If you shorted it right away you probably went broke. A *lot* of people shorted it in the $8-$10 range, only to see it run to $20. If you were one of those, either you busted out or you didn't have a very big position.
There are a couple of reasons why shorting SCOX was a bad, bad, idea. Obdislcaimer: this is not investment advice, I am not responsible if you blow your MBA fund (bwahhaahhhaa).
First off there is the price. There is a rule that says that when you short a stock below $5 the margin you have to provide never falls below $5 a share. So to short 100,000 SCOX shares you would need $0.5 million in cash or $1 million in stock. With SCOX at $0.50 you would net a maximum of $50,0000 if you won. But if for whatever reason the markets thought SCO looked like winning the case and the stock spiked to $10 you would be down $1 million.
The second reason to avoid shorting stocks as bad as SCO is that the short interest can keep the stock afloat all on its own. That is known as a short squeeze. I shorted a complete POS stock that was trading at $20. The company had no revenues and had recently done a SCO like idiot move. I bought to cover at $40, the stock hit $100 at the peak. All this despite the fact that they had no business. it took two years for the stock to drop to 50 cents, which is still overpriced.
There are certainly times when a short makes sense. When the technical staf of Cybercash all posted to the IETF mailing lists that their email address would change later that day it was clear that the game was up (public knowledge means its not insider trading). I made $20K on that short which partly covers the $50K I lost on the other.
The usual reason for using a short is to balance out a portfolio, insuring against a drop in the market. Obviously you want to pick a dog or a grossly overvalued stock since those will probably drop furthest and fastest. For example plenty of people recon that Google will remain king of the search engine space. So they put $100K on Google and short $25K on Yahoo. If search booms they make money on Google and loose some on Yahoo. If search crashes they cover part of their losses on Yahoo. Another reason for using shorts is to hedge an option strategy. From time to time it is possible to play arbitrage between the options market and the equity markets.
Lets see, $7,000 out of $20,000. Thats a third of your capital on a penny stock. Thats not investing, thats gambling. If you had taken the time to look into the company you would know that the software assets are in hock to the lawyers. If you had been following the stock you would have got out when they lost the Novell case.
$20K is peanuts as far as an investment stake is concerned. An MBA is worth upwards of $20K a year. You would have to turn the $20K to $400K to match. Not very likely.
If you want an investment, there is nothing better than education. There is no stock that can turn $20K into a $20K annuity in two years.
On the other hand the most likely story is that this is simply someone out to yank everyone's chain by constructing a sob story that gives everyone a good chuckle.
It is not important to SCO if Microsoft is actively distributing Linux or a UNIX derivative, Microsoft was one of the first big companies to pay SCO for a UNIX license. There was some suspicion that Microsoft was not really interested in doing anything with the license but was interested in legitimizing SCO's claim to have the right to license UNIX which in turn could harm the UNIX and Linux communities. From todays vantage, it is easy to see that Microsoft could not loose if it bought a license, either SCO beats down Linux and more people turn to Microsoft or SCO goes under and has to refund the money.
Microsoft paid SCO less than a third of what IBM is reconed to have paid in legal fees.
As far as picking sides goes, Microsoft does best if there is a judgement against SCO which sets a precedent against Boies type of legal tactics: "we own the copyrights to your code but we are not going to say which parts". Note that is not the same as IBM wins since IBM can win without a precedent being set.
It is somewhat ironic then that the Microsoft judgement has indirectly resulted in Novell being able to bring bankruptcy proceedings.
Apparently SCO have $7.8 million in cash on hand. If they shut down operations today there might be enough to pay off the lawyers.
Granted, that's all proven totally false, but there is some consistency to his hallucinations.
That is not quite accurate. McBride's allegations have neither been proven nor disproven. In fact they appear to fall into the category of 'not even wrong' as in 'not a testable legal theory'.
The best bet here is that the Novell monies (per the court judgement, this is money belonging to Novell and illegally "converted" [i.e., stolen] by SCO) are not subject to the bankruptcy process; instead, Novell gets to recover that amount before the Chapter 11 reorganization. It seems logical for the bankruptcy judge to either allow the Utah court to establish the amount of that judgement, or simply declare "It all belongs to Novell," before proceeding with a reorganization, given that the Novell judgement is what tips SCO into the bin.
Probably not, Novell would be an unsecured creditor. So the secured creditors get paid out first. And of course the Boies slime machine has tried to make itself first in line to be paid.
That said, the lawyers took the case on a contingency basis, SCO is now in bankruptcy so the contract with the lawyers can be voided just like any other supplier. The judgement won by Novell has established that SCO does not hold the copyrights to UNIX as they claimed, so what does SCO actually have?
It is hard to see any other law firm wanting to buy SCO's assets out of bankruptcy to continue the lawsuit. So the only likely bidders for SCO's assets are IBM, Novell and Boies. At this point it must be pretty clear to Boies that the case is lost and all they can hope to collect is at best some nuisance money from IBM. IBM has no incentive to pay since there is a court judgement to the effect that any money owed belongs to Novell.
My guess is that we won't know what is going to happen till we see what the liabilities are and which ones the judge will allow to be cancelled.
Can't see the judge being too impressed by McBride's reorganization plan. The purpose of Chapter 11 is to keep a company in business. SCO does not have a business, all they have is a lawsuit which the largest creditor wants to see ended.
I remain entirely unimpressed by Boies legal skills. He botched the Florida recount. He made idiotic arguments in Napster and SCO vs IBM that never had a chance of success. In the Microsoft case he essentially handed ultimate victory to Redmond by leading Jackson into a whole series of decisions which a competent lawyer would have realized were certain to backfire at appeal. He fought the case on entirely the wrong set of claims. He should have worked out that Clark and McNeil were looking for an alibi for their own poor management. Netscape's treatment of Spyglass in particular was just as predatory as anything Microsoft was acused of. If Boies had been the legal genius he was cracked up to be he would have taken a very different path.
On the other hand, "yes" votes can turn into "no" votes as well. I imagine the national boards that were fooled by Microsoft's "yes with comments" spiel will not be amused . ..
That would be rather harder to manage, in OASIS I have seen no votes change to yes but not the other way round.
The point of the ISO standards process is not to pick the one true standard, it is to recognize what standards people use. This type of behavior strikes me as very similar to the factionalism that kept the FORTRAN 8X standard in process for a decade. Rather than adopt the VAX extensions to FORTRAN that had long ago become the defacto standard competitors had to argue for advantage.
The fast-track process isn't over yet; all ISO has decided is that OOXML didn't pass the initial vote. There's still (probably, unless Microsoft backs down at the last minute) a Ballot Resolution Meeting to come, where the committee looks at all the comments received with the votes and tries to resolve them. If the various national boards decide that the result is good enough and vote for OOXML, it can still become a standard in the near future.
So you mean that Microsoft can lobby No votes to become Yes votes after meeting the issues raised in their comments?
Sounds to me like anyone who voted no is going to be seeing some pretty stiff lobbying. The vote was very close.
At my day job, my officemate just got Office 2007, which he was pleased as punch about... at first. Then he realized that no one else on any platform, using any software, can read Office 2007 files. He might as well write them in crayon, for what that's worth. He can select an earlier format, but then it saves as read-only.
My copy of Office 2007 works just fine. I currently only have 2007 on one machine but its working fine when I transfer files to the other machine.
Only problem I have at the moment is that I would really like to be able to use the new citation manager feature and that is a new feature so obviously 2003 does not support it.
And there is a plug in for down versions of Office to read office 2007 files in any case.
However, with ISO standards, isn't there a bit more enforcement of whether or not something adheres to the standard? Don't they actually check that products that say they meet some standard actually meet the standard? Don't they take legal recourse against products that use there standards incorrectly? Maybe I'm just wrong here, but I don't think that ISO has built up such a large reputation for standards by just letting things slide, and having their name slapped on products that don't adhere to the standard.
Completely off base. Wrong on every count.
First off I think you need to understand what ISO is, ISO does not set standards. All ISO does is to recognize standards that have already been set by other standards bodies. So ISO 3103 is actually the same as BS 6008. ISO 9000 is BS 5750 and so on.
The IETF is actually accredited as an ISO member body and in theory RFCs could become ISO standards. They never have and never will as long as ISO charges money for its standards.
There is a compliance program for ISO 9000 but it isn't run by ISO. ISO 9000 consulting is one of the things that Y2K vampires went on to do after Dec 31 1999.
If you want standards go ISO 3103 is pretty critical yet you would be hard pressed to find any US companies that are in compliance. Still, least they don't use salt water any more.
With no employees, it would be up to the officers of the corporation to execute any orders the judge issued to the corporation.
Or they can apply to put the company into liquidation, that is Chapter 7. At the moment SCO is in chapter 11, that is reorganization. If the company cannot continue to function it is not reorganizing and has to liquidate.
The problem for SCO here is that it can only reorganize in Chapter 11 if it has a good chance of demonstrating that it can secure the agreement of its creditors to the reorganization plan. The current management only have 120 days in which they have the exclusive right to propose a reorganization plan. After that they would have to pursuade the court to extend that right.
The question I would be interesting in knowing the answer to is what the situation is with respect to Novell's claims. Clearly SCO is going into bankruptcy before the bench hearing to determine what SCO owes Novell. Certain types of lawsuit get stayed by bankruptcy but it would seem odd if a case that had been decided on the merits and was only waiting for damages to be determined to be stayed by a voluntary liquidation when the only 'business' the company has is litigation.
The end of SCO does not necessarily mean the end of the case. I seem to remember that Boies and co have a bunch of charges against the assets of the company which allow them to acquire certain SCO assets and continue the litigation. Not that this is necessarily a bad thing, given the amount of time and money that has gone into the case and given that it looks like SCOs case is utterly toast it might well be better for it to at least result in a precedent.
It should not cost $50 million to force a plaintif to state a valid claim. There should be a clear precedent that ugabugah copyright lawsuits where the plaintif fails to state what the allegedly infringing content is get tossed out in future.
Objective-C is only hard to learn if you don't already know Smalltalk, and I don't think I'd trust a developer who doesn't know Smalltalk to write OO code, even if they never use the language for real work.
Objective C is miles better than C++. It is a real pity that the world was led down that blind alley. But at this point Java and C# are the ones that have won. Only good reason for using Objective C is if you are maintaining a legacy code base.
Vista works just fine on the right hardware. Admittedly the hardware I use has ten times the power of a Cray 1 if you count the graphics processors. But give it two years and my system will be mainstream.
The only problem with Vista is that it does not work at all well on machines not designed for Vista. Vista is a lot more intolerant of buggy drivers. That is a good thing, much of the instability of Windows has alawys been caused by baddly written drivers. The outsource shops that write them have little incentive to do the job right. They get paid when the box ships, driver bugs mean follow up work.
PC World is a part of Dixons, a cheezy retailer which I bought quite a few shoddy electronic gadgets from until I realized that they tended to break down within months about fifteen years ago and I have not bought from them since.
The UK retail laws are considerably more consumer friendly than in the US. The sale of goods act is on the customer's side. Laptops are commonly bought for the purpose of running Linux, end of story.
The DTI has some information that is helpful. Basically you can sue Dixons in small claims court. The threat of doing so is going to cause them to capitulate quickly.
But the best advice is never to by from Dixons, Currys, PCWorld or any of their other fronts. They are not cheap but the goods they sell often are in my experience. Unfortunately that is somewhat difficult in the UK as the Thatcher regime allowed them to establish a virtual high street monopoly by buying Currys.
If SPF were more widely implemented, or required to be implemented, wouldn't this problem be solved? Don't send NDRs to domains without SPFs or when SPF fails. NDRs get through and problem solved.
Actually there is a much better way t filter bogus NDRs. An NDR should be sent to the SMTP.From address, which is separate from the address that shows on the message.
So there are schemes such as BATV that mail servers can use to encode an authentication token into their outgoing SMTP.From address. So ted@example.com becomes AS234fw8734.ted.example.com. The authentication token is then checked against a secret key, if it does not match the bounce is suppressed.
SPF/SenderID are both very useful, but they are not the best way to solve this particular problem. The value of SPF/SenderID is to allow use of accreditation data for more effective whitelisting.
I'm surprised that anybody would change there Word Processor at all. I can't imagine a realistic business case for a business that is currently using Word 2000 or 2003 that would show a gain in bottom line by switching it over to Open Office or Office 2007. If you already have the licenses there is no reason to change. 90% of the features of word processors aren't even used by the normal user.
Actually there is an incentive to move to Word 2007, it is the first edition of Word with a citation feature that does not totally suck.
But as far as the annals of useless comparisons goes, 13,000 vs 1,300 documents is irrelevant. More HTML files are added to the Web each minute.
The value of OOXML etc will appear once there is a large enough base of users. Maybe that will take three or four years. At the moment I can't use the new features of Word 2007 because I have to use two different machines and one is stuck with the downversion.
Its not worth paying a lot to upgrade but most companies pay the same regardless of which edition they run. So the newer versions will percolate through.
What are you talking about? ODF was designed by the OASIS group - a group of a dozen different companies. It was open for any to participate in. Even Microsoft themselves were at the start involved, but they decided to drop out.
Having written more than one OASIS standard I think you overstate the case here. The whole point of OASIS is to make it easy to recognize an XML schema that is available for open use as a standard.
What OASIS expressly does not attempt to do is to avoid duplication. There can be two separate OASIS groups working on the same subject matter at the same time. There is deliberately no mechanism to prevent overlap or to reconcile different approaches. The idea being that the market does this well enough if this is needed.
From a standards point of view there are only two positions that make much sense to me. The first is to take something that is already in widespread use, the clear leader in the field, refine it a bit and call it the standard. This is what was done with S/MIME and PGP. The second approach is to build something entirely new without any legacy commitments.
OOXML took a third route, take a structure from a piece of otherwise unsuccessful code, slam it into a document and cal it the basis for a standard.
It was then developed in the open over a period of 3 years. It reuses as many previous open standards as possible (MathML for math stuff, SVG for vector graphics, etc).
More is the pity that they didn't look up my original design proposal for putting math into HTML, the original concept had been to enable a mathematica like environment within an HTML editor.
OpenOffice copies the wrong office suite. Office consists of the same trio of worn-out applications, word processor, spreadsheet, data base that have existed for three decades. OpenOffice provides a poor mans substitute for the same worn-out trio. They should have copied Mathematica instead. Unify the concepts in a coherent form. Instead we get yet another second rate reheat.
it is disgusting that it came out with: "With eight votes in favor". i think these 8 members of the board need re-evaluated. This is a sad reflection on how big business can mess-up wonderful things made by society.
The fact that everyone acknowledges here is that Office is the defacto standard for document markup. So recognizing it as a dejure standard makes perfect sense.
The ISO process does not require standards to be open. An ISO standard can be entirely encumbered by patents. So OOXML is much better in that regard than the average ISO standard.
Meanwhile Sun's proposal is just as proprietary as Microsoft's, neither is the process of an open design process, they are merely a schema dump from an existing program. And Sun has a vastly worse history as far as open standards go, suing companies for not implementing Java in their prefered maner.
So all in all I think that in this particular faction fight I have zero sympathy for the anti-Microsoft position. Recognize other formats as well, but certainly recognize the market leader.
Is there any compelling reason _not_ to use apache?! o.O
If you are using Visual Studio dotNet as your development environment you are not going to find Apache works too well.
The netcraft survey is bunk because it measures a quantity that has always been irrelevant. In the past the market share of Apache was artificially inflated because most parked domains would sit on Apache boxes. Now Microsoft has identified that as an issue they are starting to get the advantage.
The quantity of interest is not who supplies the Web server but what the development platform is. As a practical matter any code of interest can run on ISS but rather less can run on Apache and less again on LAMP.
And there is no guarantee that the code engine will be visible in any case. You could easily have an IIS back end written in dotNET being served up through a squid front end.
And the rate of use says nothing as to whether the software is any damn good. There are still plenty of FORTRAN and COBOL coders even though the languages are abysmal.
The opportunity for judicial review is minimal, but Lofgren overstates the matter by saying that there are no checks and balances at all.
Currently President SFB is threatening to veto the act in any case because it does not meet his crietria for lack of accountability.
It seems unlikely that he will follow through. But in any case the ammendment times out in six months. By which time we will in all likelihood be deep into the Gonzalez constitutional crisis. It would be nice if Congress would deal with Gonzalez in the terms he deserves:
Mr Gonzalez, you are incompetent, you are a fool, you are a liar. You have committed and you have commissioned high crimes against the constitution and the citizens of this country. You have facilitated torture, you have obstructed justice, you have committed perjury. Your name will be a byword for dishonorable conduct in high office for generations to come.
Actually he *is* talking about HTTPS, TLS is the successor to SSL it came about because the MD5 & SHA-1 algorithms have been "technically" compromised.
TLS is the successor to SSL but that is not the reason that the spec came about. The MD5 compromise came after the work was already started.
The work started when Microsoft sumbitted their Transport Layer Security protocol to the IETF as a standards proposal. Up to that point Netscape had attempted to keep SSL as a proprietary specification under their control. Which was not too popular with those of us who had broken SSL 1.0 without any difficulty and then been completely ignored in the design of SSL 2.0, which was also botched.
Sometime after the group began to start up Netscape came out with SSL 3.0 which had been extensively reworked by Paul Kocher and Netscape offered to release change control to the IETF. Microsoft agreed since that is all they had actually wanted all along. The only thing that was really changed in the end was the name and the ciphersuite options.
BTW its not surprising that Russ thinks security is the major challenge, he was until recently the security area director. Before that he was chair of the S/MIME working group.
Until 9/11 the biggest act of terror committed on US soil was the Oaklahoma City bombing, committed by a right wing white supremacist. The act of terror that caused greatest loss of life in Europe is still the Bolgona railway station bombing perpetrated by a neo-facist right wing group.
Islamic terrorism is relatively new. The PLO was secular. Their friends, the Baader Meinhof gang and Action Directe were communists.
Most religious terrorism is sectarian, Catholics against Protestants, Protestants against Catholics, Sunni against Shi'ia, Shi'ia against Sunnis.
And since we are on the subject of terrorism, what do you call a government that employs torture, detention without trial, starts wars, disegards international law and treaties? Perhaps the term is not terrorist, but the corrupt crew are still a bunch of totally evil bastards regardless.
No, I'm not a shill (but thanks for resorting to ad homimem).
That isn't an ad hominem argument. An ad hominem argument would be 'George Bush made exactly the same argument, Bush is a Dufus, therefore what you say is false'.
The point I was making was that there are paid shills to promote junk science which appear whenever an economic interest is threatened. The claim that 'the jury is out' is always made.
There is more to argument than logic, facts matter as well. An argument that begins from a false premise is false no matter how correct the application of logic.
There is a serious difference between actual fructose and High Fructose Corn Syrup. HFCS is definitely bad for you, on the other hand, if fructose is bad, should we all stop eating fruit? Lumping fructose with HFCS is like comparing apples with a Frankenstein experiment on fruit.
When you eat fructose in fruit you also eat the fibre. TFA points out that a glass of juice contains the juice of six oranges. It would take you a long time to eat your way through that as fruit.
We are evolved to respond to a particular environment. The physical stimuli we respond to are not necessarily direct. We do not respond to lack of oxygen, we respond to presence of excess carbon dioxide, result: people who enter a nitrogen-only atmosphere die of asphyxiation without noticing the lack.
You're right, the sugar quotas and corn subsidies raise prices (directly or indirectly) for almost all consumable items. The jury is still out on whether HFCS truly is tied to obesity (there are studies that go both ways, and TFA adds as far as I can tell nothing new to the debate), but there is absolutely no question that it kills us economically.
You sound just like the shills for the tobacco industry that used to claim smoking was not adictive. Then they went off to be global warming deniers.
Everyone agrees that the US has a much worse obesity epidemic than other countries. And pretty much everyone who has a qualification in nutrition agrees that the causes are lack of exercise and the consumption of junk foods.
From a nutritional point of view there is not that much difference between junk food and real food. The ludicrous amounts of corn syrup pumped in unnecessarily is the main difference.
Since stopping eating food with HFCS I have lost 30 lbs.
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Or he had enough cash to cover the short.
First off there is the price. There is a rule that says that when you short a stock below $5 the margin you have to provide never falls below $5 a share. So to short 100,000 SCOX shares you would need $0.5 million in cash or $1 million in stock. With SCOX at $0.50 you would net a maximum of $50,0000 if you won. But if for whatever reason the markets thought SCO looked like winning the case and the stock spiked to $10 you would be down $1 million.
The second reason to avoid shorting stocks as bad as SCO is that the short interest can keep the stock afloat all on its own. That is known as a short squeeze. I shorted a complete POS stock that was trading at $20. The company had no revenues and had recently done a SCO like idiot move. I bought to cover at $40, the stock hit $100 at the peak. All this despite the fact that they had no business. it took two years for the stock to drop to 50 cents, which is still overpriced.
There are certainly times when a short makes sense. When the technical staf of Cybercash all posted to the IETF mailing lists that their email address would change later that day it was clear that the game was up (public knowledge means its not insider trading). I made $20K on that short which partly covers the $50K I lost on the other.
The usual reason for using a short is to balance out a portfolio, insuring against a drop in the market. Obviously you want to pick a dog or a grossly overvalued stock since those will probably drop furthest and fastest. For example plenty of people recon that Google will remain king of the search engine space. So they put $100K on Google and short $25K on Yahoo. If search booms they make money on Google and loose some on Yahoo. If search crashes they cover part of their losses on Yahoo. Another reason for using shorts is to hedge an option strategy. From time to time it is possible to play arbitrage between the options market and the equity markets.
$20K is peanuts as far as an investment stake is concerned. An MBA is worth upwards of $20K a year. You would have to turn the $20K to $400K to match. Not very likely.
If you want an investment, there is nothing better than education. There is no stock that can turn $20K into a $20K annuity in two years.
On the other hand the most likely story is that this is simply someone out to yank everyone's chain by constructing a sob story that gives everyone a good chuckle.
Microsoft paid SCO less than a third of what IBM is reconed to have paid in legal fees.
As far as picking sides goes, Microsoft does best if there is a judgement against SCO which sets a precedent against Boies type of legal tactics: "we own the copyrights to your code but we are not going to say which parts". Note that is not the same as IBM wins since IBM can win without a precedent being set.
It is somewhat ironic then that the Microsoft judgement has indirectly resulted in Novell being able to bring bankruptcy proceedings.
Apparently SCO have $7.8 million in cash on hand. If they shut down operations today there might be enough to pay off the lawyers.
That is not quite accurate. McBride's allegations have neither been proven nor disproven. In fact they appear to fall into the category of 'not even wrong' as in 'not a testable legal theory'.
Probably not, Novell would be an unsecured creditor. So the secured creditors get paid out first. And of course the Boies slime machine has tried to make itself first in line to be paid.
That said, the lawyers took the case on a contingency basis, SCO is now in bankruptcy so the contract with the lawyers can be voided just like any other supplier. The judgement won by Novell has established that SCO does not hold the copyrights to UNIX as they claimed, so what does SCO actually have?
It is hard to see any other law firm wanting to buy SCO's assets out of bankruptcy to continue the lawsuit. So the only likely bidders for SCO's assets are IBM, Novell and Boies. At this point it must be pretty clear to Boies that the case is lost and all they can hope to collect is at best some nuisance money from IBM. IBM has no incentive to pay since there is a court judgement to the effect that any money owed belongs to Novell.
My guess is that we won't know what is going to happen till we see what the liabilities are and which ones the judge will allow to be cancelled.
Can't see the judge being too impressed by McBride's reorganization plan. The purpose of Chapter 11 is to keep a company in business. SCO does not have a business, all they have is a lawsuit which the largest creditor wants to see ended.
I remain entirely unimpressed by Boies legal skills. He botched the Florida recount. He made idiotic arguments in Napster and SCO vs IBM that never had a chance of success. In the Microsoft case he essentially handed ultimate victory to Redmond by leading Jackson into a whole series of decisions which a competent lawyer would have realized were certain to backfire at appeal. He fought the case on entirely the wrong set of claims. He should have worked out that Clark and McNeil were looking for an alibi for their own poor management. Netscape's treatment of Spyglass in particular was just as predatory as anything Microsoft was acused of. If Boies had been the legal genius he was cracked up to be he would have taken a very different path.
That would be rather harder to manage, in OASIS I have seen no votes change to yes but not the other way round.
The point of the ISO standards process is not to pick the one true standard, it is to recognize what standards people use. This type of behavior strikes me as very similar to the factionalism that kept the FORTRAN 8X standard in process for a decade. Rather than adopt the VAX extensions to FORTRAN that had long ago become the defacto standard competitors had to argue for advantage.
They should recognize both formats as standards.
So you mean that Microsoft can lobby No votes to become Yes votes after meeting the issues raised in their comments?
Sounds to me like anyone who voted no is going to be seeing some pretty stiff lobbying. The vote was very close.
My copy of Office 2007 works just fine. I currently only have 2007 on one machine but its working fine when I transfer files to the other machine.
Only problem I have at the moment is that I would really like to be able to use the new citation manager feature and that is a new feature so obviously 2003 does not support it.
And there is a plug in for down versions of Office to read office 2007 files in any case.
Completely off base. Wrong on every count.
First off I think you need to understand what ISO is, ISO does not set standards. All ISO does is to recognize standards that have already been set by other standards bodies. So ISO 3103 is actually the same as BS 6008. ISO 9000 is BS 5750 and so on.
The IETF is actually accredited as an ISO member body and in theory RFCs could become ISO standards. They never have and never will as long as ISO charges money for its standards.
There is a compliance program for ISO 9000 but it isn't run by ISO. ISO 9000 consulting is one of the things that Y2K vampires went on to do after Dec 31 1999.
If you want standards go ISO 3103 is pretty critical yet you would be hard pressed to find any US companies that are in compliance. Still, least they don't use salt water any more.
Or they can apply to put the company into liquidation, that is Chapter 7. At the moment SCO is in chapter 11, that is reorganization. If the company cannot continue to function it is not reorganizing and has to liquidate.
The problem for SCO here is that it can only reorganize in Chapter 11 if it has a good chance of demonstrating that it can secure the agreement of its creditors to the reorganization plan. The current management only have 120 days in which they have the exclusive right to propose a reorganization plan. After that they would have to pursuade the court to extend that right.
The question I would be interesting in knowing the answer to is what the situation is with respect to Novell's claims. Clearly SCO is going into bankruptcy before the bench hearing to determine what SCO owes Novell. Certain types of lawsuit get stayed by bankruptcy but it would seem odd if a case that had been decided on the merits and was only waiting for damages to be determined to be stayed by a voluntary liquidation when the only 'business' the company has is litigation.
The end of SCO does not necessarily mean the end of the case. I seem to remember that Boies and co have a bunch of charges against the assets of the company which allow them to acquire certain SCO assets and continue the litigation. Not that this is necessarily a bad thing, given the amount of time and money that has gone into the case and given that it looks like SCOs case is utterly toast it might well be better for it to at least result in a precedent.
It should not cost $50 million to force a plaintif to state a valid claim. There should be a clear precedent that ugabugah copyright lawsuits where the plaintif fails to state what the allegedly infringing content is get tossed out in future.
Goes like a bat out of hell. No performance problems at all running Vista with Aero on a 30" monitor.
Objective C is miles better than C++. It is a real pity that the world was led down that blind alley. But at this point Java and C# are the ones that have won. Only good reason for using Objective C is if you are maintaining a legacy code base.
Vista works just fine on the right hardware. Admittedly the hardware I use has ten times the power of a Cray 1 if you count the graphics processors. But give it two years and my system will be mainstream.
The only problem with Vista is that it does not work at all well on machines not designed for Vista. Vista is a lot more intolerant of buggy drivers. That is a good thing, much of the instability of Windows has alawys been caused by baddly written drivers. The outsource shops that write them have little incentive to do the job right. They get paid when the box ships, driver bugs mean follow up work.
PC World is a part of Dixons, a cheezy retailer which I bought quite a few shoddy electronic gadgets from until I realized that they tended to break down within months about fifteen years ago and I have not bought from them since.
The UK retail laws are considerably more consumer friendly than in the US. The sale of goods act is on the customer's side. Laptops are commonly bought for the purpose of running Linux, end of story.
The DTI has some information that is helpful. Basically you can sue Dixons in small claims court. The threat of doing so is going to cause them to capitulate quickly.
But the best advice is never to by from Dixons, Currys, PCWorld or any of their other fronts. They are not cheap but the goods they sell often are in my experience. Unfortunately that is somewhat difficult in the UK as the Thatcher regime allowed them to establish a virtual high street monopoly by buying Currys.
Actually there is a much better way t filter bogus NDRs. An NDR should be sent to the SMTP.From address, which is separate from the address that shows on the message.
So there are schemes such as BATV that mail servers can use to encode an authentication token into their outgoing SMTP.From address. So ted@example.com becomes AS234fw8734.ted.example.com. The authentication token is then checked against a secret key, if it does not match the bounce is suppressed.
SPF/SenderID are both very useful, but they are not the best way to solve this particular problem. The value of SPF/SenderID is to allow use of accreditation data for more effective whitelisting.
Actually there is an incentive to move to Word 2007, it is the first edition of Word with a citation feature that does not totally suck.
But as far as the annals of useless comparisons goes, 13,000 vs 1,300 documents is irrelevant. More HTML files are added to the Web each minute.
The value of OOXML etc will appear once there is a large enough base of users. Maybe that will take three or four years. At the moment I can't use the new features of Word 2007 because I have to use two different machines and one is stuck with the downversion.
Its not worth paying a lot to upgrade but most companies pay the same regardless of which edition they run. So the newer versions will percolate through.
Having written more than one OASIS standard I think you overstate the case here. The whole point of OASIS is to make it easy to recognize an XML schema that is available for open use as a standard.
What OASIS expressly does not attempt to do is to avoid duplication. There can be two separate OASIS groups working on the same subject matter at the same time. There is deliberately no mechanism to prevent overlap or to reconcile different approaches. The idea being that the market does this well enough if this is needed.
From a standards point of view there are only two positions that make much sense to me. The first is to take something that is already in widespread use, the clear leader in the field, refine it a bit and call it the standard. This is what was done with S/MIME and PGP. The second approach is to build something entirely new without any legacy commitments.
OOXML took a third route, take a structure from a piece of otherwise unsuccessful code, slam it into a document and cal it the basis for a standard.
It was then developed in the open over a period of 3 years. It reuses as many previous open standards as possible (MathML for math stuff, SVG for vector graphics, etc).
More is the pity that they didn't look up my original design proposal for putting math into HTML, the original concept had been to enable a mathematica like environment within an HTML editor.
OpenOffice copies the wrong office suite. Office consists of the same trio of worn-out applications, word processor, spreadsheet, data base that have existed for three decades. OpenOffice provides a poor mans substitute for the same worn-out trio. They should have copied Mathematica instead. Unify the concepts in a coherent form. Instead we get yet another second rate reheat.
The fact that everyone acknowledges here is that Office is the defacto standard for document markup. So recognizing it as a dejure standard makes perfect sense.
The ISO process does not require standards to be open. An ISO standard can be entirely encumbered by patents. So OOXML is much better in that regard than the average ISO standard.
Meanwhile Sun's proposal is just as proprietary as Microsoft's, neither is the process of an open design process, they are merely a schema dump from an existing program. And Sun has a vastly worse history as far as open standards go, suing companies for not implementing Java in their prefered maner.
So all in all I think that in this particular faction fight I have zero sympathy for the anti-Microsoft position. Recognize other formats as well, but certainly recognize the market leader.
If you are using Visual Studio dotNet as your development environment you are not going to find Apache works too well.
The netcraft survey is bunk because it measures a quantity that has always been irrelevant. In the past the market share of Apache was artificially inflated because most parked domains would sit on Apache boxes. Now Microsoft has identified that as an issue they are starting to get the advantage.
The quantity of interest is not who supplies the Web server but what the development platform is. As a practical matter any code of interest can run on ISS but rather less can run on Apache and less again on LAMP.
And there is no guarantee that the code engine will be visible in any case. You could easily have an IIS back end written in dotNET being served up through a squid front end.
And the rate of use says nothing as to whether the software is any damn good. There are still plenty of FORTRAN and COBOL coders even though the languages are abysmal.
Currently President SFB is threatening to veto the act in any case because it does not meet his crietria for lack of accountability.
It seems unlikely that he will follow through. But in any case the ammendment times out in six months. By which time we will in all likelihood be deep into the Gonzalez constitutional crisis. It would be nice if Congress would deal with Gonzalez in the terms he deserves:
TLS is the successor to SSL but that is not the reason that the spec came about. The MD5 compromise came after the work was already started.
The work started when Microsoft sumbitted their Transport Layer Security protocol to the IETF as a standards proposal. Up to that point Netscape had attempted to keep SSL as a proprietary specification under their control. Which was not too popular with those of us who had broken SSL 1.0 without any difficulty and then been completely ignored in the design of SSL 2.0, which was also botched.
Sometime after the group began to start up Netscape came out with SSL 3.0 which had been extensively reworked by Paul Kocher and Netscape offered to release change control to the IETF. Microsoft agreed since that is all they had actually wanted all along. The only thing that was really changed in the end was the name and the ciphersuite options.
BTW its not surprising that Russ thinks security is the major challenge, he was until recently the security area director. Before that he was chair of the S/MIME working group.
Not true.
Until 9/11 the biggest act of terror committed on US soil was the Oaklahoma City bombing, committed by a right wing white supremacist. The act of terror that caused greatest loss of life in Europe is still the Bolgona railway station bombing perpetrated by a neo-facist right wing group.
Islamic terrorism is relatively new. The PLO was secular. Their friends, the Baader Meinhof gang and Action Directe were communists.
Most religious terrorism is sectarian, Catholics against Protestants, Protestants against Catholics, Sunni against Shi'ia, Shi'ia against Sunnis.
And since we are on the subject of terrorism, what do you call a government that employs torture, detention without trial, starts wars, disegards international law and treaties? Perhaps the term is not terrorist, but the corrupt crew are still a bunch of totally evil bastards regardless.
That isn't an ad hominem argument. An ad hominem argument would be 'George Bush made exactly the same argument, Bush is a Dufus, therefore what you say is false'.
The point I was making was that there are paid shills to promote junk science which appear whenever an economic interest is threatened. The claim that 'the jury is out' is always made.
There is more to argument than logic, facts matter as well. An argument that begins from a false premise is false no matter how correct the application of logic.
When you eat fructose in fruit you also eat the fibre. TFA points out that a glass of juice contains the juice of six oranges. It would take you a long time to eat your way through that as fruit.
We are evolved to respond to a particular environment. The physical stimuli we respond to are not necessarily direct. We do not respond to lack of oxygen, we respond to presence of excess carbon dioxide, result: people who enter a nitrogen-only atmosphere die of asphyxiation without noticing the lack.
HFCS is added to foods that simply don't need it.
You sound just like the shills for the tobacco industry that used to claim smoking was not adictive. Then they went off to be global warming deniers.
Everyone agrees that the US has a much worse obesity epidemic than other countries. And pretty much everyone who has a qualification in nutrition agrees that the causes are lack of exercise and the consumption of junk foods.
From a nutritional point of view there is not that much difference between junk food and real food. The ludicrous amounts of corn syrup pumped in unnecessarily is the main difference.
Since stopping eating food with HFCS I have lost 30 lbs.