I have a suitemate who, almost every other night, will stay up until six in the morning playing Counterstrike online. This often causes him to sleep in for the rest of the day and miss an entire day's worth of classes.
I almost wish I could do that. I'll stay up to six in the morning sorting mp3s, cleaning up files, screwing around with new programs, checking my email every two minutes, and in general doing pointless geek things. I wouldn't be surprised if your friend has little social life; I might blame the Counterstrike on the social life, rather than vice versa, though.
If I have a username on your system, then I have half the information I need to login to it.
Which you might have been able to get from my email address or my www address or by guessing I use the same user name everywhere. It's not that hard to get.
Why do the VB apologists always like to use the argument that if you program in C that you have to write everything from scratch?
What makes you think I'm a VB apologist?
There are nice GUI tools available for C
That would writing code with a mouse, now wouldn't it? And how many of them honestly integrate with the programming language as smoothly as VB?
And you can run your programs on more platforms than just Windows!
Not likely. Most likely, you plugged Windows GUI code into Windows database code; either way, you're looking at a lot of rewriting. Anyway, for many purposes, who cares? There is a lot of mono-system code out there, including GNOME and KDE, both written in C/C++.
There is nothing worse than the app that was written in VB because it was "quick and easy" (and easier to learn than VC++) that then gets added to and added to until it grows into a god-awful, inefficient code bloat.
No language can prevent you from writing quick and dirty code and it growing into an unholy mess. C's actually good at that; custom memory mangement, poor type checking, random pointers pointing everywhere can all make figuring out what's going on and how to fix it without breaking something else a pain.
You'll eventually have to learn a more sophisticated programming language when MS lets VB die on the vine
Look at how fast ALGOL 60 defeated the primitive FORTRAN. Nope, ALGOL 68 - PL/I? - C? - Ada - C++ - Java? I guess Fortran's still in the running. How about Jovial - it's been twenty years since the DoD replaced Jovial with Ada, and there's still an Air Force office to handle Jovial. Languages don't die until the last programmer and the last program die, and for something like Visual Basic, that's going to be a long time. Microsoft isn't getting rid of Visual Basic until they absolutely have to.
If that is the case, then why is it apparently OK for a movie theater to fail to provide subtitled films?
I would say that's over the line for reasonable accomidation. A store can provide ramps without hurting other user's experiences; a webpage can provide accessability without hurting other user's experiences; but to add subtitles calls for either negatively influencing everyone else's view of the movie, or running a seperate movie -- the later of which may not even be economically possible.
Wehrenberg, one of the two chains in my area, offers a few open captioned films, but not on any date, not in any theater, and by far not the films I want to see.
Then complain to them. I don't know how they select the films, but every reasonable buisness listens to complaining customers. Maybe there's economic reasons they can't run Lord of the Rings; or maybe the manager is treating this as his own private best of the bunch and just needs a little nudging from upper management.
the web is considered a secondary or tertiary source of information at best.
Not for a lot of things. A lot of people, especially in rural/sparsely populated areas, buy stuff through Amazon and like; it's both cheaper and easier than driving down to the city. It's a first source of information for most of us without an encyclopedia. Especially for the blind, the web can be a primary source of information; do you want to get someone to dig through a library's shelves for you for that obscure piece of information, or would you rather hit the web and have your screen reader read to you?
internet access is as common as asphalt roads (which don't exist on probably 50% of inhabited areas) making demands of this fledgling tech
"fledgling tech"? I see too many commericals on TV about Earthlink and.COM! (Yahoo commericals?) and various internet services to believe fledgling. And who doesn't have Internet access? Most people have a library nearby with internet terminals - I know Podunk (I mean, Alva), Oklahoma, with a population of 4300 does.
Yes, asphalt roads don't run up to McMurdo Base in Antartica. But Alva has them and so does every other small town I've seen. Maybe the 1% that live in the middle of nowwhere don't have asphalt roads, but those of us with electricity and running water have asphalt roads.
Personally I'd rather see the government spend money on stemming the tide of AIDS and easily curable diseases in the 3rd world instead of worrying if memepool.com is standards compliant.
Think of the children, eh? They aren't mutually exclusive, and memepool.com isn't a site that the government would worry about; it's commerical accommidation, not Joe Blow's website.
For almost all practical purposes 355/113 is pi. Also, there isn't any other common factor that results in ~pi to a greater precision until you get up into much larger integers.
I'm not near my computer, so I can't find the exact numbers, but I don't remember that being true. I wrote a BASIC program that showed me, for every integer denominator, the fraction closest to pi with that denominator, if it was more accurate than the last fraction shown. 22/7 is amazingly accurate - there's no fraction more accurate than 22/7 before 355/113. But 355/113 is followed by a string of fractions each with a slightly larger denominator and slighly more accurate.
Crackpot ideas are less damaging to society than a missed chance.
How many people have died because they went to someone with a crackpot idea that he could heal them without surgery, without chemo, without drugs? How many people have spent needless time sick because they used homeopathic medicine (studied and disproved since 1846) instead doctor approved medicines (or chicken soup and bed rest)? How many people have had a lifetime of missed chances, because instead of working on something that could have been right, they were working on a crackpot idea that didn't have a chance in hell of being right? How many chances do we miss as a society because we spend on crackpot ideas (and supporting thier manufacturers) instead of real things, the money from which will go in part to real research?
You have to trust the language to do GC if you're so inclined, which is slow and error-prone.
Error-prone? Any decent GC is not in the least error-prone. True, most of them aren't precise, but the memory leaks that cause problems are the ones that leak and continue to leak, and every decent GC catches those.
Real programmers can manage memory and do it well.
I invite you to run valgrind on some random binaries. I've found that valgrind finds leaks with many programs that in all other ways are good programs. Maybe there are 'real' programmers out there who don't ever make memory leaks in C, but most programs are done by programmers who aren't perfect.
If you're talking about Visual Basic, then that's hilarious,
What's your obsession with Visual Basic? High level languages go vastly beyond one implemenation from a company that doesn't rate correctness as a very important attribute.
This is Good: [chopping off input at 80 characters]
Silently truncating code at 80 letters is good? It's a quick security hack; it prevents a buffer overflow, at the cost of losing information and seriously annoying users if they had data that was more than 80 letters long.
Damn true, using C for other thing than low-level stuff really is a bad habit.
Oh, God, another Visual Basic user who writes code with a mouse. Spare me.
Yes, because it's better to spend weeks and months carefully constructing a GUI by hand then to put it together in a couple days with a mouse. Especially if it's going to be used by three or four people; by God, it's more than worth it to the company for me to spend two or three months on the project (@ $60,000 a year) so those people can get their results back in a couple seconds rather than a couple minutes.
It's also better to spend weeks and months writing an efficent text processing program in C and worrying about buffer overflows and memory leaks, rather then writting it in a couple days in Perl or Snobol. Who cares that the results will inevitably be piped to less and studied for a few minutes; the fact that we shaved off 40% of 2 seconds (and added an obscure error case) is more than worth it!
Actually: Oh, God, another C programmer that will make me suffer through anonymous core dumps because his programming language is so much more macho, and so much more efficent (really wish he understand how to use Big-O notation and switch algorithms, but he spent so much time programming this one and dubugging it that he can't afford to switch. Too bad he doesn't use a language with efficent control structures predebugged and optimized.)
I once ran a program over my mp3 collection; it was using 400 MB of memory by the time I killed it. I poked around in the code; turns out there was absolutely no attempt to deallocate the memory. I tried two things - first, plugging in the Boehm-Weiser GC, and then switching malloc to alloc (since it looked like the memory usage was function local.) The latter ran four times faster.
Programmers write bugs. If the programmer can't handle C, then take it away from him. But don't try to take it away from ME.
And the best and the worst write security bugs in C. How many times has an innocent program, written by very good programmers, had a string buffer overflow? Way too many.
many self-righteous so-called "scientists" have this incredible fear of anything outside their understanding. Meteorites? They don't exist,
Psychic powers? Oops, they went away when you walked in the room.
Psychic powers? Oops, we ignored basic sercuity cautions and let the subject cheat.
Psychic powers? Oops, it looks like we fudged our numbers.
Fool me once, shame on me. Fool me twice, shame on you.
When "scientists" stop acting as defensive about their holy truths as any other two-bit religion with a tenuous basis, perhaps we can make some real progress.
Because the odds of surviving cancer haven't steadily been going up. Because there's no drugs for people with HIV to hold back the virus. Because our movies all come on magnatic media, or long rolls of optical media. Because we have to search for a payphone when we need to make a phone call. Because slow mail or expensive phone calls are the only way for most Americans, Europeans and Japanese to communicate.
get back to the "real" work of investigating the universe *as it exists*, not as you believe it to exist.
Small enough circuits have quantum bleed-over, just like predicted by theory. Einstein's theory predicted gravitational lenses, just like they were found in real life. These theories describe the universe fairly well.
On the other hand, we've been seeing perpetual motion machines for how many centuries? And they never seem to work if and when we get our hands on them. How much work should a scientist spend studying something that's been disproved time and time again? When given something that seems bogus and is presented by someone with a financial motive, that doesn't correspond to the theories that are correct in every observation they made, the general trend is that it actually is bogus.
Here's another question: what do you do? Scientists would rather not go on what they feel will probably be a wild goose chase, instead working on stuff they feel will get results. I can hardly fault someone for making that decision - I try to avoid wasting my time myself. If you believe it has value, why don't you dedicate your time to studying it?
If you are pissed with Office, its your own fault. Likewise, the problem isn't with MS, its with users.
Human nature is human nature; it's futile for me to complain about it. People who take advantage of human nature, those people I can and will complain about.
They will all be trapped because, while there will be some variations, fundamentally all suites will be the same.
Why will they be all the same? Thinking of text wordprocessors, Lyx, Texmacs, Kword, Abiword, Ted, and OpenOffice come to mind. It is not the fact that they are all the same; they are an increadibly diverse group of programs that has very little in common. Both free software programmers and proprietrary programmers try and write copies of popular programs; but free software programmers frequently write programs that fits how they think things should work, making a very diverse set of programs that don't work all the same.
Think free as in "working for IBM without getting paid".
If IBM gets some of the benefit of the work I've done on Debian, why do I care? I've got incredibly more benefit. It certainly working on some shareware program alone.
Office saves to ASCII. Everything made in the last 20 years for Word Processing accepts ASCII input in some form.
The trick is that this is less than feature rich.
That's almost as bad as taking screenshots; in many case, I can get a screenshot in with more information than ASCII.
That's not really the problem, though; Word outputs RTF which will preserve most details. The problem is that the world of Office users don't bother to export, and send out Word docs and Powerpoint presentations without hesitation. The problem is input, not output.
Everyone buying Office has known exactly what level of interoperability is avaialable,
Yes, the majority of the people buying Word bought it with full knowledge of interoperability and understanding of the implications, instead of just buying what they used at work or using what came with their computer or upgrading their version of Works.
And they're not suffering along with Office because there are no alternatives. People buy and use [Microsoft] Office because they choose to.
The single complaint I've heard the most about OpenOffice and friends? That it doesn't support Microsoft Office file formats well enough. The fact is, I have a half-dozen programs on my computer to read Microsoft Word (I don't care to install OpenOffice, as I don't need it); furthermore, I end up unable to read a number of files on the web and occasionally sent to me because they're in PowerPoint.
Is Microsoft Office a good program? Yes. But for a lot of people, the reason they don't use simpler, cheaper, more portable alternatives is because of Office's proprietary file-formats, not because Office is better for them.
More importantly, we can assume that this was not intentional on the writer's part, I'm sure they wouldn't even grasp the "classic problem
I'm not sure that's fair to the writers and directors. The predator-prey/vampire-human problem is fairly fundamental to the internal realism of the show, and IMO the writers of Buffy took care to try and keep the internal realism of the show fairly high.
what's intuitive about, "To divide by three, multiply by four"?
To divide by 3 and multiply by 12 (12/3), you multiply by 4. And as I said, it doesn't have to be obvious to everyone, if it's easy enough to learn and useful enough to justify learning.
My reference to sevenths was an attempt to point out that obsessing over having "exact" measures is pointless. Our instruments are only so precise.
Ever worked with floating point numbers? You store them with as much precision as possible, because it's very easy to shave off a significant digit here and a significant digit there. Exact measures are always correct, without worrying about just how precise the instruments are. If you cut a board in sevenths, you don't want to work with.14 and come up a little long on the end; you want to work with 1/7, because then if you come up a little long on one end, at least round-off error had nothing to do with it.
which part of the teachings of Christ and his apostles have changed the world for the worse?
That any amount of effort is worth it if you can convert one person to Christanity. It's what justified the crusades, the inquisition, western imperialism, and the annihilation of the indians.
I learned fractions in the second grade. [...] they aren't in the least bit obvious to anyone. I mean, what's intuitive about, "To divide by three, multiply by four"?
You obviously didn't learn fractions very well in the second grade. Furthermore, a tool's value is more than its use in the novices hand; it's also in how easily and powerfully an expert can use it. Since everyone has to learn the units, whether metric or imperial, surely their power in the hands of a novice is only of little importance.
what's a seventh of a foot? Stumped? What is the obsession Imperial proponents have with the number three?
I can't ever in my life remember dividing a real world object into sevenths. Twos, threes and fours are common. In any case, while fives are better in decimal, sixes are better in base 12, and sevens are truly ugly period - but at least Imperial users would keep it as 1/7, instead of.142857...
You're taking this far too personally.
You wrote a personal attack as a response; it seems more than one person is taking this personally.
And so what if someone says you can't use this software unless you don't eat at Rotten Ronnie's -- just don't use the software! Write your own, or use a competing project.
If you want a non-trivial example, try "no military use", or "no commercial use".
I can burn off and sell as many CDs as I want of Debian (excluding nonfree and contrib, which aren't technically part of Debian), with whatever package selection I chose. I can give those CDs to anyone I want, and they can use the software on them as they please, whether they're the Government of Iran upgrading their prison computers, a sergent in the military fixing tank software, a programmer setting up an internal webserver at Microsoft, or Joe Blow who happens to kick his cat. This is because there aren't any pakages with stupid licenses like this. If there were, then I would have to read the licenses of a thousand packages, and I would have to make sure that I was in compliance with them, including any random crap like this they are willing to put in.
You can release software with whatever license you want; you can use software with whatever license you want. But the free software community knows that it doesn't want the hassles of dealing with a thousand licenses with a thousand restrictions, and as a community we reject these types of licenses.
Great licenses which promote the good of Earth's people and Earth itself will flourish if people understand what they're saying Yes to, and what they're saying No to as a result.
They aren't saying yes or no to anything. I would be seriously surprised to find almost any of us who read through all their EULAs and actually agree to them. You honestly think that people who violate human rights are in general more likely to consider a license binding and feel obligied to obey it?
Consider that many dates are accompanied with forced, non-consentual (sometimes violent) sex.
Yes, date rapes do occur. Not on many dates, though; if women thought there was even a ten percent chance of getting raped on a date, they would change their plans. And people can and are arrested and convicted for date rape. In some of the countries under discussion, rape in marriage isn't even a crime.
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I have a suitemate who, almost every other night, will stay up until six in the morning playing Counterstrike online. This often causes him to sleep in for the rest of the day and miss an entire day's worth of classes.
I almost wish I could do that. I'll stay up to six in the morning sorting mp3s, cleaning up files, screwing around with new programs, checking my email every two minutes, and in general doing pointless geek things. I wouldn't be surprised if your friend has little social life; I might blame the Counterstrike on the social life, rather than vice versa, though.
If I have a username on your system, then I have half the information I need to login to it.
Which you might have been able to get from my email address or my www address or by guessing I use the same user name everywhere. It's not that hard to get.
Why do the VB apologists always like to use the argument that if you program in C that you have to write everything from scratch?
What makes you think I'm a VB apologist?
There are nice GUI tools available for C
That would writing code with a mouse, now wouldn't it? And how many of them honestly integrate with the programming language as smoothly as VB?
And you can run your programs on more platforms than just Windows!
Not likely. Most likely, you plugged Windows GUI code into Windows database code; either way, you're looking at a lot of rewriting. Anyway, for many purposes, who cares? There is a lot of mono-system code out there, including GNOME and KDE, both written in C/C++.
There is nothing worse than the app that was written in VB because it was "quick and easy" (and easier to learn than VC++) that then gets added to and added to until it grows into a god-awful, inefficient code bloat.
No language can prevent you from writing quick and dirty code and it growing into an unholy mess. C's actually good at that; custom memory mangement, poor type checking, random pointers pointing everywhere can all make figuring out what's going on and how to fix it without breaking something else a pain.
You'll eventually have to learn a more sophisticated programming language when MS lets VB die on the vine
Look at how fast ALGOL 60 defeated the primitive FORTRAN. Nope, ALGOL 68 - PL/I? - C? - Ada - C++ - Java? I guess Fortran's still in the running. How about Jovial - it's been twenty years since the DoD replaced Jovial with Ada, and there's still an Air Force office to handle Jovial. Languages don't die until the last programmer and the last program die, and for something like Visual Basic, that's going to be a long time. Microsoft isn't getting rid of Visual Basic until they absolutely have to.
If that is the case, then why is it apparently OK for a movie theater to fail to provide subtitled films?
I would say that's over the line for reasonable accomidation. A store can provide ramps without hurting other user's experiences; a webpage can provide accessability without hurting other user's experiences; but to add subtitles calls for either negatively influencing everyone else's view of the movie, or running a seperate movie -- the later of which may not even be economically possible.
Wehrenberg, one of the two chains in my area, offers a few open captioned films, but not on any date, not in any theater, and by far not the films I want to see.
Then complain to them. I don't know how they select the films, but every reasonable buisness listens to complaining customers. Maybe there's economic reasons they can't run Lord of the Rings; or maybe the manager is treating this as his own private best of the bunch and just needs a little nudging from upper management.
Now I know this is common practice in the typesetting business, but aren't those two characters conceptually different symbols?
No; they're the same symbol used two different ways.
Wouldn't it be better--and easier--to use the simple ASCII apostrophe (') instead?
Easier, yes. But the Unicode apostrophe is unified with the single closing quote, and the ASCII apostrophe is basically deprecated.
the web is considered a secondary or tertiary source of information at best.
.COM! (Yahoo commericals?) and various internet services to believe fledgling. And who doesn't have Internet access? Most people have a library nearby with internet terminals - I know Podunk (I mean, Alva), Oklahoma, with a population of 4300 does.
Not for a lot of things. A lot of people, especially in rural/sparsely populated areas, buy stuff through Amazon and like; it's both cheaper and easier than driving down to the city. It's a first source of information for most of us without an encyclopedia. Especially for the blind, the web can be a primary source of information; do you want to get someone to dig through a library's shelves for you for that obscure piece of information, or would you rather hit the web and have your screen reader read to you?
internet access is as common as asphalt roads (which don't exist on probably 50% of inhabited areas) making demands of this fledgling tech
"fledgling tech"? I see too many commericals on TV about Earthlink and
Yes, asphalt roads don't run up to McMurdo Base in Antartica. But Alva has them and so does every other small town I've seen. Maybe the 1% that live in the middle of nowwhere don't have asphalt roads, but those of us with electricity and running water have asphalt roads.
Personally I'd rather see the government spend money on stemming the tide of AIDS and easily curable diseases in the 3rd world instead of worrying if memepool.com is standards compliant.
Think of the children, eh? They aren't mutually exclusive, and memepool.com isn't a site that the government would worry about; it's commerical accommidation, not Joe Blow's website.
For almost all practical purposes 355/113 is pi. Also, there isn't any other common factor that results in ~pi to a greater precision until you get up into much larger integers.
I'm not near my computer, so I can't find the exact numbers, but I don't remember that being true. I wrote a BASIC program that showed me, for every integer denominator, the fraction closest to pi with that denominator, if it was more accurate than the last fraction shown. 22/7 is amazingly accurate - there's no fraction more accurate than 22/7 before 355/113. But 355/113 is followed by a string of fractions each with a slightly larger denominator and slighly more accurate.
Crackpot ideas are less damaging to society than a missed chance.
How many people have died because they went to someone with a crackpot idea that he could heal them without surgery, without chemo, without drugs? How many people have spent needless time sick because they used homeopathic medicine (studied and disproved since 1846) instead doctor approved medicines (or chicken soup and bed rest)? How many people have had a lifetime of missed chances, because instead of working on something that could have been right, they were working on a crackpot idea that didn't have a chance in hell of being right? How many chances do we miss as a society because we spend on crackpot ideas (and supporting thier manufacturers) instead of real things, the money from which will go in part to real research?
You have to trust the language to do GC if you're so inclined, which is slow and error-prone.
Error-prone? Any decent GC is not in the least error-prone. True, most of them aren't precise, but the memory leaks that cause problems are the ones that leak and continue to leak, and every decent GC catches those.
Real programmers can manage memory and do it well.
I invite you to run valgrind on some random binaries. I've found that valgrind finds leaks with many programs that in all other ways are good programs. Maybe there are 'real' programmers out there who don't ever make memory leaks in C, but most programs are done by programmers who aren't perfect.
If you're talking about Visual Basic, then that's hilarious,
What's your obsession with Visual Basic? High level languages go vastly beyond one implemenation from a company that doesn't rate correctness as a very important attribute.
This is Good: [chopping off input at 80 characters]
Silently truncating code at 80 letters is good? It's a quick security hack; it prevents a buffer overflow, at the cost of losing information and seriously annoying users if they had data that was more than 80 letters long.
Damn true, using C for other thing than low-level stuff really is a bad habit.
Oh, God, another Visual Basic user who writes code with a mouse. Spare me.
Yes, because it's better to spend weeks and months carefully constructing a GUI by hand then to put it together in a couple days with a mouse. Especially if it's going to be used by three or four people; by God, it's more than worth it to the company for me to spend two or three months on the project (@ $60,000 a year) so those people can get their results back in a couple seconds rather than a couple minutes.
It's also better to spend weeks and months writing an efficent text processing program in C and worrying about buffer overflows and memory leaks, rather then writting it in a couple days in Perl or Snobol. Who cares that the results will inevitably be piped to less and studied for a few minutes; the fact that we shaved off 40% of 2 seconds (and added an obscure error case) is more than worth it!
Actually: Oh, God, another C programmer that will make me suffer through anonymous core dumps because his programming language is so much more macho, and so much more efficent (really wish he understand how to use Big-O notation and switch algorithms, but he spent so much time programming this one and dubugging it that he can't afford to switch. Too bad he doesn't use a language with efficent control structures predebugged and optimized.)
you should use the Boehm Garbage collector
I once ran a program over my mp3 collection; it was using 400 MB of memory by the time I killed it. I poked around in the code; turns out there was absolutely no attempt to deallocate the memory. I tried two things - first, plugging in the Boehm-Weiser GC, and then switching malloc to alloc (since it looked like the memory usage was function local.) The latter ran four times faster.
Programmers write bugs. If the programmer can't handle C, then take it away from him. But don't try to take it away from ME.
And the best and the worst write security bugs in C. How many times has an innocent program, written by very good programmers, had a string buffer overflow? Way too many.
many self-righteous so-called "scientists" have this incredible fear of anything outside their understanding. Meteorites? They don't exist,
Psychic powers? Oops, they went away when you walked in the room.
Psychic powers? Oops, we ignored basic sercuity cautions and let the subject cheat.
Psychic powers? Oops, it looks like we fudged our numbers.
Fool me once, shame on me. Fool me twice, shame on you.
When "scientists" stop acting as defensive about their holy truths as any other two-bit religion with a tenuous basis, perhaps we can make some real progress.
Because the odds of surviving cancer haven't steadily been going up. Because there's no drugs for people with HIV to hold back the virus. Because our movies all come on magnatic media, or long rolls of optical media. Because we have to search for a payphone when we need to make a phone call. Because slow mail or expensive phone calls are the only way for most Americans, Europeans and Japanese to communicate.
get back to the "real" work of investigating the universe *as it exists*, not as you believe it to exist.
Small enough circuits have quantum bleed-over, just like predicted by theory. Einstein's theory predicted gravitational lenses, just like they were found in real life. These theories describe the universe fairly well.
On the other hand, we've been seeing perpetual motion machines for how many centuries? And they never seem to work if and when we get our hands on them. How much work should a scientist spend studying something that's been disproved time and time again? When given something that seems bogus and is presented by someone with a financial motive, that doesn't correspond to the theories that are correct in every observation they made, the general trend is that it actually is bogus.
Here's another question: what do you do? Scientists would rather not go on what they feel will probably be a wild goose chase, instead working on stuff they feel will get results. I can hardly fault someone for making that decision - I try to avoid wasting my time myself. If you believe it has value, why don't you dedicate your time to studying it?
If you are pissed with Office, its your own fault. Likewise, the problem isn't with MS, its with users.
Human nature is human nature; it's futile for me to complain about it. People who take advantage of human nature, those people I can and will complain about.
They will all be trapped because, while there will be some variations, fundamentally all suites will be the same.
Why will they be all the same? Thinking of text wordprocessors, Lyx, Texmacs, Kword, Abiword, Ted, and OpenOffice come to mind. It is not the fact that they are all the same; they are an increadibly diverse group of programs that has very little in common. Both free software programmers and proprietrary programmers try and write copies of popular programs; but free software programmers frequently write programs that fits how they think things should work, making a very diverse set of programs that don't work all the same.
Think free as in "working for IBM without getting paid".
If IBM gets some of the benefit of the work I've done on Debian, why do I care? I've got incredibly more benefit. It certainly working on some shareware program alone.
Office saves to ASCII. Everything made in the last 20 years for Word Processing accepts ASCII input in some form.
The trick is that this is less than feature rich.
That's almost as bad as taking screenshots; in many case, I can get a screenshot in with more information than ASCII.
That's not really the problem, though; Word outputs RTF which will preserve most details. The problem is that the world of Office users don't bother to export, and send out Word docs and Powerpoint presentations without hesitation. The problem is input, not output.
Everyone buying Office has known exactly what level of interoperability is avaialable,
Yes, the majority of the people buying Word bought it with full knowledge of interoperability and understanding of the implications, instead of just buying what they used at work or using what came with their computer or upgrading their version of Works.
And they're not suffering along with Office because there are no alternatives. People buy and use [Microsoft] Office because they choose to.
The single complaint I've heard the most about OpenOffice and friends? That it doesn't support Microsoft Office file formats well enough. The fact is, I have a half-dozen programs on my computer to read Microsoft Word (I don't care to install OpenOffice, as I don't need it); furthermore, I end up unable to read a number of files on the web and occasionally sent to me because they're in PowerPoint.
Is Microsoft Office a good program? Yes. But for a lot of people, the reason they don't use simpler, cheaper, more portable alternatives is because of Office's proprietary file-formats, not because Office is better for them.
More importantly, we can assume that this was not intentional on the writer's part, I'm sure they wouldn't even grasp the "classic problem
I'm not sure that's fair to the writers and directors. The predator-prey/vampire-human problem is fairly fundamental to the internal realism of the show, and IMO the writers of Buffy took care to try and keep the internal realism of the show fairly high.
what's intuitive about, "To divide by three, multiply by four"?
.14 and come up a little long on the end; you want to work with 1/7, because then if you come up a little long on one end, at least round-off error had nothing to do with it.
To divide by 3 and multiply by 12 (12/3), you multiply by 4. And as I said, it doesn't have to be obvious to everyone, if it's easy enough to learn and useful enough to justify learning.
My reference to sevenths was an attempt to point out that obsessing over having "exact" measures is pointless. Our instruments are only so precise.
Ever worked with floating point numbers? You store them with as much precision as possible, because it's very easy to shave off a significant digit here and a significant digit there. Exact measures are always correct, without worrying about just how precise the instruments are. If you cut a board in sevenths, you don't want to work with
which part of the teachings of Christ and his apostles have changed the world for the worse?
That any amount of effort is worth it if you can convert one person to Christanity. It's what justified the crusades, the inquisition, western imperialism, and the annihilation of the indians.
I learned fractions in the second grade. [...] they aren't in the least bit obvious to anyone. I mean, what's intuitive about, "To divide by three, multiply by four"?
.142857...
You obviously didn't learn fractions very well in the second grade. Furthermore, a tool's value is more than its use in the novices hand; it's also in how easily and powerfully an expert can use it. Since everyone has to learn the units, whether metric or imperial, surely their power in the hands of a novice is only of little importance.
what's a seventh of a foot? Stumped? What is the obsession Imperial proponents have with the number three?
I can't ever in my life remember dividing a real world object into sevenths. Twos, threes and fours are common. In any case, while fives are better in decimal, sixes are better in base 12, and sevens are truly ugly period - but at least Imperial users would keep it as 1/7, instead of
You're taking this far too personally.
You wrote a personal attack as a response; it seems more than one person is taking this personally.
And so what if someone says you can't use this software unless you don't eat at Rotten Ronnie's -- just don't use the software! Write your own, or use a competing project.
If you want a non-trivial example, try "no military use", or "no commercial use".
I can burn off and sell as many CDs as I want of Debian (excluding nonfree and contrib, which aren't technically part of Debian), with whatever package selection I chose. I can give those CDs to anyone I want, and they can use the software on them as they please, whether they're the Government of Iran upgrading their prison computers, a sergent in the military fixing tank software, a programmer setting up an internal webserver at Microsoft, or Joe Blow who happens to kick his cat. This is because there aren't any pakages with stupid licenses like this. If there were, then I would have to read the licenses of a thousand packages, and I would have to make sure that I was in compliance with them, including any random crap like this they are willing to put in.
You can release software with whatever license you want; you can use software with whatever license you want. But the free software community knows that it doesn't want the hassles of dealing with a thousand licenses with a thousand restrictions, and as a community we reject these types of licenses.
Great licenses which promote the good of Earth's people and Earth itself will flourish if people understand what they're saying Yes to, and what they're saying No to as a result.
They aren't saying yes or no to anything. I would be seriously surprised to find almost any of us who read through all their EULAs and actually agree to them. You honestly think that people who violate human rights are in general more likely to consider a license binding and feel obligied to obey it?
You assume too much. You opinion is wrong,
Ohh, nice debating skills.
Consider that many dates are accompanied with forced, non-consentual (sometimes violent) sex.
Yes, date rapes do occur. Not on many dates, though; if women thought there was even a ten percent chance of getting raped on a date, they would change their plans. And people can and are arrested and convicted for date rape. In some of the countries under discussion, rape in marriage isn't even a crime.