.50 cal weapons are not to be used against people, only 'equipment'.
when training on the.50 cal in basic training circa 1981, i recall the drill instructor telling us this, and then saying: "like i said, equipment - for example: helmets, and belt buckles..."
you don't want to see a computer/technology patent war. everyone would be guilty of something. Heck, IBM would have almost everyone by the balls if they chose.
luckily for open source / free software advocates, ibm is currently fondling, not squeezing.:-)
actually, it is ironic, regardless of any of your following statements.
"Word" is the de facto standard format.
the phrase "de facto standard" and the word "standard" are not synonymous, especially in computing. "word" is the de facto file format, due to ubiquity. it's not "the standard" word processing file format. there is no standard.
Incomplete support for the standard, no matter how flawed the standard itself may be,
the problem, of course, is not whether the standard is flawed or not. the problem is that the "standard" cannot possibly be a workable "standard" because the format itself isn't publicly documented anywhere.
is why we bitch at MS for IE's handling of CSS, among many other things.
CSS is completely publicly documented. IE's lack of compliance can only be ascribed to malicious intent on the part of MS. they had plenty of resources to fix the problem should they have wished to do so. but, they probably held a strategy meeting and inside of five minutes decided that the lock-in effect was well worth the lack of standards compliance. MS is contemptuous of standards.
No de jure standard is going to outweigh the de facto standard MS has created, whether we like it or not.
(putting aside the false comparison of a "de facto standard" and a "standard" for the moment...) had you used the present tense i would have agreed with you on that point. but awareness is growing over just how fucking retarded it is to lock away data in opaque proprietary formats. i'm willing to bet that if the document format becomes an ISO standard, and organizations in EU start requiring that document format, it will become the standard, and MS's proprietary undocumented formats will end up in the crapper, where they belong.
The needs of most users are more than adequately covered by versions of Microsoft Office that are several years old, as well as by Open Office.
i don't think so.
those applications are perhaps sufficient in terms of actual document editing, but the track MS is now taking is the smart one:
integration with collaboration and workgroup tools like sharepoint
section-level permissions based a centralized directory (active directory)
i wouldn't soil my hands by actually using MS-Office, but OOo will be left trailing ever further behind if it doesn't start providing these kinds of features.
OpenOffice.org actually gets in your way more than Word by default, which is truly amazing. The main feature I wish it had is better Word compatibility. When I open a Word document, it should not:
1. Dump core immediately
2. Dump core later
3. Get confused about where the cursor is and show it 3 words off from where my typing shows up
4. Look different from the Word document
5. Save in Word format in a way that will make Word show it differently than OpenOffice.org did
--/quote
how ironic that most of these problems probably are due to the proprietary microsoft file format, and the subject of this article is standardization of office file formats...
Re:All I know is...
on
The Jobs Crunch
·
· Score: 2, Informative
You think inflation is bad? Try deflation, the oppostite, when prices go down.
...or, from the carter era, stagflation: when the economy is stagnant but prices *still* rise. i learned about that real-time in my high school economics classes in the late '70s...
the prime rate for loans is currently around 4.5%. do you know what it was in 1980? 20%! 20% prime rate, plus inflation, plus stagnant economy. i remember trying to get a job after high school back then - *very* demoralizing. employers were nakedly contemptuous of job applicants because so many of them swarmed like flies around every job opening.
It does say PC Gaming. I know there are a few games out there for Linux but most serious gamers would consider Linux Gaming and oxymoron.
i'll have to give you that one. the only game i still play is ET:RTCW, which runs on linux, but it locks my machine up roughly once a day, on the days i do play. after the first reboot, it tends to work ok though.
this is one of my few remaining embarrassments re: linux on the desktop...
all of which, of course, will be indexed against typical windows box configurations, further streamlining and embedding the subconscious windows-centricity of the masses.
we bought a 2600sf house on 4 acres for myself, my wife, and three pets. probably about 1/4 to 1/3 of it is essentially unused space - she spends most of her time in the 8x22 sun room on the south side, and i spend most of mine in the 12x21 office on the north side. there are a couple rooms that we don't step foot in for weeks. every time i walk by them, the mortgage payment figure slides around before my eyes. quickly followed by the climate control expense.
if i had it to do over again, i would go smaller, more energy-efficient, and put the savings toward more land, (even) more privacy, closer to the ocean, or just plain more leisure time; but this was our first house, and we wanted a "nice" place and didn't really give as much thought to the day-to-day practicalities involved.
my current daydream is to get together with a few other people/couples and go in on a fully self-sustaining vacation house on the shore somewhere. this would allow us to buy land more cheaply (inaccessible, unserviced by utilities, etc), and put the money toward a nice waterfront view and privacy.
the house mentioned in the article doesn't quite fit the bill, since it's designed to be hooked up to the grid and contribute energy back at some times, and draw energy off it during others; but the technologies used would be applicable to a self-sustaining house as well. and any experimentation that drives the initial price of these technologies down is very welcome.
per hour, perhaps, but this is a nebulous TCO discussion, remember?:-)
my point is that you tend grow a skilled IT staff in a linux-based environment, probably more so than in the windows environment. this pays dividends when management start asking for new, creative solutions from IT.
Microsoft is evil... blah blah... yes they've got security holes... I'd really like to hear your reason to "sure as hell not be installing XP. Maybe 2000."
because microsoft is evil and they've got security holes?
Considering that most linux installations, properly set up, are far more trouble free than windows, I can't see the point you're making here.... Windows requires constant, hands on maintenance.
another angle on this that i don't see mentioned often: the nature of the man-hours component of TCO are different between windows admins and linux admins.
windows admins spend a lot of time patching machines, doing windows "refreshes" (ie, clean wipe and reinstall of the OS and applications - interesting that this process actually has a *name* in the windows world), exterminating virus outbreaks, following MSKB documents step by step, etc.
meanwhile, linux admins spend a larger chunk of their TCO man-hours on setting up systems and software packages. they often have to have a better understanding of the underlying technology to get the package optimally configured for their particular platform. once it's set up and configured, it just runs and runs and runs.
so, it seems to me that:
organizations that rely on windows burn away their TCO man-hour dollars on stupefyingly unproductive monkey-work;
meanwhile, the dollars spent by their counterparts in linux shops actually represent an investment in a more knowledgeable IT staff.
i wonder if MS figures this waste-vs.-investment differential into their TCO calculations. somehow i doubt it.
i think there's a point where you have to really look past the cynical fog and think, you know, he probably could have stopped at a couple billion if he just wanted the brownie points.
perhaps a donation to the FSF would clear the cynical fog;-)
While I admire Bill Gates for his charitable work, I don't think he himself has contributed much to the field of computer science.
i think you're a bit off on the charitable work part. consider the timing of the charitable work in relation to the anti-trust trial. you'll see that it coincides quite closely with the other get-our-political-act-together moves microsoft made at that time.
dunno about what software you use but why would anyone on this day and age use software that crashes often for _work_?
most of the time the desktop will be sitting doing almost nothing. it's not hard to think up a scenario where you would need fast cpu power couple of times a day for 3 minutes at a time or so(calculating some tables or whatever) but the rest of the day you could do well with a crappy one.
what, you call running doom3 for seven out of eight hours *doing almost nothing*??
newscaster melissa mcdermott on 9/13's "CBS Up To the Minute":
"Sec. of State Colin Powell has confirmed a huge explosion rocked North Korea last week but doesn't believe it was not connected to the country's nuclear program."
Slashdot Mirror
from what i've seen on the news, i'd be surprised if there were 600 crackers in all of north korea.
HA! *my* forehead slopes sharply back away from my brow!
take THAT, commies!
far better to bitch-slap individuals engaged in wholesale copyright infringement than to try to outlaw P2P apps outright, which have legitimate uses.
when training on the .50 cal in basic training circa 1981, i recall the drill instructor telling us this, and then saying: "like i said, equipment - for example: helmets, and belt buckles..."
by then the cheerleader will have gotten what she wanted - popularity and connections - and moved on from college to pro.
luckily for open source / free software advocates, ibm is currently fondling, not squeezing. :-)
actually, it is ironic, regardless of any of your following statements.
"Word" is the de facto standard format.
the phrase "de facto standard" and the word "standard" are not synonymous, especially in computing. "word" is the de facto file format, due to ubiquity. it's not "the standard" word processing file format. there is no standard.
Incomplete support for the standard, no matter how flawed the standard itself may be,
the problem, of course, is not whether the standard is flawed or not. the problem is that the "standard" cannot possibly be a workable "standard" because the format itself isn't publicly documented anywhere.
is why we bitch at MS for IE's handling of CSS, among many other things.
CSS is completely publicly documented. IE's lack of compliance can only be ascribed to malicious intent on the part of MS. they had plenty of resources to fix the problem should they have wished to do so. but, they probably held a strategy meeting and inside of five minutes decided that the lock-in effect was well worth the lack of standards compliance. MS is contemptuous of standards.
No de jure standard is going to outweigh the de facto standard MS has created, whether we like it or not.
(putting aside the false comparison of a "de facto standard" and a "standard" for the moment...) had you used the present tense i would have agreed with you on that point. but awareness is growing over just how fucking retarded it is to lock away data in opaque proprietary formats. i'm willing to bet that if the document format becomes an ISO standard, and organizations in EU start requiring that document format, it will become the standard, and MS's proprietary undocumented formats will end up in the crapper, where they belong.
i don't think so.
those applications are perhaps sufficient in terms of actual document editing, but the track MS is now taking is the smart one:
- integration with collaboration and workgroup tools like sharepoint
- section-level permissions based a centralized directory (active directory)
i wouldn't soil my hands by actually using MS-Office, but OOo will be left trailing ever further behind if it doesn't start providing these kinds of features.--quote
OpenOffice.org actually gets in your way more than Word by default, which is truly amazing. The main feature I wish it had is better Word compatibility. When I open a Word document, it should not:
1. Dump core immediately
2. Dump core later
3. Get confused about where the cursor is and show it 3 words off from where my typing shows up
4. Look different from the Word document
5. Save in Word format in a way that will make Word show it differently than OpenOffice.org did
--/quote
how ironic that most of these problems probably are due to the proprietary microsoft file format, and the subject of this article is standardization of office file formats...
the prime rate for loans is currently around 4.5%. do you know what it was in 1980? 20%! 20% prime rate, plus inflation, plus stagnant economy. i remember trying to get a job after high school back then - *very* demoralizing. employers were nakedly contemptuous of job applicants because so many of them swarmed like flies around every job opening.
it can get a lot worse than it is now.
yeah, then you could go watch spongebob in your footie-pajamas, and drink hi-c from your sippie-cup!
actually, that sounds kind of fun.
i'll have to give you that one. the only game i still play is ET:RTCW, which runs on linux, but it locks my machine up roughly once a day, on the days i do play. after the first reboot, it tends to work ok though.
this is one of my few remaining embarrassments re: linux on the desktop...
funk dat.
what he said.
we bought a 2600sf house on 4 acres for myself, my wife, and three pets. probably about 1/4 to 1/3 of it is essentially unused space - she spends most of her time in the 8x22 sun room on the south side, and i spend most of mine in the 12x21 office on the north side. there are a couple rooms that we don't step foot in for weeks. every time i walk by them, the mortgage payment figure slides around before my eyes. quickly followed by the climate control expense.
if i had it to do over again, i would go smaller, more energy-efficient, and put the savings toward more land, (even) more privacy, closer to the ocean, or just plain more leisure time; but this was our first house, and we wanted a "nice" place and didn't really give as much thought to the day-to-day practicalities involved.
my current daydream is to get together with a few other people/couples and go in on a fully self-sustaining vacation house on the shore somewhere. this would allow us to buy land more cheaply (inaccessible, unserviced by utilities, etc), and put the money toward a nice waterfront view and privacy.
the house mentioned in the article doesn't quite fit the bill, since it's designed to be hooked up to the grid and contribute energy back at some times, and draw energy off it during others; but the technologies used would be applicable to a self-sustaining house as well. and any experimentation that drives the initial price of these technologies down is very welcome.
per hour, perhaps, but this is a nebulous TCO discussion, remember? :-)
my point is that you tend grow a skilled IT staff in a linux-based environment, probably more so than in the windows environment. this pays dividends when management start asking for new, creative solutions from IT.
because microsoft is evil and they've got security holes?
(x.x)
(")")
you love cute bunnies...you love cute bunnies...
uh-oh, looks like you forgot to feed him!
yeah, but it's the consistency that mcd's customers buy. they know it's going to be shit whether vegetarian or not.
another angle on this that i don't see mentioned often: the nature of the man-hours component of TCO are different between windows admins and linux admins.
windows admins spend a lot of time patching machines, doing windows "refreshes" (ie, clean wipe and reinstall of the OS and applications - interesting that this process actually has a *name* in the windows world), exterminating virus outbreaks, following MSKB documents step by step, etc.
meanwhile, linux admins spend a larger chunk of their TCO man-hours on setting up systems and software packages. they often have to have a better understanding of the underlying technology to get the package optimally configured for their particular platform. once it's set up and configured, it just runs and runs and runs.
so, it seems to me that:
i wonder if MS figures this waste-vs.-investment differential into their TCO calculations. somehow i doubt it.
perhaps a donation to the FSF would clear the cynical fog ;-)
because it's a stupid, degrading practice to pimp yourself to some rich douchebag's megalomania?
i think you're a bit off on the charitable work part. consider the timing of the charitable work in relation to the anti-trust trial. you'll see that it coincides quite closely with the other get-our-political-act-together moves microsoft made at that time.
i think baboon's-ass red would be a more appropriate color.
most of the time the desktop will be sitting doing almost nothing. it's not hard to think up a scenario where you would need fast cpu power couple of times a day for 3 minutes at a time or so(calculating some tables or whatever) but the rest of the day you could do well with a crappy one.
what, you call running doom3 for seven out of eight hours *doing almost nothing*??
"Sec. of State Colin Powell has confirmed a huge explosion rocked North Korea last week but doesn't believe it was not connected to the country's nuclear program."
huh?