is the exception that proves the rule. People who voted party line didn't vote for the Democrats, they voted against the Republicans. Not because they didn't believe in the politics of the GOP anymore, but because they felt the need to send a nasty message.
As long as we're discussing Soviet Irony, how about the Permanent Republican Majority attempt to turn the U.S. into a single-party system? This from the same folks who claim credit for taking down the USSR in the first place!
I'm in your base, killing your dudes.
Which makes them kind of impractical for ground-to-ground travel. Ground-to-space is a rather more interesting possibility.
The OLPC XO is designed to minimize power consumption, but it still doesn't have a really good power solution. It works with an ordinary power supply, but the solutions designed for its off-grid target customers are less than ideal. If its main goal were to be an ebook reader, this would be a major design flaw. But of course it's meant to be a lot more than that.