It would seem to me that the GPU is not going to be as general-purpose as the CPU, but could still attain the high mathematical throughput with vector-oriented processing.
Doing string searches, complex logic analyses, etc. would probably suck, but big data manipulations, such as SETI-style wave transformations, molecular analysis, etc., might be able to take advantage of them.
Talk to each other? Heck, just remember me!
on
Sentient Data Access
·
· Score: 1, Insightful
My ATM, from LaSalle Bank (owned by a big Netherlands co.), has a lack of 'knowledge' that bugs me every time I use it.
The first question it asks me is whether I want to work with it in Spanish or English... couldn't it remember that from the card? I'm not likely to suddenly forget English. (I did run through the whole thing once in Spanish, just for kicks).
It should know which account I tend to take cash out of, and how much, and highlight those options.
The web page is strange, in that it only talks about licensing for two kinds of things: Solid State media and Consumer Electronic devices
"... devices that use removable solid state media to store data: portable digital still cameras; portable digital video cameras; portable digital still/video cameras; portable digital audio players; portable digital video players; portable digital audio/video players; multifunction printers; electronic photo frames; electronic musical instruments; and standard televisions"
So does this mean that Palm, using SD/MMC cards, does not need a license? My digital piano which uses floppies? For that matter, cameras that use floppies!?
And this doesn't talk about other operating systems at all. EVERYBODY writes FAT disks, right? IANAL, but it would seem to me that an inconsistently enforced patent is one that is no longer protected.
For major manufacturers, $250K is not a big deal, but it should entitle them to some kind of spiffy logo, I would hope ("FAT inside!", yeah right). I've got some product ideas that might have used an SD/CF/MemStick card (although outside of the above categories), and if this is enforced, I'll probably rethink that need.
It would not seem unreasonable for the ntfs driver to be copied to a USB key or other media to be used at boot time.
Optimally, like the other suggestions, this driver should be moved during config time, but I would be willing to load it my USB doohickey prior to booting Knoppix/Mandrake Live/whatevernix.
I have valid Windows NT/2000/XP licenses on my machine, or I wouldn't have the NTFS partition to begin with. Maybe that's not a guaranteed assumption, and IANAL, but I don't think it would put too many MS lawyers on alert if it were done that way.
Perhaps a copyright/license file stating "These files are to be used on computer systems with valid Windows NT/2000/XP licenses only." when they are copied to the USB Key.
Of all the wacky things in that list, the one that I think is least likely to come to pass is AI priests receiving confession. Well... maybe the predictions of 3D broadcast standards in the next 20 years is just as far out -- certainly the networks and electronics manufacturers are just as, well, catholic as the catholics.
But Priest-bots? C'mon. Even as an atheist with Jewish upbringing, I can recognize that the Pope would never allow something not human to represent the intermediary between the flock and god. At least, not without establishing divine souls being present within them. Maybe another 20 years?;^)
Maintaining a links page for my wife's business' site has always been a low priority, and finally, I put up a MySQL/PHP page to do the majority of the work.
So I've been going through all the old links, and every link request we've gotten in the business' 7-year history. Of the 120 messages in the timeframe of 1997-1999, only about 15 sites still existed. Of those, two-thirds had forwarded URLs -- often from AOL or Homestead to their own brand. A couple still existed, but had totally different content.
Many just plain didn't exist at all. A fair chunk found the server, but no such page. A few had blank pages or nearly no content. The true annoyance though, is the number of domains that are owned by spamdexers/linkfarms that have no content of their own and beg you to set your homepage to them.
I've still got to cover the rest of 2000-2003 link requests, but I expect that anything pre-2001 will be very sparse.
I always type too fast and leave important things out, so here's a little more:
1) I meant "HTML Encode anything that will end up in HTML output again."
2) I didn't bother talking about SQL insertion, that's a different gremlin from XSS.
3) I didn't implement the things I said were stupid to do... I avoided them for that particular reason. I'm saying that there are traps to avoid, such as evaluating the contents of inputted variables. Some ways of implementing template toolkits will have you build a large string to create a page, and use variable substitution on that by eval-ing it at run time. If you concatenate user text before the eval, bad things could happen.
I'm surprised this merited a news item. Webmonkey had a similar article three and a half years ago, that provide some more solid examples of what happens.
I designed an e-commerce site over the last six years, and evaluated where there might be XSS vulnerabilities. Not having a bulletin board or guestbook removes many areas for exploitation.
So if someone types contaminated data into their address field when checking out, you'd think all it hoses is their own purchase, right?
Well, with PHP or Perl CGI, it's possible that the inputted variables could exploit server knowledge: if you know the variable names used in the PHP code for, say, the MySQL password, then embedding this in the input to be evaluated on output can open an avenue for hacking. The variable has to be evaluated in most cases, although code which generates new PHP pages could result in similar problems.
Admittedly, you can encrypt documents, but it's seldom done.
This particular one was absurdly easy. You can just use the text selection tool, and grab the text behind the blackouts.
But: with the full version of Acrobat, you can delete or move text or entire text or graphical objects -- nearly as easy, why didn't they do that before hand? The same tools can help un-black those objects.
Also: Acrobat is, by default, a text format. You can usually find all kinds of juicy things in the text. Text on a page is usually found (in parentheses). Tools such as the "Browser.api" plug-in help see all the bits and pieces that make up the contents of a page. At that point, you might be in DMCA reverse-engineer land, but just barely.
So, kiddies: encrypt, redact properly, protect, and then double-check.
Not to be inflammatory, but in today's market, even for the six to ten years until sixth graders are in the job market, Windows is the skill set our schools should be training for.
Macs? Sorry, they're still a bit player. Linux? That will be gaining ground for the desktop, but slowly. If you want parents to help kids with homework, chances are the parents know Windows. If there's educational-related software, chances are it's for Windows (or possibly DOS). Maybe WINE can run some of it, but you're hiking your support costs up again.
But security of these machines is a big deal: Their contract had better include long-term antivirus support, firewall, having the vendor deliver with all patches installed (or 130,000 new Blaster hosts come on line all at once), and last but not least, a steel chain attaching the laptop to the kids' wrists, or they'll swiftly be traded for various illicit and licit (MtG cards, Yoo Hoo, MP3 songs) items.
As a domain name owner, I have found that our basic "webmaster@example.com" doesn't get a huge quantity of spam. Perhaps the spammers recognize that as a corporate entity or something, because it's not so bad.
But it mutates: aster@example.com, r@example.com, bob37, jenna624, etc. etc. Most of the spam we receive isn't to one of our known addresses. But we don't want to lock down all but a few (sales@, help@, webmaster@, orders@, myname@, hername@) so that we can help the poor sods who misspell "orders" (it happens).
So I've put filters on "aster" so far. Last sunday, though, we got 500 near-identical spams (some loan scam) addressed to about 50 different names @www.example.com. I was developing a filter while my wife was manually deleting them... and then they stopped alogether, without my taking action. Some spambot burped, I guess.
I've had this crazy idea bouncing in my head for a while about using a mob of cellphone-holding folx to record concerts, etc.
Sure, the fidelity from any one phone sucks, but some filtering (combined with knowledge of the seat placement) would be able to eliminate much of the ambient noise, and produce multipoint surround sound. Probably the same could be done with videophones to create 3D video, if enough source were integrated.
I don't even have the math to try this, but if we can dream it, we can do it, right?
Even Untargetted e-mail doesn't necessarily suck
on
Building Better Spam
·
· Score: 1
Truly, I don't mind the *occasional* unsolicited e-mail for something I don't need. I tolerate the ones from companies I've already bought from and don't blacklist them, because they're usually small and might actually have something I'd consider buying (hey, I actually bought something out of the Amazon "gold box" the other day, which is nearly as bad).
I don't even mind the companies that send me info on products I hadn't heard about before, or are at least commodity items such as a deal on a DVD.
Perhaps the sellers of some products are desperate, but
I'm happy with my johnson
So's my wife
We don't need a loan
We're well insured by a reliable company
We're not bankrupt or in serious debt
We're already college graduates
So why do you keep asking me, and ignore me when I say to stop. That's what SPAM is.
I like it: it's small, but they didn't try to shoehorn in a full keyboard for my sausage-like fingers to mash. The goofy key layout looks pretty optimal for texting with thumbs, actually.
Regarding "How do I use the PDA and talk at the same time?" -- use a $60 bluetooth headset.
What is it missing to make my perfect convergence unit? a) Higher-res screen. According to the specs at Nokia, it's only 128x160, less than an older-generation Palm. Give me at least 320x240, and we're talking useful b) Memory slot. I'm not terribly fussy. My camera is CF, my Palm is SD (but I don't own any devices for it, because it doesn't have good enough sound for me to want to download MP3s), my laptop supports SD and MS but not CF (which is solved with a PCMCIA card) c) Maybe a stylus. I've gotten very used to touchscreen on my Palm -- it's sorely missed on my GPSr for selecting items and text entry. d) Oh yeah, GPS receiver.
(a), (c) and (d) are mainly price issues. (b) means they want you to keep paying to download over the phone lines.
Having an XML representation of a Word (MS, Open, whatever) document as a stream is really no more useful to me than RTF: I can parse them both.
The better part is when you can structure your document. Not just a heading surrounding a bunch o' paragraphs, but a (to use the stuff I have to work with) Research Report contains a Title Page, a Synopsis, an Introduction, Materials Section, etc. You can't put tables and figures on the title page or Introduction, you can in the Synopsis and Materials Section. TOCs and things like that are created as part of rendition, between the Synopsis and Introduction, without the user messing with it.
Now even more than storing those sections (which would, in the HTML world, be DIVs and SPANs), I want control over the UI: disable that table button in the title page, even down to where bold and italics can be used.
Office 2003 has some facility to implement this, but it's kind of awkward -- it's an extension of how their SmartTags work. Generally pretty ugly, to control everything.
I don't want to use an XML editor, my users know Word, are used to Word Processors, and they cost 1/5 of XML editors, less in bulk licenses.
I'd be implementing this now, if it weren't for two things: a) I work for a big corporation that never buys into new releases for a couple of years, and 2) they're laying me off -- closing all the facilities in Chicago (sigh).
In reply to the other reply -- never depend on grammar checkers, they're horrid. They are extremely rigid on certain grammar rules, such as passive voice. That makes some kinds of writing nearly impossible, including software manuals ("When the button is pressed, the printer proceeds," is passive voice). I turn it on for brief periods, and I've learned what 'errors' to ignore and what to pay attention to.
Well, when mainstream authors write science fiction stories, they claim they're not writing SF because there's no spaceships blowing up or little green men: I'm referring specifically to "Oryx and Crake" by Margaret Atwood, but similar things apply to Michael Crichton (the most anti-science science fiction writer out there).
Aside from the authors already mentioned, if you want to see the future of SF, check out the women writing:
Lois McMaster Bujold: Space opera in the classic vein, with more humor than you can shake a stick at.
C.J. Cherryh: Although she still cranks out the occasional fantasy or fantasy-in-sf-garb books such as her "Rider" series, her "Invader" series and the long-running Union/Alliance books are some of the best space stuff going.
Linda Nagata: Her distant-future stories "The Bohr Maker," "Deception Well" and "Vast" are amongs the most mindblowing far space stories out there, incorporating nanoscale and galactic scale concepts in the same book.
Nancy Kress: continually putting out solid hard sf, often with a biotech basis.
Not to knock the guys writing out there, but I thought the ladies should be mentioned too.
Macro code and applications targeted to the platform are a major impediment to moving from MS Office. It seems obvious that you need it in Excel -- after all, it's just extending the spreadsheet formulas, but while there's only a few macros/apps we've created in PowerPoint, automation of Word is almost a neccessity.
The number of Word features we change, replace or enhance is enormous: "Wizards" to guide creation of tables with their captions, startup items to ensure option settings, repair commands to fix things when you've messed up your own document, etc. etc.
Without at least source compatability with VBA and the object models, moving to any other platform would be a tremendous undertaking. We did it 8 years ago from WP to Word '95 (and to a lesser extent from Word '95 to Word 2000 four years ago), and we don't want to start from scratch.
OK, I'm going to sound like a Microsoft shill, but XP is a lot more reliable than any of their previous versions.
Even Win2K had some rather doggy things about it -- it behaves just about as well, but can be glacially slow to do so.
Win98, 98SE and ME required reboots several times daily, and I wouldn't think of trying to use Sleep Mode. With XP, we leave machines running for days with nary a reboot.
Do apps still fail? Yeah, but they don't bring the machine down. I can now run DOS-style programs much more reliably than ME could ever do (and I have to: the supplier's Win32 app for ordering is a terrible program).
And about the cost of viruses: Blaster didn't hurt me at all except during the net storms slowing everything down. But Sobig has definitely harmed our business:
People reluctant to go online aren't going to shop
Forged-header messages cause people to add our address to the spam category
Infected messages we didn't send ruins our reputation
Lost productivity deleting hundreds of messages a day -- not the infected ones, we've cleared that up, but the bounces have to be checked vs. normal bounces.
It's one of my least-favorite features of MS Office 2000 and newer, and of XP: The hiding of menus and toolbar buttons you don't normally use.
I'm visually oriented, and if a menu or button moves or disappears, it makes it much harder to find other things around it by their previous relative position. Now I imagine that eventually, it'll settle out into my common pattern, until one week I have to use Thesaurus four times, and it's back for a while, or I decide to use the "Format Painter" or anything else seldomly used.
What it does is make the hard things even harder, because you won't know where to look for them. This isn't entirely an MS fault: the open source office programs have very similar menu and toolbar layouts, which aren't always grouped logically, or at least not by the logic of someone actually editing documents.
As Woody Leonhard likes to point out, the Microsoft Office toolbars are designed for marketing demonstrations: All the cool features are visible, but many of the ones you need daily are buried on subsidiary toolbars.
Slashdot Mirror
It would seem to me that the GPU is not going to be as general-purpose as the CPU, but could still attain the high mathematical throughput with vector-oriented processing.
Doing string searches, complex logic analyses, etc. would probably suck, but big data manipulations, such as SETI-style wave transformations, molecular analysis, etc., might be able to take advantage of them.
My ATM, from LaSalle Bank (owned by a big Netherlands co.), has a lack of 'knowledge' that bugs me every time I use it.
The first question it asks me is whether I want to work with it in Spanish or English... couldn't it remember that from the card? I'm not likely to suddenly forget English. (I did run through the whole thing once in Spanish, just for kicks).
It should know which account I tend to take cash out of, and how much, and highlight those options.
So does this mean that Palm, using SD/MMC cards, does not need a license? My digital piano which uses floppies? For that matter, cameras that use floppies!?
And this doesn't talk about other operating systems at all. EVERYBODY writes FAT disks, right? IANAL, but it would seem to me that an inconsistently enforced patent is one that is no longer protected.
For major manufacturers, $250K is not a big deal, but it should entitle them to some kind of spiffy logo, I would hope ("FAT inside!", yeah right). I've got some product ideas that might have used an SD/CF/MemStick card (although outside of the above categories), and if this is enforced, I'll probably rethink that need.
It would not seem unreasonable for the ntfs driver to be copied to a USB key or other media to be used at boot time.
Optimally, like the other suggestions, this driver should be moved during config time, but I would be willing to load it my USB doohickey prior to booting Knoppix/Mandrake Live/whatevernix.
I have valid Windows NT/2000/XP licenses on my machine, or I wouldn't have the NTFS partition to begin with. Maybe that's not a guaranteed assumption, and IANAL, but I don't think it would put too many MS lawyers on alert if it were done that way.
Perhaps a copyright/license file stating "These files are to be used on computer systems with valid Windows NT/2000/XP licenses only." when they are copied to the USB Key.
Of all the wacky things in that list, the one that I think is least likely to come to pass is AI priests receiving confession. Well... maybe the predictions of 3D broadcast standards in the next 20 years is just as far out -- certainly the networks and electronics manufacturers are just as, well, catholic as the catholics.
;^)
But Priest-bots? C'mon. Even as an atheist with Jewish upbringing, I can recognize that the Pope would never allow something not human to represent the intermediary between the flock and god. At least, not without establishing divine souls being present within them. Maybe another 20 years?
BTExact website Slashdotted in early December, 2003
Maintaining a links page for my wife's business' site has always been a low priority, and finally, I put up a MySQL/PHP page to do the majority of the work.
So I've been going through all the old links, and every link request we've gotten in the business' 7-year history. Of the 120 messages in the timeframe of 1997-1999, only about 15 sites still existed. Of those, two-thirds had forwarded URLs -- often from AOL or Homestead to their own brand. A couple still existed, but had totally different content.
Many just plain didn't exist at all. A fair chunk found the server, but no such page. A few had blank pages or nearly no content. The true annoyance though, is the number of domains that are owned by spamdexers/linkfarms that have no content of their own and beg you to set your homepage to them.
I've still got to cover the rest of 2000-2003 link requests, but I expect that anything pre-2001 will be very sparse.
And why doesn't anyone ever sell a dark chocolate brain or heart?
My heart is dark, why shouldn't my chocolate one be too?
I always type too fast and leave important things out, so here's a little more:
1) I meant "HTML Encode anything that will end up in HTML output again."
2) I didn't bother talking about SQL insertion, that's a different gremlin from XSS.
3) I didn't implement the things I said were stupid to do... I avoided them for that particular reason. I'm saying that there are traps to avoid, such as evaluating the contents of inputted variables. Some ways of implementing template toolkits will have you build a large string to create a page, and use variable substitution on that by eval-ing it at run time. If you concatenate user text before the eval, bad things could happen.
I'm surprised this merited a news item.
Webmonkey had a similar article three and a half years ago, that provide some more solid examples of what happens.
I designed an e-commerce site over the last six years, and evaluated where there might be XSS vulnerabilities. Not having a bulletin board or guestbook removes many areas for exploitation.
So if someone types contaminated data into their address field when checking out, you'd think all it hoses is their own purchase, right?
Well, with PHP or Perl CGI, it's possible that the inputted variables could exploit server knowledge: if you know the variable names used in the PHP code for, say, the MySQL password, then embedding this in the input to be evaluated on output can open an avenue for hacking. The variable has to be evaluated in most cases, although code which generates new PHP pages could result in similar problems.
HTML encode EVERYTHING the user sends to you.
Admittedly, you can encrypt documents, but it's seldom done.
This particular one was absurdly easy. You can just use the text selection tool, and grab the text behind the blackouts.
But: with the full version of Acrobat, you can delete or move text or entire text or graphical objects -- nearly as easy, why didn't they do that before hand? The same tools can help un-black those objects.
Also: Acrobat is, by default, a text format. You can usually find all kinds of juicy things in the text. Text on a page is usually found (in parentheses). Tools such as the "Browser.api" plug-in help see all the bits and pieces that make up the contents of a page. At that point, you might be in DMCA reverse-engineer land, but just barely.
So, kiddies: encrypt, redact properly, protect, and then double-check.
Not to be inflammatory, but in today's market, even for the six to ten years until sixth graders are in the job market, Windows is the skill set our schools should be training for.
Macs? Sorry, they're still a bit player. Linux? That will be gaining ground for the desktop, but slowly. If you want parents to help kids with homework, chances are the parents know Windows. If there's educational-related software, chances are it's for Windows (or possibly DOS). Maybe WINE can run some of it, but you're hiking your support costs up again.
But security of these machines is a big deal: Their contract had better include long-term antivirus support, firewall, having the vendor deliver with all patches installed (or 130,000 new Blaster hosts come on line all at once), and last but not least, a steel chain attaching the laptop to the kids' wrists, or they'll swiftly be traded for various illicit and licit (MtG cards, Yoo Hoo, MP3 songs) items.
As a domain name owner, I have found that our basic "webmaster@example.com" doesn't get a huge quantity of spam. Perhaps the spammers recognize that as a corporate entity or something, because it's not so bad.
But it mutates: aster@example.com, r@example.com, bob37, jenna624, etc. etc. Most of the spam we receive isn't to one of our known addresses. But we don't want to lock down all but a few (sales@, help@, webmaster@, orders@, myname@, hername@) so that we can help the poor sods who misspell "orders" (it happens).
So I've put filters on "aster" so far. Last sunday, though, we got 500 near-identical spams (some loan scam) addressed to about 50 different names @www.example.com. I was developing a filter while my wife was manually deleting them... and then they stopped alogether, without my taking action. Some spambot burped, I guess.
I've had this crazy idea bouncing in my head for a while about using a mob of cellphone-holding folx to record concerts, etc.
Sure, the fidelity from any one phone sucks, but some filtering (combined with knowledge of the seat placement) would be able to eliminate much of the ambient noise, and produce multipoint surround sound. Probably the same could be done with videophones to create 3D video, if enough source were integrated.
I don't even have the math to try this, but if we can dream it, we can do it, right?
I don't even mind the companies that send me info on products I hadn't heard about before, or are at least commodity items such as a deal on a DVD.
Perhaps the sellers of some products are desperate, but
So why do you keep asking me, and ignore me when I say to stop. That's what SPAM is.
I like it: it's small, but they didn't try to shoehorn in a full keyboard for my sausage-like fingers to mash. The goofy key layout looks pretty optimal for texting with thumbs, actually.
Regarding "How do I use the PDA and talk at the same time?" -- use a $60 bluetooth headset.
What is it missing to make my perfect convergence unit?
a) Higher-res screen. According to the specs at Nokia, it's only 128x160, less than an older-generation Palm. Give me at least 320x240, and we're talking useful
b) Memory slot. I'm not terribly fussy. My camera is CF, my Palm is SD (but I don't own any devices for it, because it doesn't have good enough sound for me to want to download MP3s), my laptop supports SD and MS but not CF (which is solved with a PCMCIA card)
c) Maybe a stylus. I've gotten very used to touchscreen on my Palm -- it's sorely missed on my GPSr for selecting items and text entry.
d) Oh yeah, GPS receiver.
(a), (c) and (d) are mainly price issues. (b) means they want you to keep paying to download over the phone lines.
Having an XML representation of a Word (MS, Open, whatever) document as a stream is really no more useful to me than RTF: I can parse them both.
The better part is when you can structure your document. Not just a heading surrounding a bunch o' paragraphs, but a (to use the stuff I have to work with) Research Report contains a Title Page, a Synopsis, an Introduction, Materials Section, etc. You can't put tables and figures on the title page or Introduction, you can in the Synopsis and Materials Section. TOCs and things like that are created as part of rendition, between the Synopsis and Introduction, without the user messing with it.
Now even more than storing those sections (which would, in the HTML world, be DIVs and SPANs), I want control over the UI: disable that table button in the title page, even down to where bold and italics can be used.
Office 2003 has some facility to implement this, but it's kind of awkward -- it's an extension of how their SmartTags work. Generally pretty ugly, to control everything.
I don't want to use an XML editor, my users know Word, are used to Word Processors, and they cost 1/5 of XML editors, less in bulk licenses.
I'd be implementing this now, if it weren't for two things: a) I work for a big corporation that never buys into new releases for a couple of years, and 2) they're laying me off -- closing all the facilities in Chicago (sigh).
The classic of that kind of thing is
PARIS
IN THE
THE SPRING
In reply to the other reply -- never depend on grammar checkers, they're horrid. They are extremely rigid on certain grammar rules, such as passive voice. That makes some kinds of writing nearly impossible, including software manuals ("When the button is pressed, the printer proceeds," is passive voice). I turn it on for brief periods, and I've learned what 'errors' to ignore and what to pay attention to.
Well, when mainstream authors write science fiction stories, they claim they're not writing SF because there's no spaceships blowing up or little green men: I'm referring specifically to "Oryx and Crake" by Margaret Atwood, but similar things apply to Michael Crichton (the most anti-science science fiction writer out there).
Aside from the authors already mentioned, if you want to see the future of SF, check out the women writing:
Lois McMaster Bujold: Space opera in the classic vein, with more humor than you can shake a stick at.
C.J. Cherryh: Although she still cranks out the occasional fantasy or fantasy-in-sf-garb books such as her "Rider" series, her "Invader" series and the long-running Union/Alliance books are some of the best space stuff going.
Linda Nagata: Her distant-future stories "The Bohr Maker," "Deception Well" and "Vast" are amongs the most mindblowing far space stories out there, incorporating nanoscale and galactic scale concepts in the same book.
Nancy Kress: continually putting out solid hard sf, often with a biotech basis.
Not to knock the guys writing out there, but I thought the ladies should be mentioned too.
Macro code and applications targeted to the platform are a major impediment to moving from MS Office. It seems obvious that you need it in Excel -- after all, it's just extending the spreadsheet formulas, but while there's only a few macros/apps we've created in PowerPoint, automation of Word is almost a neccessity.
The number of Word features we change, replace or enhance is enormous: "Wizards" to guide creation of tables with their captions, startup items to ensure option settings, repair commands to fix things when you've messed up your own document, etc. etc.
Without at least source compatability with VBA and the object models, moving to any other platform would be a tremendous undertaking. We did it 8 years ago from WP to Word '95 (and to a lesser extent from Word '95 to Word 2000 four years ago), and we don't want to start from scratch.
And from there, the DOM should let you get at all the content.
Even Win2K had some rather doggy things about it -- it behaves just about as well, but can be glacially slow to do so.
Win98, 98SE and ME required reboots several times daily, and I wouldn't think of trying to use Sleep Mode. With XP, we leave machines running for days with nary a reboot.
Do apps still fail? Yeah, but they don't bring the machine down. I can now run DOS-style programs much more reliably than ME could ever do (and I have to: the supplier's Win32 app for ordering is a terrible program).
And about the cost of viruses: Blaster didn't hurt me at all except during the net storms slowing everything down. But Sobig has definitely harmed our business:
So I can believe it's billions.
Oh. I guess I should have mentioned that it's the FIRST thing I change when I get a new machine with either XP or Office on it.
It's the users and relations I have to support that make it still a living heck.
Looking at the image, my brain tries to fit it to 'known' continents.
The Terra Meridiani area looks like either the east coast of southeast Asia (Vietnam, etc.), or the Gulf of Mexico.
Arabia Terra could easily be China.
Hellas is in the right place for Australia.
It's one of my least-favorite features of MS Office 2000 and newer, and of XP: The hiding of menus and toolbar buttons you don't normally use.
I'm visually oriented, and if a menu or button moves or disappears, it makes it much harder to find other things around it by their previous relative position. Now I imagine that eventually, it'll settle out into my common pattern, until one week I have to use Thesaurus four times, and it's back for a while, or I decide to use the "Format Painter" or anything else seldomly used.
What it does is make the hard things even harder, because you won't know where to look for them. This isn't entirely an MS fault: the open source office programs have very similar menu and toolbar layouts, which aren't always grouped logically, or at least not by the logic of someone actually editing documents.
As Woody Leonhard likes to point out, the Microsoft Office toolbars are designed for marketing demonstrations: All the cool features are visible, but many of the ones you need daily are buried on subsidiary toolbars.