It's only "ugly" if you are not used to XML. It's certainly not "bloated" at all.
"Verbose" perhaps... but verbosity is kind of the whole point of XML in the first place.
I hate MS as much as the next guy, but I'm thrilled with the fact that they are finally creeping towards some open document standards.
When you consider that their main profit strategy for the last 5-10 years has been "force pointless upgrade sales by screwing with the document format and breaking compatability with everybody, including our old customers," I think the fact that they are suddenly playing nice like this (even though it may open opportunities for other people to chop them off at the knees) shows that Balmer & Co. seriously believe that their future does not lie in merely maintaining the MS-Office monopoly. Maybe Cringely's right, and the boys from Redmond are betting the company on the X-Box evolving into a ubiquitous media console.
Then again, maybe they are so cock-sure that they have the best & brightest programmers in the world, that they think they will be able to open the format and still maintain their lead on quality alone. I find it hard to believe that they are that delusional, but you never know.
We would love to help you out, but we only carry around real money down here. Try the IMF... I hear they do a lot of banking for impoverished third-world countries.
I keed, I keed!!! I love the Canada! You've got the lakes, and... and the trees... and the beautiful lakes... and it really is a wonderful, wonderful place.... for me to poop on.
Fine and interesting, but I really fail to see why no 24 hours after a story about the new mouse, that generated more than 1400 comments (for a mouse people...), we need the next story about this very mouse.
I think you will find that 1200 of those comments are trolls and Apple zealots getting trolled.
In addition to a lot of people who love Apple, there are a lot of people who love to hate Apple. The mouse has always been one of the most visible things that's "different" about Macs and therefore a hot topic for religious flame-wars.
Personally, I'm perfectly happy mousing in OS X with one button or two. I use scroll buttons if they are there, but on my iBook I'm content to scroll with the keyboard (and love the fact that there's only one mouse button on the trackpad, so I can click by just stabbing blindly with my thumb in the general area of the button.)
I won't buy this mouse because of the lack of bluetooth, but I think it's pretty darn spiffy for anybody who doesn't mind the cord.
Yeah, but my main system is in my media room, by the projector. I operate it from the couch, currently using a little bluetooth mouse from Kensington (with a make-shift parabolic dish behind the bluetooth sensor to boost the range a little bit.)
The batteries last about two or three months, with heavy use. Of course, I'm pretty good about shutting the mouse off when I'm not using it, rather than letting it go into power-saver mode after five minutes. That probably helps.
So as much of a hassle as some people feel batteries are, a cord would be a much bigger hassle for me.
See, there you go. Some people think one-button mice are spiffy, others like all kinds of extra buttons and scrollers and stuff.
One thing we can agree on is that it's incredibly cool that OS X accomodates us both seamlessly. Try plugging a one-button mouse into a Windows or KDE system and see what kind of day you have.
But, if they believe that people want the simplicity of a one button mouse, wouldn't they ship this thing out of the box with only one button functioning? Those people that want the simplicity of a one button mouse surely won't be the ones changing the settings to disable the other buttons. After all, that sounds awfully hard to do!
If I'm a dad with young children, I might want to set up the mouse preferences differently depending on the user. Full-functions for me and the older kids, one-button for the toddlers and grandparents. It's actually a pretty fucking cool idea.
When Apple had a single-button mouse, the Apple zealots claimed that the Mac UI was superior, and didn't need to succumb to a second or third mouse button. Such things are unneeded complications!
When Apple has a multi-button mouse, suddenly they should be praised as champions of innovation. Which is it?
Personally, I think non-Unix users are really missing out on the highlight-to-copy, middle-button-as-paste functionality. But that's me.
Hmmm... some problems with your post. Allow me to edit for accuracy.
When Apple had a single-button mouse,
some Apple zealots claimed that the Mac UI was superior, and didn't need to succumb to a second or third mouse button. Such things are unneeded complications!
When Apple has a multi-button mouse, suddenly some other Apple zealots think they should be praised as champions of innovation. This is because not all users of a specific computer platform think exactly the same way. Some really liked the one-button mouse, but many didn't.
Personally, I think non-Unix users are really missing out on the absurd highlight-to-copy, middle-button-as-paste functionality. But that's just me and a handful of Linux zealots.
It takes special effort to contain information, by its very nature it wants to be free, just like a river wants to flow, a raindrop wants to fall, etc.
A very good analogy, but not in the way you meant.
A raindrop falls because gravity forces it towards the ground.
Likewise, information gets spread because people spread it.
It does not take "special effort" to contain information, only the lack of effort to spread it.
For example, you do not know my Driver's License number. Unless I tell you right now, you will die not knowing it.
Regardless of my silly signature says, information wants to nothing but stay put, just like everything else in the universe.
Now if you said "people want to free information", that would have been correct.
If you are in a place in your life where spending $200,000 to be taken up above the atmostphere for a little while seems like a good idea, you probably don't give a shit about $20,000.
Note to those who are mere millionaires instead of billionaires: It would be much cheaper and almost as good to get one of your rich asshole friends to take you along for a ride on their Gulfstream V jets sometimes. Those private gets fly high enough that the sky is dark blue in the daytime. Very cool. Plus, there's no need to wear a gay-ass looking space suit.
Look at that nice dive [yahoo.com] in HP's stocks when she was CEO from 1999-2005 and Chairman of the Board from 2000-2005. It's very hard to miss. You don't even need to look at the dates- just look at when it reached it's peak and then took a nosedive. And notice the recovering upward trend [yahoo.com] in HP's stocks since her departure [slashdot.org] in February of this year.
Not that she wasn't a completely horrible and clueless CEO (she was), but didn't pretty much every technology company not called Apple Computer go straight into the crapper beginning in 1999 and continuing until at least 2003?
We had this thing called a recession, maybe you read about it in the papers. It started in the technology sector, when a lot of speculative investments suddenly collapsed, and then continued as the single biggest tech company faced anti-trust litigation and dozens of companies (many of which were on the tech-heavy NASDAQ) were bitch-slapped for illegal accounting practices.
Then a war started, because there are people in the world who think there's nothing more fun than blowing up our finacial towers.
So, while it's easy to find fault with Fiorina's poor judgement and leadership, it's a little unfair to blame all of HP's stock-market woes on her.
Having sold many many many ipods, I noticed an interesting trend where most buyers, including Windows users, preferred to buy the Apple branded iPod over the HP one.
Probably because everybody knew that the HP iPod was identical in every way except the branding, so the only reason to buy the HP one over the Apple one was to announce to the world, "I like the iPod for music, but I'm such a raging anti-Mac zealot that I'm simply not comfortable owning something with the Apple brand on it."
Anybody buying the HP version because it happened to be what was in stock ran the risk of being mistaken for such a person.
By "reasonably affordable" I meant somewhere in the ballpark of what it's probably actually worth ($50 - $100).
Granted, to somebody with a $5000 TV set, 400 Euro-bucks might not seem like that big of a deal, but to somebody who has a $1200 projector or plasma screen, that's a pretty big chunk of change for a little converter box.
Isn't it really just a matter of time before some clever hacker builds a relatively affordable HDMI-Analog converter box?
A lot of TV tuners and other video devices (some media PC systems) are already HDMI-only, and those who bought TV's without HDMI are going to want to use some of those gadgets on their current sets.
Of course, some folks in the industry will try to stop it, claiming some kind of DMCA violation... but the fact that some consumers will require something like it just to legitimately use their TV sets tells me that it would be a hell of a court fight.
Terrorists are "breeding" all over the world, and have been for a long time. If we've got a big honey-pot in the middle of the dessert where they simply can't resist engaging us (as opposed to driving trucks into our embassies in Africa or flying planes into our skyscrapers in New York) then hooray for our side.
It was an address to a carrier crew whose mission was completed. The "Mission Accomplished" banner was to congratulate them for their success, not to declare the war over.
MoveOn.org dicks have been spinning it otherwise for a couple years now, and still can't quite let go of it in spite of being soundly debunked... but that doesn't change the facts.
Don't worry about us, Mister Ant. We Grasshoppers will use the tax code to take away that nest egg of yours and share it around when the time comes for us all to retire.
After all, it's not like a lifetime of hard work and frugal saving entitles you to be rich when your peers find themselves broke after a youth of high times and easy living.
It has been my experience that we adults don't have much to say to each other either.
If it weren't for blockbuster movies & sitcoms, spectator sports, meaningless hobbies, hopeless political arguements, old tasteless jokes, and maybe occasional bad weather, many people would just spend all day simply trying to avoid eye contact with each other.
When this Country was founded, you could move off in the woods, pick a place, and build your own house.
You still can. Homesteading still goes on from time to time, and the land will still be free for the taking as long as you agree to live on it.
The downside is, you have to live in a house out in the woods in the middle of North Dakota or Alaska or somewhere like that. Most people would rather pay $200k - $1M for a house near an urban center.
Slashdot Mirror
It's only "ugly" if you are not used to XML. It's certainly not "bloated" at all.
"Verbose" perhaps... but verbosity is kind of the whole point of XML in the first place.
I hate MS as much as the next guy, but I'm thrilled with the fact that they are finally creeping towards some open document standards.
When you consider that their main profit strategy for the last 5-10 years has been "force pointless upgrade sales by screwing with the document format and breaking compatability with everybody, including our old customers," I think the fact that they are suddenly playing nice like this (even though it may open opportunities for other people to chop them off at the knees) shows that Balmer & Co. seriously believe that their future does not lie in merely maintaining the MS-Office monopoly. Maybe Cringely's right, and the boys from Redmond are betting the company on the X-Box evolving into a ubiquitous media console.
Then again, maybe they are so cock-sure that they have the best & brightest programmers in the world, that they think they will be able to open the format and still maintain their lead on quality alone. I find it hard to believe that they are that delusional, but you never know.
We would love to help you out, but we only carry around real money down here. Try the IMF... I hear they do a lot of banking for impoverished third-world countries.
... for me to poop on.
I keed, I keed!!! I love the Canada! You've got the lakes, and... and the trees... and the beautiful lakes... and it really is a wonderful, wonderful place.
Fine and interesting, but I really fail to see why no 24 hours after a story about the new mouse, that generated more than 1400 comments (for a mouse people...), we need the next story about this very mouse.
I think you will find that 1200 of those comments are trolls and Apple zealots getting trolled.
In addition to a lot of people who love Apple, there are a lot of people who love to hate Apple. The mouse has always been one of the most visible things that's "different" about Macs and therefore a hot topic for religious flame-wars.
Personally, I'm perfectly happy mousing in OS X with one button or two. I use scroll buttons if they are there, but on my iBook I'm content to scroll with the keyboard (and love the fact that there's only one mouse button on the trackpad, so I can click by just stabbing blindly with my thumb in the general area of the button.)
I won't buy this mouse because of the lack of bluetooth, but I think it's pretty darn spiffy for anybody who doesn't mind the cord.
The only person I knew that baught[sic] one actually got it to masturbate in bed... I personally couldn't use one because I would lose it.
Oh, oh... I detect an emergency-room visit in somebody's future, Richard Gere style.
Yeah, but my main system is in my media room, by the projector. I operate it from the couch, currently using a little bluetooth mouse from Kensington (with a make-shift parabolic dish behind the bluetooth sensor to boost the range a little bit.)
The batteries last about two or three months, with heavy use. Of course, I'm pretty good about shutting the mouse off when I'm not using it, rather than letting it go into power-saver mode after five minutes. That probably helps.
So as much of a hassle as some people feel batteries are, a cord would be a much bigger hassle for me.
Personally, I'm going to pass until they come out with a bluetooth version of it. I've grown to detest mouse cables.
You make your son run XP without being able to right-click!?
That's just sick and cruel. Somebody call the CPA.
See, there you go. Some people think one-button mice are spiffy, others like all kinds of extra buttons and scrollers and stuff.
One thing we can agree on is that it's incredibly cool that OS X accomodates us both seamlessly. Try plugging a one-button mouse into a Windows or KDE system and see what kind of day you have.
How can you call it absurd if you've clearly never used it nor given it time to get used to it?
What makes you think that? I've used *nix windows managers for years.
Mac's drag-and-drop and cut-and-paste methods are vastly superior, unless you are too stuck in your ways to see it.
But, if they believe that people want the simplicity of a one button mouse, wouldn't they ship this thing out of the box with only one button functioning? Those people that want the simplicity of a one button mouse surely won't be the ones changing the settings to disable the other buttons. After all, that sounds awfully hard to do!
If I'm a dad with young children, I might want to set up the mouse preferences differently depending on the user. Full-functions for me and the older kids, one-button for the toddlers and grandparents. It's actually a pretty fucking cool idea.
When Apple has a multi-button mouse, suddenly they should be praised as champions of innovation. Which is it?
Personally, I think non-Unix users are really missing out on the highlight-to-copy, middle-button-as-paste functionality. But that's me.
Hmmm... some problems with your post. Allow me to edit for accuracy.
Much better.
But that information doesn't want to be used as fodder for extortion.
Won't somebody think of the information!?!?!?
It takes special effort to contain information, by its very nature it wants to be free, just like a river wants to flow, a raindrop wants to fall, etc.
A very good analogy, but not in the way you meant.
A raindrop falls because gravity forces it towards the ground.
Likewise, information gets spread because people spread it.
It does not take "special effort" to contain information, only the lack of effort to spread it.
For example, you do not know my Driver's License number. Unless I tell you right now, you will die not knowing it.
Regardless of my silly signature says, information wants to nothing but stay put, just like everything else in the universe.
Now if you said "people want to free information", that would have been correct.
all your old rehash joke are belong to us!
If you are in a place in your life where spending $200,000 to be taken up above the atmostphere for a little while seems like a good idea, you probably don't give a shit about $20,000.
Note to those who are mere millionaires instead of billionaires: It would be much cheaper and almost as good to get one of your rich asshole friends to take you along for a ride on their Gulfstream V jets sometimes. Those private gets fly high enough that the sky is dark blue in the daytime. Very cool. Plus, there's no need to wear a gay-ass looking space suit.
Look at that nice dive [yahoo.com] in HP's stocks when she was CEO from 1999-2005 and Chairman of the Board from 2000-2005. It's very hard to miss. You don't even need to look at the dates- just look at when it reached it's peak and then took a nosedive. And notice the recovering upward trend [yahoo.com] in HP's stocks since her departure [slashdot.org] in February of this year.
Not that she wasn't a completely horrible and clueless CEO (she was), but didn't pretty much every technology company not called Apple Computer go straight into the crapper beginning in 1999 and continuing until at least 2003?
We had this thing called a recession, maybe you read about it in the papers. It started in the technology sector, when a lot of speculative investments suddenly collapsed, and then continued as the single biggest tech company faced anti-trust litigation and dozens of companies (many of which were on the tech-heavy NASDAQ) were bitch-slapped for illegal accounting practices.
Then a war started, because there are people in the world who think there's nothing more fun than blowing up our finacial towers.
So, while it's easy to find fault with Fiorina's poor judgement and leadership, it's a little unfair to blame all of HP's stock-market woes on her.
Having sold many many many ipods, I noticed an interesting trend where most buyers, including Windows users, preferred to buy the Apple branded iPod over the HP one.
Probably because everybody knew that the HP iPod was identical in every way except the branding, so the only reason to buy the HP one over the Apple one was to announce to the world, "I like the iPod for music, but I'm such a raging anti-Mac zealot that I'm simply not comfortable owning something with the Apple brand on it."
Anybody buying the HP version because it happened to be what was in stock ran the risk of being mistaken for such a person.
It was the end of major combat. Notice that we have not been bombing anyplace, nor rolling entire tank troops from city to city.
By "reasonably affordable" I meant somewhere in the ballpark of what it's probably actually worth ($50 - $100).
Granted, to somebody with a $5000 TV set, 400 Euro-bucks might not seem like that big of a deal, but to somebody who has a $1200 projector or plasma screen, that's a pretty big chunk of change for a little converter box.
Isn't it really just a matter of time before some clever hacker builds a relatively affordable HDMI-Analog converter box?
A lot of TV tuners and other video devices (some media PC systems) are already HDMI-only, and those who bought TV's without HDMI are going to want to use some of those gadgets on their current sets.
Of course, some folks in the industry will try to stop it, claiming some kind of DMCA violation... but the fact that some consumers will require something like it just to legitimately use their TV sets tells me that it would be a hell of a court fight.
Now we have our own terrorist breeding ground
Technically, it's a terrorist killing ground.
Terrorists are "breeding" all over the world, and have been for a long time. If we've got a big honey-pot in the middle of the dessert where they simply can't resist engaging us (as opposed to driving trucks into our embassies in Africa or flying planes into our skyscrapers in New York) then hooray for our side.
That wasn't a "Mission Accomplished speach[sic]."
It was an address to a carrier crew whose mission was completed. The "Mission Accomplished" banner was to congratulate them for their success, not to declare the war over.
MoveOn.org dicks have been spinning it otherwise for a couple years now, and still can't quite let go of it in spite of being soundly debunked... but that doesn't change the facts.
Don't worry about us, Mister Ant. We Grasshoppers will use the tax code to take away that nest egg of yours and share it around when the time comes for us all to retire.
After all, it's not like a lifetime of hard work and frugal saving entitles you to be rich when your peers find themselves broke after a youth of high times and easy living.
It has been my experience that we adults don't have much to say to each other either.
If it weren't for blockbuster movies & sitcoms, spectator sports, meaningless hobbies, hopeless political arguements, old tasteless jokes, and maybe occasional bad weather, many people would just spend all day simply trying to avoid eye contact with each other.
When this Country was founded, you could move off in the woods, pick a place, and build your own house.
You still can. Homesteading still goes on from time to time, and the land will still be free for the taking as long as you agree to live on it.
The downside is, you have to live in a house out in the woods in the middle of North Dakota or Alaska or somewhere like that. Most people would rather pay $200k - $1M for a house near an urban center.