These are the same people that discovered Flash could open popup windows even when you've disabled javascript. The same people that think nothing of attacking any security vulnerability they can find to display adverts. The same people that fill-up my "blocked webservers" list with dynamically-generated hostnames. The same people that put ActiveX controls with.exe files in hidden parts of a website, hoping to take control of their customers' computers.
Are you sure about that?
The only definite link I can see between those who want less restraints on cookies and the marketers who are busy trying to find ways to exploit your attitude, is that a journalist grouped them in the same article. Apart form that, they're completely different organisations. Grouping them together indiscriminately just because they're "marketing" isn't really fair.
I dislike being targeted with annoying advertising as much as most people here, and I have no problem with taking steps to miss or reduce it. If I'm looking to buy something, though, I want to be told what my options are. Very often it's the marketing people who provide me with the information I want. If they do this without annoying me, without spying on me, and as long as they don't start trying to persuade me to buy something I don't want, I don't have a problem. Often I actually have respect for people who can do this well, and there are people who can.
Believe it or not, I like the way that Amazon uses information about my browsing, past purchases and books I own, and what books other people have liked, to make suggestions. I also don't mind them using my preferences to make suggestions for other people. It's open about the way it's being done, very often it finds me books that look interesting, and most importantly I trust them not to do anything stupid. This is marketing, and I don't consider this particular marketing to be evil or annoying at all. If I took all the steps available to stop them identifying and tracing me through their site, I wouldn't have anywhere near as useful an experience.
My impression of marketers is that they're about as diverse as high-tech computer users. It wouldn't be appropriate to compare an open source developer with a black-hat cracker just because a journalist had their computer destroyed by one, and it's not appropriate to do the same for marketers. At the very least, marketing should be referred to by the different types of marketing, but grouping it all together under the one word is silly.
I'm all for complaining about people who use subversive and annoying tactics to market things at people. But come on -- businesses have to have some way to communicate with potential customers. That's called marketing too.
if you decided to release something you wrote under a licence that permitted anyone to alter it freely, what is to stop me or anyone else to alter what you wrote sop as to subvert your intent but kept your name attached to it. I don't suppose you'd be too impressed that your views were being misrepresented.
Your local laws may vary. In New Zealand, however, we certainly have laws that would be available for prosecuting anyone who publishes something under someone else's name without permission, particularly if it's done with malicious intent to discredit someone and it's not obvious that it's faked. (If it was obvious, it might be treated as satire.)
I think there's part of our copyright law that deals with it, but I've been unable to find it when flipping through quickly. I'm not sure how this would all apply with the GPL -- there is definitely a right in NZ copyright law to object to derogatory treatment of a work.
A few weeks ago, I installed the autoconf package on my Debian system, only to discover that there was no documentation included in the standard/usr/share/doc/autoconf/ location. After checking, I discovered that it'd be recently removed, because Debian considers the GNU Free Documentation Licence -- the main documentation licence promoted by the FSF -- as a non-free licence. (Debian has concerns about how it'd work in DRM environments. The Free Software Foundation doesn't agree.)
Luckily in that case, there's now an autoconf-doc package in the non-free section of Debian, and I installed that. What confuses me, though, is how Debian expects to cope in the future if it doesn't accept something as the GFDL, which is widely accepted as the Free Software Foundation's GPL-for-documentation, and used in a lot of places related to open source. All of the KDE help files, for instance, are distributed under the GFDL. Debian hasn't cut them yet, but does this mean that it won't be including them as soon as someone realises?
I really like Debian and I have no plans to stop using it unless it stops being possible to do what I want. I'm impressed by the project's dedication to being so specific about licences, but sometimes I wonder how much of that will eventually come back to haunt it.
The poster never asserted anything about predicting earthquakes based upon the average.
Hmmm... I read: "The last one happened around 1700, so another one is fairly likely in the near future."
Your interpretation might be different, but to me that's comparing an historical average with the recent past to predict the immediate future, which is what I was commenting on. Anyway, I've enjoyed reading the responses to my comment. As I said, I'm on second-hand information.
Nope. From the USGS again: "The total amount of energy released by the earthquake, however, goes up by a factor of 32."
one happens every 200 or so years on average. The last one happened around 1700, so another one is fairly likely in the near future.
This is just a small nit-pick with this assertion. Sorry for dragging it out as I have.
I don't know where you're getting your information from, but I also have a good friend who's a geophysicist, and I know a lot of others in the Earth Sciences department next door to my own. (We have a lot of major earthquake-causing fault lines in New Zealand, and it's a popular place for geophysicists from around the world to hang out.) If someone knows more then I'd welcome a correction, but my understanding is that earthquakes are still almost entirely unpredictible with today's knowledge.
We can look at the history of any site and calculate an average earthquake frequency, just as your site averages every 200 years. If you look a short time into the future, it'll probably remain an average of about 200 years.
But in Earth science terms, a "short" time is millions of years. When the frame of reference is so large, attempting to predict events accurately to hundreds of years is hopeless. An historical average of a big quake every 200 years really doesn't tell us anything useful about the immediate future of a site in terms comparable with a human lifetime.
I've heard people argue about how the stress is released after an earthquake and there's a relation. I think this is a very common misconception that seems intuitive, but doesn't really match the facts as we know. All the geophysicists I've spoken to have claimed that this is mostly fiction, though.
The biggest problem with this approach is that there's no clear and accurate way to even estimate, let alone measure, how much stress there was in the first place. Most of what we can guess simply comes from analysing historical records, and accurate records often don't even exist beyond the past few hundred years, if even that. You might have thought that 7th magnitude quake was big and released a lot of stress, until an 8th magnitude quake suddenly releases ten times as much energy, with the earlier quake having made a negligible dent in its force.
If you look historically at the quakes in your area, you'll probably see that they're not set at all evenly. Even if you've gone for 300 years without an earthquake, chances are it's about as likely that you'll get a big one tommorrow as it is that you'll get a big one 1000 years from now. Perhaps you'll get 3 or 4 big ones in the next 3 or 4 decades.
This isn't to say that it's not worth preparing for, though. If you live on a fault, chances are that you'll at least get moderate earthquakes, and over a wide enough population, it's quite likely that some part of it will be hit every so often. (The media doesn't normally report about all of the places that didn't have earthquakes.) Good building standards and response strategies, for instance, are the reason that there may only be a few tens or hundreds of casualties in a well-off country, whereas it might be hundreds of thousands or millions of casualties for an equivalent quake in a third world country.
I'm not sure I agree.. or at least I don't see OpenOffice as being broken as much as it's simply different from Word. The problem is that those differences are making the two fundamentally incompatible in my view, but it's okay if you're not trying to force one to clone the other.
It would help if OO did not copy the Word brain-damage of paragraph styles. Style information should be completely invisible things that are *between* the characters, not attached to a paragraph. I was assumming it was more intelligently designed than Word, probably my mistake.
I'm not familiar with what you're referring to here, but I'm interested. Do you mean that something like paragraph styles should actually just be a character style attached to the line-break?
I've normally thought the model of treating paragraphs and characters separately as it's done now works very well, and it makes sense to me. WYSIWYG editors sometimes make it difficult to actually specify different styles between characters and paragraphs, though.
Can you suggest any references where I could read about what you're proposing?
What you're suggesting is exactly what the standard response is, but it doesn't solve the actual problem. I'll just comment on this one example and hopefully you'll see what I mean.
1. On import from.doc, identify empty paragraphs and remove them.
I assume we're referring to empty paragraphs within table cells, and you're suggesting that the paragraph spacing be removed if it's empty. If you mean that the empty paragraph itself should be removed, you'll have to explain further, because I don't understand what you mean to replace it with.
The problem here is that it still messes up the work-flow for anyone who's authoring a document with the intent of having someone else fill in the gaps.
Imagine, for instance, Person One, who used MS Word to author a template so that Person Two could fill in the empty table cells. There's a very good chance that Person One will set the paragraph spacing in advance, so that it'll look tidier and be easier to manage when it's returned. They do, and it's not shown on their end, due to Word policy of not showing spacing on empty paragraphs in table cells.
Person Two then imports the document into OpenOffice. OpenOffice removes the paragraph spacing with the input filter so that the document looks identical as it did in Word.
There's a clear problem here, though. If Person Two decides to add text to a table cell, it will no longer have paragraph spacing. This is when it would be necessary to implement a quirks mode to be compatible. Otherwise, Person Two will have to send back a document that's different from the one that Person One produced in more ways than just the text that they added.
Yes, you can add all sorts of extra meta information to a paragraph element style, such as an option for "Show paragraph spacing when empty", for instance. The problem is that this effectively is a quirks mode, and because of that it's a user interface nightmare. It creates a situation whereby there are more and more ways to get an identical visual effect, causing it to be harder and harder for regular users to figure out why on earth their document is acting strangely when they enter text.
The one thing you are missing is that the.doc format belongs to Microsoft Word. There is only 1 proper way of displaying the document - exactly how Microsoft Word does. Anything else is a bug. Whatever fixes/workaround OO has to do to get that functionality is irrelevant.
In that case, you'll be using an application that acts differently in some very suttle ways depending on what type of file it opened. As I mentioned earlier, it has the potential to be a usability nightmare. That's something of a dilemma that I think OpenOffice.org may soon find itself in, if it hasn't already.
I'll focus on Word Processors with this comment because that's mostly what I care about, but I think it's applicable to most of what's in a typical office suite.
My point is really that an MS Word Document and the behaviour associated with it is something that simply can't be emulated without going all out and making an exact clone of Word. The document's just data that can be read and written once it's understood, but the way that an application treats that data during editing and interaction with the user is a whole lot more complicated, and perhaps not even solvable. I'm not sure if people are recognising this issue as being so much of a problem as it really is.
Even if a document looks similar or identical when it's opened, the expected behaviour of the editing (and therefore what's going to be sent back to someone with a different application) will be different depending on what application someone happens to be using. Unless people are only passing documents around without the intention of them being edited by other people, exact compatibility would be incredibly difficult. So is it worth bothering?
People really need to decide if an exact clone is what they want. If it is, then great, and perhaps that's what OpenOffice.org is destined to become. But I'm not sure I'd want to use that application. Being able to read and write MS Word documents is a great and often essential thing, but I'd still rather have the flexibility of being able to use a better Word Processor, as well as one that's consistent with how it behaves (rather than having different editing modes). An alternative would be using either MS Word, or a word processor that clones whatever behaviour Microsoft decides is "best for everyone". Otherwise, platform issues aside, there's little reason for many people to bother considering anything else, and there's little possibility that serious competition in Office suites will ever emerge.
I wind up exporting to DOC, and the formatting has been screwed up in a couple of situations (often at inconvenient times, like when I need to turn a paper in and I find out in the lab, I learned quickly after the 1st one)...
I'm convinced that the biggest problem is that full compatibility goes well beyond file formats. It's also about application behaviour, for which there aren't any documented standards. We've gotten to the point where the file formats are understood, but behaviour compatibility is still incredibly tricky.
I use OpenOffice as much as possible these days, albeit mostly for word processing. Personally I've encountered a few less annoyances with OpenOffice, particularly with things like moderate table manipulation. Unless forced to, though, I still won't trust OpenOffice to save to.doc correctly without checking it... at least not with anything important.
In particular, I've noticed that at least some of the incompatibilities are semantic differences in the object model. I'm not sure how they can be fixed in 100% of cases.
One example that comes to mind is with paragraph spacing in tables. If a paragraph is empty, OpenOffice still includes the paragraph spacing, causing the table row height to be slightly higher. MS Word, on the other hand, ignores the paragraph spacing unless there's actually text in the paragraph.
The MS Word behaviour seems like a bug, or just another one of the little annoyances that I referred to before, but it's one that everyone in Word is used to. If you use OpenOffice.org to open an MS Word file that has tables, empty paragraphs in some of the cells, and paragraph spacing specified on those paragraphs, there's a very likely possibility that the pages won't line up.
Some people might think that the OpenOffice import filter could simply recognise that it's an MS Word file, and turn off paragraph spacing on the import -- causing the table cells to be the same height. It's not that simple, though, because if somebody decides to type in the document and send it back, it'll be messed up all over again.
The only way that OpenOffice.org can be truly compatible with MS Word is to keep track of whether the opened document was a Word document. Then it would need to either:
Implement some kind of "MS Word quirks" mode for this entire time, or
Change the OpenOffice.org document model so that it's incompatible with earlier versions of itself, and instead incorporates the inconsistencies that Word does.
Personally I'd hate the second option. I've come to like the OpenOffice.org document model a lot more, simply because it seems more predictible and consistent, and doesn't have a lot of little annoyances that the MS Word model has, at least in the ways that I use it. It'd also mess up a whole lot of older OpenOffice documents that I have lying around if they suddenly opened with a different policy on things like paragraph spacing.
The first option seems very complicated, though. It's asking OpenOffice to not just simulate the document formats, but also the behaviour of another proprietary application. It's also asking the user to keep track of all the possible different ways that OpenOffice.org might act at any given time. That in itself could turn into a UI nightmare, because suddenly the user interface of the application is much less consistent. (Keep in mind that we're talking about regular users, here. It's not like Mozilla quirks mode, where the main people dealing with the differences are web developers.)
I don't know exactly what the best way is to fix this, but it's definitely not as easy as just writing decent import and export filters. Personally I'm just fortunate enough that I don't have to share my documents very often. When I do give someone a Word-format document, though, I make a point to at least check it in Word whenever possible before handing it over.
Does anyone have the political affiliations of the people who were fired?
I don't know specifically about their affiliations, but if you trust the article, page 2 says:
Instead, the sources said, [Griffin] expressed dismay that NASA over the past several years had put a lot of people in top management positions because of what one source described as "political connections or bureaucratic gamesmanship -- not merit."
Several sources spoke of a corps of younger scientists and engineers, including Griffin, who had been groomed in the 1970s and 1980s as NASA's next generation of leaders only to be shoved aside during the past 15 years. They said Griffin hopes to bring them back.
In principle, this sounds like a very good thing. Apparently, he's kicking out people whom he believes were hired more for their political affiliations than their competance. Before taking this as it's written, however, can anyone comment on any political affiliations of Griffin himself? For all we know, and as I think you're implying, his definition of competance might be synonymous with republican.
As in so many other programs, he will say one thing and do the Orwellian switch, with no one bothering to note the discrepancy. Education, environment, energy policy, on and on. Say something thing positive, then defund and kill.
To me it sounds as if the problem is at least as much with your media as it is with your federal government.
Who votes for the journalists?
I think you're giving Windows too much credit
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software that, by now, are all graphical and almost as easy and intuitive to use as their Windows counterpart.
I don't mean any disrespect, but I think you're giving too much credit to Windows software with this comment. Being graphical and sometimes consistent does not by itself make something "easy and intuitive to use", even though a lot of people seem to equate those qualities with being visually appealing. I'm not trying to imply that any unix-derived software does any better, but I don't think it's correct to start applying labels such as "easy" and "intuitive" until somebody who's never previously seen or used the software can sit down and accomplish exactly what they want, and quickly.
I know lots of people who are very proficient at using certain Windows software. It's because they use it for tasks that they do frequently. They know the software and they've come to understand it through years of practice. At some point, though, they still had to take the leap to comprehend the idea of a "task" fitting inside a generic electronic box that supposedly does everything.
Many of the same people become incredibly frustrated as soon as they try to use software with which they're not familiar. It doesn't work in ways they expect, and often it'll use concepts that they've never been acquainted with. The fact that it's Windows, graphical, or even roughly consistent with other applications, makes no difference for it being easy and intuitive, at least beyond being able to tell the difference between a button and a menu option, for instance.
As it is, I don't personally think that most traditional software has a hope of ever really being intuitive and easy in this way. The concept of taking a generic box and having it do a million different things is just to complex. The only time that software, and computers in general, will be truly intuitive and easy to understand is when people no longer think of it as software, or computers for that matter.
A basic wrist-watch (without lots of other modes) is a really good example. Using it to find the time is an operation that most people will figure out simply by looking at it and noticing the time. It's not necessary to understand anything about computers, or how to put the watch into 'time-display' mode, to understand how to get the time from it. For most other tasks, we've still a very long way to go before software becomes "intuitive and easy". I doubt word processors will reach that point, for instance, until they're as obvious to use as something like a pen and paper. All that software really does at the moment is to make a lot of things possible that weren't possible before.
I use linux, and I prefer it over Windows at the moment. Part of this decision is because I've invested time in learning about it, and I'm happy with the relatively expert user interface that it offers for me to get what I want done more efficiently. My preferred WM is WindowMaker, because I like its light-weight feel compared with KDE or Gnome (plus it's supported by Debian). In an ideal design, though, there shouldn't be any serious difference between an expert and beginner interface, because everyone should simply be able to do exactly what they want to do efficiently and quickly.
I never thought the day would come when someone posts a joke and the respone, on/. of all places, references copyright restrictions. How ironic, if not a sad sign of how times have changed.
I don't see why it's ironic. As uninformed as some slashdot posts are, there are also a lot of users who recognise that copyright makes a lot of sense, and is actually useful. It's the enforcement of copyright that allows the GPL and the GFDL to work. What many people here do complain about is the never-ending extentions of copyright, arguably against the general public interest, and allegedly because corporations have bought off politicians.
This may be a joke, but it was copied verbatim without providing the copyright notice, which is required by the GNU Free Documentation Licence. It's a copyright violation, and to ignore it as irrelevant would be hypocritical and ironic in itself. (Not to mention illegal.)
they will need much more money to offset the inconvenience of living overseas and they will need subsidized housing, etc. so they can amass nestegg money for their eventual return.
I don't see what the issue is with this "eventual return" thing. I live in New Zealand, which also has a relatively low cost of living.
For a lot of people here, when they go overseas, they don't even bother trying to save the money so they can travel. There's little point, because the New Zealand dollar isn't worth a lot in terms of cost-of-living overseas. What people get paid here is perfectly adequate for living here, but it's much less than what's needed elsewhere. (We do get a lot of overseas tourists, because it's a comparably cheap place to visit.)
Instead, they go overseas for a working holiday. ie. They work overseas to pay for living overseas. For people going on holiday, it definitely helps to be from the US or Europe and travelling to somewhere like India. But if you have the job once you get there, it's not as critical-an-issue to have a bulk amount in advance. You'll be working there anyway.
I've been following the release-critical bugs, which were down to about 18 a few days ago but have since jumped up to about 30.
I thought it was only going to be released when there were 0 release-critical bugs. Does this mean that all those packages have been left out of sarge, as per the original announcement? Otherwise, what's going on?
saving energy is certainly considered unamerican by republicans and energy companies, which are certainly not unrelated.
I'm not from the US, but I've come to understand that there are endless conflicts of interest when it comes to promoting energy saving. Not the least of this is that nobody really wants to move energy generation out of the industrial age, which provides lots of jobs for Americans.
If there's one thing that power generation does, it's make sure that billions of dollars keeps cycling around the internal economy. Energy generation is something that hasn't yet been moved overseas, and ensuring that lots of money goes through the system for lots of output ensures that people are getting paid to do something.. no matter how redundant it is and no matter what more useful things they might be doing if they weren't wasting their time on it.
I think the only way the energy industry in the US will reform is if the customers actually do it themselves. The Federal government will only ever encourage people to spend as much money a possible. If the individual people and states realise that they could be saving money and energy by doing things differently, though, there's eventually going to be less demand for energy and the industry will be forced to reform itself.
After all, the United States is the _only_ country that still considers global warming a mere theory.
Just to clarify, I don't think there's any doubt that it's a theory, just as anything else scientifically expressed. The problem with the US government is that it's refusing to acknowledge the difference in terminology. In science, it's usually still called a "theory", even when it's proven beyond doubt.
It's true that there's still a lot of dispute about global warming, justified or not, and it covers a lot of areas. eg:
whether it's actually happening,
whether it'll matter,
whether humans are causing it or if it's happening naturally and following a cycle, and
whether we have any hope of doing anything about it.
There's a lot of reason to at the very least strongly suspect, however, that we're responsible, that we're in a lot of trouble, and that we have to act now to prevent a much bigger catastrophe than what we're otherwise heading for. Unfortunately the influential people in the US federal government don't even get as far as considering this, because it's more convenient to assume that a "theory" implies that there's no meaningful evidence behind it at all.
Maybe they'll make up for Australia and the USA not ratifying the Kyoto Protocol!
Whatever happens with Kyoto, I think it's great to see a few governments here and there finally leading by example, and getting involved in encouraging and providing incentives for saving energy. Hopefully it'll get some power saving technologies and industries much more established than they were before, and some people might actually begin to realise that there are more benefits to being efficient than possibly reducing the effects that power generation might have on the environment. Some of it may even carry over into countries that initially didn't sign on to Kyoto.
In New Zealand, where I am, finding ways to save energy has almost become a necessity, albeit one that the general population is noticing very slowly. (The main theme at the moment is everyone wanting to build more power stations, but nobody wanting them in their back yard.) Call it lack of planning if you like, but the power situation here is at the state where we're presently on the edge of getting brown-outs.
The geographic isolation makes it necessary to be entirely self-reliant with power generation, and saving energy becomes a definite alternative to generating more. (Not all the time, but certainly much of the time.) Being someone who's quite enthusiastic about reducing light pollution, it's helpful to finally have some government bodies to deal with whose actual purpose revolves around finding new ways to save energy, such as this one.
My understanding, from having spoken to people there, is that the US Federal government is comparably hopeless at implementing energy efficiency schemes, for whatever reason. (That'd mean less jobs for all those americans in the power generation industry, right?) Apparently it's a much healthier economy when a few billions of dollars extra are circulating, even if it is for energy that's not actually necessary... but whatever.
If you happen to have an interest in energy efficiency, though, I've heard that state governments and more local authorities in general are often a lot more receptive about promoting it. I presume that it's probably much easier in states that buy more energy from neighbouring states than they sell. eg. Calgary (okay, that's Canada but it's in the same direction as the US from here) recently went through a programme of replacing every one of their street lights. It's expected to pay off entirely within six to seven years, through operating costs of the lights alone.
So let's be clear where the blame belongs. Microsoft tried to innovate. They encouraged people to use the results of their innovation. And, people willingly did, thus creating the current situation.
The most irritating part of Microsoft's "innovation" for me, when I was a web developer, was when Microsoft ensured that all of their Javascript example code in MSDN used curved brackets () for array accesses instead of square brackets []. There was no difference nor advantage of supporting curved brackets except to provide yet another way that naive developers could accidentally make their code incompatible with non-IE products.
Trying to fix thousands of lines of co-worker's copied-and-pasted code was a nightmare.
I've experienced price changes within the span of five minutes, or less. I'll be surfing around to sites, comparing prices, and I'll return to a site I've just visited, and they'll increase the price on me [I've never seen a price decrease].
I would like to see a list of businesses who do this, so I can either avoid them or be extra-scrupulous when buying from them. I'm particularly interested in those who do it without being up-front and clear to the customer about what they're doing.
It can't possibly be good publicity for a company for customers to be told that the price might be changed between the time that it's advertised and the time they purchase, certainly without it being clearly indicated next to the price. In many countries this would be considered a fradulent practice.
So his belief is that Europe is so incapable of competing in the software arena with the US that their only hope is to make sure their laws make a free market impossible and authorize the European companies to steal the idea created elsewhere for their own use?
I think his "belief" is that it's silly for European people in European countries to make European laws for themselves that do nothing but disadvantage the European population. If a predominantly proprietary and intellectually restricted software industry does nothing to benefit Europe, and effectively inhibits it, why on Earth should Europeans bother to support one?
Yep, I've used xephem a little bit, but I've never really been able to figure out its interface. Even though I tend to stay away from KDE for general use, xephem is just too inconsistent for me to use or bother learning properly. For a long time, I resorted to running Skymap (which I'd already paid for) under Wine.
I checked kstars out again a few months ago, though, and it's definitely come a long way since last time I used it. I still keep Skymap around, if only because I have more detailed catalogues for it that are useful when I'm doing more detailed work, and I trust myself to get any information I urgently need from it more quickly at this time, but I've been trying to train myself to use kstars a lot more.
And yeah, Cartes du Ciel looks like it'll be brilliant when it's done, but the linux build of it is still very experimental. I've tried it a couple of times, but getting it to compile seems incredibly difficult on my system. (It's ported from the Windows version which was written in some variant of Delphi, and to compensate there's an intermediate library underneath which also needs a specialist compiler, I think.) So far I've only been able to get the pre-compiled binary running, and not very reliably. It'd be easier in my case if it was packaged up for Debian and I could just apt-get it every so often, but I doubt that'll be happening for a while at least.
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No it doesn't. You're confusing an expert command-line interface with every command line interface.
It's also possible to design a beginner's command line interface, which wouldn't necessarily imply anything of the sort.
Are you sure about that?
The only definite link I can see between those who want less restraints on cookies and the marketers who are busy trying to find ways to exploit your attitude, is that a journalist grouped them in the same article. Apart form that, they're completely different organisations. Grouping them together indiscriminately just because they're "marketing" isn't really fair.
I dislike being targeted with annoying advertising as much as most people here, and I have no problem with taking steps to miss or reduce it. If I'm looking to buy something, though, I want to be told what my options are. Very often it's the marketing people who provide me with the information I want. If they do this without annoying me, without spying on me, and as long as they don't start trying to persuade me to buy something I don't want, I don't have a problem. Often I actually have respect for people who can do this well, and there are people who can.
Believe it or not, I like the way that Amazon uses information about my browsing, past purchases and books I own, and what books other people have liked, to make suggestions. I also don't mind them using my preferences to make suggestions for other people. It's open about the way it's being done, very often it finds me books that look interesting, and most importantly I trust them not to do anything stupid. This is marketing, and I don't consider this particular marketing to be evil or annoying at all. If I took all the steps available to stop them identifying and tracing me through their site, I wouldn't have anywhere near as useful an experience.
My impression of marketers is that they're about as diverse as high-tech computer users. It wouldn't be appropriate to compare an open source developer with a black-hat cracker just because a journalist had their computer destroyed by one, and it's not appropriate to do the same for marketers. At the very least, marketing should be referred to by the different types of marketing, but grouping it all together under the one word is silly.
I'm all for complaining about people who use subversive and annoying tactics to market things at people. But come on -- businesses have to have some way to communicate with potential customers. That's called marketing too.
Your local laws may vary. In New Zealand, however, we certainly have laws that would be available for prosecuting anyone who publishes something under someone else's name without permission, particularly if it's done with malicious intent to discredit someone and it's not obvious that it's faked. (If it was obvious, it might be treated as satire.)
I think there's part of our copyright law that deals with it, but I've been unable to find it when flipping through quickly. I'm not sure how this would all apply with the GPL -- there is definitely a right in NZ copyright law to object to derogatory treatment of a work.
A few weeks ago, I installed the autoconf package on my Debian system, only to discover that there was no documentation included in the standard /usr/share/doc/autoconf/ location. After checking, I discovered that it'd be recently removed, because Debian considers the GNU Free Documentation Licence -- the main documentation licence promoted by the FSF -- as a non-free licence. (Debian has concerns about how it'd work in DRM environments. The Free Software Foundation doesn't agree.)
Luckily in that case, there's now an autoconf-doc package in the non-free section of Debian, and I installed that. What confuses me, though, is how Debian expects to cope in the future if it doesn't accept something as the GFDL, which is widely accepted as the Free Software Foundation's GPL-for-documentation, and used in a lot of places related to open source. All of the KDE help files, for instance, are distributed under the GFDL. Debian hasn't cut them yet, but does this mean that it won't be including them as soon as someone realises?
I really like Debian and I have no plans to stop using it unless it stops being possible to do what I want. I'm impressed by the project's dedication to being so specific about licences, but sometimes I wonder how much of that will eventually come back to haunt it.
Not to mention the well-known Javascript Lemmings.
Hmmm... I read: "The last one happened around 1700, so another one is fairly likely in the near future."
Your interpretation might be different, but to me that's comparing an historical average with the recent past to predict the immediate future, which is what I was commenting on. Anyway, I've enjoyed reading the responses to my comment. As I said, I'm on second-hand information.
Thanks for the correction.
This is just a small nit-pick with this assertion. Sorry for dragging it out as I have.
I don't know where you're getting your information from, but I also have a good friend who's a geophysicist, and I know a lot of others in the Earth Sciences department next door to my own. (We have a lot of major earthquake-causing fault lines in New Zealand, and it's a popular place for geophysicists from around the world to hang out.) If someone knows more then I'd welcome a correction, but my understanding is that earthquakes are still almost entirely unpredictible with today's knowledge.
We can look at the history of any site and calculate an average earthquake frequency, just as your site averages every 200 years. If you look a short time into the future, it'll probably remain an average of about 200 years.
But in Earth science terms, a "short" time is millions of years. When the frame of reference is so large, attempting to predict events accurately to hundreds of years is hopeless. An historical average of a big quake every 200 years really doesn't tell us anything useful about the immediate future of a site in terms comparable with a human lifetime.
I've heard people argue about how the stress is released after an earthquake and there's a relation. I think this is a very common misconception that seems intuitive, but doesn't really match the facts as we know. All the geophysicists I've spoken to have claimed that this is mostly fiction, though.
The biggest problem with this approach is that there's no clear and accurate way to even estimate, let alone measure, how much stress there was in the first place. Most of what we can guess simply comes from analysing historical records, and accurate records often don't even exist beyond the past few hundred years, if even that. You might have thought that 7th magnitude quake was big and released a lot of stress, until an 8th magnitude quake suddenly releases ten times as much energy, with the earlier quake having made a negligible dent in its force.
If you look historically at the quakes in your area, you'll probably see that they're not set at all evenly. Even if you've gone for 300 years without an earthquake, chances are it's about as likely that you'll get a big one tommorrow as it is that you'll get a big one 1000 years from now. Perhaps you'll get 3 or 4 big ones in the next 3 or 4 decades.
This isn't to say that it's not worth preparing for, though. If you live on a fault, chances are that you'll at least get moderate earthquakes, and over a wide enough population, it's quite likely that some part of it will be hit every so often. (The media doesn't normally report about all of the places that didn't have earthquakes.) Good building standards and response strategies, for instance, are the reason that there may only be a few tens or hundreds of casualties in a well-off country, whereas it might be hundreds of thousands or millions of casualties for an equivalent quake in a third world country.
I'm not sure I agree.. or at least I don't see OpenOffice as being broken as much as it's simply different from Word. The problem is that those differences are making the two fundamentally incompatible in my view, but it's okay if you're not trying to force one to clone the other.
I'm not familiar with what you're referring to here, but I'm interested. Do you mean that something like paragraph styles should actually just be a character style attached to the line-break?
I've normally thought the model of treating paragraphs and characters separately as it's done now works very well, and it makes sense to me. WYSIWYG editors sometimes make it difficult to actually specify different styles between characters and paragraphs, though.
Can you suggest any references where I could read about what you're proposing?
What you're suggesting is exactly what the standard response is, but it doesn't solve the actual problem. I'll just comment on this one example and hopefully you'll see what I mean.
I assume we're referring to empty paragraphs within table cells, and you're suggesting that the paragraph spacing be removed if it's empty. If you mean that the empty paragraph itself should be removed, you'll have to explain further, because I don't understand what you mean to replace it with.
The problem here is that it still messes up the work-flow for anyone who's authoring a document with the intent of having someone else fill in the gaps.
Imagine, for instance, Person One, who used MS Word to author a template so that Person Two could fill in the empty table cells. There's a very good chance that Person One will set the paragraph spacing in advance, so that it'll look tidier and be easier to manage when it's returned. They do, and it's not shown on their end, due to Word policy of not showing spacing on empty paragraphs in table cells.
Person Two then imports the document into OpenOffice. OpenOffice removes the paragraph spacing with the input filter so that the document looks identical as it did in Word.
There's a clear problem here, though. If Person Two decides to add text to a table cell, it will no longer have paragraph spacing. This is when it would be necessary to implement a quirks mode to be compatible. Otherwise, Person Two will have to send back a document that's different from the one that Person One produced in more ways than just the text that they added.
Yes, you can add all sorts of extra meta information to a paragraph element style, such as an option for "Show paragraph spacing when empty", for instance. The problem is that this effectively is a quirks mode, and because of that it's a user interface nightmare. It creates a situation whereby there are more and more ways to get an identical visual effect, causing it to be harder and harder for regular users to figure out why on earth their document is acting strangely when they enter text.
In that case, you'll be using an application that acts differently in some very suttle ways depending on what type of file it opened. As I mentioned earlier, it has the potential to be a usability nightmare. That's something of a dilemma that I think OpenOffice.org may soon find itself in, if it hasn't already.
I'll focus on Word Processors with this comment because that's mostly what I care about, but I think it's applicable to most of what's in a typical office suite.
My point is really that an MS Word Document and the behaviour associated with it is something that simply can't be emulated without going all out and making an exact clone of Word. The document's just data that can be read and written once it's understood, but the way that an application treats that data during editing and interaction with the user is a whole lot more complicated, and perhaps not even solvable. I'm not sure if people are recognising this issue as being so much of a problem as it really is.
Even if a document looks similar or identical when it's opened, the expected behaviour of the editing (and therefore what's going to be sent back to someone with a different application) will be different depending on what application someone happens to be using. Unless people are only passing documents around without the intention of them being edited by other people, exact compatibility would be incredibly difficult. So is it worth bothering?
People really need to decide if an exact clone is what they want. If it is, then great, and perhaps that's what OpenOffice.org is destined to become. But I'm not sure I'd want to use that application. Being able to read and write MS Word documents is a great and often essential thing, but I'd still rather have the flexibility of being able to use a better Word Processor, as well as one that's consistent with how it behaves (rather than having different editing modes). An alternative would be using either MS Word, or a word processor that clones whatever behaviour Microsoft decides is "best for everyone". Otherwise, platform issues aside, there's little reason for many people to bother considering anything else, and there's little possibility that serious competition in Office suites will ever emerge.
I'm convinced that the biggest problem is that full compatibility goes well beyond file formats. It's also about application behaviour, for which there aren't any documented standards. We've gotten to the point where the file formats are understood, but behaviour compatibility is still incredibly tricky.
I use OpenOffice as much as possible these days, albeit mostly for word processing. Personally I've encountered a few less annoyances with OpenOffice, particularly with things like moderate table manipulation. Unless forced to, though, I still won't trust OpenOffice to save to .doc correctly without checking it... at least not with anything important.
In particular, I've noticed that at least some of the incompatibilities are semantic differences in the object model. I'm not sure how they can be fixed in 100% of cases.
One example that comes to mind is with paragraph spacing in tables. If a paragraph is empty, OpenOffice still includes the paragraph spacing, causing the table row height to be slightly higher. MS Word, on the other hand, ignores the paragraph spacing unless there's actually text in the paragraph.
The MS Word behaviour seems like a bug, or just another one of the little annoyances that I referred to before, but it's one that everyone in Word is used to. If you use OpenOffice.org to open an MS Word file that has tables, empty paragraphs in some of the cells, and paragraph spacing specified on those paragraphs, there's a very likely possibility that the pages won't line up.
Some people might think that the OpenOffice import filter could simply recognise that it's an MS Word file, and turn off paragraph spacing on the import -- causing the table cells to be the same height. It's not that simple, though, because if somebody decides to type in the document and send it back, it'll be messed up all over again.
The only way that OpenOffice.org can be truly compatible with MS Word is to keep track of whether the opened document was a Word document. Then it would need to either:
Personally I'd hate the second option. I've come to like the OpenOffice.org document model a lot more, simply because it seems more predictible and consistent, and doesn't have a lot of little annoyances that the MS Word model has, at least in the ways that I use it. It'd also mess up a whole lot of older OpenOffice documents that I have lying around if they suddenly opened with a different policy on things like paragraph spacing.
The first option seems very complicated, though. It's asking OpenOffice to not just simulate the document formats, but also the behaviour of another proprietary application. It's also asking the user to keep track of all the possible different ways that OpenOffice.org might act at any given time. That in itself could turn into a UI nightmare, because suddenly the user interface of the application is much less consistent. (Keep in mind that we're talking about regular users, here. It's not like Mozilla quirks mode, where the main people dealing with the differences are web developers.)
I don't know exactly what the best way is to fix this, but it's definitely not as easy as just writing decent import and export filters. Personally I'm just fortunate enough that I don't have to share my documents very often. When I do give someone a Word-format document, though, I make a point to at least check it in Word whenever possible before handing it over.
I don't know specifically about their affiliations, but if you trust the article, page 2 says:
In principle, this sounds like a very good thing. Apparently, he's kicking out people whom he believes were hired more for their political affiliations than their competance. Before taking this as it's written, however, can anyone comment on any political affiliations of Griffin himself? For all we know, and as I think you're implying, his definition of competance might be synonymous with republican.
To me it sounds as if the problem is at least as much with your media as it is with your federal government.
Who votes for the journalists?
I don't mean any disrespect, but I think you're giving too much credit to Windows software with this comment. Being graphical and sometimes consistent does not by itself make something "easy and intuitive to use", even though a lot of people seem to equate those qualities with being visually appealing. I'm not trying to imply that any unix-derived software does any better, but I don't think it's correct to start applying labels such as "easy" and "intuitive" until somebody who's never previously seen or used the software can sit down and accomplish exactly what they want, and quickly.
I know lots of people who are very proficient at using certain Windows software. It's because they use it for tasks that they do frequently. They know the software and they've come to understand it through years of practice. At some point, though, they still had to take the leap to comprehend the idea of a "task" fitting inside a generic electronic box that supposedly does everything.
Many of the same people become incredibly frustrated as soon as they try to use software with which they're not familiar. It doesn't work in ways they expect, and often it'll use concepts that they've never been acquainted with. The fact that it's Windows, graphical, or even roughly consistent with other applications, makes no difference for it being easy and intuitive, at least beyond being able to tell the difference between a button and a menu option, for instance.
As it is, I don't personally think that most traditional software has a hope of ever really being intuitive and easy in this way. The concept of taking a generic box and having it do a million different things is just to complex. The only time that software, and computers in general, will be truly intuitive and easy to understand is when people no longer think of it as software, or computers for that matter.
A basic wrist-watch (without lots of other modes) is a really good example. Using it to find the time is an operation that most people will figure out simply by looking at it and noticing the time. It's not necessary to understand anything about computers, or how to put the watch into 'time-display' mode, to understand how to get the time from it. For most other tasks, we've still a very long way to go before software becomes "intuitive and easy". I doubt word processors will reach that point, for instance, until they're as obvious to use as something like a pen and paper. All that software really does at the moment is to make a lot of things possible that weren't possible before.
I use linux, and I prefer it over Windows at the moment. Part of this decision is because I've invested time in learning about it, and I'm happy with the relatively expert user interface that it offers for me to get what I want done more efficiently. My preferred WM is WindowMaker, because I like its light-weight feel compared with KDE or Gnome (plus it's supported by Debian). In an ideal design, though, there shouldn't be any serious difference between an expert and beginner interface, because everyone should simply be able to do exactly what they want to do efficiently and quickly.
I don't see why it's ironic. As uninformed as some slashdot posts are, there are also a lot of users who recognise that copyright makes a lot of sense, and is actually useful. It's the enforcement of copyright that allows the GPL and the GFDL to work. What many people here do complain about is the never-ending extentions of copyright, arguably against the general public interest, and allegedly because corporations have bought off politicians.
This may be a joke, but it was copied verbatim without providing the copyright notice, which is required by the GNU Free Documentation Licence. It's a copyright violation, and to ignore it as irrelevant would be hypocritical and ironic in itself. (Not to mention illegal.)
I don't see what the issue is with this "eventual return" thing. I live in New Zealand, which also has a relatively low cost of living.
For a lot of people here, when they go overseas, they don't even bother trying to save the money so they can travel. There's little point, because the New Zealand dollar isn't worth a lot in terms of cost-of-living overseas. What people get paid here is perfectly adequate for living here, but it's much less than what's needed elsewhere. (We do get a lot of overseas tourists, because it's a comparably cheap place to visit.)
Instead, they go overseas for a working holiday. ie. They work overseas to pay for living overseas. For people going on holiday, it definitely helps to be from the US or Europe and travelling to somewhere like India. But if you have the job once you get there, it's not as critical-an-issue to have a bulk amount in advance. You'll be working there anyway.
The new testing release is called etch.
I've been following the release-critical bugs, which were down to about 18 a few days ago but have since jumped up to about 30.
I thought it was only going to be released when there were 0 release-critical bugs. Does this mean that all those packages have been left out of sarge, as per the original announcement? Otherwise, what's going on?
I'm not from the US, but I've come to understand that there are endless conflicts of interest when it comes to promoting energy saving. Not the least of this is that nobody really wants to move energy generation out of the industrial age, which provides lots of jobs for Americans.
If there's one thing that power generation does, it's make sure that billions of dollars keeps cycling around the internal economy. Energy generation is something that hasn't yet been moved overseas, and ensuring that lots of money goes through the system for lots of output ensures that people are getting paid to do something.. no matter how redundant it is and no matter what more useful things they might be doing if they weren't wasting their time on it.
I think the only way the energy industry in the US will reform is if the customers actually do it themselves. The Federal government will only ever encourage people to spend as much money a possible. If the individual people and states realise that they could be saving money and energy by doing things differently, though, there's eventually going to be less demand for energy and the industry will be forced to reform itself.
Just to clarify, I don't think there's any doubt that it's a theory, just as anything else scientifically expressed. The problem with the US government is that it's refusing to acknowledge the difference in terminology. In science, it's usually still called a "theory", even when it's proven beyond doubt.
It's true that there's still a lot of dispute about global warming, justified or not, and it covers a lot of areas. eg:
There's a lot of reason to at the very least strongly suspect, however, that we're responsible, that we're in a lot of trouble, and that we have to act now to prevent a much bigger catastrophe than what we're otherwise heading for. Unfortunately the influential people in the US federal government don't even get as far as considering this, because it's more convenient to assume that a "theory" implies that there's no meaningful evidence behind it at all.
Whatever happens with Kyoto, I think it's great to see a few governments here and there finally leading by example, and getting involved in encouraging and providing incentives for saving energy. Hopefully it'll get some power saving technologies and industries much more established than they were before, and some people might actually begin to realise that there are more benefits to being efficient than possibly reducing the effects that power generation might have on the environment. Some of it may even carry over into countries that initially didn't sign on to Kyoto.
In New Zealand, where I am, finding ways to save energy has almost become a necessity, albeit one that the general population is noticing very slowly. (The main theme at the moment is everyone wanting to build more power stations, but nobody wanting them in their back yard.) Call it lack of planning if you like, but the power situation here is at the state where we're presently on the edge of getting brown-outs.
The geographic isolation makes it necessary to be entirely self-reliant with power generation, and saving energy becomes a definite alternative to generating more. (Not all the time, but certainly much of the time.) Being someone who's quite enthusiastic about reducing light pollution, it's helpful to finally have some government bodies to deal with whose actual purpose revolves around finding new ways to save energy, such as this one.
My understanding, from having spoken to people there, is that the US Federal government is comparably hopeless at implementing energy efficiency schemes, for whatever reason. (That'd mean less jobs for all those americans in the power generation industry, right?) Apparently it's a much healthier economy when a few billions of dollars extra are circulating, even if it is for energy that's not actually necessary... but whatever.
If you happen to have an interest in energy efficiency, though, I've heard that state governments and more local authorities in general are often a lot more receptive about promoting it. I presume that it's probably much easier in states that buy more energy from neighbouring states than they sell. eg. Calgary (okay, that's Canada but it's in the same direction as the US from here) recently went through a programme of replacing every one of their street lights. It's expected to pay off entirely within six to seven years, through operating costs of the lights alone.
The most irritating part of Microsoft's "innovation" for me, when I was a web developer, was when Microsoft ensured that all of their Javascript example code in MSDN used curved brackets () for array accesses instead of square brackets []. There was no difference nor advantage of supporting curved brackets except to provide yet another way that naive developers could accidentally make their code incompatible with non-IE products.
Trying to fix thousands of lines of co-worker's copied-and-pasted code was a nightmare.
I would like to see a list of businesses who do this, so I can either avoid them or be extra-scrupulous when buying from them. I'm particularly interested in those who do it without being up-front and clear to the customer about what they're doing.
It can't possibly be good publicity for a company for customers to be told that the price might be changed between the time that it's advertised and the time they purchase, certainly without it being clearly indicated next to the price. In many countries this would be considered a fradulent practice.
I think his "belief" is that it's silly for European people in European countries to make European laws for themselves that do nothing but disadvantage the European population. If a predominantly proprietary and intellectually restricted software industry does nothing to benefit Europe, and effectively inhibits it, why on Earth should Europeans bother to support one?
I can appreciate that.
Yep, I've used xephem a little bit, but I've never really been able to figure out its interface. Even though I tend to stay away from KDE for general use, xephem is just too inconsistent for me to use or bother learning properly. For a long time, I resorted to running Skymap (which I'd already paid for) under Wine.
I checked kstars out again a few months ago, though, and it's definitely come a long way since last time I used it. I still keep Skymap around, if only because I have more detailed catalogues for it that are useful when I'm doing more detailed work, and I trust myself to get any information I urgently need from it more quickly at this time, but I've been trying to train myself to use kstars a lot more.
And yeah, Cartes du Ciel looks like it'll be brilliant when it's done, but the linux build of it is still very experimental. I've tried it a couple of times, but getting it to compile seems incredibly difficult on my system. (It's ported from the Windows version which was written in some variant of Delphi, and to compensate there's an intermediate library underneath which also needs a specialist compiler, I think.) So far I've only been able to get the pre-compiled binary running, and not very reliably. It'd be easier in my case if it was packaged up for Debian and I could just apt-get it every so often, but I doubt that'll be happening for a while at least.
Does this then mean that Deer Park should also have the binary diff update feature? (Though presumably not supported with actual updates.)