OK, good! I'm not taking a position on the regulation, just responding to the bizarre argument that Microsoft is wronging its blind users by being excluded and leaving them without an alternative. If the ODF options step up with accessibility, then the complaint of the "clergy" becomes irrelevant; otherwise it's idiotic.
As for the distinction between "banned for document creation" and "banned" and the availability of.doc-to-ODF converters, they seem pointless to me -- what about state employees who create documents and have accessibility needs?
Microsoft Office supports the needs of blind users. The OpenDocument alternatives do not. Massachusetts bars government use of Office until it complies with OpenDocument. Microsoft, at the moment, is going to concede the market to the alternatives.
So how exactly does this become "Microsoft mean to blind users!" Shouldn't blame belong to a) Open Office and other suites that don't have adequate accessibility, b) the Massachusetts government for locking out MS Office without considering this issue and c) the people who advocated b)?
And as a Massachusetts tax payer (and quite hefty taxes, at that) it's not obvious to me why this is any of the business of a bunch of ministers in North Carolina.
Obviously the comment about "easier to use" is inane when talking about supercomputers, but that quote was invented by the submitter. What the director of the HPC unit (not Gates) actually said was "...easier to integrate into what they are already doing".
Yeah, I remember reading the CNN article on Versareef, illustrated with what looks to be Jaws at 35-40 feet. I was thinking "Gee, that's quite a wave pool they have there!" before reading the caption.
Somehow, I'm thinking the Versareef won't be quite that big!
It's interesting to see that they've managed this with less than 1000 employees. Only two others in the list are comparable in this respect. Plenty of other companies on the list have thousands or tens or thousands of employees.
OK, but only two others in the list have lower revenues! If you look at revenues/employee, Red Hat is...lessee... 30th of 50, with Hitachi so far in number 1 (36 times that of #2 Dell) I'm thinking there must be a mistake.
Who was it who was linked here last week saying that table display widgets should be full-featured spreadsheets? I'm all for it!
Something like this (it wasn't interactive, just randomly generated outcomes) exists. Trolls circa 1999 or so used to paste pages and pages of that stuff into posts. I lack the energy to start digging through ancient -1 comments looking for it, though...
Re:It'll be a sad state of affairs when this happe
on
A Flu Pandemic?
·
· Score: 1
Besides confusing Taiwan with China, you're missing the point: things have to be made before they can be stolen.
The problem isn't the money Roche loses. (You don't think they could scale up if this avian flu pandemic horseshit actually happened?) The problem is that this sort of short-sighted, self-righteous greed has already made developing new AIDS treatments a liability. At best you lose your R&D investment; at worst you get something that works and your troubles are just starting!
Arguably AIDS drugs were stolen from their makers at a point that maximized the saving of lives. (Although if a new resistant strain comes along, God help the victims because no one else will.) But Tamiflu and the rest of the current flu treatments suck. Like I said, I don't believe in this "pandemic" hysteria, but to the degree that people do, this is a really stupid point to kill the goose that lays the golden eggs.
Re:It'll be a sad state of affairs when this happe
on
A Flu Pandemic?
·
· Score: 1
You're the one person with a non-stupid response, so you deserve a reply:
Your mistake is that you think that "research" is an interchangeable commodity. There are different types of research, and the type that makes real-world drugs is insanely expensive, largely unpublishable and, despite what uninformed people constantly say, simply does not exist outside of companies. There simply is no way to drop half a billion dollars on taking a drug to market and expect to be able to recoup those costs from manufacturing patents.
This is the 2006 Midseason edition, where the game consists mostly of interminable yammering about "T.O." with occasional mentions of a football game that seems to be going on in the background. Also the Pats defense has been updated to be Tedy Bruschi and 10 guys they found playing touch football in the park.
See, one day I was wrestling with a CUPS upgrade that broke printing and telling myself I was learning something in the process, when it dawned on me -- there are more rewarding challenges in life than fighting with a computer.
To the degree that Unix makes my life easier, it's worth using. (There's a VNC window open now saving me from something that would be excruciating in Windows.) But using it to make life more difficult has lost its luster.
Even if the problem were procedural, I would think that, on transfer of control, you would lock down all non-essential functions - like "flinging" payloads into space - until control has been successfully handed off.
As I understand the story (which could easily be wrong), they had to issue the release command blindly, because the need to make the adjustment came up precisely when Murphy's Law predicts. Having the flexibility to do so at least allowed them to make the gamble that they wound up losing.
Re:It'll be a sad state of affairs when this happe
on
A Flu Pandemic?
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
Public welfare be damned, so long as the pharmaceuticals can make back their research money.
As one of those researchers, I've got to ask -- given that Taiwan is already breaking the Tamiflu patent, what makes you think my bosses are insane enough to invest that research money when the product is going to be confiscated?
Geniuses like you have already brought the development of new AIDS treatments to a near halt. Personally, I think this flu hysteria is nonsense anyway, but stopping the drug pipeline to grab the not-very-good drugs on the market right now seems counterproductive to me. Anyway, we'll go make our money elsewhere, and you'd better hope any future treatments can be produced out of Creative Commons drum 'n' bass tracks...
I believe, Monsieur Sartre, that the meaning of "replace" is limited to the specific context (task, job, whatever) in question. Not suggesting that the person ceases to exist the moment one hits:wq on the very small shell script that "replaces" him.
What do you think "if Apple embraces the FOSS community" means? That Jobs gives Richard Stallman a kiss?
I'm glad the OP would still pay $200 for a boxed DVD when a "FOSS" alternative is available for download, but I find it hard to imagine Apple staying in business with such a scheme.
This might be useful if Apple embraces the FOSS community, and lets them fill in the gaps in device drivers, etc. Keeping things closed isn't good for anyone except the company that is doing the closing, and there are many many anecdotes of where that kind of practice isn't even good for them.
If Apple loses their hardware business to clones and their software business to CheapBytes, how exactly are they going to keep making OS X? Their going out of business may be good for everyone but them (although I'd disagree with that) but that seems like an odd calculation to expect them to make.
They're running an unreleased OS on unauthorized hardware and making tables of startup time and power usage? (Hint: who restarts an OS X laptop, anyway, except for software updates?)
Obviously iTunes MP3 encoding, and a lot of the other things they mention, are going to be optimized for the x86 -- it seems silly to complain about that today.
Not only is this a dupe but the consummate trollish stupidity of the first submission set a high-water mark that seems almost sacriligious to challenge!
Like any other "format war" you just have to do your best to guess who the winner will be... or suffer through manual transfers later.
Or, if you really need to be listening to "Drop It Like It's Hot" in 2058, keep your old playback device around! People who still want to listen to their so-called "records" have a turntable in their house. They're not trying to shove vinyl into an iPod.
Whether or not they wanted to "sabotage" the MP3 phone market is another issue...
Given that the title is "Did Apple Sabotage the ROKR?" it's not obvious to me how that's "another issue". I said myself that Apple probably had strategic reasons for limiting the MP3 collection on the ROKR. But the plan was obviously acceptable to Motorola, which is hardly a naif in the matter of featureful mobile phones, so it couldn't have been *that* bad an idea!
I can believe that Apple didn't want to cannibalize their own line, and made their deal with Motorola with that in mind.
But "sabotage"?!? Motorola isn't a couple of kids with a lemonade stand, and it's not even a huge corporation operating outside its normal business. Surely they have enough experience with portable consumer electronics to have dealt with Apple with their eyes open.
Whatever the legal issues (I wonder if, had Titleserv not been able to get through his security measures and make the changes, they could have gotten a court to compel Krause to do it?)...
What an idiot! Who would ever hire Krause again, after this stunt? This is the kind of thing people here yap about doing in Ask Slashdot replies, but what fool actually does it?
Note: The Brown note was proved to be non exixstent on a recent episode of Mythbusters on the Discovery channel.It was on a "recent" episode of Brainiac, which involved the viewer in the experiment, and proved true.
Slashdot Mirror
As for the distinction between "banned for document creation" and "banned" and the availability of .doc-to-ODF converters, they seem pointless to me -- what about state employees who create documents and have accessibility needs?
So how exactly does this become "Microsoft mean to blind users!" Shouldn't blame belong to a) Open Office and other suites that don't have adequate accessibility, b) the Massachusetts government for locking out MS Office without considering this issue and c) the people who advocated b)?
And as a Massachusetts tax payer (and quite hefty taxes, at that) it's not obvious to me why this is any of the business of a bunch of ministers in North Carolina.
FYI, "...is the shit", as used by the grandparent, is the opposite of what you seem to mean, which is "...is shit."
Curiously, "flammable" and "inflammable" are still synonyms.
Obviously the comment about "easier to use" is inane when talking about supercomputers, but that quote was invented by the submitter. What the director of the HPC unit (not Gates) actually said was "...easier to integrate into what they are already doing".
Somehow, I'm thinking the Versareef won't be quite that big!
OK, but only two others in the list have lower revenues! If you look at revenues/employee, Red Hat is ...lessee... 30th of 50, with Hitachi so far in number 1 (36 times that of #2 Dell) I'm thinking there must be a mistake.
Who was it who was linked here last week saying that table display widgets should be full-featured spreadsheets? I'm all for it!
Something like this (it wasn't interactive, just randomly generated outcomes) exists. Trolls circa 1999 or so used to paste pages and pages of that stuff into posts. I lack the energy to start digging through ancient -1 comments looking for it, though...
I give it 8/10.
The problem isn't the money Roche loses. (You don't think they could scale up if this avian flu pandemic horseshit actually happened?) The problem is that this sort of short-sighted, self-righteous greed has already made developing new AIDS treatments a liability. At best you lose your R&D investment; at worst you get something that works and your troubles are just starting!
Arguably AIDS drugs were stolen from their makers at a point that maximized the saving of lives. (Although if a new resistant strain comes along, God help the victims because no one else will.) But Tamiflu and the rest of the current flu treatments suck. Like I said, I don't believe in this "pandemic" hysteria, but to the degree that people do, this is a really stupid point to kill the goose that lays the golden eggs.
Your mistake is that you think that "research" is an interchangeable commodity. There are different types of research, and the type that makes real-world drugs is insanely expensive, largely unpublishable and, despite what uninformed people constantly say, simply does not exist outside of companies. There simply is no way to drop half a billion dollars on taking a drug to market and expect to be able to recoup those costs from manufacturing patents.
This is the 2006 Midseason edition, where the game consists mostly of interminable yammering about "T.O." with occasional mentions of a football game that seems to be going on in the background. Also the Pats defense has been updated to be Tedy Bruschi and 10 guys they found playing touch football in the park.
See, one day I was wrestling with a CUPS upgrade that broke printing and telling myself I was learning something in the process, when it dawned on me -- there are more rewarding challenges in life than fighting with a computer.
To the degree that Unix makes my life easier, it's worth using. (There's a VNC window open now saving me from something that would be excruciating in Windows.) But using it to make life more difficult has lost its luster.
As I understand the story (which could easily be wrong), they had to issue the release command blindly, because the need to make the adjustment came up precisely when Murphy's Law predicts. Having the flexibility to do so at least allowed them to make the gamble that they wound up losing.
As one of those researchers, I've got to ask -- given that Taiwan is already breaking the Tamiflu patent, what makes you think my bosses are insane enough to invest that research money when the product is going to be confiscated?
Geniuses like you have already brought the development of new AIDS treatments to a near halt. Personally, I think this flu hysteria is nonsense anyway, but stopping the drug pipeline to grab the not-very-good drugs on the market right now seems counterproductive to me. Anyway, we'll go make our money elsewhere, and you'd better hope any future treatments can be produced out of Creative Commons drum 'n' bass tracks...
I believe, Monsieur Sartre, that the meaning of "replace" is limited to the specific context (task, job, whatever) in question. Not suggesting that the person ceases to exist the moment one hits :wq on the very small shell script that "replaces" him.
I'm glad the OP would still pay $200 for a boxed DVD when a "FOSS" alternative is available for download, but I find it hard to imagine Apple staying in business with such a scheme.
Uh, they stay in business by not giving away their software, as the OP suggests Apple ought to do?
If Apple loses their hardware business to clones and their software business to CheapBytes, how exactly are they going to keep making OS X? Their going out of business may be good for everyone but them (although I'd disagree with that) but that seems like an odd calculation to expect them to make.
Obviously iTunes MP3 encoding, and a lot of the other things they mention, are going to be optimized for the x86 -- it seems silly to complain about that today.
Not only is this a dupe but the consummate trollish stupidity of the first submission set a high-water mark that seems almost sacriligious to challenge!
Or, if you really need to be listening to "Drop It Like It's Hot" in 2058, keep your old playback device around! People who still want to listen to their so-called "records" have a turntable in their house. They're not trying to shove vinyl into an iPod.
Given that the title is "Did Apple Sabotage the ROKR?" it's not obvious to me how that's "another issue". I said myself that Apple probably had strategic reasons for limiting the MP3 collection on the ROKR. But the plan was obviously acceptable to Motorola, which is hardly a naif in the matter of featureful mobile phones, so it couldn't have been *that* bad an idea!
But "sabotage"?!? Motorola isn't a couple of kids with a lemonade stand, and it's not even a huge corporation operating outside its normal business. Surely they have enough experience with portable consumer electronics to have dealt with Apple with their eyes open.
What an idiot! Who would ever hire Krause again, after this stunt? This is the kind of thing people here yap about doing in Ask Slashdot replies, but what fool actually does it?