Let's be realistic. For the future generations, there is always the archival code for Office and i386 emulator.
So it would be better to continue using archived closed and opaque programs under emulators than migrate to an open-source open-file-format program that no one could take away from anyone at any time? GPL software will be around long after Microsoft Office exists only in history books. As long as it compiles, OpenOffice.org will be there.
I agree; however, some ideologies are so incompatible that people programmed in one cannot mix with others. Now-a-days, this seems to occur at the extremes, where Christian extremists want to dominate the world in their image, and Muslim extremists want the same. It think it would be fair to say, also, that they most often use their religion merely a branding scheme for their whacked-out philosophies. The war in Afghanistan still seemed fairly clearly about ideology. I really don't know about Iraq, now...we'll just have to wait and see. From what I've seen Afghanistan was so desolate and ravaged by the Russians that anything the US does might improve the situation, but Iraq is sitting on a gold mine. The battle over ideology in Iraq may have just been a red herring, but I really don't know (Saddam may have just been in the way).
I hate to make it sound like a flame but the 19 suicide bombers on 9/11 were motivated simply because they thought they were right. They were never taught the compassion of local populations the way veterans teach us of the Vietnamese.
Even if the suicide bombers were sweet as kittens, they were programmed to destroy anything that didn't support their vision. Even Hitler had a wife and family, but that doesn't justify his "world view".
Brain washing is a proven psychological method, and the suicide bombers were most definitely tainted. While physically human, they could be more accurately described as a smart bomb but flesh and not metal. Not only were the suicide bombers not taught of a compassionate enemy, they were taught quite the opposite. That is why they are so dangerous.
They can remain emotionally tough for subsequent conflicts Republicans will come up with.
Repbulican imperialism is pretty frustrating. While I would rather not see either a Republican nor a Democrat win in 2004, I'm not sure the US has much of a choice in the matter when only two parties can possibly win. I think the US is facing a different type of internal ideolical war, but one where the federal government itself could become a terrorist organization against its citizens. I'm going to have to think pretty hard about who to vote for in that election.
...they have infiltrated the ranks of moderators!:-)
At least at one time, they must have, because I have seen more than one +5 pro-Microsoft postings on Slashdot. These comments were blatantly counter-intuitive with market-droid like "Only Microsoft can offer end-to-end integrated solutions for your enterprise." There isn't proof, but if it looks like a turd and smells like a turd...
The principles on which the Vietcong fought were just as 'evil' as the principles of Saddam and Bin Laden and Hitler at that time.
Yes, the North Vietnamese were supported by China and the USSR, but the whole scenario was just very complicated, it seems. This entry at Wikipedia discusses things in more detail. If you follow some of the links, you'll see that the Vietnam war has its roots in efforts for indpendence from French colonization. If this doesn't leave Americans feeling somewhat conflicted over the whole situation, then perhaps they should look back about 200 years in US history. There just isn't a unabmiguous blatant smoking gun like "Hitler Invades Poland" or "Japs Attack Pearl Harbor," nor does there appear to be full justification for what happened. Like I said, it was just complicated.
I think a modern Platoon game with Doom 3-like realism would just scare the piss out of players. It would probably share more in common with "Alone in the Dark" than any WWII dogfight game.
When crafting a large textbook, for example, LaTeX really does blow the pants off of Word. It allows a very clear structure to be employed through includes and a structured tagging scheme. It allows EPS graphics from charting applications to be imported. There is long-standing support for indexing and bibliographies. LaTeX can also be managed by version control software, such as CVS, and can be controlled by Makefiles for well-defined and repeatable configuration management. LaTeX's open nature also guarantees that work poured into the textbook won't get lost as the proprietary Word file formats mutate or when Microsoft drops off the face of the planet.
MS Word is just a bad bet for large documents.
Daily memos are better as plain text. Data-entry forms are done better in HTML. For everything else...well, there is StarOffice or OpenOffice.org or AbiWord, etc. Quite honestly, there is little reason, anymore, to give Microsoft any money for Word any longer.
But why are vietnam games in such 'bad taste' as opposed to the other war games?
WWII, for example, was a time of global insanity. It was the entirety of the free world in a blank-and-white battle for the future of mankind. Every game where Nazis get creamed and Kamakazis fall short is a celebration of good winning over evil. WWII veterans speak very proudly of that war, even though they went through hell during it.
Vietnam, however, was just different. I'm young enough to only know Vietnam in history books and documentaries, but even today thinking of Vietnam conjurs images of Nixon and LBJ and government meddling. It isn't as black-and-white as WWII. Vietnam wasn't really a victory over communism, and it highlighted flaws in the American "War Machine".
Vietnam, in the US, just doesn't have any video game appeal. However, a video game version of "Apocalypse Now" might be appropriate, because that movie was only partially about Vietnam and was actually based on a classic novel called "Heart of Darkness." Making "Platoon" into a video game would just be sad, period.
There is actually a pretty substantial underground economy for booze. Moonshine is very much not a myth, and there are amateur-run stills throughout the back-woods of the USA. A lot of this probably stems from the fact that the tax on booze really is oppressively high. For example, I can buy a gallon of denatured ethanol dirt cheap at a hardware store, yet 750mL of Vodka imported from Kentucky costs $11.
Gasoline taxes are bordering on obscene, but it is excusable if those funds really go towards maintaining the infrastructure. However, I'm not convinded that these funds do, given how bad many roads in the U.S. are. Especially in parts of the South, where the winter is something only read about in books. Why there are two-foot wide pot holes in coastal southern roads is beyond me.
Don't forget that a single Social Psychology textbook can be titled any of the following: "Methods for Dictators: Ways to Win The Next Election", "Essential Marketing: Get People to Want Your Product Without Them Knowing It", and "Management Made Easy: How to Make Your Miserable Employees Enjoy Being Miserable".
Social Psychology is about studying populations of people and how they react as a group. Case studies in these textbooks range from Central-American cults to product marketing to organized crime to mobs to politics and so on. It is clearly a discipline used for both good and evil (like physics) but sometimes with very subtle personal consequences. How many people vote along their party line without knowing why? Why do young women wear low-cut jeans even when their gut spills over making them look foolish? Why do people seemingly never realize that MS Word is a proprietary and closed application? What is the basis behind genious marketing slogans like "Do more with less?"
When a company employs social psychologists, it is typically to find ways to get masses of people to buy their products regardless of rationalization. Basically, it is a sign that consumers should be more cautious than ever. But with Microsoft, this is certainly nothing new.
taxes could add up to huge sums of money for the state
No, high taxes will still leave the underground intact. There will be a strong motivation for people to get their fix tax-free from neighborhood dealers. The key to killing drug-related crime is to drive the costs of drugs to near-cost. Drug-based economies should not exist beyond the costs of manufacture, disribution, and modest profit.
They are rather a threat for democracy, and should be avoided at all costs.
If a person whole-heartedly supports a canidate, they should still have ways of promoting their campaign. However, what is critical to democracy is full unedited disclosure of contributions in a way that is very accessible to citizens. Not only that, each canidates own interests should be disclosed very publically. For example, if Bush and Cheny's energy-industry interests were more widely known, I bet more people would cry foul.
Canidates shouldn't have secret motives and promises that they will try to fufill over and above the needs of the People.
Unless you can think of another file format that copes with tables, images, headers, footers, embedded documents, version control and all the other things that most of us use on a regular basis.
Perhaps the Docbook editor being added to OpenOffice.org will provide some relief. HTML isn't totally out of question, either (except that Word screws up HTML, too). And, once OpenOffice.org picks up more steam, its own plain-text XML file format should be widely understood, too.
Non-trivial documents should be done in LaTeX or Docbook, anyway, because they are much more robust and capable than Word. Word is really only appropriate for memos or reports, at most. Textbooks and standards documents done in Word are pretty sad.
Must I remind you that they no longer do so by choice? Microsoft made the choices for them back in the late 1980s and early 1990s through strong-arming OEMs and killing competition. They did so so masterfully that they are nearly untouched by litigation and only now, after a decade, are real untainted competitors, such as Sun and Wal-Mart, giving Microsoft the finger and threatening the monopoly. And, necessarily, these competitors are able to compete using only Free software, which was able to evolve independently of corporate interests until it was good enough to be widely adopted.
Microsoft's days are numbered, and I won't be sorry for them when "the majority" excercises their new-found options.
Ask people killed over drug issues by organized criminals whether prohibition "worked." Ask all the non-violent people locked in federal prisons whether it "worked." Ask the taxpayers who spend billions of dollars per year in a futile never-ending "war" whether it "worked."
There is an entire black-market economy fueled by this prohibition that causes pain and suffering throughout the USA and the world. It props up terrorist organizations. It props up foreign dictatorships. It keeps addicts poor and enslaved. Are these good things to you?!?
When will people start realizing that there are free tools to handle Word format...
Where are they? Are they 100% compatible with Microsoft's undocumented, proprietary, and volatile document format? It is impossible for these tools to live up to their promises when there is a 100% likelihood their reverse-engineering efforts came up short.
Word is the format of choice even in the free-software-world
Only when Microsoft releases a 100% complete and comprehensible document explaining every aspect of the Word formats (yes there are more than one). Given that it is not in their financial interest to do so, I can guarantee that Word will basically never become the format of choice outside of the Microsoft micro-universe.
The most likely outcome is that one of the emerging XML formats, such as that for OpenOffice.org, will become the de-facto standard for editable document exchange. By then, I hope that Microsoft will be little more than a niche figment of their former selves (not unlike SCO, soon).
But Word actually is the most useful document exchange format today...
No, Word is the worst possible exchange format. It is proprietary to one corporation, it is a vector for script-based viruses, the tools that read it (other than Microsoft's products) cannot do so reliabily and predictably, and much of the world's population cannot and should not be expected to afford the MS Office software.
Given, also, the recent revival of awareness about hidden information exchanged in Word documents, Word is not only a terrible format in principle, but it is a threat to privacy and security in a most fundamental way.
So, Anonymous Astroturfer, you should go back to your cube and rethink your strategy for spreading lies into the public consciousness.
For basic exhange of information, the best formats are plain text (for text, obviously) or PDF (for type-set documents). Other formats are just asking for trouble.
Is Alan like, insecure about his job prospects, or just likes learning?
I don't know anything about his finances, but, given his status in the OSS world, the only reason has to give anyone is "because."
He doesn't have to explain himself. If he as accrued enough savings that taking a year off is not a problem, then we should be happy for him and nothing more.
A good MBA programme won't take you without experience.
This is something most graduate programs should do. Having students with some hard-knocks under their belt will ensure the classes are much more focused and the instructers can expect less bull from whiners. Also, MBA programs are applicable to people of any background who want to refocus their career.
However, like any graduate degree, an MBA can actually limit opportunities for some types of people.
What does a Linux kernel coding god need with an MBA?
He can now go get a cushy job at an insurance company with a $20K/year raise. This kernel-coding business was just something to pass time until he saved up enough for his real dream: Saving people more on their car insurance.
'approved hardware and software' before you can get online.
Now that our infomation is in the cross-hairs, a security-regulated Internet will be much much more dangerous than other forms of regulation, such as that imposed on cars. While regulation on cars can be argued for safety reasons (tempered glass is a good idea, for example), I don't see this argument regarding information. The only reason for a security-regulated Internet is government empowerment. This is something to very seriously keep in mind in 2004.
If citizens fear their own government, then who are the real terrorists?
Slashdot Mirror
You have no right to privacy on a public street or in a public place.
True, but I should also have the right to not be hunted down, detained, and strip searched because I look funny.
Being seen is one thing, being trodden upon is another.
I like to believe that at least is some circumstances a failed product will NOT be "mandated" by any agency.
How do you explain the 100s of millions of dollars of Microsoft software purchased by the Army, the Navy, and the Dept. of Homeland Security recently?
So you've got a dud system that's wasting police time.
My favorite part is the millions of taxpayers' dollars spent.
Someone needs to make a song about this.
You just did. Although the rhythm is a little quirky, for Slashdot, it's just fine. However, please don't ask us to clap along.
It'll just predict American waistlines rather than chip densities.
If the US becomes socialist under Democratic rule, we go bankrupt.
If the US becomes imperialist under Republican rule, we start World War III.
So, what now?
Let's be realistic. For the future generations, there is always the archival code for Office and i386 emulator.
So it would be better to continue using archived closed and opaque programs under emulators than migrate to an open-source open-file-format program that no one could take away from anyone at any time? GPL software will be around long after Microsoft Office exists only in history books. As long as it compiles, OpenOffice.org will be there.
Noone is inherently 'evil'.
I agree; however, some ideologies are so incompatible that people programmed in one cannot mix with others. Now-a-days, this seems to occur at the extremes, where Christian extremists want to dominate the world in their image, and Muslim extremists want the same. It think it would be fair to say, also, that they most often use their religion merely a branding scheme for their whacked-out philosophies. The war in Afghanistan still seemed fairly clearly about ideology. I really don't know about Iraq, now...we'll just have to wait and see. From what I've seen Afghanistan was so desolate and ravaged by the Russians that anything the US does might improve the situation, but Iraq is sitting on a gold mine. The battle over ideology in Iraq may have just been a red herring, but I really don't know (Saddam may have just been in the way).
I hate to make it sound like a flame but the 19 suicide bombers on 9/11 were motivated simply because they thought they were right. They were never taught the compassion of local populations the way veterans teach us of the Vietnamese.
Even if the suicide bombers were sweet as kittens, they were programmed to destroy anything that didn't support their vision. Even Hitler had a wife and family, but that doesn't justify his "world view".
Brain washing is a proven psychological method, and the suicide bombers were most definitely tainted. While physically human, they could be more accurately described as a smart bomb but flesh and not metal. Not only were the suicide bombers not taught of a compassionate enemy, they were taught quite the opposite. That is why they are so dangerous.
They can remain emotionally tough for subsequent conflicts Republicans will come up with.
Repbulican imperialism is pretty frustrating. While I would rather not see either a Republican nor a Democrat win in 2004, I'm not sure the US has much of a choice in the matter when only two parties can possibly win. I think the US is facing a different type of internal ideolical war, but one where the federal government itself could become a terrorist organization against its citizens. I'm going to have to think pretty hard about who to vote for in that election.
...they have infiltrated the ranks of moderators! :-)
At least at one time, they must have, because I have seen more than one +5 pro-Microsoft postings on Slashdot. These comments were blatantly counter-intuitive with market-droid like "Only Microsoft can offer end-to-end integrated solutions for your enterprise." There isn't proof, but if it looks like a turd and smells like a turd...
The principles on which the Vietcong fought were just as 'evil' as the principles of Saddam and Bin Laden and Hitler at that time.
Yes, the North Vietnamese were supported by China and the USSR, but the whole scenario was just very complicated, it seems. This entry at Wikipedia discusses things in more detail. If you follow some of the links, you'll see that the Vietnam war has its roots in efforts for indpendence from French colonization. If this doesn't leave Americans feeling somewhat conflicted over the whole situation, then perhaps they should look back about 200 years in US history. There just isn't a unabmiguous blatant smoking gun like "Hitler Invades Poland" or "Japs Attack Pearl Harbor," nor does there appear to be full justification for what happened. Like I said, it was just complicated.
...there was a platoon game for the NES...
I think a modern Platoon game with Doom 3-like realism would just scare the piss out of players. It would probably share more in common with "Alone in the Dark" than any WWII dogfight game.
LaTeX and friends do not even come close.
When crafting a large textbook, for example, LaTeX really does blow the pants off of Word. It allows a very clear structure to be employed through includes and a structured tagging scheme. It allows EPS graphics from charting applications to be imported. There is long-standing support for indexing and bibliographies. LaTeX can also be managed by version control software, such as CVS, and can be controlled by Makefiles for well-defined and repeatable configuration management. LaTeX's open nature also guarantees that work poured into the textbook won't get lost as the proprietary Word file formats mutate or when Microsoft drops off the face of the planet.
MS Word is just a bad bet for large documents.
Daily memos are better as plain text. Data-entry forms are done better in HTML. For everything else...well, there is StarOffice or OpenOffice.org or AbiWord, etc. Quite honestly, there is little reason, anymore, to give Microsoft any money for Word any longer.
But why are vietnam games in such 'bad taste' as opposed to the other war games?
WWII, for example, was a time of global insanity. It was the entirety of the free world in a blank-and-white battle for the future of mankind. Every game where Nazis get creamed and Kamakazis fall short is a celebration of good winning over evil. WWII veterans speak very proudly of that war, even though they went through hell during it.
Vietnam, however, was just different. I'm young enough to only know Vietnam in history books and documentaries, but even today thinking of Vietnam conjurs images of Nixon and LBJ and government meddling. It isn't as black-and-white as WWII. Vietnam wasn't really a victory over communism, and it highlighted flaws in the American "War Machine".
Vietnam, in the US, just doesn't have any video game appeal. However, a video game version of "Apocalypse Now" might be appropriate, because that movie was only partially about Vietnam and was actually based on a classic novel called "Heart of Darkness." Making "Platoon" into a video game would just be sad, period.
booze
There is actually a pretty substantial underground economy for booze. Moonshine is very much not a myth, and there are amateur-run stills throughout the back-woods of the USA. A lot of this probably stems from the fact that the tax on booze really is oppressively high. For example, I can buy a gallon of denatured ethanol dirt cheap at a hardware store, yet 750mL of Vodka imported from Kentucky costs $11.
Gasoline taxes are bordering on obscene, but it is excusable if those funds really go towards maintaining the infrastructure. However, I'm not convinded that these funds do, given how bad many roads in the U.S. are. Especially in parts of the South, where the winter is something only read about in books. Why there are two-foot wide pot holes in coastal southern roads is beyond me.
Don't forget that a single Social Psychology textbook can be titled any of the following: "Methods for Dictators: Ways to Win The Next Election", "Essential Marketing: Get People to Want Your Product Without Them Knowing It", and "Management Made Easy: How to Make Your Miserable Employees Enjoy Being Miserable".
Social Psychology is about studying populations of people and how they react as a group. Case studies in these textbooks range from Central-American cults to product marketing to organized crime to mobs to politics and so on. It is clearly a discipline used for both good and evil (like physics) but sometimes with very subtle personal consequences. How many people vote along their party line without knowing why? Why do young women wear low-cut jeans even when their gut spills over making them look foolish? Why do people seemingly never realize that MS Word is a proprietary and closed application? What is the basis behind genious marketing slogans like "Do more with less?"
When a company employs social psychologists, it is typically to find ways to get masses of people to buy their products regardless of rationalization. Basically, it is a sign that consumers should be more cautious than ever. But with Microsoft, this is certainly nothing new.
taxes could add up to huge sums of money for the state
No, high taxes will still leave the underground intact. There will be a strong motivation for people to get their fix tax-free from neighborhood dealers. The key to killing drug-related crime is to drive the costs of drugs to near-cost. Drug-based economies should not exist beyond the costs of manufacture, disribution, and modest profit.
They are rather a threat for democracy, and should be avoided at all costs.
If a person whole-heartedly supports a canidate, they should still have ways of promoting their campaign. However, what is critical to democracy is full unedited disclosure of contributions in a way that is very accessible to citizens. Not only that, each canidates own interests should be disclosed very publically. For example, if Bush and Cheny's energy-industry interests were more widely known, I bet more people would cry foul.
Canidates shouldn't have secret motives and promises that they will try to fufill over and above the needs of the People.
Unless you can think of another file format that copes with tables, images, headers, footers, embedded documents, version control and all the other things that most of us use on a regular basis.
Perhaps the Docbook editor being added to OpenOffice.org will provide some relief. HTML isn't totally out of question, either (except that Word screws up HTML, too). And, once OpenOffice.org picks up more steam, its own plain-text XML file format should be widely understood, too.
Non-trivial documents should be done in LaTeX or Docbook, anyway, because they are much more robust and capable than Word. Word is really only appropriate for memos or reports, at most. Textbooks and standards documents done in Word are pretty sad.
the majority of the world uses Microsoft software
Must I remind you that they no longer do so by choice? Microsoft made the choices for them back in the late 1980s and early 1990s through strong-arming OEMs and killing competition. They did so so masterfully that they are nearly untouched by litigation and only now, after a decade, are real untainted competitors, such as Sun and Wal-Mart, giving Microsoft the finger and threatening the monopoly. And, necessarily, these competitors are able to compete using only Free software, which was able to evolve independently of corporate interests until it was good enough to be widely adopted.
Microsoft's days are numbered, and I won't be sorry for them when "the majority" excercises their new-found options.
its prohibition "worked"
Ask people killed over drug issues by organized criminals whether prohibition "worked." Ask all the non-violent people locked in federal prisons whether it "worked." Ask the taxpayers who spend billions of dollars per year in a futile never-ending "war" whether it "worked."
There is an entire black-market economy fueled by this prohibition that causes pain and suffering throughout the USA and the world. It props up terrorist organizations. It props up foreign dictatorships. It keeps addicts poor and enslaved. Are these good things to you?!?
Now this sounds pretty well-rehearsed.
That's because it is true.
When will people start realizing that there are free tools to handle Word format...
Where are they? Are they 100% compatible with Microsoft's undocumented, proprietary, and volatile document format? It is impossible for these tools to live up to their promises when there is a 100% likelihood their reverse-engineering efforts came up short.
Word is the format of choice even in the free-software-world
Only when Microsoft releases a 100% complete and comprehensible document explaining every aspect of the Word formats (yes there are more than one). Given that it is not in their financial interest to do so, I can guarantee that Word will basically never become the format of choice outside of the Microsoft micro-universe.
The most likely outcome is that one of the emerging XML formats, such as that for OpenOffice.org, will become the de-facto standard for editable document exchange. By then, I hope that Microsoft will be little more than a niche figment of their former selves (not unlike SCO, soon).
But Word actually is the most useful document exchange format today...
No, Word is the worst possible exchange format. It is proprietary to one corporation, it is a vector for script-based viruses, the tools that read it (other than Microsoft's products) cannot do so reliabily and predictably, and much of the world's population cannot and should not be expected to afford the MS Office software.
Given, also, the recent revival of awareness about hidden information exchanged in Word documents, Word is not only a terrible format in principle, but it is a threat to privacy and security in a most fundamental way.
So, Anonymous Astroturfer, you should go back to your cube and rethink your strategy for spreading lies into the public consciousness.
For basic exhange of information, the best formats are plain text (for text, obviously) or PDF (for type-set documents). Other formats are just asking for trouble.
Is Alan like, insecure about his job prospects, or just likes learning?
I don't know anything about his finances, but, given his status in the OSS world, the only reason has to give anyone is "because."
He doesn't have to explain himself. If he as accrued enough savings that taking a year off is not a problem, then we should be happy for him and nothing more.
A good MBA programme won't take you without experience.
This is something most graduate programs should do. Having students with some hard-knocks under their belt will ensure the classes are much more focused and the instructers can expect less bull from whiners. Also, MBA programs are applicable to people of any background who want to refocus their career.
However, like any graduate degree, an MBA can actually limit opportunities for some types of people.
What does a Linux kernel coding god need with an MBA?
He can now go get a cushy job at an insurance company with a $20K/year raise. This kernel-coding business was just something to pass time until he saved up enough for his real dream: Saving people more on their car insurance.
'approved hardware and software' before you can get online.
Now that our infomation is in the cross-hairs, a security-regulated Internet will be much much more dangerous than other forms of regulation, such as that imposed on cars. While regulation on cars can be argued for safety reasons (tempered glass is a good idea, for example), I don't see this argument regarding information. The only reason for a security-regulated Internet is government empowerment. This is something to very seriously keep in mind in 2004.
If citizens fear their own government, then who are the real terrorists?