So long as he seeks unbridled power for the government, resists any legal constraints placed upon his power, and uses millenialism to justify his policies, he will never be a friend.
The only proper place for John Ashcroft is hanging from a tree.
I don't think I'm alone in saying that the constant battle between the outliner and the autoformatting engine just got to be way too problematic. OpenOffice seems to have been able to come up with a more elegant solution; I, for one, haven't had nearly the frustrating experiences with it as I have with Word.
But I think fundamentally this is another example of why MS is continuing to decline in some key areas: backwards compatibility and entrenched interests within Microsoft itself. The MS Office group is still powerful in Redmond, and the shareholders would also be resistant to such a move: Office has been a cash cow for so long that tinkering with it fundamentally like this would be scary insofar as future revenues are concerned.
So I don't think there is any possible way this will happen in the forseeable future, although for once I think Dvorak is right: it probably should. Word sucks.
(Offtopic: Tool's version of "No Quarter" is fairly nifty.)
The best protection is DON'T USE WINDOWS
on
Always Use Protection
·
· Score: 0, Flamebait
The best way to protect your children and your PC is to spend quality time with them, teaching them the basics of PC protection and chat room safety.
Insofar as buffer exploits, virii, trojans, etc. etc ad nauseum, are concerned, the best protection is simply not to use the most insecure, bug laden operating system on the planet. Ditch it and get Linux or a Mac. Simply put, the biggest security threat to modern computing systems also happens to be the OS that is most widely used: Windows. And it AIN'T cuz there are more Windows isntalls out there. It's because Microsoft seems institutionally incapable of making secure software.
The reviewer did not mention actually spending any time with your kids.
Yeah, specifically spending time with your kids and showing them Gnome or OS X's Finder or something.
I'm a Java developer, and I completely agree with what you said. JBuilder is a waste, and Forte/NetBeans is absolutely atrocious: everything but the kitchen sink is thrown into the default install, and it makes it gargantuan and inelegant.
Having said that, however, you should be aware that 80% of Java developers these days use Eclipse. This is IBM's donation to the world of IDEs, and IBM has recently announced that all (!) future applications written by them will use the Eclipse framework. It is fast, uses SWT instead of Swing (meaning you have access to the native windowing subsystem, instead of having to deal with a new [Swing] one), and incredibly flexible. I come from a MS background, and I have to say that I *vastly* prefer Eclipse to VS.NET; it's leaner, meaner, and far and away more intuitive.
To all you "Java is slow" parrots, I would just like to offer a counterexample. Where I work we serve up 70mbits a second, and the site is 100% Java/J2EE. The DBs are AS/400s and SQL Servers, but all the application code is in Java, and it performs quite well, thank you very much.
1. Who are you fighting against?
2. What makes you think they won't have bigger guns than you?
3. Where are the police/army in all this? If they're who you're fighting, you're going to need an aircraft carrier, some attack helicopters, a nuclear arsenal, and about 100,000 men to help you out (and bring their own guns)
1. Fascists. At this point in history: Republicans.
2. I do not.
3) There, and active. But look at Iraq today. Even with all of the might of the US military being used, there is still and active insurgency that is causing huge pains for the US government. These are also untrained civilians who are nonetheless able to resist -- with various degrees of success -- the powers that be.
I've yet to hear an argument with any substance at all for guns.
How about this: Sometimes in the course of human events it becomes necessary to kill another human being, and guns can be an effective tool for achieving that end.
Nope. It's not about ignoring the honorable discharge (note the spelling, please) but that he seems to have not served at all for a period of time, and in fact went AWOL. This is all, in fact, based on records provided by the government; according to those records, Bush's whereabouts were an unknown for a period of time while he was supposed to be in Texas.
And then, of course, he "arranged" something with the Pentagon so he could leave the Reserve and go work on a political campaign in Georgia, something I'm sure a lot of reservists in Iraq would love to be able to do right now.
I think you made a mistake in thinking that because I said that those men think (rightfully) that we are an invading force that I thereby admire anything about them. Just because I think they are right in one thought does not mean I think they are right in all thoughts. Nor do I respect zealous religious fanatics of any stripe, whether their name happens to be Muqtada al Sadr or Sean Hannity. If al Sadr is guilty of conspiracy to murder then I hope he is imprisoned justly and swiftly.
I understand that you think the presence or absence of mass murder is just a sort of irrelevant technicality, but the people who get killed may actually have the gall to disagree!
Are you talking about those innocents killed by Saddam, or those innocents killed by America?
Like the Left in the West, Islamists tend to regard killing as an inherent good, regardless of who gets killed or why
What are you talking about? Did you mean to say "the right" here? George Bush and the Republican party is conservative/right; they are usually the one's agitating for violence as a means to an end. And if you meant to say "the right" I would *still* challenge that statement.
Absolutely not. I'm not a free market fundamentalist. I believe the government can and should regulate businesses, what they can and can not do, and as such am very much opposed to libertarianism.
Because if you look at the development of his philosophy of non-violence, you will see that the variables he used to determine that path to be the best are not applicable to all situations. It's results were dependant upon gaining sympathy in the media and the general population; if the media is under the control of the government, either de facto or de jure, and the government imprisons or kills any leadership that comes to the fore, then non-violence will not work.
So while I hold nothing but the utmost and deepest respect and admiration for the Mahatma, I do not think that he would be as emphatic today. The government has learned how to intimidate the media and cower the population: sociology, group dynamics, propaganda, and psychology have all been used to great and evil effect. As a result, the non-violent methodologies espoused by Gandhi no longer are effective, and another method of political change has been removed. Gandhi espoused non-violence as a means of political change because it worked. It no longer does. Hence, I am not sure he would therefore espouse such tactics today.
I keep reading posts on many forums where they say things like "I would vote against Bush, but I'm just not sure that Kerry would really protect America". To me, that sounds less like sensible, enlightened caution and more like visceral fear of being blown up.
You are very much on the right track. The Denial of Death posits that ALL human behavior is driven by the fear of death of ego, and I have seen nothing that has led me to believe this is not in fact true.
When two opposed groups with supposedly opposite idealogies end up doing the same thing it makes you wonder that there is something going on. It's not cynical to notice this, it's being realistic. Both parties have something to sell, and when it comes to voting if you're not for a canidate then you're against them.
While this is true, it *is* cynical to say something like "both sides are equally corrupt" or "they all do it.", and that the belief that those who believe differently are naive.
What if, as a voter I'm for things that both parties are selling, then who do I vote for? Now you see why so many people seem cynical about the whole thing.
I dunno, I don't think that is the cause of the cynicism. I think it is beacuse our minds find it easier to categorize broad groups -- "politicians" in this case -- into predefined labels ("corrupt") and that challenges to that label are met with resistance merely because of the structure of the mind. Once that neural path is established ("politicians --> corrupt") our mind is resistant to change and will in fact eschew challenges to that path.
This is definately something in the underlying architecture we should look at refactoring. I'll get a TPS report about this to you in the morning.
1. At what point would you say this criteria is met?
When it is obvious that the people are no longer effetively in control of their government, and have no say in its workings. I believe we are close to that point now.
2. Do you draw a distinction between what happened at the dawn of the United States, and what is happening in Iraq right now?
Not really, no. Despite the "Cock" Hannity crowd crowing about "anti-Iraqi insurgents", I realize that those men who are fighting against us are doing so because they view us as an invading force, and rightfully so. My hope there is for a peaceful resolution that gives power to the Iraqi people, whether Shiite, Kurd, or other.
Thinking that both sides are equally reprehensible. Then I realized I was just parroting what I had been taught, letting cynicism and previously held (but never questioned) beliefs lead me in my thought. So I started doing research, asking questions like "Which party has had more criminals in the past 30 years?" and similar questions. I encourage you to make up your own questions and do your own research. Don't let cynicism get in your way.
So is this scientific "proof" that liberals tend to be more compassionate but also more cowardly?
No. It is, however, flamebait and fodder for the conservatives to jump over.
I'm a liberal. I also am a firm supporter of the 2nd Amendment, and in fact own multiple firearms. Why? Because I believe there may come a time where I need to defend my ideals with violence. I look at my intellectual forbears like Samuel Adams, George Washington, Mahatma Gandhi (not as peace as you believe!), Malcolm X, and other political agitators. Frequently changes can come about through peaceful means, but when peaceful means fail and tyranny rears its ugly head, then blood must be spilled.
In no religious or political tradition is the forceful opposition of tyranny considered a sin or a crime. This is very much a liberal train of thought, in the "power to the people" sense, the fundamental democratic sense. The liberals who founded America did so by violently opposing British tyranny, and they were wholly justified in doing so.
..have persuasively shown that the amygdala plays a key role in the creation of emotions like fear or empathy.
The question is: empathy towards who? I am empathetic towards the oppressed, the poor, and those who do not get treated justly by their governments. I, like Christ Jesus, will agitate for a change in this situation until my dying day. If violence is required to make it happen, then so be it. I hope it does not come to that, but if it will, I will not run from it.
Get Bush out of office. Seriously. I don't think he really cares all that much about anything nature-related, so if that is at all important to you then vote for Kerry.
I'm probably going to get modded down here, but getting Bush out of office WOULD be good for the natural world.
But for Microsoft, which is starting to see its growth slow, reinventing that suite of old reliables including Word, Excel and PowerPoint has become nothing less than a key to its future.
Umm.... Yeah. I remember when MS finally decided to get on the Internet bandwagon, and started putting "Internet functionality" in every single one of their applications. Remember how poorly that was implemented, and how little of value they were actually able to add to the various Office apps?
I don't see this as being much different. Buzzwords, ooh-ahh's from the PHBs, but little increased value for the end user. Collaborative PowerPoints? Um... Ok. Isn't that what source code control systems are for, even for binaries? Pure vaporware, baby. I mean look at this:
The new design makes programs like Word, Excel and Outlook e-mail part of collaborative work spaces. In theory, an employee working in Word could tap into all the corporate information on a customer or project.
What? What the heck does that even mean? Sounds like they're dreaming about some sort of uberlayer on top of all Office apps that will let you somehow get information no matter where it's stored. AND do it collaboratively.
I would highly doubt that Einstein's theory is flawed, but then again, they did not study the effects of gravity during a solar eclipse back then.
Not only is this comment not "insightful" but it is just plain wrong. One of the original PROOFS for relativity involved measuring the amount that light is bent during a -- pay attention now -- solar eclipse. To quote the article you so carefully did not read, it was "observations taken during a solar eclipse (of the way that light is bent when it passes close to the sun) which established General Relativity in the first place."
Next.
Mixed enterprise environments
on
IT Myths
·
· Score: 5, Informative
Where I work we run ATG Dynamo for our servlet container (Linux on staging, Solaris on production), AS/400 for our core data, SQL Server for presentation tier data,.NET for our Intranet, and until very recently a single Alpha box took care of all of our credit card processing. That little box just sat in a corner and did its job, day in, day out, taking care of thousands of requests per day, and we never had to touch it. I loved that thing.
So back on topic: Yes, large, successful systems do, in fact, use mixed systems. In fact, the only place that I have worked that used the same platform for all systems were typically smaller operations; large companies rarely are able to achieve such synchrony, and I'm not sure it's even worth the effort.
(BTW: To give you a clue who I work for, our CEO is Mr. Burns. No, really.)
I dunno, maybe do things that make *fewer* people want to kill every single one of us? Not target civilians? Keep our promises when funding AIDS relief efforts, help stablize African economies, not torture people and then pretend it was just a few reservists, not invade countries for no good reason, etc., etc. Oh, and bitchslap Israel occasionally, too. That'd be nice.
Slashdot Mirror
So long as he seeks unbridled power for the government, resists any legal constraints placed upon his power, and uses millenialism to justify his policies, he will never be a friend.
The only proper place for John Ashcroft is hanging from a tree.
I don't think I'm alone in saying that the constant battle between the outliner and the autoformatting engine just got to be way too problematic. OpenOffice seems to have been able to come up with a more elegant solution; I, for one, haven't had nearly the frustrating experiences with it as I have with Word.
But I think fundamentally this is another example of why MS is continuing to decline in some key areas: backwards compatibility and entrenched interests within Microsoft itself. The MS Office group is still powerful in Redmond, and the shareholders would also be resistant to such a move: Office has been a cash cow for so long that tinkering with it fundamentally like this would be scary insofar as future revenues are concerned.
So I don't think there is any possible way this will happen in the forseeable future, although for once I think Dvorak is right: it probably should. Word sucks.
(Offtopic: Tool's version of "No Quarter" is fairly nifty.)
The best way to protect your children and your PC is to spend quality time with them, teaching them the basics of PC protection and chat room safety.
Insofar as buffer exploits, virii, trojans, etc. etc ad nauseum, are concerned, the best protection is simply not to use the most insecure, bug laden operating system on the planet. Ditch it and get Linux or a Mac. Simply put, the biggest security threat to modern computing systems also happens to be the OS that is most widely used: Windows. And it AIN'T cuz there are more Windows isntalls out there. It's because Microsoft seems institutionally incapable of making secure software.
The reviewer did not mention actually spending any time with your kids.
Yeah, specifically spending time with your kids and showing them Gnome or OS X's Finder or something.
I'm a Java developer, and I completely agree with what you said. JBuilder is a waste, and Forte/NetBeans is absolutely atrocious: everything but the kitchen sink is thrown into the default install, and it makes it gargantuan and inelegant.
Having said that, however, you should be aware that 80% of Java developers these days use Eclipse. This is IBM's donation to the world of IDEs, and IBM has recently announced that all (!) future applications written by them will use the Eclipse framework. It is fast, uses SWT instead of Swing (meaning you have access to the native windowing subsystem, instead of having to deal with a new [Swing] one), and incredibly flexible. I come from a MS background, and I have to say that I *vastly* prefer Eclipse to VS.NET; it's leaner, meaner, and far and away more intuitive.
To all you "Java is slow" parrots, I would just like to offer a counterexample. Where I work we serve up 70mbits a second, and the site is 100% Java/J2EE. The DBs are AS/400s and SQL Servers, but all the application code is in Java, and it performs quite well, thank you very much.
... where does that put C#? In the basement with the red Swingline?
1. Who are you fighting against? 2. What makes you think they won't have bigger guns than you? 3. Where are the police/army in all this? If they're who you're fighting, you're going to need an aircraft carrier, some attack helicopters, a nuclear arsenal, and about 100,000 men to help you out (and bring their own guns)
1. Fascists. At this point in history: Republicans.
2. I do not.
3) There, and active. But look at Iraq today. Even with all of the might of the US military being used, there is still and active insurgency that is causing huge pains for the US government. These are also untrained civilians who are nonetheless able to resist -- with various degrees of success -- the powers that be.
I've yet to hear an argument with any substance at all for guns.
How about this: Sometimes in the course of human events it becomes necessary to kill another human being, and guns can be an effective tool for achieving that end.
The editors are pissed about something and decided to punish everyone, guilty or innocent, by using the IT color scheme.
Unitarianism.
I'm not a Christian. I'm a Unitarian. My preacher disagrees with my beliefs in this instance; I've spoken with her about them.
And then, of course, he "arranged" something with the Pentagon so he could leave the Reserve and go work on a political campaign in Georgia, something I'm sure a lot of reservists in Iraq would love to be able to do right now.
I think you made a mistake in thinking that because I said that those men think (rightfully) that we are an invading force that I thereby admire anything about them. Just because I think they are right in one thought does not mean I think they are right in all thoughts. Nor do I respect zealous religious fanatics of any stripe, whether their name happens to be Muqtada al Sadr or Sean Hannity. If al Sadr is guilty of conspiracy to murder then I hope he is imprisoned justly and swiftly.
I understand that you think the presence or absence of mass murder is just a sort of irrelevant technicality, but the people who get killed may actually have the gall to disagree!
Are you talking about those innocents killed by Saddam, or those innocents killed by America?
Like the Left in the West, Islamists tend to regard killing as an inherent good, regardless of who gets killed or why
What are you talking about? Did you mean to say "the right" here? George Bush and the Republican party is conservative/right; they are usually the one's agitating for violence as a means to an end. And if you meant to say "the right" I would *still* challenge that statement.
Absolutely not. I'm not a free market fundamentalist. I believe the government can and should regulate businesses, what they can and can not do, and as such am very much opposed to libertarianism.
Because if you look at the development of his philosophy of non-violence, you will see that the variables he used to determine that path to be the best are not applicable to all situations. It's results were dependant upon gaining sympathy in the media and the general population; if the media is under the control of the government, either de facto or de jure, and the government imprisons or kills any leadership that comes to the fore, then non-violence will not work.
So while I hold nothing but the utmost and deepest respect and admiration for the Mahatma, I do not think that he would be as emphatic today. The government has learned how to intimidate the media and cower the population: sociology, group dynamics, propaganda, and psychology have all been used to great and evil effect. As a result, the non-violent methodologies espoused by Gandhi no longer are effective, and another method of political change has been removed. Gandhi espoused non-violence as a means of political change because it worked. It no longer does. Hence, I am not sure he would therefore espouse such tactics today.
I keep reading posts on many forums where they say things like "I would vote against Bush, but I'm just not sure that Kerry would really protect America". To me, that sounds less like sensible, enlightened caution and more like visceral fear of being blown up.
You are very much on the right track. The Denial of Death posits that ALL human behavior is driven by the fear of death of ego, and I have seen nothing that has led me to believe this is not in fact true.
When two opposed groups with supposedly opposite idealogies end up doing the same thing it makes you wonder that there is something going on. It's not cynical to notice this, it's being realistic. Both parties have something to sell, and when it comes to voting if you're not for a canidate then you're against them.
While this is true, it *is* cynical to say something like "both sides are equally corrupt" or "they all do it.", and that the belief that those who believe differently are naive.
What if, as a voter I'm for things that both parties are selling, then who do I vote for? Now you see why so many people seem cynical about the whole thing.
I dunno, I don't think that is the cause of the cynicism. I think it is beacuse our minds find it easier to categorize broad groups -- "politicians" in this case -- into predefined labels ("corrupt") and that challenges to that label are met with resistance merely because of the structure of the mind. Once that neural path is established ("politicians --> corrupt") our mind is resistant to change and will in fact eschew challenges to that path.
This is definately something in the underlying architecture we should look at refactoring. I'll get a TPS report about this to you in the morning.
1. At what point would you say this criteria is met?
When it is obvious that the people are no longer effetively in control of their government, and have no say in its workings. I believe we are close to that point now.
2. Do you draw a distinction between what happened at the dawn of the United States, and what is happening in Iraq right now?
Not really, no. Despite the "Cock" Hannity crowd crowing about "anti-Iraqi insurgents", I realize that those men who are fighting against us are doing so because they view us as an invading force, and rightfully so. My hope there is for a peaceful resolution that gives power to the Iraqi people, whether Shiite, Kurd, or other.
Thinking that both sides are equally reprehensible. Then I realized I was just parroting what I had been taught, letting cynicism and previously held (but never questioned) beliefs lead me in my thought. So I started doing research, asking questions like "Which party has had more criminals in the past 30 years?" and similar questions. I encourage you to make up your own questions and do your own research. Don't let cynicism get in your way.
It's always someone else's fault.
Right. I mean, check out the conservative line of reasoning:
Example: "I'm not going to go see Fahrehnheit 9/11 for the same reasons liberals won't watch Fox News."
Example: "Vote fraud? Man, the liberals do it to, you just know it. (So it's ok if conservaives do.)"
Example: "Only telling one side of the story is ok, because the liberals do it to."
Example: "It's ok that the President went AWOL during the Vietnam war, beeacuse Bill Clinton got a deferrment."
Example: "It's ok to lie, cheat, and steal because some Democrat somewhere at some point did it, too."
So is this scientific "proof" that liberals tend to be more compassionate but also more cowardly?
No. It is, however, flamebait and fodder for the conservatives to jump over.
I'm a liberal. I also am a firm supporter of the 2nd Amendment, and in fact own multiple firearms. Why? Because I believe there may come a time where I need to defend my ideals with violence. I look at my intellectual forbears like Samuel Adams, George Washington, Mahatma Gandhi (not as peace as you believe!), Malcolm X, and other political agitators. Frequently changes can come about through peaceful means, but when peaceful means fail and tyranny rears its ugly head, then blood must be spilled.
In no religious or political tradition is the forceful opposition of tyranny considered a sin or a crime. This is very much a liberal train of thought, in the "power to the people" sense, the fundamental democratic sense. The liberals who founded America did so by violently opposing British tyranny, and they were wholly justified in doing so.
The question is: empathy towards who? I am empathetic towards the oppressed, the poor, and those who do not get treated justly by their governments. I, like Christ Jesus, will agitate for a change in this situation until my dying day. If violence is required to make it happen, then so be it. I hope it does not come to that, but if it will, I will not run from it.
Get Bush out of office. Seriously. I don't think he really cares all that much about anything nature-related, so if that is at all important to you then vote for Kerry.
I'm probably going to get modded down here, but getting Bush out of office WOULD be good for the natural world.
But for Microsoft, which is starting to see its growth slow, reinventing that suite of old reliables including Word, Excel and PowerPoint has become nothing less than a key to its future.
Umm.... Yeah. I remember when MS finally decided to get on the Internet bandwagon, and started putting "Internet functionality" in every single one of their applications. Remember how poorly that was implemented, and how little of value they were actually able to add to the various Office apps?
I don't see this as being much different. Buzzwords, ooh-ahh's from the PHBs, but little increased value for the end user. Collaborative PowerPoints? Um... Ok. Isn't that what source code control systems are for, even for binaries? Pure vaporware, baby. I mean look at this:
The new design makes programs like Word, Excel and Outlook e-mail part of collaborative work spaces. In theory, an employee working in Word could tap into all the corporate information on a customer or project.
What? What the heck does that even mean? Sounds like they're dreaming about some sort of uberlayer on top of all Office apps that will let you somehow get information no matter where it's stored. AND do it collaboratively.
*cough*
Righty-o. Believe it when I see it, chappies.
I would highly doubt that Einstein's theory is flawed, but then again, they did not study the effects of gravity during a solar eclipse back then.
Not only is this comment not "insightful" but it is just plain wrong. One of the original PROOFS for relativity involved measuring the amount that light is bent during a -- pay attention now -- solar eclipse. To quote the article you so carefully did not read, it was "observations taken during a solar eclipse (of the way that light is bent when it passes close to the sun) which established General Relativity in the first place."
Next.
Where I work we run ATG Dynamo for our servlet container (Linux on staging, Solaris on production), AS/400 for our core data, SQL Server for presentation tier data, .NET for our Intranet, and until very recently a single Alpha box took care of all of our credit card processing. That little box just sat in a corner and did its job, day in, day out, taking care of thousands of requests per day, and we never had to touch it. I loved that thing.
So back on topic: Yes, large, successful systems do, in fact, use mixed systems. In fact, the only place that I have worked that used the same platform for all systems were typically smaller operations; large companies rarely are able to achieve such synchrony, and I'm not sure it's even worth the effort.
(BTW: To give you a clue who I work for, our CEO is Mr. Burns. No, really.)
What do you propose we do instead?
I dunno, maybe do things that make *fewer* people want to kill every single one of us? Not target civilians? Keep our promises when funding AIDS relief efforts, help stablize African economies, not torture people and then pretend it was just a few reservists, not invade countries for no good reason, etc., etc. Oh, and bitchslap Israel occasionally, too. That'd be nice.
You know: be liberal.