I do, not that I actually use it very much anymore. But I absolutely REFUSE to pay $$$ just because they made the new format incompatible with the old. Besides, I think I installed the Word 97 filter some time ago.
...although you may absolutely HATE Word or Office, it IS the standard, whether you like it or not.
How can you call something that has never been approved by a standards body, and is proprietary (no public spec) a standard? Standards require that a body of disconnected companies agree. Since the format is not open, there has been no opportunity to do that. Just because it is the most widely used doesn't make it the standard.
What people are suggesting is that we come up with a STANDARD, OPEN format that all developers of office suites can agree on, thus greatly enabling interoperability. It's not likely that Microsoft will ever agree to that, but maybe somebody can fudge together an add-in module that allows Microsoft Word users to read and save documents in the new format. Continuing loyalty to a totally closed specification doesn't help ANYBODY, not even yourself in the long run.
Maybe it is time for the 1 million geek march on
capital hill...
Forget that. It's time for a 1 million geek march onto Hilary Rosen's lawn! Make it REAL clear what we're angry about. Besides, that's likely to get better press coverage. Everybody these days feels the need to do a march in DC.
What I want is a program that strips out all of the extraneous crap used by Microsoft Office. Unless I'm mistaken, even when you NEVER INSTALL OFFICE, a significant portion of it is already crammed into the Windows libraries and therefore loads itself when you boot your machine. This makes using alternate office packages a real pain because they have to load their own libraries on top of this. Am I right on this? Could somebody create a program to strip this junk out of the system libraries?
When I was living in Germany, they had a show sponsored by GIGA that was part of the NBC offering. During a large portion (I think from 22:00 - 24:00) of the rather long show, they featured reviews of video games. They provided reviews on new games, controllers and other hardware, and tips on playing the games. For the serious gamer, it's quite interesting. Any channel that wants to cover nothing but video games will have to offer similar resources to be successful. If people can't get information on new games and improving their own play, they aren't likely to remain interested.
A price was advertised that was wrong. The error was discovered and corrected.
Unfortunately, it's a tad more complicated. In this case, the "error" was reported by a consumer, and then the "erroneous price" was confirmed to the consumer as being valid. Furthermore, the description that went along with the supposedly incorrect price provided an approximately correct advertisement of the savings they could expect. I'm not sure if the end results change any, but there is certainly some evidence that the error was really intentional.
Also, remember that an advertised price does not constitute an offer.
This is true, but what I'd like to find out from any lawyers out there is whether or not the VERBAL confirmation of the price constitutes an offer.
IANAL, so I can't provide any insight on laws regarding what the company is allowed to do, but I can tell you that, in the US, legal action may be worth it because of the class action lawsuit, which allows legal costs to be shared by all the parties claiming damages. Spread legal costs over about 1000 or more people, and it becomes trivial. Besides, sometimes things like this are worth fighting for (even at expense) because they prevent other companies from doing the same thing in the future.
I was going to post exactly the same thing. Congratulations on being quicker to the draw. I was also going to add that there's one problem with that. At least one of the buyers called and confirmed twice that the offer and prices listed were valid. Any legal experts out there know how this will change things?
Actually, the fault is mine. I DID misunderstand because I never saw the below-threshold post, and was clueless enough to not realize that both your original post and the one I replied to were from the same person. I was defending your original post against your followup. I bet you never though you needed protection from yourself, eh?:-)
Anyway, you're right. Now that I've managed to read the anonymous post, I agree that it was idiotic -- or at least that person wasn't thinking any more clearly that I was.
Scientists should stop realeasing info like that to the stupid press before their results are confirmed.
I think that a better idea may be to just stop reading media that sensationalizes information like that to such a radical degree. I'm not sure of the facts in this case, but if scientists told the reporter that they found elements with the apparent spectral signature of chlorophyll on Mars, and the reporter translated that to something like "Life on Mars" then the problem really lies in the reporter and the editors. It's really partly our fault. We eat this crap up, thus encouraging rags to print it. When we start getting more discriminating about our news sources, instead of using them as entertainment, this kind of thing will diminish.
The only problem with my idea is that we'd probably, at least in the short run, have a great deal of difficulty finding any news to read....
Re:Doesn't the earth receive more?
on
Lunar Power
·
· Score: 2
Just an idea. Most rooves are just wasted space covering a dwelling, perhaps if a way was found to make the cells differing colours it would be accpted by more people.
Certainly, this is not a bad idea. Most roofing that I've seen is a dark color anyway, which looks similar to solar panels. The only catch to this is that the expense of installing and upkeeping a solar array prevents most people from jumping in. There are a few personal projects where this has been done, and there are some power companies that are "friendly" towards this. Normally, the solar panels provide the electricity needed by the house. If there is a power deficiency, the house draws on power provided by the power company. If there is surplus power, it is sent back to the power company over the same transmission lines. The only problem is that the credit that they get per surplus KWh is much less than the cost per KWh when the cells don't provide enough power. That doesn't seem too fair, given that the people who own the house paid for everything. Personally, I think we should all be able to LEASE roof space to the power company. They pay for the install and maintenance, and they pay me a monthly fee (or credit to my power bill) for using the space. Sure, it won't eliminate my power bill, but it would lower it substantially.
Well, I highly doubt Charmed's mods are in any distro, especially Redhat and Debian.
Ah, but if they are selling an OS licensed under GPL, wouldn't they be REQUIRED to provide the source, whether they made modifications or not? Do I misunderstand?
One of the amazing things is how effective physics is at explaining the universe.
I'm certain that physics very adequately explains almost every observation that we have encountered. That would, of course, be the goal. My point is that in some cases, you need to approach new claims and existing physics models with near-equal skepticism.
The reasons why perpetual motion is dismissed outright because
Let's not get hung up on perpetual motion. I actually mentioned that at the beginning of what I wrote because it's one of the most ludicrous claims out there. I too would automatically treat any such claim with immediately disbelief. The reasons that you listed for dismissing perpetual motion are all perfectly valid and I agree with every single one of them. However, in other arenas of physics, such as fusion (both cold and otherwise), people are perhaps unnecessarily skeptical. Even prominent science journals are telling both the skeptics and the supporters to just back off and let the scientific process run its course.
I actually think we have two problems. 1) We have recently decided to release new research information in high-profile media events before there are substantial peer reviews, and 2) As a result of #1, we've become unnecessarily dismissive of any new claim that we hear about.
It's amazing how people are skeptical of the wrong things.
I'm not suggesting that we should be skeptical just about laws of physics. I'm merely expressing an opinion that we should ALL perhaps do a better job of balancing that skepticism.
If there really is a better law, please publish it, and let others be the judge.
I'm not going to try to say that perpetual motion is impossible, but if there is a better law somewhere, just poopooing somebody elses work because it "violates law X" is a mindset that will never let a better replacement for "law X" be found. If somebody does an experiment that appears to violate one of the laws of physics, rather than call them a quack, we should say "Hmmm. This seems to violate the laws of physics. What can we learn?" Then, we analyze the experiment and try to find out what happened. Most of the time, we'll find a problem with the experiment or analysis of the results, but every once in a while there will be some interesting nugget of truth about how our laws of physics fail us. One has to hope that this is exactly what is going on in the scientific community.
And to top it off, they compare it to the 1040EZ, which is a snap to complete. Rather than spending the average 28 hours on completing tax forms, those that qualify for the EZ can usually finish their federal taxes in less than half an hour.
why solve the problem at the level of a search engine. it makes more sense to block the sites themselves
Unfortunately, blocking the sites that have the content doesn't eliminate it from Google's cache. Even if you can't get to the original site, you can retrieve the documents from the cache.
Well, the last part says it all. They can convert it back into fuel.
Later in the article, they actually say that the CO2 is used to process the petroleum. In light of that, I found the following interesting.
Cost of the entire process is equivalent to about 20 cents per gallon of gasoline - a nominal cost when one considers the recent price fluctuations at gasoline pumps across the nation, Dubey said.
So, does that 20 cents per gallon include an estimated return on providing petroleum processors with the large amounts carbon dioxide they need? If not, would include that into the equation yield a solution that is cost neutral? Or maybe even cheaper overall? That would be cool. Those places out west that get to pay a premium for gasoline could reduce their costs because there is a CO2 reprocessing center in the nearby desert.
If Titanium is plentiful, then why is it so blasted expensive? It can't be solely because it's hard to work with, can it? Is it expensive because it's currently only used for "special" applications? If we start using it more, will the cost go down?
As long as the client sends the 'referer(sic)' in the header, you're golden.
I think we could be a bit more simple. Just backfall to "slashdotted" mode whenever activity gets beyond a certain safety limit. Return to "normal" mode when activity falls. Obviously, this isn't for EVERYBODY, but in some cases it would be pretty helpful.
I know. Drat! Now that I've read page one, I'm totally drooling. I've been wondering about this crap for year too, and I want to know the answer.
BTW, I think we need a new mod_slashdot module for Apache that automatically detects the "slashdot" effect and starts serving up plain-text pages to minimize the problem. Anybody agree?
Non-sense I have DSL out in the middle of nowhere*, and by nowhere I mean on a farm, miles away from civilization. My ISP/Telco's central office has got to be at least 20 miles away.
Either they have a relay station of some sort(scaled down CO) near you, or they will be coming after you shortly for revealing that they have the technology to span those distances.:-) Other than a relay, I honestly don't know how they managed it. Last year, I had a choice of two "local" phone companies that were providing DSL. Neither of them could reach my house with anything but iDSL, and I was only about 5 miles from the CO.
All of your rants are certainly justified, but unfortunately solving this issue is not as easy as it appears. These days, you have pretty much four choices for high-speed internet: cable, DSL, satellite and wireless (radio, optical, microwave). You can immediately toss out satellite for many uses because of the high latency times that are not resolvable unless we find a way to make light travel faster (tachyons?). Similarly, all the wireless technologies that I'm aware of are more prone to weather disturbances than the others. However, they may still be fine for some levels of service.
We are left with two choices of service where there is a physical wire running to our house. That's DSL and cable. DSL is, at the present, hindered by transmission distances. You have to be relatively close to a central office to obtain adequate DSL service. And before somebody mentions iDSL, let me say that in my opinion, that's not high-speed. Cable modem is somewhat hindered by limits on how many locations you can put on a single loop. Certainly there are many areas that can receive cable TV that just have too many people out there to make cable modem available to all. To complicate matters, it seems that most areas that have one of these choices available lacks the other choice. This is, actually, not too surprising. Central offices will be closest to the most dense areas, while cable modem is actually more operable in areas with less density. You can also be sure that the avoidance of competition has been somewhat intentional. After all, you can charge higher prices and provide crappier service if there's nobody to compete against. I'm not going to accuse the big DSL and cable providers of collaborating on this, but I wouldn't be overly surprised to find out that they do. And as far as I know, there's nothing illegal about that unless they discuss pricing. (IANAL)
Now, let's suppose that Congress mandates the availability of DSL to all customers. That means that the phone company needs to build CO's close to every tiny little area on the map. That's INCREDIBLY expensive (obtaining land and permits, building the office, laying the cable), takes time, and the phone company may never see anything close to a return on their "investment." Cable providers would have similar problems, although it may be cheaper to lay cable for an additional loop than it would be to build a new CO. I'm not sure about that.
All of the service problems that have been mentioned (no VPN, no servers, bandwidth limits, crappy service, high prices) are the DIRECT result of the lack of competition. Unfortunately, the local monopolies OWN that "last mile" that is necessary to connect to the residences. They paid to install all of that cable and it's not really fair to ask them to just give access to it away at no price. And there are very very few startups who have the resources to lay their own wires. So, those few companies that provide any competition are forced to pay for use of the local loops. Once the big boys start charging for use of their wires, it's really easy for them to set the prices or service levels such that it drives their competition right out of business. And it's really hard to regulate that part of the industry.
So, how do we resolve the situation? There are really only a few choices as far as I can see.
The government can find a way to regulate last mile pricing and service levels -- a task easier said than done, and not likely to happen anytime soon.
The government can flat out BUY the local lines from the big boys, but I don't think that the government has ever in its history managed to run things any cheaper than private enterprise, so the results of this would be shaky at best.
People can turn to building their own DSL co-op, with all of the associated reliability and administration problems. Obviously, the provider that ultimately connects these do-it-yourself networks to the internet can still provide really crappy service just to frustrate the people using it.
Are there any better ideas out there? Do we have any new DSL technology that still works over copper and at much longer distances?
Slashdot Mirror
I do, not that I actually use it very much anymore. But I absolutely REFUSE to pay $$$ just because they made the new format incompatible with the old. Besides, I think I installed the Word 97 filter some time ago.
How can you call something that has never been approved by a standards body, and is proprietary (no public spec) a standard? Standards require that a body of disconnected companies agree. Since the format is not open, there has been no opportunity to do that. Just because it is the most widely used doesn't make it the standard.
What people are suggesting is that we come up with a STANDARD, OPEN format that all developers of office suites can agree on, thus greatly enabling interoperability. It's not likely that Microsoft will ever agree to that, but maybe somebody can fudge together an add-in module that allows Microsoft Word users to read and save documents in the new format. Continuing loyalty to a totally closed specification doesn't help ANYBODY, not even yourself in the long run.
Forget that. It's time for a 1 million geek march onto Hilary Rosen's lawn! Make it REAL clear what we're angry about. Besides, that's likely to get better press coverage. Everybody these days feels the need to do a march in DC.
What I want is a program that strips out all of the extraneous crap used by Microsoft Office. Unless I'm mistaken, even when you NEVER INSTALL OFFICE, a significant portion of it is already crammed into the Windows libraries and therefore loads itself when you boot your machine. This makes using alternate office packages a real pain because they have to load their own libraries on top of this. Am I right on this? Could somebody create a program to strip this junk out of the system libraries?
When I was living in Germany, they had a show sponsored by GIGA that was part of the NBC offering. During a large portion (I think from 22:00 - 24:00) of the rather long show, they featured reviews of video games. They provided reviews on new games, controllers and other hardware, and tips on playing the games. For the serious gamer, it's quite interesting. Any channel that wants to cover nothing but video games will have to offer similar resources to be successful. If people can't get information on new games and improving their own play, they aren't likely to remain interested.
Or more likely those who want to listen to them on the radio.... :)
Unfortunately, it's a tad more complicated. In this case, the "error" was reported by a consumer, and then the "erroneous price" was confirmed to the consumer as being valid. Furthermore, the description that went along with the supposedly incorrect price provided an approximately correct advertisement of the savings they could expect. I'm not sure if the end results change any, but there is certainly some evidence that the error was really intentional.
Also, remember that an advertised price does not constitute an offer.
This is true, but what I'd like to find out from any lawyers out there is whether or not the VERBAL confirmation of the price constitutes an offer.
IANAL, so I can't provide any insight on laws regarding what the company is allowed to do, but I can tell you that, in the US, legal action may be worth it because of the class action lawsuit, which allows legal costs to be shared by all the parties claiming damages. Spread legal costs over about 1000 or more people, and it becomes trivial. Besides, sometimes things like this are worth fighting for (even at expense) because they prevent other companies from doing the same thing in the future.
I was going to post exactly the same thing. Congratulations on being quicker to the draw. I was also going to add that there's one problem with that. At least one of the buyers called and confirmed twice that the offer and prices listed were valid. Any legal experts out there know how this will change things?
Anyway, you're right. Now that I've managed to read the anonymous post, I agree that it was idiotic -- or at least that person wasn't thinking any more clearly that I was.
Pun intended?
I think that a better idea may be to just stop reading media that sensationalizes information like that to such a radical degree. I'm not sure of the facts in this case, but if scientists told the reporter that they found elements with the apparent spectral signature of chlorophyll on Mars, and the reporter translated that to something like "Life on Mars" then the problem really lies in the reporter and the editors. It's really partly our fault. We eat this crap up, thus encouraging rags to print it. When we start getting more discriminating about our news sources, instead of using them as entertainment, this kind of thing will diminish.
The only problem with my idea is that we'd probably, at least in the short run, have a great deal of difficulty finding any news to read....
Certainly, this is not a bad idea. Most roofing that I've seen is a dark color anyway, which looks similar to solar panels. The only catch to this is that the expense of installing and upkeeping a solar array prevents most people from jumping in. There are a few personal projects where this has been done, and there are some power companies that are "friendly" towards this. Normally, the solar panels provide the electricity needed by the house. If there is a power deficiency, the house draws on power provided by the power company. If there is surplus power, it is sent back to the power company over the same transmission lines. The only problem is that the credit that they get per surplus KWh is much less than the cost per KWh when the cells don't provide enough power. That doesn't seem too fair, given that the people who own the house paid for everything. Personally, I think we should all be able to LEASE roof space to the power company. They pay for the install and maintenance, and they pay me a monthly fee (or credit to my power bill) for using the space. Sure, it won't eliminate my power bill, but it would lower it substantially.
Ah, but if they are selling an OS licensed under GPL, wouldn't they be REQUIRED to provide the source, whether they made modifications or not? Do I misunderstand?
I'm certain that physics very adequately explains almost every observation that we have encountered. That would, of course, be the goal. My point is that in some cases, you need to approach new claims and existing physics models with near-equal skepticism.
The reasons why perpetual motion is dismissed outright because
Let's not get hung up on perpetual motion. I actually mentioned that at the beginning of what I wrote because it's one of the most ludicrous claims out there. I too would automatically treat any such claim with immediately disbelief. The reasons that you listed for dismissing perpetual motion are all perfectly valid and I agree with every single one of them. However, in other arenas of physics, such as fusion (both cold and otherwise), people are perhaps unnecessarily skeptical. Even prominent science journals are telling both the skeptics and the supporters to just back off and let the scientific process run its course.
I actually think we have two problems. 1) We have recently decided to release new research information in high-profile media events before there are substantial peer reviews, and 2) As a result of #1, we've become unnecessarily dismissive of any new claim that we hear about.
It's amazing how people are skeptical of the wrong things.
I'm not suggesting that we should be skeptical just about laws of physics. I'm merely expressing an opinion that we should ALL perhaps do a better job of balancing that skepticism.
I'm not going to try to say that perpetual motion is impossible, but if there is a better law somewhere, just poopooing somebody elses work because it "violates law X" is a mindset that will never let a better replacement for "law X" be found. If somebody does an experiment that appears to violate one of the laws of physics, rather than call them a quack, we should say "Hmmm. This seems to violate the laws of physics. What can we learn?" Then, we analyze the experiment and try to find out what happened. Most of the time, we'll find a problem with the experiment or analysis of the results, but every once in a while there will be some interesting nugget of truth about how our laws of physics fail us. One has to hope that this is exactly what is going on in the scientific community.
And to top it off, they compare it to the 1040EZ, which is a snap to complete. Rather than spending the average 28 hours on completing tax forms, those that qualify for the EZ can usually finish their federal taxes in less than half an hour.
Unfortunately, blocking the sites that have the content doesn't eliminate it from Google's cache. Even if you can't get to the original site, you can retrieve the documents from the cache.
Now what would be nice companion data to that would be information on how much their top executives get paid. Any idea?
Later in the article, they actually say that the CO2 is used to process the petroleum. In light of that, I found the following interesting.
So, does that 20 cents per gallon include an estimated return on providing petroleum processors with the large amounts carbon dioxide they need? If not, would include that into the equation yield a solution that is cost neutral? Or maybe even cheaper overall? That would be cool. Those places out west that get to pay a premium for gasoline could reduce their costs because there is a CO2 reprocessing center in the nearby desert.I guess I should have read the WHOLE article, eh?
If Titanium is plentiful, then why is it so blasted expensive? It can't be solely because it's hard to work with, can it? Is it expensive because it's currently only used for "special" applications? If we start using it more, will the cost go down?
I think we could be a bit more simple. Just backfall to "slashdotted" mode whenever activity gets beyond a certain safety limit. Return to "normal" mode when activity falls. Obviously, this isn't for EVERYBODY, but in some cases it would be pretty helpful.
I know. Drat! Now that I've read page one, I'm totally drooling. I've been wondering about this crap for year too, and I want to know the answer.
BTW, I think we need a new mod_slashdot module for Apache that automatically detects the "slashdot" effect and starts serving up plain-text pages to minimize the problem. Anybody agree?
Either they have a relay station of some sort(scaled down CO) near you, or they will be coming after you shortly for revealing that they have the technology to span those distances. :-) Other than a relay, I honestly don't know how they managed it. Last year, I had a choice of two "local" phone companies that were providing DSL. Neither of them could reach my house with anything but iDSL, and I was only about 5 miles from the CO.
We are left with two choices of service where there is a physical wire running to our house. That's DSL and cable. DSL is, at the present, hindered by transmission distances. You have to be relatively close to a central office to obtain adequate DSL service. And before somebody mentions iDSL, let me say that in my opinion, that's not high-speed. Cable modem is somewhat hindered by limits on how many locations you can put on a single loop. Certainly there are many areas that can receive cable TV that just have too many people out there to make cable modem available to all. To complicate matters, it seems that most areas that have one of these choices available lacks the other choice. This is, actually, not too surprising. Central offices will be closest to the most dense areas, while cable modem is actually more operable in areas with less density. You can also be sure that the avoidance of competition has been somewhat intentional. After all, you can charge higher prices and provide crappier service if there's nobody to compete against. I'm not going to accuse the big DSL and cable providers of collaborating on this, but I wouldn't be overly surprised to find out that they do. And as far as I know, there's nothing illegal about that unless they discuss pricing. (IANAL)
Now, let's suppose that Congress mandates the availability of DSL to all customers. That means that the phone company needs to build CO's close to every tiny little area on the map. That's INCREDIBLY expensive (obtaining land and permits, building the office, laying the cable), takes time, and the phone company may never see anything close to a return on their "investment." Cable providers would have similar problems, although it may be cheaper to lay cable for an additional loop than it would be to build a new CO. I'm not sure about that.
All of the service problems that have been mentioned (no VPN, no servers, bandwidth limits, crappy service, high prices) are the DIRECT result of the lack of competition. Unfortunately, the local monopolies OWN that "last mile" that is necessary to connect to the residences. They paid to install all of that cable and it's not really fair to ask them to just give access to it away at no price. And there are very very few startups who have the resources to lay their own wires. So, those few companies that provide any competition are forced to pay for use of the local loops. Once the big boys start charging for use of their wires, it's really easy for them to set the prices or service levels such that it drives their competition right out of business. And it's really hard to regulate that part of the industry.
So, how do we resolve the situation? There are really only a few choices as far as I can see.
- The government can find a way to regulate last mile pricing and service levels -- a task easier said than done, and not likely to happen anytime soon.
- The government can flat out BUY the local lines from the big boys, but I don't think that the government has ever in its history managed to run things any cheaper than private enterprise, so the results of this would be shaky at best.
- People can turn to building their own DSL co-op, with all of the associated reliability and administration problems. Obviously, the provider that ultimately connects these do-it-yourself networks to the internet can still provide really crappy service just to frustrate the people using it.
Are there any better ideas out there? Do we have any new DSL technology that still works over copper and at much longer distances?