After interviewing Miguel, the LNW article goes on, via rather a neat bit of linking that meant I didn't even realise at first that I was in a different article, to talk about the forthcoming GPL StarOffice release.
It says:
But consider the other interesting part of the StarOffice release: the code is going to be reworked, integrated with Bonobo and GTK, and released as a set of reusable components. If you are a GNOME programmer looking to put together a powerful application, you will be able to pick and use any pieces of StarOffice that your application needs. The result is likely to be an explosion of new, user-centric applications for Linux.
Is it just me, or does this sound like a recipe for duplicating the two-year wait for a first Open Source mozilla? I would have loved to get ahold of a Netscape 4 with the bugs fixed - just think how much better all our worlds would be if the first month of Open Source mozilla development effort had gone on bug fixes before they threw all the software up in the air and started again.
If the same happens with StarOffice, then the world and his wife will most surely be running Bill's Linux port of MS-Office before those two years are up and the Open Source versions of Star Office start to appear.
Please - someone - protect StarOffice from premature componentisation! Live now first; live tomorrow next.
The thrust of the order -- if upheld by a higher court -- will be to provide legal cover to every e-commerce site with a mind to block out price comparison sites or shop bots attempting to access its pages.
So what's the big deal? If online shop A refused to let shop-bot B see its prices, then A's products will simply not be listed on site B. People who go there for price comparisons will never choose to buy from A since it won't even be listed. Who's the loser here?
Same thing later in the article:
Imagine a future in which certain Web sites, backed by the power of the law, can control which services can search them. It's hardly beyond the pale to conceive of a situation where the big Web sites would first demand payments from search engines before they allow their pages to wind up on any index.
So some sites might now play? WHO CARES?! They're the ones who won't get referrals from AlataVista and co. For the rest of us, there's plenty of other content to be had.
The simple fact is that comparison bots, search engines and the like are providing a free service to the commerce sites, in the form of customer referrals. If some sites want to cut off their own noses, then let 'em.
mind you the anti-MS block on Slashdot will of course equate Microsoft's involvement with the project to mean that this is really about mind control
And sure enough that's exactly what's happened. I find myself wondering how different the reponses to this article would have been if it had been reported that Sun or Bell Labs or Apple were doing this work instead of Microsoft. With luck, someone with clout at/. will post just such a faux story and we can see for ourselves...
Please - let's try to evaluate things on their merits. Don't get me wrong, ``I hate the Romans as much as anyone'' but there's really no need to go bashing Microsoft for no reason.
Magnetism. Launch cargo from big-assed hypervelocity rail guns built up the sides of the Andes down 'round the equator. It won't work for people, but it would be great for anything that can handle the acceleration. Couldn't hurt Chile's economy either.
Isn't it basically impossible to impart sufficient velocity at ground level to get something into orbit? I thought that air resistance, growing as it does with velocity, will always slow you down too much?
Otherwise this approach (and the other poster's coil) seem ideal - a way of leaving all that heavy thrust-generation hardware down on ground instead of lugging it around with you.
The problem with nuclear is that you still need reaction mass that has the sames drawbacks, ie weight, as standard fuels.
Huh, that seems kind of obviously true now you say it. But can't a sufficiently violent reaction compensate by just throwing relatively little reaction mass out the back very very fast?
(You can tell how much physics I've forgotten, can't you?:-)
In the experience of most of my friends, what this article describes is all too true. BUT in the UK at least (which is where I am), it's still possible - if not particularly easy - to find employers who pay well while respecting the endearingly old-fashioned notion of Working Hours.
I know this because when I applied for my current job (just over a year ago) I made it very clear on my CV (or resume if you must) that I was prepared to work 9am-5pm five days a week and that's it. So that filtered out a lot of potential employers even before I got to the stage of being offered interviews: I'm sure plenty of companies looked at my CV and immediately thought, ``that's not the sort of person we want working for us''. But that's OK, because they're not the sort of companies I want to work for either.
The result is that I got a lot fewer offers than I would otherwise have had. I chose my job from a smaller pool. But I'm happy with the hours I'm working, I'm being paid enough (though surely less than I could get if I were prepared to compromise on hours), and my employer's getting what I promised (i.e. expectations were pre-emptively managed!)
Is it worth reducing your choice of employers this much? Depends how much the Rest Of Your Life is worth to you. I'm married with two young children, I'm involved in my church, I like to read, to brew beer, to write free software and lots of other stuff - so for me, the answer was an emphatic yes. For you, it might legitimately be more important to earn an extra 50% - for example, because you're still Young, Free And Single (this forum is full of geeks, right:-) and you want to be in a position to pay off your mortgage early.
I guess the only concrete lesson here is, the earlier in the whole job-search process you say what you really want, the less of your and other people's time you'll waste, looking at jobs whose corporate culture isn't a good match for what you want. There's no point putting on your CV that you're a dynamic, go-getting, motivated, mutual individual when the truth is that you want your evenings and weekends. In other words, Honesty Is The Best Policy. Hmmm. Is that news?
Oh, and the other thing is that for anyone who's not worked this out yet, mobile phones are the instrument of Satan. Just say no.
This is a fascinating article as far as it goes, but I'd be much more excited to see someone propose how we're going to achieve the twenty-fold decrease in launch costs that's described as ``radical''.
What are the alternatives?
I don't know enough about the subject to comment very intelligently, but it must be dependent on what the major costs are. Can anyone fill us in on this? Of the $10k that it costs NASA to put a pound of matter into orbit, how much goes where?
For example, if a major cost is fuels, then the way to go must surely be a more efficient propulsion system - yup, nuclear unless anyone's got a better idea. Actually, I think that more efficient propulsion has to be the answer for another reason - that then we can drop the costs of carting all that fuel around for the first few minutes of the flight. Presumably the fuel for a putative nuclear drive would have negligible mass compared with all that liquid oxygen.
The MacOS has gotten decent enough at working around its limitations that only rarely do processes not play nice with each other, hog memory, etc. [...] When I use any Mac app, I can intuitively go to "Edit->Preferences" to change the behavior of the program [...] Out of all the cards and peripherals I've added to my aging machine over the years, I think I've had to install drivers like once
These are all excellent reasons for liking Apple products, but the original post was asking which people have any loyalty left to Apple the company. I haven't seen a good answer to that yet.
I just say ``ooo'', as in the first sound you make if you say the word ``water'' with the first phoneme extended. Works OK - everyone understands what's meant by it, any road up.
But I wonder if 40% is accurate enough; next to mars, between the 'solid' planets and the gas giants, are a lot of asteroids orbiting the sun
This reminds me of a question that bothers me: how is it that the small planets in our solar system are solid, while the large ones are gaseous? Wouldn't we expect that the greater mass of the large planets, and consequently greater gravity, would compress all their matter into denser (solid) forms?
And a related question: our solar system has solid and gaseous planets; is there any fundamental eason that there couldn't be liquid planets, or is that just how it happens to fall in this particular uncharted backwater of the unfashionable end of the western spiral arm?
which for better or for worse, has all five books of the hitchhiker trilogy in iSilo (reader software for palmpilot) and ascii format.
Hmm, tasty. Does anyone know of a program to convert from the iSilo format into something open that looks a bit nicer than plain text (HTML would be favourite)? Or failing that, a specification of the file format would be fine: I'd be happy to write the converter. After all, ``how hard can it be'', right?
There's a certain dry quality to some of DNA's answer's, isn't there? Reminds me of a section I enjoyed in Neil Gaimain's (I think) book about the HHGTTG series: it had some fan mail Adams had received, especially letters with a lot of questions in, together with his replies. The one that sticks in the memory went:
Q. Have you ever been contacted by the intergalactic police concerning the whereabouts of Zaphod Beeblebrox?
Whenever someone claims that a field is essentially complete, they are nearly always wrong.
"Inventions have long since reached their limit, and I see no hope for further development" -- Julius Sextus Frontinus, Highly regarded Roman engineer, 1st century AD.
The patch provides a new version of the Office 2000 UA Control. The new version is marked "safe for scripting", but the functionality has been reduced so that this really is the case. After installing the patch, the "Show Me" function in Office Help will no longer function. In addition, "pop-ups" in Office 2000 Help will no longer work - "pop-ups" are text boxes that pop up when you put your mouse over a specially-marked term.
In other words, instead of simply fixing what the same FAQ earlier describes as an "error in marking the particular control at issue" by turning off the "safe for scripting" flag, they have elected to disable real functionality (the genuinely useful show me feature).
Why? I can only assume because they've realised that there's some other security issue buried in this quagmire, and they don't want to tell us about it.
Oh dear. Every time I try to be reasonable about Microsoft and admire the good things they've done, something like this comes up...
That's not to say that linux is going to be around forever, or die in the next two years. Linux is going to be a BIG player in the next decade....but i'm afraid that corporate big wigs are going to kill it. I'm afraid that corporate greed is going to usurp the freedom that everyone went to linux for in the first place.
This is scarily easy to believe. If fluxrad is right, then it looks like we have to give Stallman credit for having seen further ahead than the rest of us.
Yes, RMS is extremist, blinkered, dismissive of everyone who doesn't agree with him, and approaching paranoia. No, I don't like the way he summarily disses non-techie things he clearly knows nothing about (religion springs to mind). But we're close, aren't we, to concluding that Free Software (because free is right) is more important than Open Source (because open is efficient). After all, what's efficient this year will be prehistoric next year. But freedom will still be important.
Slashdot Mirror
See this Bob the Angry Flower cartoon for the definitive method of winning Nobel prizes in physics.
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It says:
Is it just me, or does this sound like a recipe for duplicating the two-year wait for a first Open Source mozilla? I would have loved to get ahold of a Netscape 4 with the bugs fixed - just think how much better all our worlds would be if the first month of Open Source mozilla development effort had gone on bug fixes before they threw all the software up in the air and started again.If the same happens with StarOffice, then the world and his wife will most surely be running Bill's Linux port of MS-Office before those two years are up and the Open Source versions of Star Office start to appear.
Please - someone - protect StarOffice from premature componentisation! Live now first; live tomorrow next.
--
--
Same thing later in the article:
So some sites might now play? WHO CARES?! They're the ones who won't get referrals from AlataVista and co. For the rest of us, there's plenty of other content to be had.The simple fact is that comparison bots, search engines and the like are providing a free service to the commerce sites, in the form of customer referrals. If some sites want to cut off their own noses, then let 'em.
--
And sure enough that's exactly what's happened. I find myself wondering how different the reponses to this article would have been if it had been reported that Sun or Bell Labs or Apple were doing this work instead of Microsoft. With luck, someone with clout at /. will post just such a faux story and we can see for ourselves ...
Please - let's try to evaluate things on their merits. Don't get me wrong, ``I hate the Romans as much as anyone'' but there's really no need to go bashing Microsoft for no reason.
Not when there are so many legitimate reasons :-)
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Isn't it basically impossible to impart sufficient velocity at ground level to get something into orbit? I thought that air resistance, growing as it does with velocity, will always slow you down too much?
Otherwise this approach (and the other poster's coil) seem ideal - a way of leaving all that heavy thrust-generation hardware down on ground instead of lugging it around with you.
Huh, that seems kind of obviously true now you say it. But can't a sufficiently violent reaction compensate by just throwing relatively little reaction mass out the back very very fast?
(You can tell how much physics I've forgotten, can't you? :-)
--
I know this because when I applied for my current job (just over a year ago) I made it very clear on my CV (or resume if you must) that I was prepared to work 9am-5pm five days a week and that's it. So that filtered out a lot of potential employers even before I got to the stage of being offered interviews: I'm sure plenty of companies looked at my CV and immediately thought, ``that's not the sort of person we want working for us''. But that's OK, because they're not the sort of companies I want to work for either.
The result is that I got a lot fewer offers than I would otherwise have had. I chose my job from a smaller pool. But I'm happy with the hours I'm working, I'm being paid enough (though surely less than I could get if I were prepared to compromise on hours), and my employer's getting what I promised (i.e. expectations were pre-emptively managed!)
Is it worth reducing your choice of employers this much? Depends how much the Rest Of Your Life is worth to you. I'm married with two young children, I'm involved in my church, I like to read, to brew beer, to write free software and lots of other stuff - so for me, the answer was an emphatic yes. For you, it might legitimately be more important to earn an extra 50% - for example, because you're still Young, Free And Single (this forum is full of geeks, right :-) and you want to be in a position to pay off your mortgage early.
I guess the only concrete lesson here is, the earlier in the whole job-search process you say what you really want, the less of your and other people's time you'll waste, looking at jobs whose corporate culture isn't a good match for what you want. There's no point putting on your CV that you're a dynamic, go-getting, motivated, mutual individual when the truth is that you want your evenings and weekends. In other words, Honesty Is The Best Policy. Hmmm. Is that news?
Oh, and the other thing is that for anyone who's not worked this out yet, mobile phones are the instrument of Satan. Just say no.
--
What are the alternatives?
I don't know enough about the subject to comment very intelligently, but it must be dependent on what the major costs are. Can anyone fill us in on this? Of the $10k that it costs NASA to put a pound of matter into orbit, how much goes where?
For example, if a major cost is fuels, then the way to go must surely be a more efficient propulsion system - yup, nuclear unless anyone's got a better idea. Actually, I think that more efficient propulsion has to be the answer for another reason - that then we can drop the costs of carting all that fuel around for the first few minutes of the flight. Presumably the fuel for a putative nuclear drive would have negligible mass compared with all that liquid oxygen.
So where else are the costs?
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These are all excellent reasons for liking Apple products, but the original post was asking which people have any loyalty left to Apple the company. I haven't seen a good answer to that yet.
--
I just say ``ooo'', as in the first sound you make if you say the word ``water'' with the first phoneme extended. Works OK - everyone understands what's meant by it, any road up.
--
This reminds me of a question that bothers me: how is it that the small planets in our solar system are solid, while the large ones are gaseous? Wouldn't we expect that the greater mass of the large planets, and consequently greater gravity, would compress all their matter into denser (solid) forms?
And a related question: our solar system has solid and gaseous planets; is there any fundamental eason that there couldn't be liquid planets, or is that just how it happens to fall in this particular uncharted backwater of the unfashionable end of the western spiral arm?
--
Hmm, tasty. Does anyone know of a program to convert from the iSilo format into something open that looks a bit nicer than plain text (HTML would be favourite)? Or failing that, a specification of the file format would be fine: I'd be happy to write the converter. After all, ``how hard can it be'', right?
--
No? Oh well, I thought it was funny.
--
"Inventions have long since reached their limit, and I see no hope for further development" -- Julius Sextus Frontinus, Highly regarded Roman engineer, 1st century AD.
--
In other words, instead of simply fixing what the same FAQ earlier describes as an "error in marking the particular control at issue" by turning off the "safe for scripting" flag, they have elected to disable real functionality (the genuinely useful show me feature).
Why? I can only assume because they've realised that there's some other security issue buried in this quagmire, and they don't want to tell us about it.
Oh dear. Every time I try to be reasonable about Microsoft and admire the good things they've done, something like this comes up ...
--
This is scarily easy to believe. If fluxrad is right, then it looks like we have to give Stallman credit for having seen further ahead than the rest of us.
Yes, RMS is extremist, blinkered, dismissive of everyone who doesn't agree with him, and approaching paranoia. No, I don't like the way he summarily disses non-techie things he clearly knows nothing about (religion springs to mind). But we're close, aren't we, to concluding that Free Software (because free is right) is more important than Open Source (because open is efficient). After all, what's efficient this year will be prehistoric next year. But freedom will still be important.
--