The ideal way would be for IE to be a fully add/removable program.
No, actually, the ideal way would be for MS Windows to have a general-purpose download/install/upgrade package, like linux (and most other unix) systems have had for a decade or so.
That way, Windows wouldn't have to come with everything you might ever want pre-installed. You could buy a basic system, and as you found you needed something just open up Windows Installer, tell it what you want (and optionally what sites you prefer to download from. It would reach out, pull down the package, and install it.
I sorta suspect that this wouldn't be beyond the capabilities of Microsoft's vaunted software development people. In fact, I suspect that they could deliver it within a few weeks. They already have a general-purpose upgrade capability. All they need is to make sure an "upgrade" works for something that isn't installed yet. That should be easy, unless they've totally implemented the upgrade in an insane fashion. After all, upgrading sometimes means installing a major new release that requires completely overwriting the previous version, and that's pretty much indistinguishable from an initial install; the only difference is that the code has to ignore all the "file not found" errors.
Of course, they'd probably set it up so that it would refuse to install from anything but a Microsoft address. But whatcha wanna bet that some hackers would find a solution[TM] to that problem within a few weeks.
Is actual competition too much for Microsoft to handle?
Yes. They don't know how to compete the normal way. With an actual salable product, on the merits.
And why should they? Right at the start, they learned an important lesson: Market competition is for the little guys. If you want to be a winner, you don't compete; you dominate.
Remember that Microsoft started of as a subcontractor to IBM. They used IBM marketing to sell their first systems, and IBM had a marketing budget larger than the operating budget of all those puny little CP/M companies. It was instant success, and there was no competition at all. The geeks kept saying that their product wasn't all that good, but it didn't matter. With a marketing budget like that, you don't need quality. In fact, spending money on quality is just a waste, and won't get you nearly enough extra sales to make up for the expense.
Since then, Microsoft has grown to a powerhouse that's able to spend a billion dollars ($1,000,000,000) on marketing major releases. The geeks keep jeering at their low quality, and the Market keeps telling them that it doesn't matter. People buy Microsoft, because it's the only brand they know about. Again, the lesson is clear: Quality doesn't produce a market leader; marketing does. As long as your marketing budget is larger than all your competitors' budgets combined, you'll remain the winner, regardless of quality.
So why should Microsoft engage in actual competition? Their approach is clearly the one that "the Market" wants and approves. It made them the winner. They'd be rather stupid to engage in the tactics that keep the small companies small. And they'd be stupid to waste money on quality, when that's clearly not what customers are willing to pay for (or even get free).
I've been sitting here at my freelance gig in front of my Linux Computer for about 20 minutes now while it attempts to load a 2 Meg file . 20 minutes.
Hmmm... WTF do you have running in the background? I was just using vi to edit a 2GB file on a 7-tear-old 512-MB Dell box running linux, and I felt frustrated by the fact that it took nearly 20 seconds to load. You've gotta have something running that's using up most of the memory and cpu. (Yeah, I do to, but it's not that bad.)
I originally started learning vi and emacs at the same time, back around 1980. I decided to concentrate on vi mostly because I kept noticing that looking over an emacs user's shoulder while they edited something was painful, because they always took so many keystrokes to do anything. Even as a novice vi user, I could not only use vi much faster than I could emacs, but I could edit faster with vi than the emacs experts could with emacs. And after working on recovery of a few crippled machines, where vi worked but emacs was a zombie, I decided to not waste any more time with emacs.
Now I probably qualify as a vi expert. And I keep feeling frustrated and sorry when I watch emacs users edit something, because it's so slow and laborious. Maybe I've never seen a real emacs expert at work, though. Maybe there's a way to make it fast that is unknown to anyone I've ever watched.
Of course, part of the speed of vi for me is the ability to use commands that start with line noise like ":.,$!", and I have a number of little programs that do useful things to chunks of text, written in an assortment of languages. I think of them as extensions of vi. I could write them in lisp, and they'd be useful in emacs, but I rarely do these days. (But I do lament the lack of snobol on most modern systems. It'd be nice to have a real text-munging language, instead of these crippled RE-based text parsers.;-)
The problem is that most people believe that MS Word is a public data-exchange format (ie: that if you write something in MS Word that anyone can read it, edit it etc.)
True. I've had a bit of fun with this when I've received Word docs in email. What I sometimes do is mention that here in the US, we now have a law that makes "decrypting" docs without explicit permission from the encrypter is a federal crime, for which you can get a $500,000 fine and 5 years in a federal prison. Since Microsoft hasn't given me permission to decrypt Word docs, and I haven't bought MS Word, successfully displaying the contents of a Word doc on my non-MS computers would put me in violation of this law.
The usual reaction is "Oh; I didn't realize that" and they send me the doc in a different format.
What's really fun is to suggest that they send it in PDF. That's also a proprietary format (so you don't have to bear the shame of using a free and open format;-). But the owner of PDF, Adobe, has given the public the right to use their format, and there's no legal danger to decoding and displaying a PDF doc. You can even legally write your own code to produce PDF (though Adobe is making the reasonable bet that most of us won't want to do that, and will pay them for an encoder).
MS, on the other hand, has applied for patents for some of their encodings. And a patented text encoding scheme isn't just a legal risk for someone doing the encoding. It's especially a legal risk for anyone who receives the document and decodes it, since those are the people who may not have paid the patent holder for a license to use the format.
More likely is that folks just won't use it most of the time, and then will bitch about having to convert stuff whenever it leaves the building. The will work in whatever standard it saves stuff by default(.doc one assumes), and only worry about ODF for things getting made available to the public.
Maybe, at least at first. But in many companies and organizations, management will eventually get tired of the problems of dealing with 10-year-old.doc files. They'll order that all those.doc files be translated to.odf, while they still have some old machines that can read them. And they'll order that future internal docs be in odf form, to end forever the annoying problem of unreadable older docs.
This is what Microsoft really wants to block. But they don't have the sense to make sure that old.doc formats are supported forever. That would just encourage people to put off upgrading to the latest release of Word.
if they're halfway decent about it they will cite *their* sources, then you might as well go there and check up on it. If you've done that you are now in a position to cite the original article.
Yes, when that's possible. With many topics, including most recent scientific stories, it's often not possible to cite the original sources. Those sources are usually restricted to subscribers only, and it's absurd to expect a student to take out a subscription to every journal in order to get at the primary sources. That would be far beyond the financial capability of most studends.
This has always been a problem, although at good schools, it has often been possible (if slow) to get under-the-table copies of articles in obscure journals. One of the downsides to scientific journals going online is that this is growing more difficult now. The growing strictness of copyright enforcement has added to the problem.
However, one of the interesting developments is that many researchers now put summaries of their results into wikipedia as they publish their results on restricted sites. This is mostly true for subjects that have a great deal of public interest, such as astronomy and medicine, but it happens in other fields.
So a realistic approach is to use wikipedia to get the details on research where the primary articles aren't available within your budget. Then you just have the problem that your instructors will grade you down if you cite the only independent, reliable source that you can easily access.
Something's not quite right here. It really sounds like a "Keep 'em ignorant" approach to learning. Not that there's anything new with that.
Anybody that is researching stuff and either uses Wikipedia or another encyclopedia (Brittanica) as a single source should indeed be failed for their research project.
Nobody suggests using wikipedia as a single source. Nobody suggests using Enc.Brit. as a single source, either. Wales was just quoted as saying that his site is an educational resource, which it certainly is.
And by junior high, any student should know how to use the list of bibliographic links at the bottom of most wikipedia articles. This is a big improvement over what most dead-tree encyclopedias provide, when they provide such references at all.
(I wonder if Enc.Brit. has similar links in their online articles? But I'm not curious enough to pay for a subscription to find out.;-)
... programmers who have never used Visual Studio or Eclipse or similar IDEs for strongly typed languages, they have *no* *idea* what refactoring is, and what it can do for your productivity,...
Heh. I have lots and lots of ideas of what refactoring is. I've worked on a number of projects where the term was used, and in every one, the definition was different. Usually there were groups using different definitions, and wasting a lot of time trying to convert each other to their terminology.
I've concluded that there's a core of a Good Idea in there, but it has been so buried in buzzwordism that it's really hard to spot the Idea.
And most of the cases I've seen where a bunch has done refactoring has produced a mass of write-only code that they didn't even understand themselves. This was obvious from all the bugs that appeared which they couldn't find and fix. Or, more often, we got behavior that was baffling to users, but defended by the developers as how it has to work due to their clever (re)design.
But I don't blame the programming languages for this.
Hey, that's a bet that's really easy to win. As you just did. And your friend can't object, because it's clearly OT.
You should thank the guy who set it up for you.
Re:Perl 6: The Language of the Future (... Forever
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State of the Onion 11
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Perl prides itself so much on "there's more than one way to do it", why is it apparently so closed to the idea that some of those ways might mean using another language.
But it does. Consider the system command, or the `...` syntax. You can even embed code in another language inside a perl program, via the operator.
These ways of invoking a subprocess (that's usually in a different language) was the original reason for calling perl a "scripting language", though reading other messages here shows that there's little actual agreement on what people mean by that phrase.
Anyway, one of perl's original uses was as a replacement for older "scripting languages" such as sh and csh, done in a way that both makes it less often necessary to call a subprocess, and also makes it simpler and more efficient when you do so.
Of course, those of us who have used it from the early days are quite aware that perl 1 and perl 2 weren't at all the powerful, high-level language we have today. Larry's first goal was to simplify the complex tasks that were done with tools like sh, grep and awk, and do them all with a more consistent syntax.
But it did eventually get out of hand, and turn into a real programming language. The good thing was that Larry (and others) discussed this process all along, didn't pretend that it wasn't happening, and applied a lot of the lessons of history to avoid the mistakes of earlier languages. For example, perl got variables with actual types, and builtin operators on those types, at an early stage. Try doing arithmetic in any of the descendants of sh if you don't understand this. And perl has data structures for storing masses of data, doing away with most of the need for temp files (at the cost of using more memory).
Still, invoking subprocesses is a normal part of perl programming, so it has kept its "scripting" roots while it developed a syntax that most people don't want to use as an interactive "shell".
Heaven forbid someone in American politics play dirty and hire a company to "promote" another candidate... just saying..
That's a little "tinfoil hatish" if you ask me.
So who asked you?;-)
Haven't you heard of "push polls"? I've been "polled" by at least three of them in the past year. They never will tell you who's paying them, either. But this story is just an "on the Internet" version of the same sort of dirty tricks. It's an old, old story.
Then there was my favorite trick: Soon after I moved to Boston in the early 80's, there was a local election in which one of the candidates had an Irish name that's very common in the area. Shortly before the deadline to register for the election, several other people with the same name registered for the same office. None of them campaigned. The fellow lost to the only other candidate that did campaign.
Of course, there are limits to that tactic. There probably aren't very many Americans named "Barack Obama". Or "Hillary Clinton", for that matter.;-)
I'm going to have to teach my kids come junior high though that wikipedia shouldn't be used for "real" reports. That's going to be hard for me to explain why we've been using it up to then though.
What's the problem? Note that the name "wikipedia" was intentionally similar to "encyclopedia", and such things have always been primarily for short intros with little depth. True, wikipedia has gone quite a bit farther than traditional dead-tree encyclopedias ever did. But it's still basically an encyclopedia. It's quite good at what it was designed for, but it wasn't designed for great depth. It has links at the bottom of most pages to help you with that.
Presumably any competent teacher has always, sometimes around junior-high years, insisted that students do more than paraphrase an encyclopedia entry. That's fine for 5th graders, to prove that they can read and understand common reference material. But somewhere around the age of 10 or 12, you should expect more from the students. Wikipedia hasn't changed that in any way. By that age, the students should know how to follow those links at the bottom, and summarize a number of the in-depth pages that they know how to find.
Why do people pretend that wikipedia is something new under the sun? It's not; it's just somewhat better (and a lot faster) than the older things that its based on. And it has pretty much the same limitations. This isn't a criticism, of course; it's just an observation that I suspect Jimmy Wales would mostly agree with.
In my experience, the only way that I or anyone else can develop software is to have a quiet area where we won't be interrupted. In a big, open arena, interruptions and distractions will be constant. This may be fine for people in "people" jobs like marketing or management. But it'll be a total killer for any software development.
So I guess these companies don't intend to do that any more. Maybe all software development has been outsourced?
Microsoft got handed a near-monopoly on business computers by IBM. The only way you can get to call Microsoft's product "superior" is in the trivial, circular fashion, where you point at its almost complete dominance in the market as proof.
Ah, but Microsoft's first product was superior in the only sense that mattered to the business community: It was decorated with the three magic letters, "I", "B" and "M". Without that logo, other computers were just toys, no matter how good they were. With that logo, it became a real computer in the eyes of most businessmen.
That it, is was the "superior" small computer because to the business community, it was the only small computer. The rest were just experimental, toy-like gadgets not deserving the name "computer", because they lacked the requisite logo to be real computers.
Hmmm... Only one mod, "Insightful". This is a good example of why we should encourage people to always include a smiley in posts that are written as humor. Especially the one that on their surface can be read as any of the conventional semi-religious economic dogmas. People who believe in those dogmas do get mod points, and they tend not to notice subtle humor.
And the hypocrisy is that books like Leviticus are also the ones that admonish, for example, wearing wool and cotton at the same time. If a Christian is not going to keep a completely kosher house and lifestyle, it is pretty hypocritical to attack homosexuality from that same reference.
One of my favorite examples for confusing the "literal interpretation" people is to refer them to Leviticus 11:20-22, where it makes it clear that the arthropods are generally not acceptable as food, except that you should eat the Orthoptera. I'll ask if they eat shrimp or lobster or crayfish, and usually the answer is "Yes". So I'll ask if they eat grasshoppers or crickets, and usually the answer is "Ick!" So they're violating both parts of that particular dietary law.
Actually, as the liberal religious historians like to point out, these laws made emminent sense in the society where they were written. Edible crustacea generally had to be transported from the Mediterranean, and they generally weren't very safe to eat once they got far inland. But the Orthoptera were serious agricultural pests, available in large numbers locally in some years, and are in fact highly nutritious. To someone living in Louisiana or Hawaii, the reverse would be true, but that's not where the Bible's authors were living.
(And you could really confuse people by pointing out that the Bible talks about insects "walking on all fours", which is sorta strange, since insects have six legs, not four. I should look up the original Hebrew and see if it really uses the number four. If it does, that's a serious problem for anyone that believes in biblical inerrancy.;-)
Has anyone in the history of humanity ever been out-debated into changing their beliefs?
Actually, the history of science has lots of examples of scientists becoming convinced they were wrong. Of course, the term "debate" might not be the best way to describe the process, which usually involves collecting a lot of evidence. This is something that the IDers generally don't do, of course, since nobody can think of a way to find actual evidence for or against the ID "theory". (It's hard to get evidence concerning al all-powerful god that can work miracles.) Their main approach is to attempt to poke holes in the scientists' evidence. This is easy, since the scientists themselves spend a lot of time talking about the holes in the fossil evidence, usually concluding that "further research is needed".
We had a good example recently of scientists slowly changing from skepticism to acceptance of a new theory: The impact theory of the KT extinction. When it was proposed back in the 1970s, most scientists were highly skeptical, and rightly so, since the evidence was weak. But the field research was done, and a decade later, there was an overwhelming pile of independent lines of evidence that all pointed to the impact. Eventually, they even found the impact spot. Google for "Chicxulub" for about 1/3 million pages on the topic. Today, a few scientists maintain a semi-skeptical approach, but it's mostly pro-forma, based on the idea that no theory should ever go unchallenged. The general expectation now is that further research will continue to fill in the details of the impact event. And, to nobody's surprise, the growing evidence was that the event and its aftermath were a lot more complicated than people thought at first. It wasn't just Bam! and instantly 90% of land species were gone. Some of them hung on for many thousands of years, and things weren't stable again for a million years or so.
There was another recent example, in the gradual acceptance of the reclassification of birds as a branch of the dinosaurs. This was actually suggested by Darwin, but the evidence was weak, and most biologists just said "Well, that's interesting; can you find some good supporting evidence?" Things stayed like that until the 1970s and 80s, when some new fossils of early birds were discovered (mostly in China, and a few in South America). Eventually, birds were reclassified as theropod dinosaurs, and many subsequent fossil discoveries have added support to this classification. And again, there are scientists who repeatedly challenge the current classification, mostly on the grounds that scientific theories should be challenged whenever possible. And in this case, the later fossil finds have really complicated the theories. For example, it seems that feathers did evolve long before avian flight, and may have been common in most small dinosaurs.
Anyway, it's not uncommon for good scientists to actively support several competing theories (and also attack all of them). And it's not especially remarkable when a scientist switches personal support to a different theory. It tends to happen when the theories are preliminary and not enough testing has been done. It's easy to casually accept the most popular theory, but if new tests come along that disprove that theory, the sensible thing is to switch to the one that now has the best support.
One could argue that the main difference from between a scientific theory and a religious theory is that scientific theories are open to radical revision or total replacement, while religious theories like ID aren't (except via extermination of one or more of the factions;-).
[I]f you publish something with no licensing info, it is copyrighted to you by default. (In the US at least, and many other countries as well.) So even if you're looking at a site that is, say, clearly marked as a tutorial, that doesn't necessarily mean that you can use that code, unless the guy comes out and says the code is public domain/GPL/etc.
Good point. I think I'll use it the next time someone comments about code of mine that is overly complex and convoluted.
"You see, all the simple ways of doing it have been published in tutorials. This means that they're copyrighted by the author. If I used simple code, I'd almost certainly be violating some author's copyright, and since you hired me to write the code, they'd probably sue both of us. Wouldn't want that, would we?"
(Only half-joking here. This is what the world's coming to.;-)
Google would be wise to offer users an option to encrypt your information
Yeah, I suppose it would be wise, from google's viewpoint. After all, if they offer encryption, many customers would use it. And since google supplied the encryption, google can decrypt it any time they want (or any time a government agent orders them to do so).
What percent of the users do you think would fall for this, and thing that their stuff is secure because google encrypted it?
It is good to see that others here are suggesting various encryption packages that you can install on your own machine. At least someone has some sense.
[S]ome of us are far more interested in "a free exchange of ideas and code that let you do what ever you wanted with it"...
While that sounds admirable, it does have a possible downside. Suppose I like your code, so I take i, replace your name with mine throughout, start selling my version - and sue you for infringement on my "IP". You say I should be able to do whatever I want with it; would you object if I do that?
I've been under the impression that the main value of the GPL is that it attempts to block this sort of turnabout "theft". Maybe I've been misunderstanding something.
Anyone have a good legal explanation? Does "public domain" prevent someone from doing as I just described? If so, how does it work? If not, why not, and what can I do to guarantee that I can continue to use something that I've released to the public domain?
There's a lot of precedent for people claiming copyright or getting patents for other people's work. In the current copyright/patent situation, does "public domain" actually exist in the sense that we want it to exist? Or does "public domain" just mean "free for anyone to claim"?
You don't even need Clausewitz, Powell will suffice. To use a shortened version of the Powell doctrine: - Do we have a clear attainable objective? - Have the risks and costs been fully and frankly analyzed? - Have all other non-violent policy means been fully exhausted? - Is there a plausible exit strategy to avoid endless entanglement? - Have the consequences of our action been fully considered?
But if the Bush Administration had followed such a doctrine, there would have been no war. It has become clear from comments of assorted "insiders" that this Administrations was planning the Iraq war from the day the Supreme Court declared Bush the winner in Nov 2000. And they weren't about to allow such questions as the above to be asked, much less considered and answered.
It does seem that they seriously believed that the war would be short, they would occupy the country, their colleagues' corporations would run it, and they'd all profit. They seem to be truly surprised that the occupied population didn't see things their way, and a significant number were willing to fight back.
Note especially that, especially in the past couple years, Bush has made it clear that withdrawing from Iraq would be a question for his successors. He had no exit strategy, because he expected his people would be staying. So Powell's doctrine was "irrelevant", in Bush's terminology.
America won the war in Iraq, that was the easy part. Winning the peace is harder, and that's where they are failing.
Close, but numerous writers (including a lot of military folks) have been suggesting somewhat better terminology: America did win the "war", and in just a few days. What they're fighting now in Iraq isn't technically a war; it's called an occupation. It's definitely not peace. And it's not something you can "win". The best you can do with an occupation is to wear down the opposition, so they decide that it's better to accept your rule than fight you and lose. The most effective way to do this is by supporting the population and the local economy, not by treating them as wartime enemies.
It's hard to say where the US government will go with this, since they have a rather mixed history. People pay a lot of attention to how the US handled their big win back in 1945. They didn't generally stage any occupations then. Rather, they and the Allies set up what were at first puppet governments, but allowed them to become independent in only a few years. For the most part, this worked fairly well, in part due to major US support for rebuilding the damaged economies of Europe and Japan. The major exception was China (which was a rather special case).
There have been many other cases though, where the US government installed and supported oppressive dictators and oligopolies that kept the masses poor. Most of the "poster children" for this are in Latin America, and some of them have been ongoing disasters. This could easily be what happens now in Iraq.
There'll be another major US election in about 11 months, and it's likely to produce some major changes. Things could go either way. Stay tuned.
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The ideal way would be for IE to be a fully add/removable program.
No, actually, the ideal way would be for MS Windows to have a general-purpose download/install/upgrade package, like linux (and most other unix) systems have had for a decade or so.
That way, Windows wouldn't have to come with everything you might ever want pre-installed. You could buy a basic system, and as you found you needed something just open up Windows Installer, tell it what you want (and optionally what sites you prefer to download from. It would reach out, pull down the package, and install it.
I sorta suspect that this wouldn't be beyond the capabilities of Microsoft's vaunted software development people. In fact, I suspect that they could deliver it within a few weeks. They already have a general-purpose upgrade capability. All they need is to make sure an "upgrade" works for something that isn't installed yet. That should be easy, unless they've totally implemented the upgrade in an insane fashion. After all, upgrading sometimes means installing a major new release that requires completely overwriting the previous version, and that's pretty much indistinguishable from an initial install; the only difference is that the code has to ignore all the "file not found" errors.
Of course, they'd probably set it up so that it would refuse to install from anything but a Microsoft address. But whatcha wanna bet that some hackers would find a solution[TM] to that problem within a few weeks.
I don't want to start a holy war here, ...
;-)
... WTF do you have running in the background? I was just using vi to edit a 2GB file on a 7-tear-old 512-MB Dell box running linux, and I felt frustrated by the fact that it took nearly 20 seconds to load. You've gotta have something running that's using up most of the memory and cpu. (Yeah, I do to, but it's not that bad.)
;-)
Yes, you do. Admit it!
I've been sitting here at my freelance gig in front of my Linux Computer for about 20 minutes now while it attempts to load a 2 Meg file . 20 minutes.
Hmmm
I originally started learning vi and emacs at the same time, back around 1980. I decided to concentrate on vi mostly because I kept noticing that looking over an emacs user's shoulder while they edited something was painful, because they always took so many keystrokes to do anything. Even as a novice vi user, I could not only use vi much faster than I could emacs, but I could edit faster with vi than the emacs experts could with emacs. And after working on recovery of a few crippled machines, where vi worked but emacs was a zombie, I decided to not waste any more time with emacs.
Now I probably qualify as a vi expert. And I keep feeling frustrated and sorry when I watch emacs users edit something, because it's so slow and laborious. Maybe I've never seen a real emacs expert at work, though. Maybe there's a way to make it fast that is unknown to anyone I've ever watched.
Of course, part of the speed of vi for me is the ability to use commands that start with line noise like ":.,$!", and I have a number of little programs that do useful things to chunks of text, written in an assortment of languages. I think of them as extensions of vi. I could write them in lisp, and they'd be useful in emacs, but I rarely do these days. (But I do lament the lack of snobol on most modern systems. It'd be nice to have a real text-munging language, instead of these crippled RE-based text parsers.
The problem is that most people believe that MS Word is a public data-exchange format (ie: that if you write something in MS Word that anyone can read it, edit it etc.)
;-). But the owner of PDF, Adobe, has given the public the right to use their format, and there's no legal danger to decoding and displaying a PDF doc. You can even legally write your own code to produce PDF (though Adobe is making the reasonable bet that most of us won't want to do that, and will pay them for an encoder).
True. I've had a bit of fun with this when I've received Word docs in email. What I sometimes do is mention that here in the US, we now have a law that makes "decrypting" docs without explicit permission from the encrypter is a federal crime, for which you can get a $500,000 fine and 5 years in a federal prison. Since Microsoft hasn't given me permission to decrypt Word docs, and I haven't bought MS Word, successfully displaying the contents of a Word doc on my non-MS computers would put me in violation of this law.
The usual reaction is "Oh; I didn't realize that" and they send me the doc in a different format.
What's really fun is to suggest that they send it in PDF. That's also a proprietary format (so you don't have to bear the shame of using a free and open format
MS, on the other hand, has applied for patents for some of their encodings. And a patented text encoding scheme isn't just a legal risk for someone doing the encoding. It's especially a legal risk for anyone who receives the document and decodes it, since those are the people who may not have paid the patent holder for a license to use the format.
More likely is that folks just won't use it most of the time, and then will bitch about having to convert stuff whenever it leaves the building. The will work in whatever standard it saves stuff by default(.doc one assumes), and only worry about ODF for things getting made available to the public.
.doc files. They'll order that all those .doc files be translated to .odf, while they still have some old machines that can read them. And they'll order that future internal docs be in odf form, to end forever the annoying problem of unreadable older docs.
.doc formats are supported forever. That would just encourage people to put off upgrading to the latest release of Word.
Maybe, at least at first. But in many companies and organizations, management will eventually get tired of the problems of dealing with 10-year-old
This is what Microsoft really wants to block. But they don't have the sense to make sure that old
if they're halfway decent about it they will cite *their* sources, then you might as well go there and check up on it. If you've done that you are now in a position to cite the original article.
Yes, when that's possible. With many topics, including most recent scientific stories, it's often not possible to cite the original sources. Those sources are usually restricted to subscribers only, and it's absurd to expect a student to take out a subscription to every journal in order to get at the primary sources. That would be far beyond the financial capability of most studends.
This has always been a problem, although at good schools, it has often been possible (if slow) to get under-the-table copies of articles in obscure journals. One of the downsides to scientific journals going online is that this is growing more difficult now. The growing strictness of copyright enforcement has added to the problem.
However, one of the interesting developments is that many researchers now put summaries of their results into wikipedia as they publish their results on restricted sites. This is mostly true for subjects that have a great deal of public interest, such as astronomy and medicine, but it happens in other fields.
So a realistic approach is to use wikipedia to get the details on research where the primary articles aren't available within your budget. Then you just have the problem that your instructors will grade you down if you cite the only independent, reliable source that you can easily access.
Something's not quite right here. It really sounds like a "Keep 'em ignorant" approach to learning. Not that there's anything new with that.
Anybody that is researching stuff and either uses Wikipedia or another encyclopedia (Brittanica) as a single source should indeed be failed for their research project.
;-)
[Emphasis added]
Congrats on the subtle introduction of a straw man argument.
Nobody suggests using wikipedia as a single source. Nobody suggests using Enc.Brit. as a single source, either. Wales was just quoted as saying that his site is an educational resource, which it certainly is.
And by junior high, any student should know how to use the list of bibliographic links at the bottom of most wikipedia articles. This is a big improvement over what most dead-tree encyclopedias provide, when they provide such references at all.
(I wonder if Enc.Brit. has similar links in their online articles? But I'm not curious enough to pay for a subscription to find out.
... programmers who have never used Visual Studio or Eclipse or similar IDEs for strongly typed languages, they have *no* *idea* what refactoring is, and what it can do for your productivity, ...
Heh. I have lots and lots of ideas of what refactoring is. I've worked on a number of projects where the term was used, and in every one, the definition was different. Usually there were groups using different definitions, and wasting a lot of time trying to convert each other to their terminology.
I've concluded that there's a core of a Good Idea in there, but it has been so buried in buzzwordism that it's really hard to spot the Idea.
And most of the cases I've seen where a bunch has done refactoring has produced a mass of write-only code that they didn't even understand themselves. This was obvious from all the bugs that appeared which they couldn't find and fix. Or, more often, we got behavior that was baffling to users, but defended by the developers as how it has to work due to their clever (re)design.
But I don't blame the programming languages for this.
Hey, that's a bet that's really easy to win. As you just did. And your friend can't object, because it's clearly OT.
You should thank the guy who set it up for you.
Perl prides itself so much on "there's more than one way to do it", why is it apparently so closed to the idea that some of those ways might mean using another language.
But it does. Consider the system command, or the `...` syntax. You can even embed code in another language inside a perl program, via the operator.
These ways of invoking a subprocess (that's usually in a different language) was the original reason for calling perl a "scripting language", though reading other messages here shows that there's little actual agreement on what people mean by that phrase.
Anyway, one of perl's original uses was as a replacement for older "scripting languages" such as sh and csh, done in a way that both makes it less often necessary to call a subprocess, and also makes it simpler and more efficient when you do so.
Of course, those of us who have used it from the early days are quite aware that perl 1 and perl 2 weren't at all the powerful, high-level language we have today. Larry's first goal was to simplify the complex tasks that were done with tools like sh, grep and awk, and do them all with a more consistent syntax.
But it did eventually get out of hand, and turn into a real programming language. The good thing was that Larry (and others) discussed this process all along, didn't pretend that it wasn't happening, and applied a lot of the lessons of history to avoid the mistakes of earlier languages. For example, perl got variables with actual types, and builtin operators on those types, at an early stage. Try doing arithmetic in any of the descendants of sh if you don't understand this. And perl has data structures for storing masses of data, doing away with most of the need for temp files (at the cost of using more memory).
Still, invoking subprocesses is a normal part of perl programming, so it has kept its "scripting" roots while it developed a syntax that most people don't want to use as an interactive "shell".
Hmmm ... that period doesn't show up on my screen. Does this mean that my browser (SeaMonkey) is broken? Should I file a bug report?
So who asked you?
Haven't you heard of "push polls"? I've been "polled" by at least three of them in the past year. They never will tell you who's paying them, either. But this story is just an "on the Internet" version of the same sort of dirty tricks. It's an old, old story.
Then there was my favorite trick: Soon after I moved to Boston in the early 80's, there was a local election in which one of the candidates had an Irish name that's very common in the area. Shortly before the deadline to register for the election, several other people with the same name registered for the same office. None of them campaigned. The fellow lost to the only other candidate that did campaign.
Of course, there are limits to that tactic. There probably aren't very many Americans named "Barack Obama". Or "Hillary Clinton", for that matter.
"area's of expertise"
I'm reminded of Dave Barry's observation, that in modern English, the apostrophe is used to warn the reader that an "s" is coming up.
Maybe he should have written "area's of experti'se".
I'm going to have to teach my kids come junior high though that wikipedia shouldn't be used for "real" reports. That's going to be hard for me to explain why we've been using it up to then though.
What's the problem? Note that the name "wikipedia" was intentionally similar to "encyclopedia", and such things have always been primarily for short intros with little depth. True, wikipedia has gone quite a bit farther than traditional dead-tree encyclopedias ever did. But it's still basically an encyclopedia. It's quite good at what it was designed for, but it wasn't designed for great depth. It has links at the bottom of most pages to help you with that.
Presumably any competent teacher has always, sometimes around junior-high years, insisted that students do more than paraphrase an encyclopedia entry. That's fine for 5th graders, to prove that they can read and understand common reference material. But somewhere around the age of 10 or 12, you should expect more from the students. Wikipedia hasn't changed that in any way. By that age, the students should know how to follow those links at the bottom, and summarize a number of the in-depth pages that they know how to find.
Why do people pretend that wikipedia is something new under the sun? It's not; it's just somewhat better (and a lot faster) than the older things that its based on. And it has pretty much the same limitations. This isn't a criticism, of course; it's just an observation that I suspect Jimmy Wales would mostly agree with.
In my experience, the only way that I or anyone else can develop software is to have a quiet area where we won't be interrupted. In a big, open arena, interruptions and distractions will be constant. This may be fine for people in "people" jobs like marketing or management. But it'll be a total killer for any software development.
So I guess these companies don't intend to do that any more. Maybe all software development has been outsourced?
Microsoft got handed a near-monopoly on business computers by IBM. The only way you can get to call Microsoft's product "superior" is in the trivial, circular fashion, where you point at its almost complete dominance in the market as proof.
Ah, but Microsoft's first product was superior in the only sense that mattered to the business community: It was decorated with the three magic letters, "I", "B" and "M". Without that logo, other computers were just toys, no matter how good they were. With that logo, it became a real computer in the eyes of most businessmen.
That it, is was the "superior" small computer because to the business community, it was the only small computer. The rest were just experimental, toy-like gadgets not deserving the name "computer", because they lacked the requisite logo to be real computers.
Hmmm ... Only one mod, "Insightful". This is a good example of why we should encourage people to always include a smiley in posts that are written as humor. Especially the one that on their surface can be read as any of the conventional semi-religious economic dogmas. People who believe in those dogmas do get mod points, and they tend not to notice subtle humor.
And the hypocrisy is that books like Leviticus are also the ones that admonish, for example, wearing wool and cotton at the same time. If a Christian is not going to keep a completely kosher house and lifestyle, it is pretty hypocritical to attack homosexuality from that same reference.
;-)
One of my favorite examples for confusing the "literal interpretation" people is to refer them to Leviticus 11:20-22, where it makes it clear that the arthropods are generally not acceptable as food, except that you should eat the Orthoptera. I'll ask if they eat shrimp or lobster or crayfish, and usually the answer is "Yes". So I'll ask if they eat grasshoppers or crickets, and usually the answer is "Ick!" So they're violating both parts of that particular dietary law.
Actually, as the liberal religious historians like to point out, these laws made emminent sense in the society where they were written. Edible crustacea generally had to be transported from the Mediterranean, and they generally weren't very safe to eat once they got far inland. But the Orthoptera were serious agricultural pests, available in large numbers locally in some years, and are in fact highly nutritious. To someone living in Louisiana or Hawaii, the reverse would be true, but that's not where the Bible's authors were living.
(And you could really confuse people by pointing out that the Bible talks about insects "walking on all fours", which is sorta strange, since insects have six legs, not four. I should look up the original Hebrew and see if it really uses the number four. If it does, that's a serious problem for anyone that believes in biblical inerrancy.
Has anyone in the history of humanity ever been out-debated into changing their beliefs?
;-).
Actually, the history of science has lots of examples of scientists becoming convinced they were wrong. Of course, the term "debate" might not be the best way to describe the process, which usually involves collecting a lot of evidence. This is something that the IDers generally don't do, of course, since nobody can think of a way to find actual evidence for or against the ID "theory". (It's hard to get evidence concerning al all-powerful god that can work miracles.) Their main approach is to attempt to poke holes in the scientists' evidence. This is easy, since the scientists themselves spend a lot of time talking about the holes in the fossil evidence, usually concluding that "further research is needed".
We had a good example recently of scientists slowly changing from skepticism to acceptance of a new theory: The impact theory of the KT extinction. When it was proposed back in the 1970s, most scientists were highly skeptical, and rightly so, since the evidence was weak. But the field research was done, and a decade later, there was an overwhelming pile of independent lines of evidence that all pointed to the impact. Eventually, they even found the impact spot. Google for "Chicxulub" for about 1/3 million pages on the topic. Today, a few scientists maintain a semi-skeptical approach, but it's mostly pro-forma, based on the idea that no theory should ever go unchallenged. The general expectation now is that further research will continue to fill in the details of the impact event. And, to nobody's surprise, the growing evidence was that the event and its aftermath were a lot more complicated than people thought at first. It wasn't just Bam! and instantly 90% of land species were gone. Some of them hung on for many thousands of years, and things weren't stable again for a million years or so.
There was another recent example, in the gradual acceptance of the reclassification of birds as a branch of the dinosaurs. This was actually suggested by Darwin, but the evidence was weak, and most biologists just said "Well, that's interesting; can you find some good supporting evidence?" Things stayed like that until the 1970s and 80s, when some new fossils of early birds were discovered (mostly in China, and a few in South America). Eventually, birds were reclassified as theropod dinosaurs, and many subsequent fossil discoveries have added support to this classification. And again, there are scientists who repeatedly challenge the current classification, mostly on the grounds that scientific theories should be challenged whenever possible. And in this case, the later fossil finds have really complicated the theories. For example, it seems that feathers did evolve long before avian flight, and may have been common in most small dinosaurs.
Anyway, it's not uncommon for good scientists to actively support several competing theories (and also attack all of them). And it's not especially remarkable when a scientist switches personal support to a different theory. It tends to happen when the theories are preliminary and not enough testing has been done. It's easy to casually accept the most popular theory, but if new tests come along that disprove that theory, the sensible thing is to switch to the one that now has the best support.
One could argue that the main difference from between a scientific theory and a religious theory is that scientific theories are open to radical revision or total replacement, while religious theories like ID aren't (except via extermination of one or more of the factions
[I]f you publish something with no licensing info, it is copyrighted to you by default. (In the US at least, and many other countries as well.) So even if you're looking at a site that is, say, clearly marked as a tutorial, that doesn't necessarily mean that you can use that code, unless the guy comes out and says the code is public domain/GPL/etc.
;-)
Good point. I think I'll use it the next time someone comments about code of mine that is overly complex and convoluted.
"You see, all the simple ways of doing it have been published in tutorials. This means that they're copyrighted by the author. If I used simple code, I'd almost certainly be violating some author's copyright, and since you hired me to write the code, they'd probably sue both of us. Wouldn't want that, would we?"
(Only half-joking here. This is what the world's coming to.
Canada is ... Only 2% (6.7% of the land surface).
Hey, use a Mercator projection map. It'll make Canada a lot larger than that.
Google would be wise to offer users an option to encrypt your information
Yeah, I suppose it would be wise, from google's viewpoint. After all, if they offer encryption, many customers would use it. And since google supplied the encryption, google can decrypt it any time they want (or any time a government agent orders them to do so).
What percent of the users do you think would fall for this, and thing that their stuff is secure because google encrypted it?
It is good to see that others here are suggesting various encryption packages that you can install on your own machine. At least someone has some sense.
[S]ome of us are far more interested in "a free exchange of ideas and code that let you do what ever you wanted with it" ...
While that sounds admirable, it does have a possible downside. Suppose I like your code, so I take i, replace your name with mine throughout, start selling my version - and sue you for infringement on my "IP". You say I should be able to do whatever I want with it; would you object if I do that?
I've been under the impression that the main value of the GPL is that it attempts to block this sort of turnabout "theft". Maybe I've been misunderstanding something.
Anyone have a good legal explanation? Does "public domain" prevent someone from doing as I just described? If so, how does it work? If not, why not, and what can I do to guarantee that I can continue to use something that I've released to the public domain?
There's a lot of precedent for people claiming copyright or getting patents for other people's work. In the current copyright/patent situation, does "public domain" actually exist in the sense that we want it to exist? Or does "public domain" just mean "free for anyone to claim"?
You don't even need Clausewitz, Powell will suffice. To use a shortened version of the Powell doctrine:
- Do we have a clear attainable objective?
- Have the risks and costs been fully and frankly analyzed?
- Have all other non-violent policy means been fully exhausted?
- Is there a plausible exit strategy to avoid endless entanglement?
- Have the consequences of our action been fully considered?
But if the Bush Administration had followed such a doctrine, there would have been no war. It has become clear from comments of assorted "insiders" that this Administrations was planning the Iraq war from the day the Supreme Court declared Bush the winner in Nov 2000. And they weren't about to allow such questions as the above to be asked, much less considered and answered.
It does seem that they seriously believed that the war would be short, they would occupy the country, their colleagues' corporations would run it, and they'd all profit. They seem to be truly surprised that the occupied population didn't see things their way, and a significant number were willing to fight back.
Note especially that, especially in the past couple years, Bush has made it clear that withdrawing from Iraq would be a question for his successors. He had no exit strategy, because he expected his people would be staying. So Powell's doctrine was "irrelevant", in Bush's terminology.
America won the war in Iraq, that was the easy part. Winning the peace is harder, and that's where they are failing.
Close, but numerous writers (including a lot of military folks) have been suggesting somewhat better terminology: America did win the "war", and in just a few days. What they're fighting now in Iraq isn't technically a war; it's called an occupation. It's definitely not peace. And it's not something you can "win". The best you can do with an occupation is to wear down the opposition, so they decide that it's better to accept your rule than fight you and lose. The most effective way to do this is by supporting the population and the local economy, not by treating them as wartime enemies.
It's hard to say where the US government will go with this, since they have a rather mixed history. People pay a lot of attention to how the US handled their big win back in 1945. They didn't generally stage any occupations then. Rather, they and the Allies set up what were at first puppet governments, but allowed them to become independent in only a few years. For the most part, this worked fairly well, in part due to major US support for rebuilding the damaged economies of Europe and Japan. The major exception was China (which was a rather special case).
There have been many other cases though, where the US government installed and supported oppressive dictators and oligopolies that kept the masses poor. Most of the "poster children" for this are in Latin America, and some of them have been ongoing disasters. This could easily be what happens now in Iraq.
There'll be another major US election in about 11 months, and it's likely to produce some major changes. Things could go either way. Stay tuned.