There is no new information in parent post, and no new logic connecting known facts in a way that stands up to analysis. There is only a continued assertion that Suse is safe to develop on, because... uh...
"...I have said it thrice:
What i tell you three times is true".
——The Bellman's Rule
Invoking the Bellan's Rule doesn't change my situation. I cannot recommend using Suse as the basis for a custom distro simply because a slashdotter with a somewhat lower usernumber than mine says it would be okay to do that. When it is time to do so, I can and probably will recommend that we not waste time evaluating whether Suse might be better than Redhat, etc, since there is this weird black cloud over Suse that Novell has brought on themselves. It's not like there aren't any good alternatives to Suse.
In a way, that guy who used to jump around yelling "developers! developers! developers!..." was right. A distro whose management has allowed the well of developers to be poisoned by a competitor with known predatory business practices is a sick distro. It prolly needs to be forked. Funny that it was that very same monkey-dancing fool who visited these problems on Novell.
Quite Honestly it makes little difference what these customers [of Novell] develop in the first place because their are not redistributing this software.
You are making a major assumption that no customer of Novell's would ever develop and distribute a derivative of Suse-- and that is absurd.
One of our projects in early incubation is developing a distro on a flash drive or low cost portable computer that would provide adult students in back-to-work programs with an affordable interactive curriculum. If we can get this funded and developed, we will want to distribute it under GLOSS[see below] licensing both directly to students and to similar back-to-work programs nationwide. This is not a liberal-based feel-good thing; it is a serious effort to take as many people off of public assistance as possible by turning them into taxpayers with living wage jobs as health care technicians, administrative assistants, and so on.
Novell's actions have poisoned Suse for this work. Any modified distro of Suse we come up with would be at greater risk of patent attack from Microsoft than would be the case for RedHat, Debian, Ubuntu, or any other distro. This would be true even if the modifications were simply stripping out device drivers and functionalities that our students would not need, because there would be no way for us to determine whether Novell had introduced any patent-tainted code into some component that we were retaining.
Novell has poisoned Suse for this kind of specialized distro development work. Who would willingly step into the FUD and confusion they have swirled around themselves when there are numerous alternatives to Suse that are not so encumbered? For that matter, who would willingly pay support fees to a company that has so publicly hoisted themselves with their own petard? Novell is just too damn clever for its own good.
I expect that most of the privately owned WinXP boxes that get replaced by Vista boxes will become hand-me-downs or Goodwill donations.
I am concerned about whether the corporate changeovers to Vista will dump hundreds of boxes at a time on the way too few volunteer refurbisher/recylcers like Free Geek.
These donations are tax write-offs for the businesses. Places like Free Geek strip them down, test and salvage the good components, and use those to build Linux boxes that are put back into the community. Some are awarded as grants to non-profits like churches and youth groups; some are awarded to volunteers who have completed a term of service. Components that fail testing are sorted into scrap bins and sent to recylcers. It is mathematically certain that some of the gold on the pins of CPUs that Intel produced last week was used in a computer before.
Places like Free Geek will need to ramp up in a big way if the corporate world makes a sudden change to Vista. Fortunately, that isn't likely to happen any time soon, if at all.
I checked out where Gates' heart was a week or so ago, and posted about it on another thread. Going by the required public annual reports of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation (seek and ye shall find... on Google),
For the last several years, B&MGF has made annual donations of 4.8% of its total value to charities
During those years, earnings from investments have increased its value in varying amounts between about 9% and 15% annually
IRS requires a philanthropic foundation to donate at least 5% of its assets annually, or it loses the special tax status it enjoys.
I have no doubt that after various corrections for overheads, B&MGF donates 5% of its current year assets, or maybe even a smidge more. There is nothing blatantly illegal about this; B&MGF can continue to make a profit and still be a legal philanthropy.
But this is not Bill giving away his money. Bill's money continues to grow.
I would start with figuring out what it would cost to fix broken systems, downtime, etc.
Right on!
This is not a situation that can be analyzed in terms of ROI; ROI is the wrong tool for this work. Writer of TFA should check out "Risk Management" for a start. That is what you want to be doing: providing the corporate officers with a report that says "Here are the risks measured in dollars of potential loss; here are the odds we face on each of the risks; here are some strategies we could use to mitigate these risks; and here are the costs of adopting each of the strategies".
If I was thinking of taking on this kind of project, I would go first to Accounting and see if I could enlist their aid. A lot of this is in their baliwick. Fortunately, it seems most bean counters enjoy the game of this kind of cost accounting. On a different matter, I once sat down with a financial officer and my data flow diagram, and by tracing through it together, we were able to work out how many of what kind of personnel were involved in each of the processes. It wouldn't have been hard to estimate the payroll costs for each hour of process activity, and usually the payroll costs are the biggest costs.
As TFA states, its if you want to watch an HD-DVD or BluRay at full resolution that the DRM will kick in...
And if you never watch Premium Content, you still get the full benefit of paying for hardware that is capable of degrading its performance on demand, and for OS processes that eat up cycles while they constantly look to see if it is time to start performance degradation.
If you think that the appropriate design goal of an OS is to get your computing tasks done in a safe and efficient way, then Vista is "defective by design".
Vista may have a place— in the home entertainment center between the boob tube and the boom box. There are better choices of OS for businesses— even WinXP is better.
It is the content producers choice to use DRM on their content and they are rightfully to blame for it.
I won't argue with blaming the content producers for DRM. But they aren't the ones who are paying for it. The people who buy Vista are paying for it— through the additional monetary costs of the hardware needed solely for the Premium Content pipes, and through the obligatory CPU overhead of running the processes that assure the OS that you haven't sneaked any non-DRM hardware onto the machine in the last few milliseconds.
The people who buy Vista are paying for all this even if the box will never be used for Premium Content. Even if the only thing they will ever do is run spreadsheets, word processing, Blender, and Tetris— they will stay pay to protect DRM Content Providers from the possibility that a copyright might be infringed on in their box.
Vista is a great way to spend a lot more money on a new box that will give you marginally better performance on the job than your old WinXP box. If you think that the appropriate design goal of an OS is to provide the user with the most cost effective means of utilizing cost effective hardware to get his computing tasks done, then Vista is "defective by design".
What does this book offer...... that all the free online resources [do not] offer?
Just one thing: Eric Meyer's insights into the theory and practice of CSS. A web developer reading one of Meyer's books is sort of like an aspiring novelist reading Steven King's book On Writing.
Can anyone explain the grammar rule for why corporations are sometimes considered to be groups of people, in a context when it doesn't look like they should be?
The short answer: this is an example of "metonymic merging of grammatical number". Under certain conditions, a writer may use a collective noun that usually takes a singular verb form with a plural verb form to indicate that the individuals in the collective are active participants (as well as the collective as a group entity).
The longer answer requires an understanding of these points:
english has a collective noun feature that allows groups such as an organization like Microsoft to be treated as if they were an individual;
english allows sentence constructions that use metaphors of personification, such as the one that was "emboldened" at the beginning of this item;
Used together, these let writers convey more meanings in a short phrase than would otherwise be possible: "The USA consumes 20 million tons of sweeteners per year" is a simple example;
Because metaphors are by definition imprecise mappings of phrases to realities, it is also possible to build multilayered constructions in a few words with this technique: "In a fit of anger and grief, the USA vented its rage on Iraq" simultaneously expresses several different concepts in a braid rather than as separate threads. A full judgment of this statement requires the reader to tease out each thread and determine its truth value separately;
In practice, most people don't bother with a depth analysis and would just say they "mostly agree" or "mostly disagree"; the master wordsmith can use these kinds of overlays to make it seem like several separate small groups are actually one large group who mostly agree with the proposition;
More significantly to Slashdotters, a very junior, apprentice wordsmith can use these techniques to generate FUD very easily, and cause a large group that is in agreement on something to splinter into factions who flame each other over detail that doesn't really matter to the main discussion;
Getting back to the main discussion; American corporate law came into existence to protect participants in a business venture from being liable for the corporation's debts;
There have been numerous attempts to expand this corporate shield so that corporate officers and agents of the corporation would be protected from the consequences of actions that are illegal for an individual;
A core part of these attempts involves the fiction of personifying the corporation so that only the fictional corporate entity could be culpable for anything that the individuals in the company might try to get away with;
There is currently a growing reaction to this (Enron, etc);
This is leading to an increased use of metonymy of number with regard to corporations by some writers, in an effort to remind readers that there is no "Microsoft" when it comes to making decisions about stealing other people's work: there is instead a living, breathing, chair-throwing, monkey-dancing, potty-mouthed individual who is ultimately responsible for those decisions, and it would be a good idea to have his actions directly examined by a Grand Jury;
For the historical record of Microsoft is prima facie evidence that there has been a long established conspiracy to circumvent Americal laws that involves the highest level of corporate officers.
On the other hand, referring to a corporation or organization as a collection of individuals is correct in British english, and apparently in Canadian english. It is just one of those examples of how America, England, and Canada are separated by a common tongue.
There is some serious misinformation about disk storage technology in this thread, and some of it is in parent post.
This isn't the place for teaching the subject. There was a time when part of my job involved using Mace Utilities and similar tools to repair logically damaged hard drives or recover "erased" information. I pretty much know what I am talking about.
My post of yesterday says that there is a fixed overhead of 19 KB for a Word97 file. There is also a variable overhead that depends on whether the formatting tables and structures defined in the fixed section are populated and the amount and complexity of that presentational metadata.
This should have been obvious from the context of TFA. They are using MavisBeaconWords. These have the equivalent length of 5 ascii characters plus one spacer character, so the conversion is 1 MavisBeaconWord = 6 bytes (assuming ascii encoding).
160 kilobits = _ 10,000 _ traditional 16 bit words
____________ = _ 20,000 _ bytes
____________ = __ 3,333 _ MavisBeaconWords (avg 5char/word w singlespace word separators)
____________ = ______ 2.5 typewrittenPages (apx)
Meanwhile, when saved to the desktop on a WinXP NTFS box, a Word97 document containing one character requires 19 kilobytes of storage. So:
bytes (from above): 20,000
less W97 overheads: 19,455 (19 KB less the 1 byte of content in the test file)
__________________ -------
______________________ 544 bytes
_______________________ 91 MavisBeaconWords
So W97 could store a moderate length paragraph in this puppy, while a text editor could store the rough draft of a crappy sophomore school paper. Which just goes to show that people who write with Word are clearly more succinct, concise, and cogent than people who write with vi or emacs.
The Microsoft Office 2007 Legacy and Mission: To boldly, italicly, strongly, & emphatically go where no word processor has ever bothered to go before.
Well, the other way to look at it is that Microsoft's successes have been partially due to the fact that they are not ethically encumbered. Others have used a financial model, and state that Microsoft's profitability is due to their minimal ethical overheads. Either way, the concept is that they don't carry a lot of unnecessary baggage that would slow their pursuit of profits.
The aim for both of these giants is to shift people towards non-local computing...
I don't like that myself, since it hurts reliability and autonomy in computing.
I'm of two minds about the autonomy concern, but after 27 years of working with personal computers, I'm convinced that Google offers storage and retrieval capabilities that are more reliable than anything I could put together at home. More reliable, in fact, than any system a small business would be willing to budget for.
As to autonomy, I'm trying to find a good recipe for that part. I look forward to eventually doing a lot of collaborative work with the descendants of Google Docs & Spreadsheets, but I'll probably still do a lot of work off line with something like OOo. Of course this isn't yet a significant issue since the online Office software isn't mature enough for critical work.
I can't find anything in parent post to agree with, and I did try to. Really.
I couldn't even find agreement with the spelling in PP's subject line.
I don't see anything negative about this merger of OSDL with FSG. Both have become increasingly focused on Linux; their interests have been converging for some time. Overtly recognizing this will allow the new Linux Foundation to speak with clear authority. That will increase the signal to noise ratio, decrease the opportunities for third parties to FUD the messages, and generally be a good thing all the way around.
I think TFA's statement about The Linux Foundation competing directly with Microsoft is both unfortunate and not true. Linux will continue to win converts on its own merits: that is its manifest destiny. To paraphrase a great quote from someone else (since I can't locate the original): the goal of Linux development is to continue to improve this operating system. That this will also destroy Windows is merely an unintended consequence.
An underlying assumption is that these stock schemes are pump'n'dumps fostered by someone who has actually risked money on buying the stock. I don't think that's generally the case.
Whether a pump'n'dump succeeds or not, the broker handling the transactions will take his commission. Anyhting that increases a broker's transaction volume will increase his earnings, including shorts; he always takes his cut. A "shrewd" broker, like the ones known for calling nursing home residents to encourage them to day trade their life savings, don't need to do an actual pump'n'dump scheme; all they need to do is make it look like one is happening and wait for the suckers who want to take a ride on it. It doesn't matter whether the stocks go up or down, either way they collect when these are bought, and collect again when they are sold.
I think most of these stock scams are coming from sleazy brokers rather than stock speculators. Paying a few bucks a month to a spammer who is getting the same amount from a bunch of other brokers would be more than worthwhile when it increases the monthly transaction volume for all of them. Tracking the transactions he sees for the stocks the spammer decides to use is a simple way of checking whether the subscription to the spammer's service has been worthwhile.
Doing it this way, no one would actually have to work at researching pump'n'dump possibilities or risk any of their own money in a speculative buy. Also, there would be no way to trace back from the stock to the crooks, since the crooks never touched the stock itself. For con artists, this is a perfect deal. The marks suckered into it aren't going to talk about it: who is going to admit that they lost money trying to beat a pump'n'dump scheme?
Of course no one who reads slashdot would be dumb enough to fall for this scheme, right?
Also, why not go to the REAL root of the problem — Windows and the zombies that run on it.
Hear! Hear! Fix the probelm at its source...
Anyone connected to the net with an pwn3d box pays $100...
Uh, no. That would be a massive policing program with huge overheads requiring the creation of an entirely new bureaucracy with powers that cross international borders.
Besides, there is a much simpler way under existing US law.
Microsoft is responsible for this, along with the principle Microsoft shareholders at the time when the decisions to market OSs whose security defects were known (or would have been known by prudent managers and owners) were being made. The bunch of them should be brought to court on charges of criminal negligence and class action suits should be filed.
Their crime is deliberately allowing the sale of defective products that have cost US businesses and taxpayers billions of dollars in lost time and damages. This is the surest way of assuring that the spambot problem isn't repeated with the Next Big Thing (whatever it might be), and a good source of funding for the next step. Rip the profits out of building dangerous software, in the same way that the profits were ripped out of building dangerous automobiles 40 odd years ago.
The US Congress could legislate that moneys obtained through legal actions against Microsoft and its owners would be used to fund replacing risky MS products on Windows boxes with equivalent safe FOSS products. This would have to be voluntary, but persons who refused to convert to a securable platform (where security was design in, not bolted on later) would be put on a "No Internet" blacklist until they decided to comply.
Does anyone know why Vista is such a resource hog?
I've been thinking that it has to do with the tilt bits, and all the other cross-checks that are needed to pump Premium Content from a secured file on the HD to the screen and/or speakers. Monitoring so that nothing could leech the PremCon has got to put a hell of an overhead on the OS.
That was my response to Win95. It didn't hurt me or my part-time consulting & repair business to stay with Win3.11 until Win98 was a proven product. Skipping an OS upgrade now and then isn't necessarily a bad thing-- it can be a smart business move. I know I picked up a few clients because the consultants they had been using were too tied up in unsnarling Win95 problems to meet their needs.
I like the direction that this is evolving toward. Let's start calling it GLOSS.
Talking about bringing more GLOSS into IT operations, and the desirability of getting our documents up to accepted GLOSSy standards— that will work in my institution. I could easily get my Director comfortable with explaining Gratis/Libre Open Source Software concepts in those high level meetings where Grand Strategies are developed. "Free as in beer" was such a show-stopper.
First we'll toss in one some people will kick and scream about: Graphic Design. Yes, I know all about the Gimp.
I disagree.
Not about the GIMP; for production work on raster images it doesn't make sense to leave the known comforts of PhotoShop or Paint Shop Pro for a FOSS equivalent that might do the job as well, but offers no significant improvements. Yet tomorrow's graphics designers are currently on student budgets and are learning The GIMP because of that— something that should be making Adobe nervous about tomorrow's profits.
But Blender and POV-Ray are major presences in animation and ray tracing work: many of the younger people working in the field cut their teeth on these, and still use them for exploring some concepts. Inkscape has compatibility benefits over Illustrator and is beginning to attract commercial use for that reason, even though it is a long way from its v1.0. Scribus is poised to shoulder its way into first tier desk top publishing.
FOSS has become majorily important in the graphics sector.
I don't know anything about audio mixers. Maybe the value of 1 kazillion is closer to 10 than to 8. Maybe FOSS products like Audacity are making significant inroads among the independent bands. I've no idea.
I know nothing about games, either. I know a lot of tomorrow's animators and game designers are developing their techniques with Blender and POV-Ray— I expect that they will continue to use these to some degree when they get paying jobs.
Slashdot Mirror
Whatever.
There is no new information in parent post, and no new logic connecting known facts in a way that stands up to analysis. There is only a continued assertion that Suse is safe to develop on, because... uh...
"...I have said it thrice:What i tell you three times is true".
——The Bellman's Rule
Invoking the Bellan's Rule doesn't change my situation. I cannot recommend using Suse as the basis for a custom distro simply because a slashdotter with a somewhat lower usernumber than mine says it would be okay to do that. When it is time to do so, I can and probably will recommend that we not waste time evaluating whether Suse might be better than Redhat, etc, since there is this weird black cloud over Suse that Novell has brought on themselves. It's not like there aren't any good alternatives to Suse.
In a way, that guy who used to jump around yelling "developers! developers! developers!..." was right. A distro whose management has allowed the well of developers to be poisoned by a competitor with known predatory business practices is a sick distro. It prolly needs to be forked. Funny that it was that very same monkey-dancing fool who visited these problems on Novell.
Quite Honestly it makes little difference what these customers [of Novell] develop in the first place because their are not redistributing this software.
You are making a major assumption that no customer of Novell's would ever develop and distribute a derivative of Suse-- and that is absurd.
One of our projects in early incubation is developing a distro on a flash drive or low cost portable computer that would provide adult students in back-to-work programs with an affordable interactive curriculum. If we can get this funded and developed, we will want to distribute it under GLOSS [see below] licensing both directly to students and to similar back-to-work programs nationwide. This is not a liberal-based feel-good thing; it is a serious effort to take as many people off of public assistance as possible by turning them into taxpayers with living wage jobs as health care technicians, administrative assistants, and so on.
Novell's actions have poisoned Suse for this work. Any modified distro of Suse we come up with would be at greater risk of patent attack from Microsoft than would be the case for RedHat, Debian, Ubuntu, or any other distro. This would be true even if the modifications were simply stripping out device drivers and functionalities that our students would not need, because there would be no way for us to determine whether Novell had introduced any patent-tainted code into some component that we were retaining.
Novell has poisoned Suse for this kind of specialized distro development work. Who would willingly step into the FUD and confusion they have swirled around themselves when there are numerous alternatives to Suse that are not so encumbered? For that matter, who would willingly pay support fees to a company that has so publicly hoisted themselves with their own petard? Novell is just too damn clever for its own good.
Note: GLOSS— Gratis/Libre OSS
Oops. Let me fix that for you:
It's not an empirical science.
See this generally accepted categorization of the sciences.
swym: say what you mean
What colossal failures have you seen that could be attributed to Executive Hubris?
Apple Lisa
IBM PS/2 line of computers
Microsoft Vista
These are the Edsels and DeLorians of our age.
And now I shall run away very fast, faster than a flying chair...
I expect that most of the privately owned WinXP boxes that get replaced by Vista boxes will become hand-me-downs or Goodwill donations.
I am concerned about whether the corporate changeovers to Vista will dump hundreds of boxes at a time on the way too few volunteer refurbisher/recylcers like Free Geek.
These donations are tax write-offs for the businesses. Places like Free Geek strip them down, test and salvage the good components, and use those to build Linux boxes that are put back into the community. Some are awarded as grants to non-profits like churches and youth groups; some are awarded to volunteers who have completed a term of service. Components that fail testing are sorted into scrap bins and sent to recylcers. It is mathematically certain that some of the gold on the pins of CPUs that Intel produced last week was used in a computer before.
Places like Free Geek will need to ramp up in a big way if the corporate world makes a sudden change to Vista. Fortunately, that isn't likely to happen any time soon, if at all.
I checked out where Gates' heart was a week or so ago, and posted about it on another thread. Going by the required public annual reports of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation (seek and ye shall find... on Google),
I have no doubt that after various corrections for overheads, B&MGF donates 5% of its current year assets, or maybe even a smidge more. There is nothing blatantly illegal about this; B&MGF can continue to make a profit and still be a legal philanthropy.
But this is not Bill giving away his money. Bill's money continues to grow.
I would start with figuring out what it would cost to fix broken systems, downtime, etc.
Right on!
This is not a situation that can be analyzed in terms of ROI; ROI is the wrong tool for this work. Writer of TFA should check out "Risk Management" for a start. That is what you want to be doing: providing the corporate officers with a report that says "Here are the risks measured in dollars of potential loss; here are the odds we face on each of the risks; here are some strategies we could use to mitigate these risks; and here are the costs of adopting each of the strategies".
If I was thinking of taking on this kind of project, I would go first to Accounting and see if I could enlist their aid. A lot of this is in their baliwick. Fortunately, it seems most bean counters enjoy the game of this kind of cost accounting. On a different matter, I once sat down with a financial officer and my data flow diagram, and by tracing through it together, we were able to work out how many of what kind of personnel were involved in each of the processes. It wouldn't have been hard to estimate the payroll costs for each hour of process activity, and usually the payroll costs are the biggest costs.
As TFA states, its if you want to watch an HD-DVD or BluRay at full resolution that the DRM will kick in...
And if you never watch Premium Content, you still get the full benefit of paying for hardware that is capable of degrading its performance on demand, and for OS processes that eat up cycles while they constantly look to see if it is time to start performance degradation.
If you think that the appropriate design goal of an OS is to get your computing tasks done in a safe and efficient way, then Vista is "defective by design".
Vista may have a place— in the home entertainment center between the boob tube and the boom box. There are better choices of OS for businesses— even WinXP is better.
It is the content producers choice to use DRM on their content and they are rightfully to blame for it.
I won't argue with blaming the content producers for DRM. But they aren't the ones who are paying for it. The people who buy Vista are paying for it— through the additional monetary costs of the hardware needed solely for the Premium Content pipes, and through the obligatory CPU overhead of running the processes that assure the OS that you haven't sneaked any non-DRM hardware onto the machine in the last few milliseconds.
The people who buy Vista are paying for all this even if the box will never be used for Premium Content. Even if the only thing they will ever do is run spreadsheets, word processing, Blender, and Tetris— they will stay pay to protect DRM Content Providers from the possibility that a copyright might be infringed on in their box.
Vista is a great way to spend a lot more money on a new box that will give you marginally better performance on the job than your old WinXP box. If you think that the appropriate design goal of an OS is to provide the user with the most cost effective means of utilizing cost effective hardware to get his computing tasks done, then Vista is "defective by design".
What does this book offer... ... that all the free online resources [do not] offer?
Just one thing: Eric Meyer's insights into the theory and practice of CSS. A web developer reading one of Meyer's books is sort of like an aspiring novelist reading Steven King's book On Writing.
The short answer: this is an example of "metonymic merging of grammatical number". Under certain conditions, a writer may use a collective noun that usually takes a singular verb form with a plural verb form to indicate that the individuals in the collective are active participants (as well as the collective as a group entity).
The longer answer requires an understanding of these points:
On the other hand, referring to a corporation or organization as a collection of individuals is correct in British english, and apparently in Canadian english. It is just one of those examples of how America, England, and Canada are separated by a common tongue.
There is some serious misinformation about disk storage technology in this thread, and some of it is in parent post.
This isn't the place for teaching the subject. There was a time when part of my job involved using Mace Utilities and similar tools to repair logically damaged hard drives or recover "erased" information. I pretty much know what I am talking about.
My post of yesterday says that there is a fixed overhead of 19 KB for a Word97 file. There is also a variable overhead that depends on whether the formatting tables and structures defined in the fixed section are populated and the amount and complexity of that presentational metadata.
Is that an English football, or an American football?
Sorry everybody, I just couldn't resist.
Must control these Montyesque fingertappings...
These are good questions!
I can only answer a couple of them at the moment.
Is this volatile or non-volatile memory?
It is non-volatile... so long as nobody sneezes.
What size word are they using?
This should have been obvious from the context of TFA. They are using MavisBeaconWords. These have the equivalent length of 5 ascii characters plus one spacer character, so the conversion is 1 MavisBeaconWord = 6 bytes (assuming ascii encoding).
160 kilobits = _ 10,000 _ traditional 16 bit words
____________ = _ 20,000 _ bytes
____________ = __ 3,333 _ MavisBeaconWords (avg 5char/word w singlespace word separators)
____________ = ______ 2.5 typewrittenPages (apx)
Meanwhile, when saved to the desktop on a WinXP NTFS box, a Word97 document containing one character requires 19 kilobytes of storage. So:
bytes (from above): 20,000
less W97 overheads: 19,455 (19 KB less the 1 byte of content in the test file)
__________________ -------
______________________ 544 bytes
_______________________ 91 MavisBeaconWords
So W97 could store a moderate length paragraph in this puppy, while a text editor could store the rough draft of a crappy sophomore school paper. Which just goes to show that people who write with Word are clearly more succinct, concise, and cogent than people who write with vi or emacs.
The Microsoft Office 2007 Legacy and Mission: To boldly, italicly, strongly, & emphatically go where no word processor has ever bothered to go before.
Are they *that* ethically challenged?
Well, the other way to look at it is that Microsoft's successes have been partially due to the fact that they are not ethically encumbered. Others have used a financial model, and state that Microsoft's profitability is due to their minimal ethical overheads. Either way, the concept is that they don't carry a lot of unnecessary baggage that would slow their pursuit of profits.
I'm of two minds about the autonomy concern, but after 27 years of working with personal computers, I'm convinced that Google offers storage and retrieval capabilities that are more reliable than anything I could put together at home. More reliable, in fact, than any system a small business would be willing to budget for.
As to autonomy, I'm trying to find a good recipe for that part. I look forward to eventually doing a lot of collaborative work with the descendants of Google Docs & Spreadsheets, but I'll probably still do a lot of work off line with something like OOo. Of course this isn't yet a significant issue since the online Office software isn't mature enough for critical work.
I can't find anything in parent post to agree with, and I did try to. Really.
I couldn't even find agreement with the spelling in PP's subject line.
I don't see anything negative about this merger of OSDL with FSG. Both have become increasingly focused on Linux; their interests have been converging for some time. Overtly recognizing this will allow the new Linux Foundation to speak with clear authority. That will increase the signal to noise ratio, decrease the opportunities for third parties to FUD the messages, and generally be a good thing all the way around.
I think TFA's statement about The Linux Foundation competing directly with Microsoft is both unfortunate and not true. Linux will continue to win converts on its own merits: that is its manifest destiny. To paraphrase a great quote from someone else (since I can't locate the original): the goal of Linux development is to continue to improve this operating system. That this will also destroy Windows is merely an unintended consequence.
An underlying assumption is that these stock schemes are pump'n'dumps fostered by someone who has actually risked money on buying the stock. I don't think that's generally the case.
Whether a pump'n'dump succeeds or not, the broker handling the transactions will take his commission. Anyhting that increases a broker's transaction volume will increase his earnings, including shorts; he always takes his cut. A "shrewd" broker, like the ones known for calling nursing home residents to encourage them to day trade their life savings, don't need to do an actual pump'n'dump scheme; all they need to do is make it look like one is happening and wait for the suckers who want to take a ride on it. It doesn't matter whether the stocks go up or down, either way they collect when these are bought, and collect again when they are sold.
I think most of these stock scams are coming from sleazy brokers rather than stock speculators. Paying a few bucks a month to a spammer who is getting the same amount from a bunch of other brokers would be more than worthwhile when it increases the monthly transaction volume for all of them. Tracking the transactions he sees for the stocks the spammer decides to use is a simple way of checking whether the subscription to the spammer's service has been worthwhile.
Doing it this way, no one would actually have to work at researching pump'n'dump possibilities or risk any of their own money in a speculative buy. Also, there would be no way to trace back from the stock to the crooks, since the crooks never touched the stock itself. For con artists, this is a perfect deal. The marks suckered into it aren't going to talk about it: who is going to admit that they lost money trying to beat a pump'n'dump scheme?
Of course no one who reads slashdot would be dumb enough to fall for this scheme, right?
Hear! Hear! Fix the probelm at its source...
Uh, no. That would be a massive policing program with huge overheads requiring the creation of an entirely new bureaucracy with powers that cross international borders.
Besides, there is a much simpler way under existing US law.
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Microsoft is responsible for this, along with the principle Microsoft shareholders at the time when the decisions to market OSs whose security defects were known (or would have been known by prudent managers and owners) were being made. The bunch of them should be brought to court on charges of criminal negligence and class action suits should be filed. Their crime is deliberately allowing the sale of defective products that have cost US businesses and taxpayers billions of dollars in lost time and damages. This is the surest way of assuring that the spambot problem isn't repeated with the Next Big Thing (whatever it might be), and a good source of funding for the next step. Rip the profits out of building dangerous software, in the same way that the profits were ripped out of building dangerous automobiles 40 odd years ago.
The US Congress could legislate that moneys obtained through legal actions against Microsoft and its owners would be used to fund replacing risky MS products on Windows boxes with equivalent safe FOSS products. This would have to be voluntary, but persons who refused to convert to a securable platform (where security was design in, not bolted on later) would be put on a "No Internet" blacklist until they decided to comply.
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Does anyone know why Vista is such a resource hog?
I've been thinking that it has to do with the tilt bits, and all the other cross-checks that are needed to pump Premium Content from a secured file on the HD to the screen and/or speakers. Monitoring so that nothing could leech the PremCon has got to put a hell of an overhead on the OS.
[on Windows releases] ...about every 2 or 2.5 years (3.1 in 92, 3.11 in 93, 95 in 95, 98 in 98, ...
Wasn't Windows 95 delayed until late 1996 or early 1997?
Not that this detracts from your point... in fact it emphasizes it since Win95 was a venture into unknown technology, just like Vista.
The whole thing is just maddening to use.
That was my response to Win95. It didn't hurt me or my part-time consulting & repair business to stay with Win3.11 until Win98 was a proven product. Skipping an OS upgrade now and then isn't necessarily a bad thing-- it can be a smart business move. I know I picked up a few clients because the consultants they had been using were too tied up in unsnarling Win95 problems to meet their needs.
Free can be either Gratis or Libre
I like the direction that this is evolving toward. Let's start calling it GLOSS.
Talking about bringing more GLOSS into IT operations, and the desirability of getting our documents up to accepted GLOSSy standards— that will work in my institution. I could easily get my Director comfortable with explaining Gratis/Libre Open Source Software concepts in those high level meetings where Grand Strategies are developed. "Free as in beer" was such a show-stopper.
Let's move forward with GLOSS.
First we'll toss in one some people will kick and scream about: Graphic Design. Yes, I know all about the Gimp.
I disagree.
Not about the GIMP; for production work on raster images it doesn't make sense to leave the known comforts of PhotoShop or Paint Shop Pro for a FOSS equivalent that might do the job as well, but offers no significant improvements. Yet tomorrow's graphics designers are currently on student budgets and are learning The GIMP because of that— something that should be making Adobe nervous about tomorrow's profits.
But Blender and POV-Ray are major presences in animation and ray tracing work: many of the younger people working in the field cut their teeth on these, and still use them for exploring some concepts. Inkscape has compatibility benefits over Illustrator and is beginning to attract commercial use for that reason, even though it is a long way from its v1.0. Scribus is poised to shoulder its way into first tier desk top publishing.
FOSS has become majorily important in the graphics sector.
I don't know anything about audio mixers. Maybe the value of 1 kazillion is closer to 10 than to 8. Maybe FOSS products like Audacity are making significant inroads among the independent bands. I've no idea.
I know nothing about games, either. I know a lot of tomorrow's animators and game designers are developing their techniques with Blender and POV-Ray— I expect that they will continue to use these to some degree when they get paying jobs.