Exactly. Microsoft have won this hands down. Notice how the mainstream press are reporting Microsoft's OOXML ISO approval, without mentioning the dirty tricks (illegal or not) that they used to get it "approved". So for Government programs that state that documents MUST be based on an open standard, Microsoft have won, and for anyone who mentions ODF is also an ISO standard, they can say "Who cares? ISO is a disorganized and easily corrupted organization, nothing they rubber stamp means anything!".
It's not at all surprising that Microsoft went after this whole hog, handcuffing customers to MS Office is the source of their income and power. All else (windows monopoly, etc) follows.
Standard slashdot response - no one follows the link, which shows that it's a large open house event with many activities. Anyhoo, the Atlas detector looked very cool in a magazine I read recently (National Geographic?).
It would definitely ground any storm coming along, with a nice big flash! Their copper tether was nowhere near as long as a satellite tether would be, and theirs wasn't shorting out a thunderhead like a satellite tether would,
Now, IF you could somehow manage the danger of a sudden lightning strike, I think you're right that there would be large voltages across the length of the tether, and you should be able to harvest it for a power source. The act of harvesting the electrical charges might even be a part of the solution..
Not quite sure about your question - do you mean we should tax everyone, and then give everyone the tax dollars to make everyone richer? It's interestingly close to the design of a perpetual motion machine, and probably violates some Law of financial thermodynamics. Taxes above some limit, are known to have a net braking effect on the economy, and therefore tend towards making everyone poorer. Yes we all collectively agree to build roads, hospitals, infrastructure, health care etc, and that's an acceptable drain on the pocket book. A welfare system for Music Industry execs is not my idea of a good thing to spend tax dollars on.
(Note how the RIAA are not distributing their hundreds of millions in lawsuit winnings with the musicians they claim to be protecting).
Even limiting the debate to the scope of only the music industry, should we pay all musicians equally from this new source of revenue? Should the guy who is totally tone deaf who does covers of Yoko Ono be paid as much as a world class Jazz musician? Since the government (or some industry group - by proxy) will be in charge of giving out the cash, how do they decide who gets what?
I prefer a free market solution - if someone thinks your music/art/dog poop sculptures are of value, let them chose with their wallets.
I like the dream of Utopia. Being financially illiterate won't get us there.
Aircraft are struck by lightning as well, and survive too.
The entire craft (due to the benefits of being a Faraday Cage) rises up to high voltage almost all at once, meaning there is no serious voltage difference across the craft, therefore no dangerous currents, therefore no power dissipated into the craft.
A tether holding a satellite in place and attached to the Ground (KEY WORD) will have All of the voltage of a lightning strike across it, so the hundreds of thousands of amps from a lightning strike will try to flow along the tether, and cause it to vaporize.
It would absorb far more energy than the average tree that gets hit by lightning, and which usually explode.
Don't forget the people who would like to be paid to sit and drink beer too, don't they also deserve free money?
The whole concept seems to be that a given minority (Music Industry Execs - this is NOT musicians working on this) seem to think they are "owed" something, and they want the governments to extract it from everyone.
While it's a nice utopian dream to have everyone independently wealthy so they can do whatever they like, it's not reality. By then going to the government to force people to pay for their own dream, it crosses the line to unfairness and an abuse of government power.
What about all the independent musicians? Do you think they will get a share in this tax?
Remember, this isn't collecting royalties, this is the traditional and dying music industry looking for free money.
Why not tax electricity for the RIAA? After all, we all know music pirates have to use electricity to make illegal copies, therefore all users of electricity must be music pirates! (This is the kind of logic we're talking about here)..
This blanket tax thing is an incredibly bad idea.
Ask Nine Inch Nails and Radiohead how they feel about such a tax, after showing they can make far more money without the "help" of a corrupt and bloated music industry.
Even MS Dos was a poorly done clone of CP/M. MS Dos had this annoying hole in the middle of the memory which meant that you couldn't even use all of that very expensive 640K of ram you paid for. CP/M did not.
Having started on Sun Unix in 1984 (mice, windowing systems, network printing, email, Usenet - which all the companies were handed from Xerox on a silver platter to the dismay of the Palo Alto research center), then ending up being dragged thru several years of extremely buggy MS operating systems, while watching Microsoft cheat/steal and out market all the rest, I have never liked their products or their company.
It's like what happens if you have a decent set of stereo speakers, then you hear someone else's far better speakers. If you have never used anything better than Microsoft products, then you're blissfully ignorant of how bad they always were.
If you use an open standardized file format, you are not forced to spend money on new licenses, deployment costs, and training, like you are forced to by the vendors of closed format software. Spending time and money because the vendor forces you to is lost productivity.
One company I was at managed to avoid moving from Office 95 to for a long time (it was good enough, thanks) until they could no longer buy more seats for new employees as the company expanded.
Once that happens, then everyone has to upgrade to the next version, like it or not, because they make sure the file formats are different enough that you have to upgrade.
It's also a benefit of using an open source tool, never mind the file format argument, no one can take it away from you, and you can always have as many copies of your deployed version as you need, forever.
If you're happy with your current system, then you are right, there are no compelling reasons for you to switch.
For the rest of us, linux users, mac or windows users who don't want to pay for MS Office, and for anyone who prefers their documents be stored in a truly open format that won't forcibly be obsoleted by the vendor in 12 months when they need another stock price bump, we are glad that OO continues to improve and remain a viable set of office tools.
Your basic complaint is you want to identify executable files.
".exe" is the Microsoft 8.3 way.
An executable flag is the Unix/Linux way(and now Mac way since it's BSD under the hood). This has been part of Unix since at least the early 1980's.
Neither method has any real security advantage.
Shell scripts on the unix derivatives means that all the scripting languages can be made executable, no matter what the extension (or lack thereof). This is a definite advantage. I can make.perl files,.sh files,.sh files, etc etc etc and they are all executable.
".exe" implies a very specific intel binary executable for Microsoft OS's, and it should stay that way.
My introduction to SF was sitting in the back seat watching 2001 at the drive in when I was in grade 3 (I was supposed to be asleep). Even though Kubrick made it almost incomprehensible, (you have to read the book!) that led to a lifelong love of science fiction and a career in electronics engineering.
It may well be that the Toshiba HD players have the best upscalers in them, but all that implies is that the upscalers in the HD displays are crap (which would not be surprising, given that the display manufacturers want you to buy HD everything, so why make an effort at having your old DVDs look good on the display?).
So, if a DVD HD player makes a good DVD upscaler, and you can buy it dirt cheap, why the heck not!
The blueray player price rise someone mentioned here could really shoot Sony in the foot. Hi def downloads over bittorrent are already possible now.
Agreed, this is a classic feedback loop control problem, nothing really new at all, except that an electronic control system could easily iron out the resonances in this case.
In the human case the basic problem is with reaction time, a little worse than a tenth of a second.
Say a driver slows down for 5 seconds then returns to normal speed. The one right behind him has to slow down, but takes a tenth of a second to respond. The one behind him also has to slow down, now two tenths of a second later than the originator, and so on, by the time you get one hundred cars back the slowdown is 10 seconds behind the original event. The slowdown event in this case travels backwards like a wave at a rate of a tenth of a second per car "space", which is the car length plus the gap that the driver leaves in front of his car for safety.
If the slowdown wave travels backwards at the same speed that the cars are driving, you get one of those annoying events where everyone has to slow down at the same point on the highway (because the car in front had to slow down and so on), but there seems to be no reason for the holdup.
Being humans, the model is a poor approximation, some drivers might see the brake lights of a few cars ahead and react sooner, others are busy talking on cellphones and react later etc..
A reasonably well designed computerized driving system could easily remove the resonances, reacting far faster than humans, it would not be too difficult to design one that reacted in less than a millisecond or better.
I'm surprised the researchers seem to be discovering this now? Anyone bored and stuck in this kind of stop and go traffic on a freeway (and a little bit observant..) would have noticed this long ago.
The idea of using a ramdisk (and then storing commonly used binaries, including loadable libraries) was around back in the 1980's on Sun Solaris, it's an old, but good idea.
The first thing that went in though was usually/tmp..
Doctor Strangelove's quote covers the situation: "What is the point in having the ultimate weapon if you don't tell the enemy you have it??"
IE you mess with ours, we'll mess with yours.
Now both sides know that either side can take out all the world's satellites easily, "balance" is restored.
Not that I'm saying I agree with this "cold war" thinking, but it's my guess that's what the two governments are up to. Before this China might have assumed that the US were unable to easily do this, now they have the facts.
So just in case anyone was unclear - in the case of a superpower war, all the satellites will be gone almost immediately, in fact that would be the first sign of some really bad stuff to come.
Trouble is of course, if someone's satellite goes offline for unknown reasons, the owners could easily jump to the wrong conclusion.
It's a big game of chess where the rest of us are the pawns.
I haven't bought blank CD's for a while (why bother, they're a terrible backup medium, and I have two flash based music players), but last time I bought some at london drugs, they still itemized the blank cd fine separately on my receipt.
These propaganda releases from the RIAA and other IP terrorists are designed to frighten the Canadian politicians into their extremist point of view, and unfortunately it works - the average Canadian politician seems to be entirely clueless about.. well just about everything really..
When the "Industry Minister Jim Prentice" was faced with many protesters in his Calgary office (can't find the reference, sorry!) he apparently was surprised that anyone was paying any attention at all to the copyright reform bill he was about to launch.
The politicians seem to think that the issue is all about music pirates whining that they won't be able to steal music. What bothers me most about us cloning the US DMCA is the instances where the DMCA is used to silence free speech on the internet, nothing at all to do with actual copyright violations.
Thats it, someone copyright the US DMCA act, then we can't copy it in Canada!
Since there's an awful lot of charged particles, micrometeorites, and high energy photons bathing the astronauts while on a space walk, perhaps the smell is coming from all the ionized molecules on their suits and gear.
Also, the space station is not entirely out of the atmosphere, is it? Isn't the top layer a lot of ionized gas as well - due to the same radiation sources?
It would be interesting to compare the molecules per cubic meter in the ISS airlock with the number of molecules per cubic meter a human nose can detect..
I hope he does continue to research this curiosity!
In general I agree with the sentiment that one should hire a pro for a given task at hand.
What I find interesting is how many people are determined to box people into hard categories: "If you're technical, there's NO WAY you could have any artistic talent!"
It's not only an incorrect world view, it's also not logical. Of course, if someone were artistic but nontechnical, they wouldn't understand this simple logic..
The original poster didn't ask how he could paint like Picasso in 6 easy lessons, he just was looking for some overall design guides. It may very well be that he has zero visual design talent (in which case he wouldn't even realize it) but without seeing his work it is illogical to assume so.
Don't assume that because the hot extension cord was at thermal equilibrium that it was also stable. There is an inherent thermal runaway possible that could wait for just the right combination of a rise in ambient air temperature, and a mild "up" fluctuation in the line voltage that puts the cord into a flash point at any time. (Higher temp means more resistance, means more heat dissipation means even higher temp - loop till on fire).
I once was working on a prototype electronic circuit board that had a tantalum capacitor in backwards. Nothing happened for a few months, then it finally blew like a bit of fireworks a few inches from my face.
It ought to be against the law or charter of rights to just charge a levy on blank CD's to compensate for piracy, and I hope to hell they don't do it for ISP's.
Yes musicians should be paid for their work. That doesn't mean we automatically assign blank fees to 100% of the population.
Should we add a gas tax for musicians too? Pirates had to drive to the store to buy blank CD Roms, seems fair doesn't it?
Slashdot Mirror
Exactly. Microsoft have won this hands down.
Notice how the mainstream press are reporting Microsoft's OOXML ISO approval, without mentioning the dirty tricks (illegal or not) that they used to get it "approved".
So for Government programs that state that documents MUST be based on an open standard, Microsoft have won, and for anyone who mentions ODF is also an ISO standard, they can say "Who cares? ISO is a disorganized and easily corrupted organization, nothing they rubber stamp means anything!".
It's not at all surprising that Microsoft went after this whole hog, handcuffing customers to MS Office is the source of their income and power. All else (windows monopoly, etc) follows.
Standard slashdot response - no one follows the link,
which shows that it's a large open house event with many activities.
Anyhoo, the Atlas detector looked very cool in a magazine I read recently (National Geographic?).
Personally I'd also try to see one of the pulse power supplies that drives the LHC injector kicker magnets, because my father's team designed them.
http://www.triumf.ca/publications/pub/arch05/pp-05-19.pdf
Yes you can tell I'm proud of him!
It would definitely ground any storm coming along, with a nice big flash!
Their copper tether was nowhere near as long as a satellite tether would be, and theirs wasn't shorting out a thunderhead like a satellite tether would,
Now, IF you could somehow manage the danger of a sudden lightning strike, I think you're right that there would be large voltages across the length of the tether, and you should be able to harvest it for a power source. The act of harvesting the electrical charges might even be a part of the solution..
Not quite sure about your question - do you mean we should tax everyone, and then give everyone the tax dollars to make everyone richer?
It's interestingly close to the design of a perpetual motion machine, and probably violates some Law of financial thermodynamics.
Taxes above some limit, are known to have a net braking effect on the economy, and therefore tend towards making everyone poorer.
Yes we all collectively agree to build roads, hospitals, infrastructure, health care etc, and that's an acceptable drain on the pocket book.
A welfare system for Music Industry execs is not my idea of a good thing to spend tax dollars on.
(Note how the RIAA are not distributing their hundreds of millions in lawsuit winnings with the musicians they claim to be protecting).
Even limiting the debate to the scope of only the music industry,
should we pay all musicians equally from this new source of revenue?
Should the guy who is totally tone deaf who does covers of Yoko Ono be paid as much as a world class Jazz musician?
Since the government (or some industry group - by proxy) will be in charge of giving out the cash,
how do they decide who gets what?
I prefer a free market solution - if someone thinks your music/art/dog poop sculptures are of value, let them chose with their wallets.
I like the dream of Utopia. Being financially illiterate won't get us there.
That's actually not the same problem at all.
Aircraft are struck by lightning as well, and survive too.
The entire craft (due to the benefits of being a Faraday Cage) rises up to high voltage almost all at once,
meaning there is no serious voltage difference across the craft, therefore no dangerous currents, therefore no power dissipated into the craft.
A tether holding a satellite in place and attached to the Ground (KEY WORD) will have All of the voltage of a lightning strike across it, so the hundreds of thousands of amps from a lightning strike will try to flow along the tether, and cause it to vaporize.
It would absorb far more energy than the average tree that gets hit by lightning, and which usually explode.
And able to withstand direct lightning hits!
Exactly!
Don't forget the people who would like to be paid to sit and drink beer too, don't they also deserve free money?
The whole concept seems to be that a given minority (Music Industry Execs - this is NOT musicians working on this) seem to think they are "owed" something, and they want the governments to extract it from everyone.
While it's a nice utopian dream to have everyone independently wealthy so they can do whatever they like,
it's not reality. By then going to the government to force people to pay for their own dream, it crosses the line to unfairness and an abuse of government power.
What about all the independent musicians? Do you think they will get a share in this tax?
Remember, this isn't collecting royalties, this is the traditional and dying music industry looking for free money.
Why not tax electricity for the RIAA? After all, we all know music pirates have to use electricity to make illegal copies,
therefore all users of electricity must be music pirates! (This is the kind of logic we're talking about here)..
This blanket tax thing is an incredibly bad idea.
Ask Nine Inch Nails and Radiohead how they feel about such a tax, after showing they can make far more money without the "help" of a corrupt and bloated music industry.
Seconded.
Even MS Dos was a poorly done clone of CP/M. MS Dos had this annoying hole in the middle of the memory which meant that you couldn't even use all of that very expensive 640K of ram you paid for. CP/M did not.
Having started on Sun Unix in 1984 (mice, windowing systems, network printing, email, Usenet - which all the companies were handed from Xerox on a silver platter to the dismay of the Palo Alto research center), then ending up being dragged thru several years of extremely buggy MS operating systems, while watching Microsoft cheat/steal and out market all the rest, I have never liked their products or their company.
It's like what happens if you have a decent set of stereo speakers, then you hear someone else's far better speakers. If you have never used anything better than Microsoft products, then you're blissfully ignorant of how bad they always were.
Ah, I stand corrected!
.exe extension for the other reasons I mentioned, even though I had my history wrong :)
I still wouldn't like to see the unix family adopt the
Ok, to spell it out,
If you use an open standardized file format, you are not forced to spend money on new licenses, deployment costs, and training,
like you are forced to by the vendors of closed format software. Spending time and money because the vendor forces you to is lost productivity.
One company I was at managed to avoid moving from Office 95 to for a long time (it was good enough, thanks) until they could no longer buy more seats for new employees as the company expanded.
Once that happens, then everyone has to upgrade to the next version, like it or not, because they make sure the file formats are different enough that you have to upgrade.
It's also a benefit of using an open source tool, never mind the file format argument, no one can take it away from you, and you can always have as many copies of your
deployed version as you need, forever.
If you're happy with your current system, then you are right, there are no compelling reasons for you to switch.
For the rest of us, linux users, mac or windows users who don't want to pay for MS Office, and for anyone who prefers their documents be stored in a truly open format that won't forcibly be obsoleted by the vendor in 12 months when they need another stock price bump,
we are glad that OO continues to improve and remain a viable set of office tools.
Your basic complaint is you want to identify executable files.
.perl files, .sh files, .sh files, etc etc etc and they are all executable.
".exe" is the Microsoft 8.3 way.
An executable flag is the Unix/Linux way(and now Mac way since it's BSD under the hood).
This has been part of Unix since at least the early 1980's.
Neither method has any real security advantage.
Shell scripts on the unix derivatives means that all the scripting languages can be made executable,
no matter what the extension (or lack thereof). This is a definite advantage.
I can make
".exe" implies a very specific intel binary executable for Microsoft OS's, and it should stay that way.
My introduction to SF was sitting in the back seat watching 2001 at the drive in when I was in grade 3 (I was supposed to be asleep).
Even though Kubrick made it almost incomprehensible, (you have to read the book!) that led to a lifelong love of science fiction and a career in electronics engineering.
Good bye, and thanks for all the great stories!
Gord Wait
Exactly!
It may well be that the Toshiba HD players have the best upscalers in them, but all that implies is that the upscalers in the HD displays are crap (which would not be surprising, given that the display manufacturers want you to buy HD everything, so why make an effort at having your old DVDs look good on the display?).
So, if a DVD HD player makes a good DVD upscaler, and you can buy it dirt cheap, why the heck not!
The blueray player price rise someone mentioned here could really shoot Sony in the foot. Hi def downloads over bittorrent are already possible now.
Agreed, this is a classic feedback loop control problem, nothing really new at all, except that an electronic control system could easily iron out the resonances in this case.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Control_theory
In the human case the basic problem is with reaction time, a little worse than a tenth of a second.
Say a driver slows down for 5 seconds then returns to normal speed. The one right behind him has to slow down, but takes a tenth of a second to respond. The one behind him also has to slow down, now two tenths of a second later than the originator, and so on, by the time you get one hundred cars back the slowdown is 10 seconds behind the original event. The slowdown event in this case travels backwards like a wave at a rate of a tenth of a second per car "space", which is the car length plus the gap that the driver leaves in front of his car for safety.
If the slowdown wave travels backwards at the same speed that the cars are driving, you get one of those annoying events where everyone has to slow down at the same point on the highway (because the car in front had to slow down and so on), but there seems to be no reason for the holdup.
Being humans, the model is a poor approximation, some drivers might see the brake lights of a few cars ahead and react sooner, others are busy talking on cellphones and react later etc..
A reasonably well designed computerized driving system could easily remove the resonances, reacting far faster than humans, it would not be too difficult to design one that reacted in less than a millisecond or better.
I'm surprised the researchers seem to be discovering this now? Anyone bored and stuck in this kind of stop and go traffic on a freeway (and a little bit observant..) would have noticed this long ago.
The idea of using a ramdisk (and then storing commonly used binaries, including loadable libraries) was around back in the 1980's on Sun Solaris,
/tmp..
it's an old, but good idea.
The first thing that went in though was usually
Doctor Strangelove's quote covers the situation:
"What is the point in having the ultimate weapon if you don't tell the enemy you have it??"
IE you mess with ours, we'll mess with yours.
Now both sides know that either side can take out all the world's satellites easily, "balance" is restored.
Not that I'm saying I agree with this "cold war" thinking, but it's my guess that's what the two governments are up to.
Before this China might have assumed that the US were unable to easily do this, now they have the facts.
So just in case anyone was unclear - in the case of a superpower war, all the satellites will be gone almost immediately,
in fact that would be the first sign of some really bad stuff to come.
Trouble is of course, if someone's satellite goes offline for unknown reasons, the owners could easily jump to the wrong conclusion.
It's a big game of chess where the rest of us are the pawns.
Agreed! Current Microsoft revenue rate is about 7.5 million dollars per hour, so 100 million is easy to shake loose for the entertainment budget.
I haven't bought blank CD's for a while (why bother, they're a terrible backup medium, and I have two flash based music players),
but last time I bought some at london drugs, they still itemized the blank cd fine separately on my receipt.
Checking: yep, they still do it:
http://www.londondrugs.com/Cultures/en-US/Content/Library/Computers/cd_levy.htm
These propaganda releases from the RIAA and other IP terrorists are designed to frighten the Canadian politicians into their extremist point of view,
and unfortunately it works - the average Canadian politician seems to be entirely clueless about.. well just about everything really..
When the "Industry Minister Jim Prentice" was faced with many protesters in his Calgary office (can't find the reference, sorry!) he apparently was surprised that anyone was paying any attention at all to the copyright reform bill he was about to launch.
The politicians seem to think that the issue is all about music pirates whining that they won't be able to steal music.
What bothers me most about us cloning the US DMCA is the instances where the DMCA is used to silence free speech on the internet, nothing at all to do with actual copyright violations.
Thats it, someone copyright the US DMCA act, then we can't copy it in Canada!
Since there's an awful lot of charged particles, micrometeorites, and high energy photons bathing the astronauts while on a space walk,
perhaps the smell is coming from all the ionized molecules on their suits and gear.
Also, the space station is not entirely out of the atmosphere, is it? Isn't the top layer a lot of ionized gas as well - due to the same radiation sources?
It would be interesting to compare the molecules per cubic meter in the ISS airlock with the number of molecules per cubic meter a human nose can detect..
I hope he does continue to research this curiosity!
A lot of the technologies you see on the market today were born at MSR.
Ok I'll bite, name a few?Fascinating,
In general I agree with the sentiment that one should hire a pro for a given task at hand.
What I find interesting is how many people are determined to box people into hard categories: "If you're technical, there's NO WAY you could have any artistic talent!"
It's not only an incorrect world view, it's also not logical. Of course, if someone were artistic but nontechnical, they wouldn't understand this simple logic..
The original poster didn't ask how he could paint like Picasso in 6 easy lessons, he just was looking for some overall design guides.
It may very well be that he has zero visual design talent (in which case he wouldn't even realize it) but without seeing his work it is illogical to assume so.
Don't assume that because the hot extension cord was at thermal equilibrium that it was also stable.
There is an inherent thermal runaway possible that could wait for just the right combination of a rise in ambient air temperature,
and a mild "up" fluctuation in the line voltage that puts the cord into a flash point at any time.
(Higher temp means more resistance, means more heat dissipation means even higher temp - loop till on fire).
I once was working on a prototype electronic circuit board that had a tantalum capacitor in backwards.
Nothing happened for a few months, then it finally blew like a bit of fireworks a few inches from my face.
Guilty until proven innocent.
It ought to be against the law or charter of rights to just charge a levy on blank CD's to compensate for piracy,
and I hope to hell they don't do it for ISP's.
Yes musicians should be paid for their work. That doesn't mean we automatically assign blank fees to 100% of the population.
Should we add a gas tax for musicians too? Pirates had to drive to the store to buy blank CD Roms, seems fair doesn't it?