Unfortunately, a fifth or even a third for a given key is slightly out of tune (the half step and the octave are the only perfectly in tune intervals on a modern day piano.)
And even saying that, many pianos employ "stretch tuning", where notes are tuned progressively sharper the higher up the keyboard they are. So octaves aren't even tuned in tune either...
Having said which, much of the richness of an ensemble sound comes from the fact that each player is just slightly out of tune with the others; likewise, much of the richness of an analogue synth comes from the marginal tuning instabilities of analogue oscillators... and one of the most universally recognised sounds in dance music is basically a bunch of sawtooth waves wildly out of tune with each other (the spread can be as much as half a semitone). So there's a lot to be said for not being quite in tune.
Unfortunately, my experience is that it takes a lot to shake people out of their complacency about authority, and until they're so dislodged they tend to react exactly this way - even if they don't shout that kind of abuse themselves, they at least give the shouters their quiet approval.
Did it not occur to anyone at Microsoft that undermining the credibility of the standards body you want to rubber-stamp your document would be counterproductive? Or did they simply not care, in their quest for the hearts and minds of jobsworth bureaucrats?
The challenge would be to prove which of the (many) confessions is false; the harder a confession is to discredit, the higher your score. The game would end with you presenting the murderer a soup-plate medal, a 22ct gold pistol, and the names and addresses of the RIAA's directors (so plenty of scope for sequels).
At the best, standards organizations can be "behind" the software curve, but it simply can't lead.
That was precisely my point. Standards are baselines, minimum specifications, lowest common denominators. They're not supposed to lead, and when they attempt to do so they fail.
ISO failed to do due diligence when rubberstamping ODF, and no slashdotter complained, in fact, they cheered. Now you're pissed that OOXML is being run through the mill (that ODF wasn't put through) and is surviving. Hypocrisy at its finest.
I didn't mention ODF. If ODF has similar problems, I would agree that it shouldn't be a standard either. However, my original post attempted to make a broader point - that the OOXML debacle might be exposing fundamental weaknesses in the ISO's procedures, regardless of how we feel about the organisations involved. Moreover, if you're going to accuse me of hypocrisy, you'll have to find something I've said which demonstrates a viewpoint contrary to the one I stated above.
As to your specific criticism of ODF, can you give some details (or references) as to how the implementations of ODF in KOffice and OpenOffice (or any other implementation, for that matter) diverge from the published standards, and/or instances of major interoperability issues?
Hmm. If things continue this way, and we end up with the ISO effectively rubber-stamping OOXML on the strength of purchased votes, what effect will this have on the ISO's credibility in the long run? The ISO looks after a lot more standards than just data exchange formats; will we have to consider that every single one of those standards is potentially bought and paid for by its richest benecifiaries, despite technical flaws in the standard and opposition from peers?
I can't help thinking that the OOXML standardisation effort should be shelved until one of two things becomes true: either at least two or more independent implementations, developed by distinct organisations from the specification alone, can be shown to interoperate to a degree that justifies the moniker "standard"; or preferably, a complete reference implementation, with full source code available under a BSD (or equally permissive) licence, is submitted with the proposal. In fact, I can't understand why this isn't, er, standard practice. Were it so, the OOXML efforts could be trivially dismissed on technical grounds, and this whole dog and pony show could be avoided.
certain clauses go well beyond copyright agreements (i.e. they give some people the right to manage terms of a copyright license independant of any copyrights of their own)
If the government started subsidizing like shareholders did, i.e. "you promise me growth of x% or I withdraw my shares," then I think it's possible.
Promises aren't worth anything; what matters is delivery. But yes, that's what I mean - or in cases where government own the whole company, "you deliver me a growth of x% or I dismiss you and find a new CEO/CFO/board of directors". Not subsidy but investment; subsidies are by their very nature only there to prop up ailing businesses.
But the amount of supervision and overhead the state would require to do that on a large scale would be cost-prohibitive.
In the same way as it's cost-prohibitive for investment funds today, presumably?
I say government is terrible at providing services.
But you don't say why.
And thus, by inference, that they are terrible at running companies.
So are investment firms... except that they're quite good at running investment firms, of course.
How does this keep the government from earning its keep?
OK. First off, let's say a government only charges per service, rather than generally taxing its citizens. But as you say above, governments are terrible at providing services, so already those are poor value for money. Worse, when you buy a service, you're not just paying for the service; you're paying for a little chunk of the government machinery behind it - so the prices are artificially inflated. In short, the government is not earning the money it's charging - ie. not earning its keep.
Secondly, the services that you say must be provided by government are by their very definition not revenue-generating services. That leaves governments with only one way to obtain money - to steal it from its citizens. A funny thing about being mugged - I don't particularly care whether the mugger takes all my money, half of it, or only a tenner. I care about the violation.
But I'm a government minimalist
I'm an anarchist, personally; but if I must live under a government, I do at least want it to be able to pay its own way, rather than coming and rifling my wallet every time it gets a bit short.
So, whilst you begin by saying "private enterprise is more efficient", your argument is basically that competition is what produces efficiency? So why can't a state-owned company be a fair player in a competitive industry? After all, the only difference would be who had title on the shares; if the problem is that the government could introduce a regulatory skew into the market, that could be prevented by constitution (in countries which have constitutional governments, at least). Potentially, a large collection of state-owned (but otherwise independent) companies could essentially be used to reduce personal taxation to nothing - even to pay each citizen dividends.
In contrast, dogmatically insisting that governments cannot run companies properly and must be prevented from owning them produces governments which can never earn their keep or pay their own way, which are always a drain on individual effort and enterprise, and which have no sense of responsibility (it's hard to maintain one when not only do you earn all your money by theft and extortion, but you are prohibited from exercising any other choice).
I don't know what's funnier, your aggressive defensiveness towards someone who did no more than point up an amusing incongruity, or your admission that you consider Youtube "educational".
Do also remember that a lot of people who are generally strong supporters of FOSS have expressed grave misgivings about the shortcomings of MySQL since the day it was released - $0.00 is still too high a price for something that doesn't do the job required.
Moreover I can't see anyone here "turning on" MySQL who wasn't already of the opinion that it was a heap of junk. Your accusation appears to be a strawman.
No, actually. At least under English law, it goes along with the doctrine that the contract of sale is formed only at the point at which an offer to purchase is accepted - so for example, in a supermarket, when the buyer presents an item to the cashier they are actually making an offer to purchase that item, and the cashier can either accept or reject that offer. "Offering" an item for sale in a shop is merely making an invitation to treat. The principle has been relied on a number of times over the last century or so; some notable cases are Pharmaceutical Society of Great Britain v Boots Cash Chemists [1953] 1 QB 401, Partridge v Crittenden [1968] 1 WLR 1204, and Fisher v Bell [1961] 1 QB 394. Of course, as a seller you can't act deceptively (eg. bait & switch), and once you've accepted an offer to purchase at a specific price you're bound by it, but up until the formation of a contract both parties have the right to walk away.
(IANAL, this isn't advice, To Serve Man is a cookbook... you know the drill)
Slashdot Mirror
And even saying that, many pianos employ "stretch tuning", where notes are tuned progressively sharper the higher up the keyboard they are. So octaves aren't even tuned in tune either...
Having said which, much of the richness of an ensemble sound comes from the fact that each player is just slightly out of tune with the others; likewise, much of the richness of an analogue synth comes from the marginal tuning instabilities of analogue oscillators... and one of the most universally recognised sounds in dance music is basically a bunch of sawtooth waves wildly out of tune with each other (the spread can be as much as half a semitone). So there's a lot to be said for not being quite in tune.
Ah, so that's where Argos got their business model...
Unfortunately, my experience is that it takes a lot to shake people out of their complacency about authority, and until they're so dislodged they tend to react exactly this way - even if they don't shout that kind of abuse themselves, they at least give the shouters their quiet approval.
Did it not occur to anyone at Microsoft that undermining the credibility of the standards body you want to rubber-stamp your document would be counterproductive? Or did they simply not care, in their quest for the hearts and minds of jobsworth bureaucrats?
It always amuses me when people say that kind of thing in public without irony.
I don't think he forgot.
The challenge would be to prove which of the (many) confessions is false; the harder a confession is to discredit, the higher your score. The game would end with you presenting the murderer a soup-plate medal, a 22ct gold pistol, and the names and addresses of the RIAA's directors (so plenty of scope for sequels).
That was precisely my point. Standards are baselines, minimum specifications, lowest common denominators. They're not supposed to lead, and when they attempt to do so they fail.
I didn't mention ODF. If ODF has similar problems, I would agree that it shouldn't be a standard either. However, my original post attempted to make a broader point - that the OOXML debacle might be exposing fundamental weaknesses in the ISO's procedures, regardless of how we feel about the organisations involved. Moreover, if you're going to accuse me of hypocrisy, you'll have to find something I've said which demonstrates a viewpoint contrary to the one I stated above.
As to your specific criticism of ODF, can you give some details (or references) as to how the implementations of ODF in KOffice and OpenOffice (or any other implementation, for that matter) diverge from the published standards, and/or instances of major interoperability issues?
Hmm. If things continue this way, and we end up with the ISO effectively rubber-stamping OOXML on the strength of purchased votes, what effect will this have on the ISO's credibility in the long run? The ISO looks after a lot more standards than just data exchange formats; will we have to consider that every single one of those standards is potentially bought and paid for by its richest benecifiaries, despite technical flaws in the standard and opposition from peers?
I can't help thinking that the OOXML standardisation effort should be shelved until one of two things becomes true: either at least two or more independent implementations, developed by distinct organisations from the specification alone, can be shown to interoperate to a degree that justifies the moniker "standard"; or preferably, a complete reference implementation, with full source code available under a BSD (or equally permissive) licence, is submitted with the proposal. In fact, I can't understand why this isn't, er, standard practice. Were it so, the OOXML efforts could be trivially dismissed on technical grounds, and this whole dog and pony show could be avoided.
Care to cite an example of that?
Promises aren't worth anything; what matters is delivery. But yes, that's what I mean - or in cases where government own the whole company, "you deliver me a growth of x% or I dismiss you and find a new CEO/CFO/board of directors". Not subsidy but investment; subsidies are by their very nature only there to prop up ailing businesses.
In the same way as it's cost-prohibitive for investment funds today, presumably?
But you don't say why.
So are investment firms... except that they're quite good at running investment firms, of course.
OK. First off, let's say a government only charges per service, rather than generally taxing its citizens. But as you say above, governments are terrible at providing services, so already those are poor value for money. Worse, when you buy a service, you're not just paying for the service; you're paying for a little chunk of the government machinery behind it - so the prices are artificially inflated. In short, the government is not earning the money it's charging - ie. not earning its keep.
Secondly, the services that you say must be provided by government are by their very definition not revenue-generating services. That leaves governments with only one way to obtain money - to steal it from its citizens. A funny thing about being mugged - I don't particularly care whether the mugger takes all my money, half of it, or only a tenner. I care about the violation.
I'm an anarchist, personally; but if I must live under a government, I do at least want it to be able to pay its own way, rather than coming and rifling my wallet every time it gets a bit short.
So, whilst you begin by saying "private enterprise is more efficient", your argument is basically that competition is what produces efficiency? So why can't a state-owned company be a fair player in a competitive industry? After all, the only difference would be who had title on the shares; if the problem is that the government could introduce a regulatory skew into the market, that could be prevented by constitution (in countries which have constitutional governments, at least). Potentially, a large collection of state-owned (but otherwise independent) companies could essentially be used to reduce personal taxation to nothing - even to pay each citizen dividends.
In contrast, dogmatically insisting that governments cannot run companies properly and must be prevented from owning them produces governments which can never earn their keep or pay their own way, which are always a drain on individual effort and enterprise, and which have no sense of responsibility (it's hard to maintain one when not only do you earn all your money by theft and extortion, but you are prohibited from exercising any other choice).
Only for you. For the people who do own everything, it's a great idea - feudalism was stable for centuries.
Well, it does explain John Howard.
Microsoft, obviously. Think of it as $3 per patent licence.
Yes, because your rights are in so much danger from mildly sarcastic comments on Slashdot.
I don't know what's funnier, your aggressive defensiveness towards someone who did no more than point up an amusing incongruity, or your admission that you consider Youtube "educational".
Don't forget Firebird!
Do also remember that a lot of people who are generally strong supporters of FOSS have expressed grave misgivings about the shortcomings of MySQL since the day it was released - $0.00 is still too high a price for something that doesn't do the job required.
Moreover I can't see anyone here "turning on" MySQL who wasn't already of the opinion that it was a heap of junk. Your accusation appears to be a strawman.
Consider the source.
Unfortunately, if you aren't prepared to give your life in defence of freedom, you will lose it in time.
Which, as a solution, also discriminates against those people without money.
The only lasting solution to this problem will come through the populace exercising their Second Amendment rights:
No, actually. At least under English law, it goes along with the doctrine that the contract of sale is formed only at the point at which an offer to purchase is accepted - so for example, in a supermarket, when the buyer presents an item to the cashier they are actually making an offer to purchase that item, and the cashier can either accept or reject that offer. "Offering" an item for sale in a shop is merely making an invitation to treat. The principle has been relied on a number of times over the last century or so; some notable cases are Pharmaceutical Society of Great Britain v Boots Cash Chemists [1953] 1 QB 401, Partridge v Crittenden [1968] 1 WLR 1204, and Fisher v Bell [1961] 1 QB 394. Of course, as a seller you can't act deceptively (eg. bait & switch), and once you've accepted an offer to purchase at a specific price you're bound by it, but up until the formation of a contract both parties have the right to walk away.
(IANAL, this isn't advice, To Serve Man is a cookbook... you know the drill)