Well, the problem with that is that's actually the direction they're going - not "Office for Android" specifically, but for platform independence. We already have Office 365, which works fine under Firefox for Ubuntu. At a guess I'd say that, actually Office for Android will probably become available soon after a proper Office RT comes out (that is, a platform--formerly-known-as-Metro version, not the current "We just recompiled the desktop version for ARM" thing.) - the hard bit is creating a touch version.
And whether it'll be "Office for Android" or simply "Office 365 version 17 now using jQuery Mobile" is open to question. But I think it'll happen.
Have you ever tried to do some simple task and found yourself overheating, recovering only by stopping all work and sitting under a fan running at full speed? Well, if so, you may have AMD...
So it's not all Europe, just "most Europe" whatever that means.
WP also says this:
It has been introduced to varying degrees in many countries and territories outside the U.S., including Argentina, Australia, Brazil, Canada, Chile, Colombia, Hong Kong, Ireland, Israel, Korea, Malaysia, New Zealand, the Philippines, Singapore, Spain, the UK, and Vietnam
Ireland, Spain and the UK, I'd be very surprised if there aren't other countries on that list.
FWIW, I find the sentence you quote raises more questions than answers. It's saying there's been a decline in tooth decay because of flouride toothpaste, but it makes no effort to explain whether the decline is the same as if water had been flouridated in that same area. It's subtly slimy, transmitting an inferance ("Flouridation isn't necessary because other countries don't use it and they've reduced their rates") that isn't backed by the arguement it uses.
Well, many of us did try various distros and in the end switched to Ubuntu because it was really the only one that "Just worked".
Now it's possible that's changed and Slackware or Fedora or Debian "just work" but I'm not getting that feel from what I'm reading of any of these distros. I'm still hearing the same moans about stuff that isn't quite integrated. The tragedy with Ubuntu is that it's slipped and is heading towards the lack of quality we saw with distros five years ago.
In any case, the point is that Ubuntu works the way we want. So our first choice is always going to be something that works the way Ubuntu did until it started to get annoying.
BTW my other problem with the OR (original reply) was that it assumed that we want to punish Canonical for daring fail us, and that's why we wanted to switch, to send some kind of message.
But I don't want to. Actually I hate the idea of treating Canonical in that way, I'm reluctant to switch to Mint, and if there was a GCUbuntu (like Kubuntu or Xubuntu, but with the new Gnome Classic system) I'd probably jump on that instead - leaving aside the ease issues of switching to such a branch.
Why? First, because Canonical did such a great job in the beginning anyway. For a time, we genuinely had a platform that was close to being as usable as the most usable platform (Mac OS X) while having the flexibility, power, and support of the most popular platform (Windows). And Canonical has been a victim here not of hubris but of a lack of it. It wanted to do better.
I like the fact it wanted to, and I like the fact they tried. I think Unity brings great ideas to the table, the problem is it doesn't, ultimately, work. It's not a good system. The Mir/Wayland fiasco is another example, not just of Ubuntu but of the community as a whole, that sees problems with X11 and wants to do better, but again I just don't see how it's better - impossible to measure in the real world benchmarks do not a better display platform make.
I think there's a call for GCUbuntu, and I hope it's heard. And if I do switch to Mint I'll be doing so reluctantly, hoping that Canonical can get things right over time.
Neither Mir nor Wayland are X servers, though they do provide an add-on X server as a shim to allow "legacy" apps to run. And before anyone complains "What's the difference", it's the same as the difference between Windows 7, and Ubuntu (which provides Wine as a shim to allow "legacy" apps to run...)
I think if what he wants is a supported operating system that's as close as possible to Ubuntu as it is now but without the newer changes he dislikes, switching to something that isn't remotely related to Ubuntu isn't going to help him. That'd be like a Windows 7 user switching to Mac OS X because he doesn't like Windows 8.
That's not how car dealerships work. You don't walk into a dealership that has both Ford and GM franchises and see, say, Mercury Grand Marquis's next to the Chevy Suburbans. Dealerships are generally required to keep seperate lots, virtually always by manufacturer, and frequently even by brand.
Apple? Apple didn't start Apple Stores because Best Buy's sales people were saying "You like this iMac? I don't want to sell it to you, why don't you buy this HP instead?", Apple wasn't, by and large, having much luck getting Macs into large chain stores in the first place. By and large, you had to get it from an Apple dealer, and Apple dealers were too few and far between.
With plenty of cash to use, Apple bankrolled the creation of an owned-and-operated dealer network, which had the side effect that they had more control over the branding and buying experience.
Yes, I'm sure Musk is after controlling the branding and buying experience, but what he and Apple have in common is that when the Apple Store system first started, Macs were a platform that virtually nobody was interested in, and as a result, few stores wanted to sell. Being at the mercy of the car dealership system means, in practice, not having a presence in much of the country, as nobody wants to own a car dealership that sells one car a month on a good month.
"I'm really not all that worried about re-election on the basis of this issue, the thing is Elon, there are more car dealerships in my state than there are voters who can afford to drop a hundred grand on a glorified roadster. Now, if you want to make a case to me about justice or even the economics of allowing direct sales, go right ahead, but quite honestly, you're barking up the wrong tree with the voters thing."
Preventing one state from erecting barriers to trade with another is exactly what that clause had in mind.
I think it's more of a gray area than that. After all, Texas can easily argue both that they're not doing anything most other states aren't doing, and more importantly, that their rules are non-discriminatory and have nothing to do with in-state or out-of-state businesses. That is to say, if Texas had a car industry, it would be bound by the same marketing rules, and that the rules have applied to Ford, GM, and other out-of-state manufacturers for decades with no apparent problem.
As I've said before, FWIW, SCOTUS is not the legislature, and it doesn't exist to protect us from stupid decisions made by legislatures we elected in the first place. It has a relatively narrow scope to shoot down bad laws, and unfortunately "The law is clearly stupid" is not one. If it was the case that its job was to protect us from bad legislation then:
1. I wouldn't want the current members to be the current members. Would you? Nine elderly partisans some of whom appear to be batshit insane regardless of their grasp of law.
2. We'd already have much fewer stupid laws.
I don't give a crap because it's not even slightly comparable. JPEG is not a proprietary format, it's documented, it's a defacto standard, and it's easy for web browser creators to incorporate functionality to implement it (whether using libpr0n or otherwise) into their own browsers, which they do.
It is not even in the same ballpark as unknown proprietary plug-ins that depend upon APIs that are not standardized.
While there are many misogynist myths about women that have a basis in truth, I find it highly unlikely that women exist as a single, collective, shared intelligence, as would be required to accept the logic above. That's assuming you didn't make the mistake of believing the GP was claiming that while women-as-sex-objects might cause long term harm to women generally, it would only cause harm to women who themselves engage in such marketing and no other women.
Yes, opinions about whether DRM should be in HTML vary, and some people are very opposed to it, and have a perfect right to be. Reasonable people can disagree.
However, the proposal isn't DRM in HTML, it's worse. It's a way to call DRM plug-ins. It doesn't standardize the DRM, or the plug-ins, or the language the plug-ins are written in, or in any other way reflect the notion that HTML is a platform in and of itself, independent of the layer it runs over.
Indeed, it doesn't specify anything that cannot, today, be done via plug-ins.
As such, it's a stupid addition to web standards. It's pointless. It will not make studios suddenly excited about using the web, because if they're excited about using the web they're already using it with the existing plug-in framework. And it will not stop content providers who demand, rightly or wrongly, DRM, fleeing the web, because it doesn't add anything.
This proposal should not appear in the HTML standards. It should never have even been considered for inclusion.
I don't actually agree with the principle that the executive's role is defend laws, good or bad. Enforce them, yes, but it seems to be a politicized use of taxpayers money for a neutral executive to defend the constitutionality of a law, and, where officials are obliged to swear an oath to the constitution, morally abhorent too.
This comment only makes internal sense if you believe that the purpose of politics is decide how much power the government has instead of what the government should do with it.
To put it another way: yes, Ron Paul believes that governments should only have the limited powers he agrees with, and should be deprived of those he doesn't agree with. But so did Stalin, so that's a dumb basis for determining the political leanings of any human being.
This is probably the most incoherent argument I've read today. There is literally no combination of sentences that forms a cogent line of reasoning.
I appreciate you're angry at the decision for some reason, but perhaps you need to calm down and rewrite what your thoughts are once it's a little easier for you to write rationally.
Well your problem here is that you've read some quotation marks where there are none. I wasn't quoting the FTC, I was indicating what the FTC is trying to achieve and asking for. Taking one word I've written, ascribing a meaning that I never intended and that you have no real right to assume I intended, and then criticising the FTC's position (who haven't used the word "nobody") by proxy, isn't especially helpful.
I don't think anyone's arguing the web solution is perfect, but ultimately there is a massive demand for a distributed client server platform that's independent of any one vendor, and that's what's brought us here. That demand isn't just from "content providers" (I don't mean the RIAA/MPAA members here, I mean the wider group that includes everyone from bloggers to game developers), but also from users who are used to the basic web "visit a webpage and it just works" model and want that to be the way everything else works.
(BTW, not relevent to this discussion but FWIW I feel Javascript is actually a very underrated language, it's a shame its lowly beginnings and the fact we're still stuck as JS programmers interacting with the outside world using the DOM, are preventing it from being taken seriously. 99% of the time when I hear criticism it's either by people unaware of what it can do - hell, even Java's still catching up - or by people who confuse languages with APIs and whose beef is actually with the DOM.)
Because the web is increasingly an application delivery platform, and modern web standards reflect that. Many people may not like it particularly, but that's what it is.
Google almost never gives me anything remotely useful for rarer and non-trivial searches.
* Google will, almost always, rewrite the query to something it can find over a million search results for and then require you click on a link, easily missed, to get the query you actually had.
* On being told "No, I really wanted to search for..." it will then ignore your search query and come up with anything related to one word in your query rather than the entire thing.
At this point, you end up sticking plusses and quotation marks in various combinations to try to get something (even a "There's nothing on the entire internet about this, sorry" message would be useful because then you can work on something else rather than plowing through irrelevent search results trying to find out if something obscure in one of those pages actually matches), and nine times out of ten, Google will still ignore the query and pretend you're not asking for what you're asking for.
Google is shit for rarer and non-trivial searches. Is it better than Bing anyway? Possibly, I've never spent long enough switched to Bing to evaluate it (yes, Bing is just as shitty in my experience), but quite honestly, pretending it's optimized for these kinds of queries in some way that Bing isn't suggests to me you haven't used it in ten years.
Bing is Google's equal. Neither are remotely as good as Google was five years ago.
Because it's a troll. It's basically an abuse of statistics to cherry pick a range and then turn around and say "Aha, reality matches what I'm saying!". Ten years? They show warming. 20? Warming. 30? Warming. Do I need go on? But right now, if you pick 15 years (apparently, I thought it was 17? Or maybe it was 17 last year?) you can pretend there's been a tiny bit of cooling.
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Well, the problem with that is that's actually the direction they're going - not "Office for Android" specifically, but for platform independence. We already have Office 365, which works fine under Firefox for Ubuntu. At a guess I'd say that, actually Office for Android will probably become available soon after a proper Office RT comes out (that is, a platform--formerly-known-as-Metro version, not the current "We just recompiled the desktop version for ARM" thing.) - the hard bit is creating a touch version.
And whether it'll be "Office for Android" or simply "Office 365 version 17 now using jQuery Mobile" is open to question. But I think it'll happen.
Have you ever tried to do some simple task and found yourself overheating, recovering only by stopping all work and sitting under a fan running at full speed? Well, if so, you may have AMD...
So it's not all Europe, just "most Europe" whatever that means.
WP also says this:
Ireland, Spain and the UK, I'd be very surprised if there aren't other countries on that list.
FWIW, I find the sentence you quote raises more questions than answers. It's saying there's been a decline in tooth decay because of flouride toothpaste, but it makes no effort to explain whether the decline is the same as if water had been flouridated in that same area. It's subtly slimy, transmitting an inferance ("Flouridation isn't necessary because other countries don't use it and they've reduced their rates") that isn't backed by the arguement it uses.
Nasty.
Well, many of us did try various distros and in the end switched to Ubuntu because it was really the only one that "Just worked".
Now it's possible that's changed and Slackware or Fedora or Debian "just work" but I'm not getting that feel from what I'm reading of any of these distros. I'm still hearing the same moans about stuff that isn't quite integrated. The tragedy with Ubuntu is that it's slipped and is heading towards the lack of quality we saw with distros five years ago.
In any case, the point is that Ubuntu works the way we want. So our first choice is always going to be something that works the way Ubuntu did until it started to get annoying.
BTW my other problem with the OR (original reply) was that it assumed that we want to punish Canonical for daring fail us, and that's why we wanted to switch, to send some kind of message.
But I don't want to. Actually I hate the idea of treating Canonical in that way, I'm reluctant to switch to Mint, and if there was a GCUbuntu (like Kubuntu or Xubuntu, but with the new Gnome Classic system) I'd probably jump on that instead - leaving aside the ease issues of switching to such a branch.
Why? First, because Canonical did such a great job in the beginning anyway. For a time, we genuinely had a platform that was close to being as usable as the most usable platform (Mac OS X) while having the flexibility, power, and support of the most popular platform (Windows). And Canonical has been a victim here not of hubris but of a lack of it. It wanted to do better.
I like the fact it wanted to, and I like the fact they tried. I think Unity brings great ideas to the table, the problem is it doesn't, ultimately, work. It's not a good system. The Mir/Wayland fiasco is another example, not just of Ubuntu but of the community as a whole, that sees problems with X11 and wants to do better, but again I just don't see how it's better - impossible to measure in the real world benchmarks do not a better display platform make.
I think there's a call for GCUbuntu, and I hope it's heard. And if I do switch to Mint I'll be doing so reluctantly, hoping that Canonical can get things right over time.
Neither Mir nor Wayland are X servers, though they do provide an add-on X server as a shim to allow "legacy" apps to run. And before anyone complains "What's the difference", it's the same as the difference between Windows 7, and Ubuntu (which provides Wine as a shim to allow "legacy" apps to run...)
I can't speak for the rest of Europe but when I lived in Britain they fluoridated the water.
I'm not even sure that's accurate. One signal is the "inverse" of the other? Then how is it Wi-Fi?
I think if what he wants is a supported operating system that's as close as possible to Ubuntu as it is now but without the newer changes he dislikes, switching to something that isn't remotely related to Ubuntu isn't going to help him. That'd be like a Windows 7 user switching to Mac OS X because he doesn't like Windows 8.
That's not how car dealerships work. You don't walk into a dealership that has both Ford and GM franchises and see, say, Mercury Grand Marquis's next to the Chevy Suburbans. Dealerships are generally required to keep seperate lots, virtually always by manufacturer, and frequently even by brand.
Apple? Apple didn't start Apple Stores because Best Buy's sales people were saying "You like this iMac? I don't want to sell it to you, why don't you buy this HP instead?", Apple wasn't, by and large, having much luck getting Macs into large chain stores in the first place. By and large, you had to get it from an Apple dealer, and Apple dealers were too few and far between.
With plenty of cash to use, Apple bankrolled the creation of an owned-and-operated dealer network, which had the side effect that they had more control over the branding and buying experience.
Yes, I'm sure Musk is after controlling the branding and buying experience, but what he and Apple have in common is that when the Apple Store system first started, Macs were a platform that virtually nobody was interested in, and as a result, few stores wanted to sell. Being at the mercy of the car dealership system means, in practice, not having a presence in much of the country, as nobody wants to own a car dealership that sells one car a month on a good month.
"I'm really not all that worried about re-election on the basis of this issue, the thing is Elon, there are more car dealerships in my state than there are voters who can afford to drop a hundred grand on a glorified roadster. Now, if you want to make a case to me about justice or even the economics of allowing direct sales, go right ahead, but quite honestly, you're barking up the wrong tree with the voters thing."
I think it's more of a gray area than that. After all, Texas can easily argue both that they're not doing anything most other states aren't doing, and more importantly, that their rules are non-discriminatory and have nothing to do with in-state or out-of-state businesses. That is to say, if Texas had a car industry, it would be bound by the same marketing rules, and that the rules have applied to Ford, GM, and other out-of-state manufacturers for decades with no apparent problem.
As I've said before, FWIW, SCOTUS is not the legislature, and it doesn't exist to protect us from stupid decisions made by legislatures we elected in the first place. It has a relatively narrow scope to shoot down bad laws, and unfortunately "The law is clearly stupid" is not one. If it was the case that its job was to protect us from bad legislation then:
1. I wouldn't want the current members to be the current members. Would you? Nine elderly partisans some of whom appear to be batshit insane regardless of their grasp of law.
2. We'd already have much fewer stupid laws.
I don't give a crap because it's not even slightly comparable. JPEG is not a proprietary format, it's documented, it's a defacto standard, and it's easy for web browser creators to incorporate functionality to implement it (whether using libpr0n or otherwise) into their own browsers, which they do.
It is not even in the same ballpark as unknown proprietary plug-ins that depend upon APIs that are not standardized.
While there are many misogynist myths about women that have a basis in truth, I find it highly unlikely that women exist as a single, collective, shared intelligence, as would be required to accept the logic above. That's assuming you didn't make the mistake of believing the GP was claiming that while women-as-sex-objects might cause long term harm to women generally, it would only cause harm to women who themselves engage in such marketing and no other women.
Dr Jaffe misses the point.
Yes, opinions about whether DRM should be in HTML vary, and some people are very opposed to it, and have a perfect right to be. Reasonable people can disagree.
However, the proposal isn't DRM in HTML, it's worse. It's a way to call DRM plug-ins. It doesn't standardize the DRM, or the plug-ins, or the language the plug-ins are written in, or in any other way reflect the notion that HTML is a platform in and of itself, independent of the layer it runs over.
Indeed, it doesn't specify anything that cannot, today, be done via plug-ins.
As such, it's a stupid addition to web standards. It's pointless. It will not make studios suddenly excited about using the web, because if they're excited about using the web they're already using it with the existing plug-in framework. And it will not stop content providers who demand, rightly or wrongly, DRM, fleeing the web, because it doesn't add anything.
This proposal should not appear in the HTML standards. It should never have even been considered for inclusion.
I don't actually agree with the principle that the executive's role is defend laws, good or bad. Enforce them, yes, but it seems to be a politicized use of taxpayers money for a neutral executive to defend the constitutionality of a law, and, where officials are obliged to swear an oath to the constitution, morally abhorent too.
This comment only makes internal sense if you believe that the purpose of politics is decide how much power the government has instead of what the government should do with it.
To put it another way: yes, Ron Paul believes that governments should only have the limited powers he agrees with, and should be deprived of those he doesn't agree with. But so did Stalin, so that's a dumb basis for determining the political leanings of any human being.
This is probably the most incoherent argument I've read today. There is literally no combination of sentences that forms a cogent line of reasoning.
I appreciate you're angry at the decision for some reason, but perhaps you need to calm down and rewrite what your thoughts are once it's a little easier for you to write rationally.
Well your problem here is that you've read some quotation marks where there are none. I wasn't quoting the FTC, I was indicating what the FTC is trying to achieve and asking for. Taking one word I've written, ascribing a meaning that I never intended and that you have no real right to assume I intended, and then criticising the FTC's position (who haven't used the word "nobody") by proxy, isn't especially helpful.
I don't think anyone's arguing the web solution is perfect, but ultimately there is a massive demand for a distributed client server platform that's independent of any one vendor, and that's what's brought us here. That demand isn't just from "content providers" (I don't mean the RIAA/MPAA members here, I mean the wider group that includes everyone from bloggers to game developers), but also from users who are used to the basic web "visit a webpage and it just works" model and want that to be the way everything else works.
(BTW, not relevent to this discussion but FWIW I feel Javascript is actually a very underrated language, it's a shame its lowly beginnings and the fact we're still stuck as JS programmers interacting with the outside world using the DOM, are preventing it from being taken seriously. 99% of the time when I hear criticism it's either by people unaware of what it can do - hell, even Java's still catching up - or by people who confuse languages with APIs and whose beef is actually with the DOM.)
I say make them use the BLINK tag.
This isn't about number of ads. It's about clearly labelling ads as ads.
Google's front page can look like a NASCAR car and it'll be fine as far as the FTC is concerned as long as nobody mistakes the ads for search results.
Because the web is increasingly an application delivery platform, and modern web standards reflect that. Many people may not like it particularly, but that's what it is.
Uh, what? Seriously?
Google almost never gives me anything remotely useful for rarer and non-trivial searches.
* Google will, almost always, rewrite the query to something it can find over a million search results for and then require you click on a link, easily missed, to get the query you actually had. ..." it will then ignore your search query and come up with anything related to one word in your query rather than the entire thing.
* On being told "No, I really wanted to search for
At this point, you end up sticking plusses and quotation marks in various combinations to try to get something (even a "There's nothing on the entire internet about this, sorry" message would be useful because then you can work on something else rather than plowing through irrelevent search results trying to find out if something obscure in one of those pages actually matches), and nine times out of ten, Google will still ignore the query and pretend you're not asking for what you're asking for.
Google is shit for rarer and non-trivial searches. Is it better than Bing anyway? Possibly, I've never spent long enough switched to Bing to evaluate it (yes, Bing is just as shitty in my experience), but quite honestly, pretending it's optimized for these kinds of queries in some way that Bing isn't suggests to me you haven't used it in ten years.
Bing is Google's equal. Neither are remotely as good as Google was five years ago.
Because it's a troll. It's basically an abuse of statistics to cherry pick a range and then turn around and say "Aha, reality matches what I'm saying!". Ten years? They show warming. 20? Warming. 30? Warming. Do I need go on? But right now, if you pick 15 years (apparently, I thought it was 17? Or maybe it was 17 last year?) you can pretend there's been a tiny bit of cooling.
Yep, software houses will now have the choice of literally ones of seasoned FreeBSD game developers to choose from!
Coming soon from Electronic Arts: Nethack Freeplay!