I'll agree with that - I was wrong to use person's name instead of the name of the guideline.
But, you'll have to agree that in those times spelling was kind of optional, not because people didn't care but because it hasn't been standardised (if two words were pronounciated the same, they were often interchanged; my favourite example is the name of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sir_Walter_Raleigh). I consider both Ockham and Occam valid and most people would recognize both forms.
...or on the other hand it might be a total coincedence that in this huge (or infinite?) universe there is a small number of galactical objects that accidentally appear to be in a line?
We can't be certain just now, but I think Occam would agree with me.
Oh yes, exactly! And did you know that if you accelerate and I do the same in different direction, and a tree falls somewhere between us we'll never agree at which time it happened? It's totally out there...
I'm not saying the Styx thing is true, only that eventually, time will tell. And if it doesn't prove to be true now, it's maybe because current instruments are too crude to prove it yet. As someone one said, reality is SO much more weirder than fantasy.
You should back those statments up with some real-world information:
- how is it outdated and antiquated? It's a hierarhical database just like, for example, LDAP. Unfortunately it doesn't provide quite rich search possibilities but that's because it's made for situations where you know where to find what you're looking for (mostly because you have put it there). And a (hierahical) filesystem is also a database.
- how is it unreliable? Has a registry corruption On WinNT+ ever happened to you personally or someone you know? Has it been fatal?
I'm sure that, if Microsoft did something like that (turn Registry into bunch of XML files), there would be an army of Slashdot-reading nerds going "Wow, M$ is stooopid - and what about memory consumption and speed of processing of all that XML files?!", "And just how is M$ going to ensure data reliability / transaction safety with textual XML data?!" and others.
The Windows Registry in Windows NT systems is a database-like construct, with sort-of transactions. They even have access control lists to manage security - keys can be made writeable only by some users, etc. Some registry files ("hives") contain security information and are not readable by normal filesystem utilities (access-denied on open(); though this is not registry-specific:) ).
Think of it like using mysql or sqlite database to store and manage system configuration instead of bunch of config files - it's NOT a bad idea.
(I'm not attacking the config-file approach, just saying that having a convenient standardised interface to config data across all applications is a Good Thing).
Not to detract from his points - bringing more focus can't hurt in the long run - but around 1.2 days I surfed the bug database and found an amazing number of bugs relating to... word counts.
People don't understand why people use word count so much are just the perfect example of what's wrong with "Open-source movement". The reason is: professional writers (including journalists and somewhat, scientists) *NEED* the word count feature to do their work.
A "office suite" won't be nearly as accepted or considered important if professionals don't use it.
(for this purpose: professional = getting payed for the work)
That just doesn't make any sense, just because you have an opinnion of OO does not give you authority to make that judgement.
I can state my opinion, can I?:)
What I said was probably a bit harsh but it's the truth.
Latex and troff are nice and good, but NOT usable in common office environment - you can't just re-educate users to, instead of using WYSIWYG tools, start typing some "weird" markup:) And for the truly geeky, even they (or "we") often just don't want to mess with it all.
No, it's not that - my "problem" (maybe "problem" is too harsh a word) is that it's almost as bloated. For example, its startup time is the same or worse. And at ~200MB on drive (windows version) excluding JRE it's not exactly smallish.
Did you ever use OOo? If yes, and you have a grain of objectivity in you, you'll know.
As one friend of mine said: We ("the geeky") use OOo only because there's nothing better out there that will run on Linux (and similar systems).
The thing is: it's buggy, it's bloated and compared to some other commercial software, it's not very feature-rich. The user interface is tolerable.
(My authority to make this claims comes from using it exclusively as an office-application-set for two years, and I'm a demanding user:) OOo 2 has bugs that 1.1 didn't have.)
It's great that it exists, but it's just not as good as Firefox and others on the list, even though they also contain nasty known bugs.
Does this actually do anything? From the MS article: the ActiveX controls will STILL load and execute their code, it's only that their interface will be disabled until user clicks on it. The means almost all access to system calls, registry etc. will still work for AX controls.
IMHO, it takes significantly more complex computing to distinguish finger movements (!curled! finger movements) than to track two dots going up and down.
Maybe the intention os the statement(s) is not so funny. Look at it this way: if you take out the little-green-men motif out of the story, what he's saying is that the US has become a liability and that if the current track of ignorant leaders (and ignorant folks that elects them) continues, global world peace is in danger.
Did anyone here actually try and use the damned things?:)
I hada fit of laughter with a slight sense of nostalgia when I typed a few lines to the bots. The thing is, this is a command-line driven interface just like the world had a couple of decades ago. You even have "menus" like "Type # next to movie to see showtimes, M to go back to the Main Menu or anything else to search again. "
Hellooooo! The eighties called and want their menu-driven command interfaces back:)
You don't sign a contract until a lawyer has looked at it...
Oops!
Oh well, that 500 EULAs I've clicked through while installing various commercial software probably didn't have anything important in them anyway... Oh, by the way, I just got a phone call from some sleazy sounding guy who insists I've signed my dog to him in exchange for using his software... must be some crazy person:)
This happens to me when I'm *close* to the machine. For example, when I'm walking by a machine. The thing that makes it exceptional is that sometimes you can walk across the server room and just happen to be there, in the right place at the right time, close enough to hear a drive spinning down.
Of course, if you are sitting at a desk and there's no machines near you (my home computer case is half-opened, it's around 1m from where I'm sitting and I can hear perfectly when disks are spinning down) then it's probably something else:)
Something like that happens a lot to me. Actually, it happened just now when I finished reading your story...
Creepy, huh?
I must admit, I see a lot of horror movies and read lots of horror books, so I got pretty distrubed when this started happening. It sometimes scares me even now.
But, the cause is sadly mundane: disk drives spinning down! Disks drive usually spin very fast ant the frequency of vibrations they produce are above human hearing levels. As they spin down, they pass quickly through the hearing range producing a sound like somebody is whistling on their breaths end... a "fading" whistle of sorts. Many operating systems today can be setup to spin down disks after periods of inactivity, so there - if you're close enough to the case, you hear a single solitary, "sad-sounding" whistle. I believe the "puff of air" in this case is just imagination, as we "know" that all whistles are produced by puffing air:)
(btw. this is not guesswork - I checked: at least one of my disks produces a sort-of-whistling sound when it spins down and the case is open so the sound is more audiable)
The gist of TFA is: they did it because it's cheaper. Not because of philisophical properties of Free or Open source ("Philosophy doesn't pay the bills!"), not because of technical quality, but - because it's cheaper.
And that's great! Since a financial company did it, large software houses can no longer say "Yes, it's free (as in beer) to use, but eventually you'll have to pay more to get competent Open-source techies and invest in more/different hardvare that if you just went with Our Solution(tm) all the way."
And that is how you gain mindshare - not by making a bunch of extremenly technical reports saying how it's better then everything else, but by hitting them on the wallet.
The downside is that because of using such "cheap" software, some other techies working for large software houses can get underpayed or sacked. We'll just have to see what the net balance gets to be.
I don't really know what the state of things is today, but in the time of Word 97, MS Word Import-Export filter hooks were well documented. One thing I remember is that the filter framework uses RTF as an intermediate format. I know that even today there are lots of third-party filters written for MS Word that support old or exotic formats.
So, it's not a problem. Basically, someone has to make a converter from RTF to ODT and study the MS manuals on how to plug it into MS Office applications.
Slashdot Mirror
But, you'll have to agree that in those times spelling was kind of optional, not because people didn't care but because it hasn't been standardised (if two words were pronounciated the same, they were often interchanged; my favourite example is the name of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sir_Walter_Raleigh). I consider both Ockham and Occam valid and most people would recognize both forms.
We can't be certain just now, but I think Occam would agree with me.
I'm not saying the Styx thing is true, only that eventually, time will tell. And if it doesn't prove to be true now, it's maybe because current instruments are too crude to prove it yet. As someone one said, reality is SO much more weirder than fantasy.
- how is it outdated and antiquated? It's a hierarhical database just like, for example, LDAP. Unfortunately it doesn't provide quite rich search possibilities but that's because it's made for situations where you know where to find what you're looking for (mostly because you have put it there). And a (hierahical) filesystem is also a database.
- how is it unreliable? Has a registry corruption On WinNT+ ever happened to you personally or someone you know? Has it been fatal?
The Windows Registry in Windows NT systems is a database-like construct, with sort-of transactions. They even have access control lists to manage security - keys can be made writeable only by some users, etc. Some registry files ("hives") contain security information and are not readable by normal filesystem utilities (access-denied on open(); though this is not registry-specific :) ).
Think of it like using mysql or sqlite database to store and manage system configuration instead of bunch of config files - it's NOT a bad idea.
(I'm not attacking the config-file approach, just saying that having a convenient standardised interface to config data across all applications is a Good Thing).
Yes, TCP/IP is built to be reliable and decentralized, but the lower-level protocols used by big telcos, like ATM, can discriminate just fine.
A "office suite" won't be nearly as accepted or considered important if professionals don't use it.
(for this purpose: professional = getting payed for the work)
Latex and troff are nice and good, but NOT usable in common office environment - you can't just re-educate users to, instead of using WYSIWYG tools, start typing some "weird" markup :) And for the truly geeky, even they (or "we") often just don't want to mess with it all.
No, it's not that - my "problem" (maybe "problem" is too harsh a word) is that it's almost as bloated. For example, its startup time is the same or worse. And at ~200MB on drive (windows version) excluding JRE it's not exactly smallish.
As one friend of mine said: We ("the geeky") use OOo only because there's nothing better out there that will run on Linux (and similar systems). The thing is: it's buggy, it's bloated and compared to some other commercial software, it's not very feature-rich. The user interface is tolerable. (My authority to make this claims comes from using it exclusively as an office-application-set for two years, and I'm a demanding user :) OOo 2 has bugs that 1.1 didn't have.)
It's great that it exists, but it's just not as good as Firefox and others on the list, even though they also contain nasty known bugs.
Ok, just checking :)
I can't see a notable security benefit in this...
IMHO, it takes significantly more complex computing to distinguish finger movements (!curled! finger movements) than to track two dots going up and down.
Maybe the intention os the statement(s) is not so funny. Look at it this way: if you take out the little-green-men motif out of the story, what he's saying is that the US has become a liability and that if the current track of ignorant leaders (and ignorant folks that elects them) continues, global world peace is in danger.
I hada fit of laughter with a slight sense of nostalgia when I typed a few lines to the bots. The thing is, this is a command-line driven interface just like the world had a couple of decades ago. You even have "menus" like "Type # next to movie to see showtimes, M to go back to the Main Menu or anything else to search again. "
Hellooooo! The eighties called and want their menu-driven command interfaces back :)
Oops!
Oh well, that 500 EULAs I've clicked through while installing various commercial software probably didn't have anything important in them anyway... Oh, by the way, I just got a phone call from some sleazy sounding guy who insists I've signed my dog to him in exchange for using his software... must be some crazy person :)
The BETA & RC period was long and many people are running it since the first BETA.
Not yet, but (for some values of deadness) it will soon be available, for example at http://www.bsdmall.com/freebsd1.html :)
Of course, if you are sitting at a desk and there's no machines near you (my home computer case is half-opened, it's around 1m from where I'm sitting and I can hear perfectly when disks are spinning down) then it's probably something else :)
Creepy, huh?
I must admit, I see a lot of horror movies and read lots of horror books, so I got pretty distrubed when this started happening. It sometimes scares me even now.
But, the cause is sadly mundane: disk drives spinning down! Disks drive usually spin very fast ant the frequency of vibrations they produce are above human hearing levels. As they spin down, they pass quickly through the hearing range producing a sound like somebody is whistling on their breaths end... a "fading" whistle of sorts. Many operating systems today can be setup to spin down disks after periods of inactivity, so there - if you're close enough to the case, you hear a single solitary, "sad-sounding" whistle. I believe the "puff of air" in this case is just imagination, as we "know" that all whistles are produced by puffing air :)
(btw. this is not guesswork - I checked: at least one of my disks produces a sort-of-whistling sound when it spins down and the case is open so the sound is more audiable)
I agree with that. For some reason I thought the new solution was applied for some time now...
And that's great! Since a financial company did it, large software houses can no longer say "Yes, it's free (as in beer) to use, but eventually you'll have to pay more to get competent Open-source techies and invest in more/different hardvare that if you just went with Our Solution(tm) all the way."
And that is how you gain mindshare - not by making a bunch of extremenly technical reports saying how it's better then everything else, but by hitting them on the wallet.
The downside is that because of using such "cheap" software, some other techies working for large software houses can get underpayed or sacked. We'll just have to see what the net balance gets to be.
Now if only the remaining 80% of ISP's and other hosting providers were to move away from version 3.23.x...
So, it's not a problem. Basically, someone has to make a converter from RTF to ODT and study the MS manuals on how to plug it into MS Office applications.