Ah yes...I'm sure that will work. Tell me, where do I get a free WYSIWG editor so that I can collaborate with other people who can't write latex?
What? There isn't one? Well, that's not going to work, is it?
perks like the speed of office, the interoperability, and some of the features OpenOffice might not have the speed, but it has more compatibility than Office does. Try this: get several versions of Word. Get them to output documents containing text boxes with floating alignments and put them on a page containing text. If you can think of a few more esoteric things to put in there, do so - just not macros, which obviously depend on other programs.
Try opening the result in each of the versions of Word you got and also in OpenOffice. In my experience, OpenOffice wins.
they have done a nice job at emulating all the really bad elements OpenOffice has no clippy. The native format is considerably better than doc from a file-design standpoint. The html writer is MUCH, MUCH better, as is the rtf writer. Obviously they haven't emulated all the really bad elements. Or are you complaining that they put stuff in there for the interoperability that leads to the same problems as MS? You can't have it both ways there. Either it's interoperable, or the design is good. You can't have it both ways.
Words can be identified as a specific part of speech, or a specific part of a sentence, or even just identified as words, for instance - all of which would I would consider non-semantic meanings.
In language theory/compilers, semantic meaning is information that cannot be obtained by a lexer (a.k.a information that cannot be gained through regular expressions a.k.a. non-regular language components).
The part that can be recognized by a lexer is still part of the meaning, which is the reason for the name.
Consider these assertions: 1) Cars are large and easy to track. 2) There are smaller, less traceable things to steal. Because of 1 and 2, anyone who steals cars is stupid. Stupid people can't figure out how to create this circumvention, so your car is safe.
The only problem with this logic is that smart people are more than willing to sell things to stupid people to help them increase the depth of their stupidity.
Actually, we have a word for that. Most people know it. You should probably check out that link; you don't want to seem ignorant when someone uses it in a sentence.
No extenuating circumstances ever, eh? Killing people is killing people? In the middle ages it was common practice to kill the young before a village was ransacked to keep them from being enslaved. It was believed that they would all go to heaven because they hadn't reached the age of accountability - when one is held accountable for ones own actions. So the village elders who did this out of love are as evil as Hitler?
What about abortion? What about euthanasia? What about accidental civilian casualties during peacetime? Isn't there a difference between premeditated crimes and crimes of passion? Between accidents and deliberate acts?
I think intent is a bigger deal than you make it to be, and that the issue is more complicated than you say.
because we have brains a few thousand times larger than mice, not because of any special virtue of our brain tissue, and our brain cells are certainly not going to be optimal for controlling a mouse's body and living as a mouse
Personally, I think it's actually the work of aliens who use plastic as fuel. They planted us on this planet eons ago in order to convert all of Earth's resources into plastic and then die out.
Then they can come back and harvest it with no fuss. Still...I've heard that these extradimensional beings do observe our progress and gently nudge us towards their goals occasionally. They're the mice, actually.
Of course, you're forgetting the counterintuitive yet also highly likely result of global warming - an ice age.
Possibly just another one of those problems that we can deal with, but maybe not. At any rate, it debunks your argument that global warming is almost definitely a good thing.
Umm...have you seen Firefly? They did the gritty camera stuff first. They even did the "low-tech even though we're in space" bit.
I haven't had cable until recently, but its sounding more and more like BSG is a lot like Firefly but with more ships.
So they got their revamps from Firefly and the original concept from another series. What is original about this new version of BSG? Please don't take this as a troll. I'd really like to know.
No way. First thing, stop calling them "normals." It brings their hopes up and offends management. Call them peons, grunts, minions, or human resources, all of which are suitably devaluing. In addition, you should refrain from calling your minions by names. Make them all get numbers tatooed to their foreheads and refer to them by those.
Replace coffee with electric shocks as a wake up. Reward failure with ever increasing voltage electric shocks, administered through the seat of the minions whenever you see fit. Reward success by allowing a minion to skip their morning electric shock.
Use the shocks, verbal abuse, and threats of layoff to convince your minions that you are superior in all ways. The ones who have become convinced can then be given tazers of their own in order to opress the rest of the office. This will lead to your eventual rise to become the SHOEO of the company (supreme high overlord executive officer).
At this point you can then install all the latest accompaniments afforded to the average SHOEO: the harem, the trap door into the pirhana pit, and, of course, the evil talisman of layoff (I know, most non-SHOEOs don't know about that - essentially, it magically steals job security from others to make it's user virtually impossible to fire, while simultaneously eliminating those pesky do-gooders).
Of course, as a geek, you can add your own embellishments. To go with my PC, I have a Beowulf Cluster of Pain, and USB Flash of lightning generator. Oh, all the cameras and devices - including the lights are hooked directly to my cluster via X10 technology so that I can make sure that nobody exceeds their light or enjoyment ration.
I would go further and say that many of the contributions of free software advocates are more of a sacrifice than Bill Gate's $750 million.
They give up the opportunity to make as much money as the might in the closed world, they give up their code, and they give up the time they could have spent doing something selfish.
Think of it this way: Bill Gates has a net worth of somewhere around 29.5 billion. By this figure, he has given up just over 2.5% of his wealth. Big sacrifice there, especially since 2.5% of his wealth probably buys more than he could ever possibly want, monitarily speaking. And how long would he have to have spent on that to make it happen? About long enough to sign a check. For $750 million, any agency would be more than happy to carry out the details, and they probably did.
Consider what that would take in opportunity cost for a developer. To simplify, I'll give you an example.
Consider a developer with a net worth of $100000. Assume said developer earned $50 an hour at a job. How much time would it take to make the same percentage of investment into his project in opportunity cost?
Just under 50 hours. I doubt that there are many developers who have even spent only half that. .
Thanks for the tip. I have a webapp I was going to rewrite for the desktop because it needs an editor, but...I think I'll just use that one.
And the thing about working the same: it's not a problem that they don't work the same; it's a problem that people expect them to do so. Everyone wants all webapps to work on all browsers.
Actually, you're wrong about the "save at exit" thing. That would actually be fairly straightforward to implement in javascript.
But there are plenty of things that aren't: -It is nearly impossible to make a more advanced text widget than what are available in html already. -Rendering images takes a long time in interpreted languages by nature (of course, javascript could become JIT and this problem would be gone). -You're sandboxed into the browser. You can't interact with other desktop apps. To do so would be to create a security risk. -Browsers don't work the same, but people expect them to. Most people don't know, for instance, that sound stuff is easier to get to work in IE, while events are more well supported in Mozilla-based.
Most of these are fundamental problems, and they're not going to go away. If they do, of course, I'll switch to old browsers. I personally prefer to have a more restricted browser that isn't a virus magnet.
It makes it sound like the expected way to use it is for the client to be Javascript. If you're going to do that, why not just write an html frontend? There are a ton of ways to do that for all the languages listed. You don't need to use RPC of any kind. In fact, doing so is stupid. How do you expect to get the data into the RPC in the first place? A java client? You're going to be using html forms.
And if you're not doing that, then you're writing some other kind of clients that can do more than html is capable of doing. In that case, you might as well use XML-RPC. There are already clients and servers available in tons of languages. And, it's easier to parse.
How did it become a standard, though? It became a standard because free mp3 players or advertising revenue based mp3 players didn't have to pay a fee. Then the company changed that policy.
In other words, because they weren't enforcing their IP rights, people figured they were up for grabs. Otherwise, nobody would have used mp3 at all. It's not like its the only encoding technique of its kind; every step in mp3 was actually invented by someone else, and each step is freely available.
Somebody correct me if I'm wrong here, but if you give away an intellectual property right, isn't taking it back legally questionable?
Wow, yeah. Who would have thought that the average transformer, which uses essentially the same technology, would be on Star Trek?
Who would have thought that a TV show from the 60s would be able to predict something that was invented around one hundred years before that? Talk about predicting what's coming. Next thing you know, they'll be using futuristic devices such as pulleys to lift heavy things, or possibly show the amazing futuristic possibilities of using wheels to make locomotion easier. Oh, I know! Maybe they'll show the futuristic sharpening of rocks to form crude weapons!
Today's Word docs have a lot "tacked on", but they still have the basic structure openable by the original Word.
Word documents are not backward compatible, except in a few lucky cases, despite the fact that most of the functionality is the same. Have you even tried this? Word XP documents don't work in Word 97; 97 don't work in 95, and I would assume it goes back even farther.
I think a better claim would be "backwards compatibilty is a huge thing to avoid at MS" considering that almost no new functionality has been added to word in the past 10 years and yet the document format has changed.
While developers could create obfuscated DTDs or encrypt their data in a proprietary manner, they would lose most of the benefits of using XML.
I think you're missing what Microsoft would consider the benefits of XML. Namely, that they could create obfuscated DTDs and encrypt their data in a proprietary manner while still using it, thus convincing the masses that they're using an open format while not actually using one. They're actually doing this with their html exporter now.
Another thing they like to do is put bugs and workarounds into their code that no one else knows about (of course, they only do this in places they own the marketshare). Their RTF encoder is riddled with these.
So...I think the only fair thing to do is to make an open format and make the government-approved reference implementation open source.
...or it could be a realization that they can sell the most DVDs in the USA and Japan, and they can't get them into the stores unless it's legal. I thik the economic reasons are a lot stronger than the political ones.
The US might loose it's edge in really bland entertainment?
I blame them for all the spelling mistakes we see on the web Without TV, we'd resort to reading, so we'd probably have a higher standard of literacy here.
It looks like an enforceable idea, but that doesn't make it good. Hacking the cartridges in order to make generic ones would become arguably illegal. Bad idea, maybe. It's possible less people will buy them. It's also possible they'll be declared a vertical monopoly and fined and forced not to do it ever again.
You say it like it's some sort of collective who is doing everything. It's not. It's one guy. Well, one guy and all his peeps.
Ever heard of Stan Lee, the creator of Marvel Comics? He's the producer of every single one of the movies you mentioned.
Every ten years or so he makes another try at getting them popular again. Twice since the sixties the fad has reached the movie phase (this being the second time), and he rode the fad until it died out. No really new ideas - the ideas themselves are rather timeless - just a new setting. Peter Parker actually wore bellbottoms and had 70s hair last time.
Another three decades or so and he'll probably make movies again...if he somehow finds a way to become immortal.
Slashdot Mirror
Ah yes...I'm sure that will work. Tell me, where do I get a free WYSIWG editor so that I can collaborate with other people who can't write latex?
What? There isn't one? Well, that's not going to work, is it?
perks like the speed of office, the interoperability, and some of the features
OpenOffice might not have the speed, but it has more compatibility than Office does. Try this: get several versions of Word. Get them to output documents containing text boxes with floating alignments and put them on a page containing text. If you can think of a few more esoteric things to put in there, do so - just not macros, which obviously depend on other programs.
Try opening the result in each of the versions of Word you got and also in OpenOffice. In my experience, OpenOffice wins.
they have done a nice job at emulating all the really bad elements
OpenOffice has no clippy. The native format is considerably better than doc from a file-design standpoint. The html writer is MUCH, MUCH better, as is the rtf writer. Obviously they haven't emulated all the really bad elements. Or are you complaining that they put stuff in there for the interoperability that leads to the same problems as MS? You can't have it both ways there. Either it's interoperable, or the design is good. You can't have it both ways.
Words can be identified as a specific part of speech, or a specific part of a sentence, or even just identified as words, for instance - all of which would I would consider non-semantic meanings.
In language theory/compilers, semantic meaning is information that cannot be obtained by a lexer (a.k.a information that cannot be gained through regular expressions a.k.a. non-regular language components).
The part that can be recognized by a lexer is still part of the meaning, which is the reason for the name.
Consider these assertions:
1) Cars are large and easy to track.
2) There are smaller, less traceable things to steal.
Because of 1 and 2, anyone who steals cars is stupid.
Stupid people can't figure out how to create this circumvention, so your car is safe.
The only problem with this logic is that smart people are more than willing to sell things to stupid people to help them increase the depth of their stupidity.
Actually, we have a word for that. Most people know it. You should probably check out that link; you don't want to seem ignorant when someone uses it in a sentence.
No extenuating circumstances ever, eh? Killing people is killing people? In the middle ages it was common practice to kill the young before a village was ransacked to keep them from being enslaved. It was believed that they would all go to heaven because they hadn't reached the age of accountability - when one is held accountable for ones own actions. So the village elders who did this out of love are as evil as Hitler?
What about abortion?
What about euthanasia?
What about accidental civilian casualties during peacetime?
Isn't there a difference between premeditated crimes and crimes of passion? Between accidents and deliberate acts?
I think intent is a bigger deal than you make it to be, and that the issue is more complicated than you say.
Certainly that won't happen. Those computer companies just care too much about people to be that careless.
I mean, look how they treat their employees and consumers now. *shudder*
I wouldn't be surpised if the next time I go in for a dental check up I wind up a different sex and with only one eye and leg when I come out.
because we have brains a few thousand times larger than mice, not because of any special virtue of our brain tissue, and our brain cells are certainly not going to be optimal for controlling a mouse's body and living as a mouse
Wrong.
Your argument at best is an oversimplification.
Personally, I think it's actually the work of aliens who use plastic as fuel. They planted us on this planet eons ago in order to convert all of Earth's resources into plastic and then die out.
Then they can come back and harvest it with no fuss. Still...I've heard that these extradimensional beings do observe our progress and gently nudge us towards their goals occasionally. They're the mice, actually.
Of course, you're forgetting the counterintuitive yet also highly likely result of global warming - an ice age.
Possibly just another one of those problems that we can deal with, but maybe not. At any rate, it debunks your argument that global warming is almost definitely a good thing.
Umm...have you seen Firefly? They did the gritty camera stuff first. They even did the "low-tech even though we're in space" bit.
I haven't had cable until recently, but its sounding more and more like BSG is a lot like Firefly but with more ships.
So they got their revamps from Firefly and the original concept from another series. What is original about this new version of BSG? Please don't take this as a troll. I'd really like to know.
No way. First thing, stop calling them "normals." It brings their hopes up and offends management. Call them peons, grunts, minions, or human resources, all of which are suitably devaluing. In addition, you should refrain from calling your minions by names. Make them all get numbers tatooed to their foreheads and refer to them by those.
Replace coffee with electric shocks as a wake up.
Reward failure with ever increasing voltage electric shocks, administered through the seat of the minions whenever you see fit.
Reward success by allowing a minion to skip their morning electric shock.
Use the shocks, verbal abuse, and threats of layoff to convince your minions that you are superior in all ways. The ones who have become convinced can then be given tazers of their own in order to opress the rest of the office. This will lead to your eventual rise to become the SHOEO of the company (supreme high overlord executive officer).
At this point you can then install all the latest accompaniments afforded to the average SHOEO: the harem, the trap door into the pirhana pit, and, of course, the evil talisman of layoff (I know, most non-SHOEOs don't know about that - essentially, it magically steals job security from others to make it's user virtually impossible to fire, while simultaneously eliminating those pesky do-gooders).
Of course, as a geek, you can add your own embellishments. To go with my PC, I have a Beowulf Cluster of Pain, and USB Flash of lightning generator. Oh, all the cameras and devices - including the lights are hooked directly to my cluster via X10 technology so that I can make sure that nobody exceeds their light or enjoyment ration.
It's a good job if you do it right.
I would go further and say that many of the contributions of free software advocates are more of a sacrifice than Bill Gate's $750 million.
They give up the opportunity to make as much money as the might in the closed world, they give up their code, and they give up the time they could have spent doing something selfish.
Think of it this way: Bill Gates has a net worth of somewhere around 29.5 billion. By this figure, he has given up just over 2.5% of his wealth. Big sacrifice there, especially since 2.5% of his wealth probably buys more than he could ever possibly want, monitarily speaking. And how long would he have to have spent on that to make it happen? About long enough to sign a check. For $750 million, any agency would be more than happy to carry out the details, and they probably did.
Consider what that would take in opportunity cost for a developer. To simplify, I'll give you an example.
Consider a developer with a net worth of $100000. Assume said developer earned $50 an hour at a job. How much time would it take to make the same percentage of investment into his project in opportunity cost?
Just under 50 hours. I doubt that there are many developers who have even spent only half that. .
Thanks for the tip. I have a webapp I was going to rewrite for the desktop because it needs an editor, but...I think I'll just use that one.
And the thing about working the same: it's not a problem that they don't work the same; it's a problem that people expect them to do so. Everyone wants all webapps to work on all browsers.
Actually, you're wrong about the "save at exit" thing. That would actually be fairly straightforward to implement in javascript.
But there are plenty of things that aren't:
-It is nearly impossible to make a more advanced text widget than what are available in html already.
-Rendering images takes a long time in interpreted languages by nature (of course, javascript could become JIT and this problem would be gone).
-You're sandboxed into the browser. You can't interact with other desktop apps. To do so would be to create a security risk.
-Browsers don't work the same, but people expect them to. Most people don't know, for instance, that sound stuff is easier to get to work in IE, while events are more well supported in Mozilla-based.
Most of these are fundamental problems, and they're not going to go away. If they do, of course, I'll switch to old browsers. I personally prefer to have a more restricted browser that isn't a virus magnet.
It makes it sound like the expected way to use it is for the client to be Javascript. If you're going to do that, why not just write an html frontend? There are a ton of ways to do that for all the languages listed. You don't need to use RPC of any kind. In fact, doing so is stupid. How do you expect to get the data into the RPC in the first place? A java client? You're going to be using html forms.
And if you're not doing that, then you're writing some other kind of clients that can do more than html is capable of doing. In that case, you might as well use XML-RPC. There are already clients and servers available in tons of languages.
And, it's easier to parse.
How did it become a standard, though? It became a standard because free mp3 players or advertising revenue based mp3 players didn't have to pay a fee. Then the company changed that policy.
In other words, because they weren't enforcing their IP rights, people figured they were up for grabs. Otherwise, nobody would have used mp3 at all. It's not like its the only encoding technique of its kind; every step in mp3 was actually invented by someone else, and each step is freely available.
Somebody correct me if I'm wrong here, but if you give away an intellectual property right, isn't taking it back legally questionable?
Wow, yeah. Who would have thought that the average transformer, which uses essentially the same technology, would be on Star Trek?
Who would have thought that a TV show from the 60s would be able to predict something that was invented around one hundred years before that? Talk about predicting what's coming. Next thing you know, they'll be using futuristic devices such as pulleys to lift heavy things, or possibly show the amazing futuristic possibilities of using wheels to make locomotion easier. Oh, I know! Maybe they'll show the futuristic sharpening of rocks to form crude weapons!
Today's Word docs have a lot "tacked on", but they still have the basic structure openable by the original Word.
Word documents are not backward compatible, except in a few lucky cases, despite the fact that most of the functionality is the same. Have you even tried this? Word XP documents don't work in Word 97; 97 don't work in 95, and I would assume it goes back even farther.
I think a better claim would be "backwards compatibilty is a huge thing to avoid at MS" considering that almost no new functionality has been added to word in the past 10 years and yet the document format has changed.
While developers could create obfuscated DTDs or encrypt their data in a proprietary manner, they would lose most of the benefits of using XML.
I think you're missing what Microsoft would consider the benefits of XML. Namely, that they could create obfuscated DTDs and encrypt their data in a proprietary manner while still using it, thus convincing the masses that they're using an open format while not actually using one. They're actually doing this with their html exporter now.
Another thing they like to do is put bugs and workarounds into their code that no one else knows about (of course, they only do this in places they own the marketshare). Their RTF encoder is riddled with these.
So...I think the only fair thing to do is to make an open format and make the government-approved reference implementation open source.
...or it could be a realization that they can sell the most DVDs in the USA and Japan, and they can't get them into the stores unless it's legal. I thik the economic reasons are a lot stronger than the political ones.
The US might loose it's edge in really bland entertainment?
I blame them for all the spelling mistakes we see on the web Without TV, we'd resort to reading, so we'd probably have a higher standard of literacy here.
It looks like an enforceable idea, but that doesn't make it good. Hacking the cartridges in order to make generic ones would become arguably illegal. Bad idea, maybe. It's possible less people will buy them. It's also possible they'll be declared a vertical monopoly and fined and forced not to do it ever again.
At least he didn't decide to go for more realism by posing on a motorcycle wearing a bikini.
This is fake, right?
Here's the mirrordot location (shows the pictures).
What happens if Slashdot puts a link to mirrordot? Will mirrordot mirror itself?
You say it like it's some sort of collective who is doing everything. It's not. It's one guy. Well, one guy and all his peeps.
Ever heard of Stan Lee, the creator of Marvel Comics? He's the producer of every single one of the movies you mentioned.
Every ten years or so he makes another try at getting them popular again. Twice since the sixties the fad has reached the movie phase (this being the second time), and he rode the fad until it died out. No really new ideas - the ideas themselves are rather timeless - just a new setting. Peter Parker actually wore bellbottoms and had 70s hair last time.
Another three decades or so and he'll probably make movies again...if he somehow finds a way to become immortal.
You make a good point. The Sonicare's multifunctionality is what makes it useful!
Is a crippled PC even worth it?
Actually...for $400 and a subscription it better be a pretty decent PC, and the subscription better cover basic internet access.
E-machines used to be free with a two year MSN subscription. That seems like a better deal for idiots.