You're right, but it is worth noting that the timing system itself does have a resolution greater than 1/100 of a second, they just don't show the extra digits. However, they did go to the 1/1000th resolution once. in 1972. You can read about it here:
FINA eventually decided that no pool could possibly be built so precise that using 1/1000th of a second would be a fair way to judge a final, so they allow ties on the 1/100th resolution. Didn't do the guy who lost by 2/1000th of a second in '72 any good though.
did not garner support from two-thirds of the members of the ISO Technical Management Board and IEC Standardization Management Board, which is required by ISO/IEC rules to keep the appeals process alive.
Yeah, after actually watching the team, I take it back. Their appearance, combined with the evidence out there that they are not 16, are pretty convincing.
No doubt that on merit, they deserved to beat the Americans. Their performances were great. But they almost certainly weren't eligible to compete.
However, I doubt the IOC would want to take away that medal, at least not right now.
There are ways to slow development though that allow someone who is 16 years chronologically to be much younger biologically. Some mature slower to begin with, and there are techniques than can be used beyond that.
With a pool of 1.3billion people to choose from, it is possible to get a small team of athletes who just naturally mature slowly. But who knows how they're actually achieving it.
What exactly is stopping Debian from adopting the changes that Ubuntu makes? It is all open source remember. Debian simply has different goals and policies than Ubuntu. Ubuntu gains from Debian's work by using them as the base for their distro, and Debian gains from the many contributions that the Ubuntu devs contribute to Debian.
Actually, there will be more minutes of sunlight in a day the further north you go. Of course, the weather in Alberta hasn't exactly been great this week. Tornado near Vulcan yesterday, and lots of storms all week.
A summary for a science article on a geek website, and they give a temperature in Fahrenheit? And don't even specify the unit? Bad Slashdot!
Though I suppose it would be much more of a surprise to see trees thriving in a "cool" 70C, and therefore more newsworthy. Perhaps they were just going for a sensational headline.
I think you mean Windows 98 to Windows ME. ME was basically a small update to 98, same kernel and basically the same UI. Windows 2000 was based on NT4. Windows 2000 had a similar UI skin to the Win9x series, and did include the win32 bits, but was far different besides that.
I guess we'll see if the Conservatives really care about passing this bill or not. If they want it to pass, they'll make it a confidence motion, and either force it through or force an election. If not, they're just going through motions, doing what was asked of them by those companies who bribe/support them, but not really willing to risk their government over it.
This government's end is long overdue. Unfortunately a new election would give us pretty much the same results, unless something major happens.
I'd have to think that is their plan. They were going to bring this forward months ago already, but there was so much opposition, that they decided to leave it alone for a while. Obviously they have no intention of actually making the changes that Canadians want to see. They are just looking for a way to sneak it through without too many people noticing.
That was supposed to have a 'Nelson' close tag. I really ought to proofread. Oh well.
Glad to hear of this decision from ISO. I wonder if MS was anticipating this all along, hence the fact ODF will be included in the next MS Office, while OOXML will not be.
Sure, Microsoft can prop up the monopoly by offering free or nearly free Windows to those small groups that threaten to use Linux. So far they've been relatively effective at suppressing the small revolts, and some companies have been very effective at using the threat as leverage against MS.
But as this becomes more common, what are they going to do? They can't make a business of giving Windows away for free. At some point they may have to stick to their guns on price, and just hope the OEMs that are unwilling to pay will sink instead of swim.
We're definitely in interesting times: - Wine 1.0 - iPhone and Safari - ODF support in MS Office - Linux ROMs built into motherboards - Dell and Ubuntu, Ubuntu Netbook, ASUS Eee PC - and now Acer
Well, I didn't say it was as good as ODF on paper. OOXML reimplements a bunch of things that could be done with existing XML standards. ODF saves many pages by not reinventing the wheel. And also by not worrying about compatibility with past formats (which is probably the single biggest design difference between the two).
The OOXML standard itself, while bloated and faulty in many ways, is not the actual issue to a lot of people. It wouldn't be the first time we had to work with a bloated and slightly ugly standard in the IT world. The ISO process that fast tracked it to ratification is where there are bigger issues.
Of course OOXML wouldn't exist at all if it weren't for ODF, so the format itself and the process it has gone through are pretty difficult to separate. We all know MS isn't really that interested in the technical specification itself either. It is all about competing with ODF, confusing the marketplace with purposefully similar names, and pollution of the term "open" and "ISO standard". This was spurred by government's requiring ODF, not by the technical needs of MS.
Yeah, there are legitimate problems with OOXML and ODF from a technical standpoint. OOXML on paper isn't necessarily a horrible example of an open format. And it is too early to say whether the way it is implemented will be open and interoperable.
I think the bigger problem is the ISO process that saw OOXML get fast tracked as a standard, despite not being even close to meeting the requirements for it. What was supposed to be a technical forum was turned into a pissing match between IBM/Sun and MS. The voting process was so corrupt as to be useless. Microsoft deserves the majority (though not the entirely) of the blame for that.
Referencing OOXML as the way MS is moving towards does tend to bring to mind the corruption of ISO more than the file format itself, even though I'm sure that it wasn't what the MS guy actually intended to say when he sent his email.
There is some truth to that. ODF 1.0 had some rough edges where things aren't specified as fully as they need to be. The later drafts help to fix these problems. Even with the poorly defined parts of ODF 1.0, people were able to look at the OpenOffice.org code and just take the motto "do it like OpenOffice does". This is obviously not ideal for an ISO standard, and does need to get fixed. But open source did provide a nice workaround here, since there was at least one reference implementation available to look at on top of the spec itself.
OOXML is very bad for doing its own thing where it could instead be using existing XML standards. I think this makes ODF a better starting point for creating an open XML format for documents than OOXML. From a technical standpoint, ODF has many advantages over OOXML due to a cleaner design. And where it has weaknesses, they are much more likely to be fixed.
OOXML also has no actual implementations yet. The company that pushed the standard may never actually implement it themselves, let alone anyone else. Interop is likely going to be a nightmare. The standard is so large that there are bound to be many rough edges where interpretations differ. And in this case, there is no reference implementation to use. You could try looking at Office 2007 documents, but they aren't actually standard OOXML either. Worse yet, most office suits will want to handle Office 2007 files with the same filter, so the code will need to deal with multiple variants of this "standard".
So I agree that ODF does need to be cleaned up. We need to make sure compatibility is actually being delivered. I think the promises and hype from the ODF camp are greater than the reality right now. But it is pretty premature to say that OOXML doesn't have compatibility issues, given there are no implementations yet. Though neither is perfect, I have much more hope for ODF than I do OOXML.
OOXML is definitely better than the old blobs. But it should've never become an ISO standard either. Only massive corruption allowed that to happen.
With Blender, as long as those MS file import/export filters work on all platforms that Blender does, sure, go ahead and add support for these file formats. But if the filters use some library only available on a Windows system, then Blender ends up with functionality that only works on the Windows platform. This is great for MS, but maybe not so good for the entire Blender project.
As someone on the mailing list pointed out, the original email from MS is pretty vague as to what they're looking to help with. There would need to be more discussion before the Blender folks could figure out whether this offer to help is something they want to pursue. Hopefully the help isn't turned down before that part happens. Better to look at the technical merits and other factors involved first, instead of just making assumptions it is a bad idea because it involves Microsoft.
There is good reason to be suspicious, but dismissing them outright before knowing the details just widens the gulf between FOSS and MS, and gives them little incentive to even try working with the community.
Re:Why does Qt get such kudos?
on
In-Depth With Qt 4.4
·
· Score: 5, Informative
A number of possible answers, with varying degrees of importance/truth depending on your opinions:
- Because QT is cross platform. - Perhaps it saves enough development effort over the MS stuff that it is worth the cost. - It has a GPL version on all the major desktop platforms, so fully OSS apps are possible - Is compiled instead of interpreted
There are probably lots more differences between the platforms that I missed as well. Not all of them would favour QT. Depends what you're looking for I guess.
But it isn't surprising that QT is popular with much of the Slashdot crowd, since it is GPL and supports non-Windows platforms. So I'm not sure why one would even have to ask why people here prefer QT over MSDN and Visual Studio.
What'd even be better in my opinion is a machine with Ubuntu and XP, with Ubuntu set up in a similar manner to OS X with VMWare Fusion or Parallels Desktop. Basically make a Ubuntu version that is an "upgrade" path for XP users, where all of their XP apps will run and integrate into the environment, via virtualization.
Since Dell still has an OEM deal with MS for XP, and a partnership with Ubuntu, all they'd be missing is the virtualization and the integration bits to make it seamless. On the XP side, that'd mostly be just Windows drivers and some preloaded software, which they already know how to write. On the Linux side, it'd be a matter of having features in the VM to aid in Desktop integration, and perhaps some customizations to the Linux Desktop itself to make it more seamless - to make it feel more like an upgrade to XP.
Though I know people will have differing opinions about marketing Linux as an upgrade to 'XP', and whether it is a good idea.
Their OSS stuff is generally high quality production code: Java, OO.org, Solaris...
But the OSS projects themselves have problems involving people outside of Sun. In the case of OpenOffice, Novel had to fork to get their improvements in at a reasonable pace. NeoOffice had to fork to get a useable Mac OS X version at all.
OpenSolaris may head down the same path, with Nexenta having the better and more available build than the main project does.
It seems that Sun knows how to code. They just don't know how to be open. Websites with registrations and download managers are barriers. Projects that accept outside contributions at a glacial pace, if they accept them at all, are barriers. And these are typical of everything Sun.
If they could learn how to create vibrant open communities, while still retaining the ability to guide/control the projects as much as needed for their purposes, they'd be an even more incredible force in the OSS world.
Agreed. The outdoor air temperature here can vary from -45C to +45C. And at +45, you can bet that most electronics will be running warmer than ambient temperature.
I'm most disappointed in this thing's ability to handle cold. Only down to 0C? Pretty much useless around here.
Besides, nearly all of this region is already home to oilfield activity. The Bakken formation is just at a different depth than the existing oilfields, which have been in production for decades now.
Drilling at different depths in existing oilfields has been happening for a long time. The only thing different about Bakken is the immense amount of oil that might be in the formation. It has been there under our noses the whole time, but we just didn't know to drill for it. But even without this formation, we've still been finding many new pockets of oil in this fairly old region. Just nothing quite like Bakken is rumoured to be.
Slashdot Mirror
You're right, but it is worth noting that the timing system itself does have a resolution greater than 1/100 of a second, they just don't show the extra digits. However, they did go to the 1/1000th resolution once. in 1972. You can read about it here:
http://www.cbc.ca/olympics/blog/sports_commentators/byron_macdonald/photo_finishes_in_swimming.html
FINA eventually decided that no pool could possibly be built so precise that using 1/1000th of a second would be a fair way to judge a final, so they allow ties on the 1/100th resolution. Didn't do the guy who lost by 2/1000th of a second in '72 any good though.
Yeah, the 10 lane thing isn't new, but this is the first Olympics in a 3m deep pool. The depth would definitely help reduce turbulence.
did not garner support from two-thirds of the members of the ISO Technical Management Board and IEC Standardization Management Board, which is required by ISO/IEC rules to keep the appeals process alive.
Oh sure, now they start following the rules!
Yeah, after actually watching the team, I take it back. Their appearance, combined with the evidence out there that they are not 16, are pretty convincing.
No doubt that on merit, they deserved to beat the Americans. Their performances were great. But they almost certainly weren't eligible to compete.
However, I doubt the IOC would want to take away that medal, at least not right now.
There are ways to slow development though that allow someone who is 16 years chronologically to be much younger biologically. Some mature slower to begin with, and there are techniques than can be used beyond that.
With a pool of 1.3billion people to choose from, it is possible to get a small team of athletes who just naturally mature slowly. But who knows how they're actually achieving it.
What exactly is stopping Debian from adopting the changes that Ubuntu makes? It is all open source remember. Debian simply has different goals and policies than Ubuntu. Ubuntu gains from Debian's work by using them as the base for their distro, and Debian gains from the many contributions that the Ubuntu devs contribute to Debian.
Actually, there will be more minutes of sunlight in a day the further north you go. Of course, the weather in Alberta hasn't exactly been great this week. Tornado near Vulcan yesterday, and lots of storms all week.
A summary for a science article on a geek website, and they give a temperature in Fahrenheit? And don't even specify the unit? Bad Slashdot!
Though I suppose it would be much more of a surprise to see trees thriving in a "cool" 70C, and therefore more newsworthy. Perhaps they were just going for a sensational headline.
I think you mean Windows 98 to Windows ME. ME was basically a small update to 98, same kernel and basically the same UI. Windows 2000 was based on NT4. Windows 2000 had a similar UI skin to the Win9x series, and did include the win32 bits, but was far different besides that.
I guess we'll see if the Conservatives really care about passing this bill or not. If they want it to pass, they'll make it a confidence motion, and either force it through or force an election. If not, they're just going through motions, doing what was asked of them by those companies who bribe/support them, but not really willing to risk their government over it.
This government's end is long overdue. Unfortunately a new election would give us pretty much the same results, unless something major happens.
I'd have to think that is their plan. They were going to bring this forward months ago already, but there was so much opposition, that they decided to leave it alone for a while. Obviously they have no intention of actually making the changes that Canadians want to see. They are just looking for a way to sneak it through without too many people noticing.
That was supposed to have a 'Nelson' close tag. I really ought to proofread. Oh well.
Glad to hear of this decision from ISO. I wonder if MS was anticipating this all along, hence the fact ODF will be included in the next MS Office, while OOXML will not be.
Haha!
Sure, Microsoft can prop up the monopoly by offering free or nearly free Windows to those small groups that threaten to use Linux. So far they've been relatively effective at suppressing the small revolts, and some companies have been very effective at using the threat as leverage against MS.
But as this becomes more common, what are they going to do? They can't make a business of giving Windows away for free. At some point they may have to stick to their guns on price, and just hope the OEMs that are unwilling to pay will sink instead of swim.
We're definitely in interesting times:
- Wine 1.0
- iPhone and Safari
- ODF support in MS Office
- Linux ROMs built into motherboards
- Dell and Ubuntu, Ubuntu Netbook, ASUS Eee PC
- and now Acer
Well, I didn't say it was as good as ODF on paper. OOXML reimplements a bunch of things that could be done with existing XML standards. ODF saves many pages by not reinventing the wheel. And also by not worrying about compatibility with past formats (which is probably the single biggest design difference between the two).
The OOXML standard itself, while bloated and faulty in many ways, is not the actual issue to a lot of people. It wouldn't be the first time we had to work with a bloated and slightly ugly standard in the IT world. The ISO process that fast tracked it to ratification is where there are bigger issues.
Of course OOXML wouldn't exist at all if it weren't for ODF, so the format itself and the process it has gone through are pretty difficult to separate. We all know MS isn't really that interested in the technical specification itself either. It is all about competing with ODF, confusing the marketplace with purposefully similar names, and pollution of the term "open" and "ISO standard". This was spurred by government's requiring ODF, not by the technical needs of MS.
Yeah, there are legitimate problems with OOXML and ODF from a technical standpoint. OOXML on paper isn't necessarily a horrible example of an open format. And it is too early to say whether the way it is implemented will be open and interoperable.
I think the bigger problem is the ISO process that saw OOXML get fast tracked as a standard, despite not being even close to meeting the requirements for it. What was supposed to be a technical forum was turned into a pissing match between IBM/Sun and MS. The voting process was so corrupt as to be useless. Microsoft deserves the majority (though not the entirely) of the blame for that.
Referencing OOXML as the way MS is moving towards does tend to bring to mind the corruption of ISO more than the file format itself, even though I'm sure that it wasn't what the MS guy actually intended to say when he sent his email.
There is some truth to that. ODF 1.0 had some rough edges where things aren't specified as fully as they need to be. The later drafts help to fix these problems. Even with the poorly defined parts of ODF 1.0, people were able to look at the OpenOffice.org code and just take the motto "do it like OpenOffice does". This is obviously not ideal for an ISO standard, and does need to get fixed. But open source did provide a nice workaround here, since there was at least one reference implementation available to look at on top of the spec itself.
OOXML is very bad for doing its own thing where it could instead be using existing XML standards. I think this makes ODF a better starting point for creating an open XML format for documents than OOXML. From a technical standpoint, ODF has many advantages over OOXML due to a cleaner design. And where it has weaknesses, they are much more likely to be fixed.
OOXML also has no actual implementations yet. The company that pushed the standard may never actually implement it themselves, let alone anyone else. Interop is likely going to be a nightmare. The standard is so large that there are bound to be many rough edges where interpretations differ. And in this case, there is no reference implementation to use. You could try looking at Office 2007 documents, but they aren't actually standard OOXML either. Worse yet, most office suits will want to handle Office 2007 files with the same filter, so the code will need to deal with multiple variants of this "standard".
So I agree that ODF does need to be cleaned up. We need to make sure compatibility is actually being delivered. I think the promises and hype from the ODF camp are greater than the reality right now. But it is pretty premature to say that OOXML doesn't have compatibility issues, given there are no implementations yet. Though neither is perfect, I have much more hope for ODF than I do OOXML.
OOXML is definitely better than the old blobs. But it should've never become an ISO standard either. Only massive corruption allowed that to happen.
With Blender, as long as those MS file import/export filters work on all platforms that Blender does, sure, go ahead and add support for these file formats. But if the filters use some library only available on a Windows system, then Blender ends up with functionality that only works on the Windows platform. This is great for MS, but maybe not so good for the entire Blender project.
As someone on the mailing list pointed out, the original email from MS is pretty vague as to what they're looking to help with. There would need to be more discussion before the Blender folks could figure out whether this offer to help is something they want to pursue. Hopefully the help isn't turned down before that part happens. Better to look at the technical merits and other factors involved first, instead of just making assumptions it is a bad idea because it involves Microsoft.
There is good reason to be suspicious, but dismissing them outright before knowing the details just widens the gulf between FOSS and MS, and gives them little incentive to even try working with the community.
A number of possible answers, with varying degrees of importance/truth depending on your opinions:
- Because QT is cross platform.
- Perhaps it saves enough development effort over the MS stuff that it is worth the cost.
- It has a GPL version on all the major desktop platforms, so fully OSS apps are possible
- Is compiled instead of interpreted
There are probably lots more differences between the platforms that I missed as well. Not all of them would favour QT. Depends what you're looking for I guess.
But it isn't surprising that QT is popular with much of the Slashdot crowd, since it is GPL and supports non-Windows platforms. So I'm not sure why one would even have to ask why people here prefer QT over MSDN and Visual Studio.
Actually Fink and FinkCommander make it pretty easy to install unix software. Especially if you have Apple's X11 or install the latest from Xorg.
MacPorts is another option, as another person already mentioned.
Maybe not as easy and integrated as apt-get is in Debian/Ubuntu, but better than Cygwin. Some would say better than Solaris even.
What'd even be better in my opinion is a machine with Ubuntu and XP, with Ubuntu set up in a similar manner to OS X with VMWare Fusion or Parallels Desktop. Basically make a Ubuntu version that is an "upgrade" path for XP users, where all of their XP apps will run and integrate into the environment, via virtualization.
Since Dell still has an OEM deal with MS for XP, and a partnership with Ubuntu, all they'd be missing is the virtualization and the integration bits to make it seamless. On the XP side, that'd mostly be just Windows drivers and some preloaded software, which they already know how to write. On the Linux side, it'd be a matter of having features in the VM to aid in Desktop integration, and perhaps some customizations to the Linux Desktop itself to make it more seamless - to make it feel more like an upgrade to XP.
Though I know people will have differing opinions about marketing Linux as an upgrade to 'XP', and whether it is a good idea.
Their OSS stuff is generally high quality production code: Java, OO.org, Solaris...
But the OSS projects themselves have problems involving people outside of Sun. In the case of OpenOffice, Novel had to fork to get their improvements in at a reasonable pace. NeoOffice had to fork to get a useable Mac OS X version at all.
OpenSolaris may head down the same path, with Nexenta having the better and more available build than the main project does.
It seems that Sun knows how to code. They just don't know how to be open. Websites with registrations and download managers are barriers. Projects that accept outside contributions at a glacial pace, if they accept them at all, are barriers. And these are typical of everything Sun.
If they could learn how to create vibrant open communities, while still retaining the ability to guide/control the projects as much as needed for their purposes, they'd be an even more incredible force in the OSS world.
Agreed. The outdoor air temperature here can vary from -45C to +45C. And at +45, you can bet that most electronics will be running warmer than ambient temperature.
I'm most disappointed in this thing's ability to handle cold. Only down to 0C? Pretty much useless around here.
Perhaps we can build our own theme park. With hookers! And blackjack! In fact, forget the theme park...
Besides, nearly all of this region is already home to oilfield activity. The Bakken formation is just at a different depth than the existing oilfields, which have been in production for decades now.
Drilling at different depths in existing oilfields has been happening for a long time. The only thing different about Bakken is the immense amount of oil that might be in the formation. It has been there under our noses the whole time, but we just didn't know to drill for it. But even without this formation, we've still been finding many new pockets of oil in this fairly old region. Just nothing quite like Bakken is rumoured to be.