- No zero-fuss Font embedding. - No vector animation. - No filters. - No ubiqious logic engine/VM. - No timelines (yes they can be usefull) - No zero-fuss sound embedding.
Flash will be around for a long time. It didn't die 10 years ago, it didn't die 5 years ago and it won't die now.
The only difference is that a Fettecke has no resemblance of art to the layman and thus its removal by cleaners shouldn't suprise anyone. Where as a streetart painting usually does display concrete results of artistic effort that aren't easy to dublicate. I could make a Fettecke right away, but not a piece of streetart. Not without artistic practice and training that is. Goes to show what is truly art and what not, imho.
Have the employees make the ECDL or have it as a prerequisite to applying for the job. The ECDL is vendor independent and standardizes the training of basic 101 computer operations skills. They should have some basic security training in there as well. Definitely worthwhile checking it out. My 2 cents.
If you want to start building your own social network and/or help out in FOSS social networking, check out Noserub, an OSS decentralised social networking protocol with some existing implementations in PHP and so forth.
Otherwise I'd check out Ning.com. There you can build your own social network in half an hour or so.
Sorry folks, but while I'm a total n00b when it comes to robots, I believe I could come up with a much better Tetris solving programm in a single day. Is it just me or is that bot really bad at Tetris?
Looking back at lonelier episodes in my life and looking at the lonely episodes, sometimes decades, of others I notice the habit of notably more frequent hot bathing during those times. I've come to find that a warm bath is a suprisingly good substitute for the physical and emotional warmth of a sustained intimate embrace. (Gee, I can't believe how technical that sentence sounds...)
I'm quite sure that many people subconsciously chose a warm bath as a substitute without really being aware of it. I don't think this vest can beat that. Or a mammal pet, for that matter - the more obvious choice of human substitute for the socially handicapped.
While the pictures are real, the stories of her riding around alone on her bike in the disaster zone where debunked as fake and made-up. There are pictures she took showing others standing next to her indicating that the took one of the officical bus trips into the zone, since no one was allowed in alone at the time. There may be a little yarn spun into her descriptions, so take them with a grain of salt.
Dude, those pictures you took from the bumpercars at the amusement park and the stacked radiators and stuff tell me that you where a tad close to those kind of things, if I may put it that way. I remember pretty clearly others describing their dosimeter going wild when closing in on metal objects and walls facing the reactor.
Did you have a dosimeter or szintomat on you when walking about and taking those pictures?
I'd suggest you switch to an organic diet with lots of iodine and vitamin D for the next year or two... Jesus, you gotta watch out, there was a frigging reactor superdisaster out there!
Just had the idea: Wouldn't it be a sort of cool project to build a robot that plays Astroids? I mean the actual arcade version? Shouldn't be that difficult. Such a device could beat the world record, no?... In fact, it could probably play endlessly.
Oh, gee, YA/. Flash discussion, yet again heaploads of non-sense and misconceptions... Ok, here we go:
Hoi Slashdot.
Veteran Flash Developer here, this is rumor / BS control - here are the facts:
At oh-sixhundred an EEV... oh, sorry, wrong script...
1) Flash is by far the most ubiqious end user plattform in existance. Period. It has been for a good decade. Since deployment of Java as end user app delivery method still sucks as much as it did already in 1999 and ActionScript 2 and AS3 have improved the Flash stack in leaps and bounds and are practically indistinguishable for Java in power and versatility, everybody in web technology who has more than two braincells is still betting his money and his pocket cash on Flash as a rich client plattform. All others have failed, and they have failed miserably. Everyone knows why, nobody is learning from it. And thus Flash remains.
And since JavaFX still is the typical Type-A botchjob Sun like do pull when they try to push Java into the appspace it was initially meant for, Flash can stay as crappy as it is and it still has nothing to fear. I wonder if Oracle can change this. They said they'll continue with JavaFX, but that can just so mean they'll continue to screw around like Sun did for 12 years in a row.
2) The web is - if anything - even more diversified than 5 years ago. Mobile doesn't help it. The first Flash Player for Android will have Flash at a solid #1 position again, for another 5 years at least. Not that I really love that, but we have to face the truth... It will probably even give Android another solid boost vs. iPhone, which, strangely, would actually be a good thing.
3) The FOSS community is pushing Ajax Frameworks with a bizar amount of manhours and developer force, yet for Fonts, Animation and Sound there is no alternative. And if I look at the fuss I have to put up with to get a decent Ajax RIA running across browsers I can tell you this: For anything than the most well planned asynchronous built-to-fit purpose in a single webform, Ajax quickly becomes unbearably cumbersome.
And for tried and true decoupled business apps Tibco Gi is Ajax as about as good as it gets, but needs an experienced devteam to make use of - and then still are there only a few browsers supported. Ergo: Fallback to Flash (or Flex in this case).
4) RIA webapps are square pegs in a round hole. The web is document driven. Yet again and again people are going to try and carve the next nifty thing out of it, no matter what bizar hacks it takes. That's the way we are and it won't change. Not as long as my customers pay me good money to build Flash Applications. The last one took us two years and a team of 25, 7 of which were doing Flash/AS full time on the project. Just to give you an impression of the critical mass advantage Flash has over anything else. MS Silverlight included.
As long as everything else on the web is 10 years behind in enabling something like this, Flash will remain Number One. And no, Chrome with some OpenQL experiments or Ajax/HTML won't cut it. Trust me on this one.
5) Flash is not a security issue. Not compared to anything else on the web. ActiveX is, Flash is not. In fact, Flash has gained inroads in white-collar space based on its extremely conservative approach to security issues. Calling Flash a vector for exploits is just plain silly. Stop doing that, that's bad karma. Flash has other flaws that are plenty enough to rant about.
6) Flash has had serious flaws and shortcomings for 10 years now. Build a FOSS RIA kit that does away with them and Flash is dead in an instant, and the web is ours. Until then quit the non-sense. Ads aren't what drives Flash. Opinion leaders are. And those with the cash. And as long as the best webdesigners on the planet earn no more th
Given that you've always been enthusiastic about the technical aspects and ideas of.Net and have managed to build an impressive re-implementation of.Net in FOSS, have you considered dropping the focus on.Net compliance?
After all, MS governance of the.Net ecosystem is laking, as you say. And from what you say it sounds very much like I'd expect it to be: That following.Net everywhere it goes is more trouble than it's worth. On top of that, from what I can tell Mono has gained solid traction in the development world all by itself and on its own merit.
This all together with the solid marketing the mono project does all by itself I can't shake the notion that by now de-prioritizing.Net compliance in Mono would actually give Mono adoption a boost.
What is your take on this?
(And, btw., thanks for the Mono toolkit. I've actually gotten curious about C# all because of it and the Monodevelop IDE.)
Mono is cool and Miguel should right away take the consequences of his late insight on to this issue and publicly announce that compliance with.Net is not Monos prime goal anymore. As far as I can tell there are more usefull tools and programms built with Mono than with.Not (Unity 3D comes to mind). He could walk away from all-out.Net compliance right now and MS would be the looser on this one.
What a conincidence. I just heard a talk with him today. He's visiting our company to help with the development of a star trek game and he also introduced the very same concept. Neat idea and - as he says - it works with those who play games and then is a better alternative to grades. His explainations seemed plausible to me.
Goes to show that C is nothing but a bunch of bloatware and the c advocates nothing but a bunch of hypocrites. This will shut them up once they come to me ragging on Python or PHP again. Ha!
Join Fon if you can determine that there's a Fonspot near where you're staying or get your connectivity here in Germany. There are multiple Phoneshops in every street of every city and town here, the hassle will be much less than if you try to get german connectivity in the US. Most people speak usable english here, so you'll have no trouble negotiating in a Phoneshop.
If Fon isn't an option I'd try and find out if there is a T-Mobile WiFi Hotspot near where you're staying (probably is) and get a Flatrate code for a month or so. T-M. Hotspot had that sort of thing a few years ago - you'd buy a card with a code which, once activated, you could use for a month. They probably still have simular offers - iirc you can purchase them directly at the T-Mobile webshop.
Bottom line: If Fon isn't an option, don't worry and just come over here, you'll get your daily internet fix one way or the other.
Look people, I don't know what problems you have, but there are a few things I can say for sure:
- Since 1985 I've used many different operating systems and currently Ubuntu is top-of-the-line for end users, along with Mac OS X. The latter only working hassle-free with the hardware that was built for it (!)... and coming with a bucket full of Apple DRM and multimedia lock-in.
- Canonical has gone out of it's way to raise the bar for everyday end-user Linux *and* they are giving it away for free. Until Ubuntu the only distro with zero-fuss hardware detection was Knoppix and that looked like shit right of the bat.
- Ubuntu is so good it managed to lead me to peace with Gnome - which I allways thought as notably lacking (i.e. breathtakingly shitty) compared with the non-x.0 releases of KDE. And I still do. Yet Ubuntu original delivers it so well I couldn't be bothered to switch to KDE - and I'm a guy who makes a living developing on Linux. That's how good Ubuntu is.
- If you don't like the brown/orange or new purple/brown/orange theme, then change it. It takes 10 seconds. And you've got like 10 well designed themes to chose from off the bat. Try that with Windows or OS X. And besides: I and many others are grateful for a consistant visual style that - for once - isn't just a generic variant of the blue OS X.0 rippoff we've been served for the past decade from every vendor on the planet.
- They've now perfected their style and changed the logo. What's the fuss about it? And aside from the fact that I was getting used to the rounded helvetica, the logo actually as gotten better. *AND* they give the reason for the changes right there in their blog! Dig it folks: They have payed professional(!!) designers who derived and improved the new Ubuntu theme for them. Show me another client level FOSS project that has this. Or, for that matter, even a professional distro that does it this well.
Bottom line: All you ranters and whiners: Please shut the f*ck up and for f*ck sake, be gratefull for once. Thank you.
What bothers me is the term 'religion' becoming synonymous with the term 'confession'.
I can be a perfectly reasonable person, even an atheist or agnostic, and still be religious, accepting the concept of religion as an optimised means of using formalised liturgy as a method for mental and spiritual advancement. And I can even choose a stronger formalised confession as my means of exercising my chosen religion. However, the problems start when I try to superimpose my confession upon others. That's when things turn south and where crackpottery and fanatism starts.
I'd wish for more reasonable people to make that distinction and see the difference, as that's the only way to gain inroads in healing the crackpots and fanatics - whatever their confession may be (materialism included).
What you're describing is pretty much a type-A nerd experience which - I would bet - something like the majority of all slashdotters had in their youth. The study actually describes the same thing, but from another perspective. If you are so occupied with your own thoughts and interests, it's no wonder that you can't read cues from others. As your interests don't really focus on learning them, but on other stuff. In many ways we where the 'mental' or 'verbal' bullies and I - after having had my first high-school reunion after 15 years - see the bullying reaction as pretty much a statement of helplessness of my peers in dealing with my - in their book - strange and unsocial behaviour.
What young nerds have to learn - and I had to learn the hard way - is that it's not entirely the others fault if you constantly get picked on. I eventually found it quite rewarding to put my nerd/geek/smart-guy skills to use for my peers and I very often experienced that, when I was alone with the toughest kid in the class or any of his buddies, that they actually envied me at some point.
Never the less, learning to fight and stand for yourself and speak the language of the street is a skill-kit that one has to learn aswell. And just because a majority has stacked me out as their main target doesn't mean I'm allways wrong. It could also mean that I'm just smarter than them, or, more likely, have put more thoughts to the issue on which our oppinions differ.
In any case, it's allways good to take a step back and look at a bad situation from all sides in order to get the right picture. A good teacher can teach any type of kid that sort of approach, be it the bully or the nerd.
Aren't they supposed to use XML to be compliant and open? And what if they can say: 'Hey, we tried, but this one bad small company threatend de poor liddle MicroSoft with a patent lawsuit and now we have to take XML out, sooo sad! The truth is, MS wants it's formats to stay proprietary and I figure they'd welcome any reason that holds to keep it that way. I wouldn't be suprised if this XML-patent thing was staged.
While James Cameron isn't in my top list of directors by a long shot, having seen most (all?) of his movies and now Avatar I have to admit he is a good director. He does the movies he likes and he puts loads of personal effort and risk into them. And he knows how to get the plot, visuals *and* the screenplay right. I said *right* not original or superb. Given, the Avatar plot isn't anything new. Cameron boldfacidly admitted in an interview that it was 'Dances with Wolves' (..Pocahontas/Ferngully/etc....) in SF and I, as everyone else, was prepared to see a generic plotline unfold.
But: I was suprised that the didn't flog a dead horse in terms of stale american cornyness in dialouge. There was a bit to much of that in Abyss and I was surprised that he'd improved on that in leaps and bounds. The play and dialog where simply textbook, no more and no less, but they avoided pressing any issue. It was as if Cameron almost expected one to know the story. And Avatars pacing is excellent, imho. No strange Abyss-like 'Submarine drama turned ET' plot-turns or mood-swings. Just the right amount of action, tension, poetry and subplot you can expect and not to much avantgarde experimenting as not to confuse the target audience, i.e. the masses. The FX are first class and lack the significant botches that disturbed the visual experience in 'Attack of the Clones'. I was prepared for something like that in the 95% CGI movie that Avatar is, and was glad they didn't screw up.
Bottom line: Camerons movies are certainly not top-of-the-line in terms of avantgarde and arthouse, but they are allways a sure bet for a few hours of popcorn-movie fun. Which, as I understand, is his intention. And thus makes him a good director, in my book.
Clifford Stoll is an internet sceptic, not a ludite. His arguments against expensive school IT programms financed by cuts in the teaching staff of public schools have solid points. As do his warnings about the Interweb isolating people rather than bringing them together.
Some of his worries turned out to be unwarranted, others turned out to be quite valid.
I'll take the advice and thoughts over an educated sceptic like Stoll over some permanent yay-sayer anytime.
The best FOSS tool you can get for this is Open Office and templates you build or purchase for it. Taxation ERP is the most boring job in IT and you won't find FOSS programmers doing it for the love. And it's not about forms or templates anyway, its about writing the right numbers in the right places, and for that you need a professional, no matter how small your business is. Hire or contract one. All else quickly becomes a waste of time and money.
If I every go back to being a freelancer, that's the very first thing I'd change. I did all the accounting and tax stuff myself and it was hell. Ok, so this is Germany - the big, dark, evil and twisted Empire of tax laws - but never the less, your job is doing IT and not figuring out US tax law. That independant accountant down the street is much better and more effective at that than you.
Slashdot Mirror
- No zero-fuss Font embedding.
- No vector animation.
- No filters.
- No ubiqious logic engine/VM.
- No timelines (yes they can be usefull)
- No zero-fuss sound embedding.
Flash will be around for a long time. It didn't die 10 years ago, it didn't die 5 years ago and it won't die now.
And earlier!
http://gizmodo.com/5063917/diy-egg-beater-centrifuge-can-save-lives
The only difference is that a Fettecke has no resemblance of art to the layman and thus its removal by cleaners shouldn't suprise anyone. Where as a streetart painting usually does display concrete results of artistic effort that aren't easy to dublicate. I could make a Fettecke right away, but not a piece of streetart. Not without artistic practice and training that is. Goes to show what is truly art and what not, imho.
Have the employees make the ECDL or have it as a prerequisite to applying for the job. The ECDL is vendor independent and standardizes the training of basic 101 computer operations skills. They should have some basic security training in there as well. Definitely worthwhile checking it out.
My 2 cents.
If you want to start building your own social network and/or help out in FOSS social networking, check out Noserub, an OSS decentralised social networking protocol with some existing implementations in PHP and so forth.
Otherwise I'd check out Ning.com. There you can build your own social network in half an hour or so.
Sorry folks, but while I'm a total n00b when it comes to robots, I believe I could come up with a much better Tetris solving programm in a single day. Is it just me or is that bot really bad at Tetris?
Looking back at lonelier episodes in my life and looking at the lonely episodes, sometimes decades, of others I notice the habit of notably more frequent hot bathing during those times. I've come to find that a warm bath is a suprisingly good substitute for the physical and emotional warmth of a sustained intimate embrace. (Gee, I can't believe how technical that sentence sounds ...)
I'm quite sure that many people subconsciously chose a warm bath as a substitute without really being aware of it. I don't think this vest can beat that. Or a mammal pet, for that matter - the more obvious choice of human substitute for the socially handicapped.
While the pictures are real, the stories of her riding around alone on her bike in the disaster zone where debunked as fake and made-up. There are pictures she took showing others standing next to her indicating that the took one of the officical bus trips into the zone, since no one was allowed in alone at the time. There may be a little yarn spun into her descriptions, so take them with a grain of salt.
Dude, those pictures you took from the bumpercars at the amusement park and the stacked radiators and stuff tell me that you where a tad close to those kind of things, if I may put it that way. I remember pretty clearly others describing their dosimeter going wild when closing in on metal objects and walls facing the reactor.
Did you have a dosimeter or szintomat on you when walking about and taking those pictures?
I'd suggest you switch to an organic diet with lots of iodine and vitamin D for the next year or two ... Jesus, you gotta watch out, there was a frigging reactor superdisaster out there!
Just had the idea: Wouldn't it be a sort of cool project to build a robot that plays Astroids? I mean the actual arcade version? Shouldn't be that difficult. Such a device could beat the world record, no? ... In fact, it could probably play endlessly.
Oh, gee, YA /. Flash discussion, yet again heaploads of non-sense and misconceptions ... Ok, here we go:
Hoi Slashdot.
Veteran Flash Developer here, this is rumor / BS control - here are the facts:
At oh-sixhundred an EEV ... oh, sorry, wrong script ...
1) Flash is by far the most ubiqious end user plattform in existance. Period. It has been for a good decade. Since deployment of Java as end user app delivery method still sucks as much as it did already in 1999 and ActionScript 2 and AS3 have improved the Flash stack in leaps and bounds and are practically indistinguishable for Java in power and versatility, everybody in web technology who has more than two braincells is still betting his money and his pocket cash on Flash as a rich client plattform. All others have failed, and they have failed miserably. Everyone knows why, nobody is learning from it. And thus Flash remains.
And since JavaFX still is the typical Type-A botchjob Sun like do pull when they try to push Java into the appspace it was initially meant for, Flash can stay as crappy as it is and it still has nothing to fear. I wonder if Oracle can change this. They said they'll continue with JavaFX, but that can just so mean they'll continue to screw around like Sun did for 12 years in a row.
2) The web is - if anything - even more diversified than 5 years ago. Mobile doesn't help it. The first Flash Player for Android will have Flash at a solid #1 position again, for another 5 years at least. Not that I really love that, but we have to face the truth ... It will probably even give Android another solid boost vs. iPhone, which, strangely, would actually be a good thing.
3) The FOSS community is pushing Ajax Frameworks with a bizar amount of manhours and developer force, yet for Fonts, Animation and Sound there is no alternative. And if I look at the fuss I have to put up with to get a decent Ajax RIA running across browsers I can tell you this: For anything than the most well planned asynchronous built-to-fit purpose in a single webform, Ajax quickly becomes unbearably cumbersome.
And for tried and true decoupled business apps Tibco Gi is Ajax as about as good as it gets, but needs an experienced devteam to make use of - and then still are there only a few browsers supported. Ergo: Fallback to Flash (or Flex in this case).
4) RIA webapps are square pegs in a round hole. The web is document driven. Yet again and again people are going to try and carve the next nifty thing out of it, no matter what bizar hacks it takes. That's the way we are and it won't change. Not as long as my customers pay me good money to build Flash Applications. The last one took us two years and a team of 25, 7 of which were doing Flash/AS full time on the project. Just to give you an impression of the critical mass advantage Flash has over anything else. MS Silverlight included.
As long as everything else on the web is 10 years behind in enabling something like this, Flash will remain Number One. And no, Chrome with some OpenQL experiments or Ajax/HTML won't cut it. Trust me on this one.
5) Flash is not a security issue. Not compared to anything else on the web. ActiveX is, Flash is not. In fact, Flash has gained inroads in white-collar space based on its extremely conservative approach to security issues. Calling Flash a vector for exploits is just plain silly. Stop doing that, that's bad karma. Flash has other flaws that are plenty enough to rant about.
6) Flash has had serious flaws and shortcomings for 10 years now. Build a FOSS RIA kit that does away with them and Flash is dead in an instant, and the web is ours. Until then quit the non-sense. Ads aren't what drives Flash. Opinion leaders are. And those with the cash. And as long as the best webdesigners on the planet earn no more th
Given that you've always been enthusiastic about the technical aspects and ideas of .Net and have managed to build an impressive re-implementation of .Net in FOSS, have you considered dropping the focus on .Net compliance?
After all, MS governance of the .Net ecosystem is laking, as you say. And from what you say it sounds very much like I'd expect it to be: That following .Net everywhere it goes is more trouble than it's worth. On top of that, from what I can tell Mono has gained solid traction in the development world all by itself and on its own merit.
This all together with the solid marketing the mono project does all by itself I can't shake the notion that by now de-prioritizing .Net compliance in Mono would actually give Mono adoption a boost.
What is your take on this?
(And, btw., thanks for the Mono toolkit. I've actually gotten curious about C# all because of it and the Monodevelop IDE.)
Mono is cool and Miguel should right away take the consequences of his late insight on to this issue and publicly announce that compliance with .Net is not Monos prime goal anymore. As far as I can tell there are more usefull tools and programms built with Mono than with .Not (Unity 3D comes to mind). He could walk away from all-out .Net compliance right now and MS would be the looser on this one.
Shut up!
What a conincidence. I just heard a talk with him today. He's visiting our company to help with the development of a star trek game and he also introduced the very same concept. Neat idea and - as he says - it works with those who play games and then is a better alternative to grades. His explainations seemed plausible to me.
Goes to show that C is nothing but a bunch of bloatware and the c advocates nothing but a bunch of hypocrites. This will shut them up once they come to me ragging on Python or PHP again. Ha!
Join Fon if you can determine that there's a Fonspot near where you're staying or get your connectivity here in Germany. There are multiple Phoneshops in every street of every city and town here, the hassle will be much less than if you try to get german connectivity in the US. Most people speak usable english here, so you'll have no trouble negotiating in a Phoneshop.
If Fon isn't an option I'd try and find out if there is a T-Mobile WiFi Hotspot near where you're staying (probably is) and get a Flatrate code for a month or so. T-M. Hotspot had that sort of thing a few years ago - you'd buy a card with a code which, once activated, you could use for a month. They probably still have simular offers - iirc you can purchase them directly at the T-Mobile webshop.
Bottom line: If Fon isn't an option, don't worry and just come over here, you'll get your daily internet fix one way or the other.
Look people, I don't know what problems you have, but there are a few things I can say for sure:
- Since 1985 I've used many different operating systems and currently Ubuntu is top-of-the-line for end users, along with Mac OS X. The latter only working hassle-free with the hardware that was built for it (!) ... and coming with a bucket full of Apple DRM and multimedia lock-in.
- Canonical has gone out of it's way to raise the bar for everyday end-user Linux *and* they are giving it away for free. Until Ubuntu the only distro with zero-fuss hardware detection was Knoppix and that looked like shit right of the bat.
- Ubuntu is so good it managed to lead me to peace with Gnome - which I allways thought as notably lacking (i.e. breathtakingly shitty) compared with the non-x.0 releases of KDE. And I still do. Yet Ubuntu original delivers it so well I couldn't be bothered to switch to KDE - and I'm a guy who makes a living developing on Linux. That's how good Ubuntu is.
- If you don't like the brown/orange or new purple/brown/orange theme, then change it. It takes 10 seconds. And you've got like 10 well designed themes to chose from off the bat. Try that with Windows or OS X. And besides: I and many others are grateful for a consistant visual style that - for once - isn't just a generic variant of the blue OS X .0 rippoff we've been served for the past decade from every vendor on the planet.
- They've now perfected their style and changed the logo. What's the fuss about it? And aside from the fact that I was getting used to the rounded helvetica, the logo actually as gotten better. *AND* they give the reason for the changes right there in their blog! Dig it folks: They have payed professional(!!) designers who derived and improved the new Ubuntu theme for them. Show me another client level FOSS project that has this. Or, for that matter, even a professional distro that does it this well.
Bottom line:
All you ranters and whiners: Please shut the f*ck up and for f*ck sake, be gratefull for once. Thank you.
My 2 cents.
What bothers me is the term 'religion' becoming synonymous with the term 'confession'.
I can be a perfectly reasonable person, even an atheist or agnostic, and still be religious, accepting the concept of religion as an optimised means of using formalised liturgy as a method for mental and spiritual advancement. And I can even choose a stronger formalised confession as my means of exercising my chosen religion. However, the problems start when I try to superimpose my confession upon others. That's when things turn south and where crackpottery and fanatism starts.
I'd wish for more reasonable people to make that distinction and see the difference, as that's the only way to gain inroads in healing the crackpots and fanatics - whatever their confession may be (materialism included).
Errrm, ... the market and the customers? ... Maybe? ... Just some random thought.
What you're describing is pretty much a type-A nerd experience which - I would bet - something like the majority of all slashdotters had in their youth.
The study actually describes the same thing, but from another perspective. If you are so occupied with your own thoughts and interests, it's no wonder that you can't read cues from others. As your interests don't really focus on learning them, but on other stuff. In many ways we where the 'mental' or 'verbal' bullies and I - after having had my first high-school reunion after 15 years - see the bullying reaction as pretty much a statement of helplessness of my peers in dealing with my - in their book - strange and unsocial behaviour.
What young nerds have to learn - and I had to learn the hard way - is that it's not entirely the others fault if you constantly get picked on. I eventually found it quite rewarding to put my nerd/geek/smart-guy skills to use for my peers and I very often experienced that, when I was alone with the toughest kid in the class or any of his buddies, that they actually envied me at some point.
Never the less, learning to fight and stand for yourself and speak the language of the street is a skill-kit that one has to learn aswell. And just because a majority has stacked me out as their main target doesn't mean I'm allways wrong. It could also mean that I'm just smarter than them, or, more likely, have put more thoughts to the issue on which our oppinions differ.
In any case, it's allways good to take a step back and look at a bad situation from all sides in order to get the right picture. A good teacher can teach any type of kid that sort of approach, be it the bully or the nerd.
My 2 cents.
Aren't they supposed to use XML to be compliant and open? And what if they can say: 'Hey, we tried, but this one bad small company threatend de poor liddle MicroSoft with a patent lawsuit and now we have to take XML out, sooo sad!
The truth is, MS wants it's formats to stay proprietary and I figure they'd welcome any reason that holds to keep it that way. I wouldn't be suprised if this XML-patent thing was staged.
My 2 cents.
While James Cameron isn't in my top list of directors by a long shot, having seen most (all?) of his movies and now Avatar I have to admit he is a good director. He does the movies he likes and he puts loads of personal effort and risk into them. And he knows how to get the plot, visuals *and* the screenplay right. I said *right* not original or superb. Given, the Avatar plot isn't anything new. Cameron boldfacidly admitted in an interview that it was 'Dances with Wolves' (..Pocahontas/Ferngully/etc. ...) in SF and I, as everyone else, was prepared to see a generic plotline unfold.
But:
I was suprised that the didn't flog a dead horse in terms of stale american cornyness in dialouge. There was a bit to much of that in Abyss and I was surprised that he'd improved on that in leaps and bounds. The play and dialog where simply textbook, no more and no less, but they avoided pressing any issue. It was as if Cameron almost expected one to know the story. And Avatars pacing is excellent, imho. No strange Abyss-like 'Submarine drama turned ET' plot-turns or mood-swings. Just the right amount of action, tension, poetry and subplot you can expect and not to much avantgarde experimenting as not to confuse the target audience, i.e. the masses. The FX are first class and lack the significant botches that disturbed the visual experience in 'Attack of the Clones'. I was prepared for something like that in the 95% CGI movie that Avatar is, and was glad they didn't screw up.
Bottom line: Camerons movies are certainly not top-of-the-line in terms of avantgarde and arthouse, but they are allways a sure bet for a few hours of popcorn-movie fun. Which, as I understand, is his intention. And thus makes him a good director, in my book.
My 2 cents.
Clifford Stoll is an internet sceptic, not a ludite. His arguments against expensive school IT programms financed by cuts in the teaching staff of public schools have solid points. As do his warnings about the Interweb isolating people rather than bringing them together.
Some of his worries turned out to be unwarranted, others turned out to be quite valid.
I'll take the advice and thoughts over an educated sceptic like Stoll over some permanent yay-sayer anytime.
My 2 cents.
The best FOSS tool you can get for this is Open Office and templates you build or purchase for it. Taxation ERP is the most boring job in IT and you won't find FOSS programmers doing it for the love. And it's not about forms or templates anyway, its about writing the right numbers in the right places, and for that you need a professional, no matter how small your business is. Hire or contract one. All else quickly becomes a waste of time and money.
If I every go back to being a freelancer, that's the very first thing I'd change. I did all the accounting and tax stuff myself and it was hell. Ok, so this is Germany - the big, dark, evil and twisted Empire of tax laws - but never the less, your job is doing IT and not figuring out US tax law. That independant accountant down the street is much better and more effective at that than you.
My 2 cents.