This is clearly a case of state Seantors attempting to alter the executive branch's good faith efforts to run IT in the interests of the citizens. So mod this up, the grandparent post was wrong to blame the executive branch.
Standards are not fun. Try reading standards for mundane things like nuts and bolts. Besides the obvious pitch and diameter, there are all sorts of standards for the profiles of each thread, the metals that are to be used, how the strength of the screw is to be determined, and so on. Even in the 'obvious' features like diameter and pitch, don't you suppose that there needs to be an agreed upon margin of error? The standards are dry as the Sahara, but I'm really glad that I don't have to worry about having to get nuts and bolts from the same batch or even from the same manufacturer.
Why should software be different than nuts and bolts? Large detailed standards are not a bad thing. Now, if you can show that ODF is poorly designed compared with Microsoft's format, then I will listen. From the review of the two formats on Groklaw, I am actually inclined to prefer ODF to Microsoft's Office XML. ODF uses XLink, rather than reinventing that wheel, and ODF allows for mixed content (text and tags within the same parent tag) just like (X)HTML.
How about reading it critically yourself? In Genesis 1, man is created after plants and animals (Gen 1:20, 24, 26). He also created man and woman in Gen 1:27. In Genesis 2, man is created before the plants and animals (Gen 2:7). Adam has to name all of the animals before God gets around to making Eve in Gen 2:23
There is also the classic question, who did Cain marry? Hopefully, not his sister. Perhaps he is the original hillbilly, but it seems like he found a woman who was not his sister. So, I can only conclude that there were parents other than Adam and Eve by the time Cain was ready to marry.
How can you not know what field his PhD is in? I can assure you that my kids know that mine is in Physics (and grandpa's is in Music). Pharmacology and Physics are quite seperate fields (although I guess that a French physicst is a physicien and all know that Pharmacologists and physicians work together.)
My kids are sick and tired about hearing about my stories from grad school. There are only so many things you can do with liquid nitrogen to stave of the bordom of collecting data. They know all my rubber nail in 2x4, frozen cricket (they really do stop chirping if they are cold enough) & exploding pop bottle stories (a 2 liter plastic bottle with a few tens of milliliters of LN will completely vaporize if you put on the cap and wait for the LN to evaporate. It leaves a cloud of frozen water vapor too.) By now, you probably understand why they are sick of my stories.
The normal (Catholic, Orthodox and mainstream Protestant) position is that the Bible is the Word of God as revealed to man. The Revelation is considered perfect, but the imperfect writer records the message imperfectly. This is completely consistent with Shanon's information theory describing communication through a noisy (imperfect) channel. If I was a Bronze Age scribe and the history of the universe from Big Bang through the ascent of man (via evolution) was revealed to me, my recount of the history would be no more accurate that the average stoner's recollection of an acid trip. Even a casual reading of Genesis 1 and 2 shows logical inconsistencies in things as basic as to the order of Creation.
Fundimentalists that insist on a literal interpretation should be called to task as Heretics. I will argue that a Fundimentalist that reject his intellect is rejecting one of God's greatest gifts.
I have an image of the Microsoft flag with green/grey mold starting to fill in the four color patches. The caption reads "Microsoft Live". In the backgropund, we need a team of Open Source mascots approaching with a can of AJAX and brillo pads. Of course, Puffy doesn't even need a Brillo pad, he could just lather up and get to work. Does any semi-competent artist what to try? I think now is the perfect time to do AJAX:-)
But seriously, how is Microsoft or Google going to move the world to AJAX if they cannot count on a browser to implement Javascript? I suppose Google can say "Firefox", but what is Microsoft going to do?
1. Perhaps 'hypocritical' would suit you better. But ironic is less hostile, and 'Poignantly contrary to what was expected' seems like a reasonable description of a group that champions handicap accessibility in a Office product but accepts tools that make handicap accessible web applications quite difficult to produce.
2. The attacks on OpenOffice are not coming from Slashdot. Go to Groklaw and look at the transcripts of the ongoing battles between the 'pro-Microsoft' camp and the 'open standards' camp.
3. Yes, of course. But if Microsoft was committed to handicap accessablity, rather than access to government markets, they would have given us tools to support 508 before Visual Studio 2005. The ADA has been around longer than the web, so this isn't exactly a new requirement for applications.
4. It is the nature of Microsoft technology to suck you into a morass of tools that seem to be intentionally designed for lock-in. One of the nominal advantages of office 12 is the use of XML. It isn't hard to use ASP or ASP.Net to generate XML. So you could use ASP to generate ODF or Office 12 documents. But, we probably can't do this easily if Office 12 has the same sort of 'binary key' data as the current Office 2005 XML formats. But if you get the next set of really cool Microsoft developer tools, it will proabably quite easy to develop Office documents on the fly. This was not my original point, but Microsoft seems to avoid standards just so you have to get the latest tools in order to benefit from the 'promise of the web'. If they would just implement the standards in the first place, it would be easier for everyone to benefit from web standards.
5. My point is that the parent post discussed 508 compliance, and it seems to me that Microsoft is in a funny position of advocating handicap acessiblity while not supporting (at least until VisualStudio 2005) Section 508. This seems hypocritical. (See 1)
You are correct, but that doesn't address all of the existing legacy web sites. How many people are actually coding in VS 2005 today? I would argue that it soon will be the case where Visual Studio developers join the community of developers that can develop 508-compliant sites without much effort.
By the way, what version of Javascript does VS 2005 support. I also read that Microsoft is going to be pushing AJAX developement. Will that be part of VS 2005, if not when will this be integrated with the mothership, aka Visual Studio?
So what? The truckers don't need to design the truck, they just drive it. By this logic, I suppose that I can't use Linux because I'm too much of a 'hillbilly' to have written an operating system on my own. Who cares about the education and social status of the truckers, as long as they can add fuel and water, they can use this system.
I find is ironic that pro-Microsoft folks are touting handicap accessability. ASP and ASP.Net are notorious for generating remarkably bad HTML that is in no way compliant with 508 guidelines. As a quick and dirty test, open a web page in links (or any other text browser). If you can read it, it means that the 2 dimension 'web page' has been converted to a 1 dimensional 'text stream'. Braille terminals are able to represent these text streams quite successfully. Web sites built with some open source frameworks like Zope/Plone are almost automatically 508 compliant, but web applications developed with Visual Studio are rarely 508 Compliant. When you 'drag and drop' components onto a page, the relationship between the location and the order of the component in the 'text stream' is lost. So web development, as done by most developers using Visual Studio, results in pages that cannot easily be make 508 compliant.
The Microsoft camp seems to be rather oportunistic in when they choose to extol the virtue of handicap-accessiblity
I commend our superluminary overlord. If you happen to be looking for a date, I sugggest Miss Bright, who gained fame as the object of poetry...
There was a young lady named Bright
Whose speed was much faster than light.
She set out one day,
in a relative way,
And returned on the previous night.
Poets may not think much of this, but for a physicist its relatively good.
Look at the code in the tarball. To be polite, it is a bunch of empty stubs that 'implement' enough methods so that the code will compile. The file office.dtd that has a single line containing the XML document declaration
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
. This could be the foundation of a working translation, but lets see if they actually do the work and get this done.
This isn't what I would call a BSD license. For an example of a BSD license, open ftp.exe (in C:\Windows\System32) and read the license as written by the University of California.
Look at the code in the tarball. To be polite, it is a bunch of empty stubs that 'implement' enough methods so that the code will compile. There is a dtd that has a single line (the XML document declaration
There is a binary XML format called bxml. If OpenOffice were to use BXML for the internal representation of the data, there is reason to believe that parsing XML documents could be significantly faster. In fact, there are performance comparisons using XML from OpenOffice.org's Writer. It looks like a speed up of 4x to 6x would be possible if bxml were to replace xml. This is still an open format and it can be (trivially) converted back to XML. This would be a natural way to have the portablity of XML with an efficient binary data strructure. And it can be done with open source libraries, hopefully with only small changes to the existing code.
He-Ne (continuous) lasers were demonstrated in 1960. If Bell Labs could do it, I would expect that Russians could do it. Lev Landau could do almost anything with 1/2 the number of steps of anyone else:-)
The corner cube idea is brilliant, so thanks for the post. I'm starting to understand why the test of a truely excellent machinist is to make a nearly perfect cube. It means they can work for the spooks making 'innocent' items to the precision needed to turn frames into corner cube reflectors with one face so thin it oscillates.
Katanas are used to cut others. The wakizashi is used for Seppuku,as well as cutting others that get too close. See the wikipedia article on Seppuku for details...
When OS/X runs on a standard x86 this is a solution for the masses. Until then, you have to buy a new box to do this. That adds a great deal to the cost, even if Macs are not overpriced as in past years. I can take an old box and test any BSD, Linux distro or a version of Windows. I can't do that with OS/X, so I have to 'take the plunge' or else I'll never use a Mac. The 'transition barrier' for OS/X is very high. Even if the final state is very high, a high activation energy can be rate limiting. In this case, marketing follows chemistry:-)
I agreed with everything until the last sentence. The astronauts left behind a lander in shinny gold foil. If that catches sunlight, you should be able to see the 'glint' even if you cannot resolve it. Of course, showing Buba a hot pixel in a Hubble image is not going to convice him that the Apollo missions were not fakes.
Wouldn't it be cheaper to hire dozens of BSD developers? Get a version of Microsoft's GUI to run on x.org and they are off to the races. They could dust off Rotor and get it able to support.Net 2.0. But this still leaves them with a major question - What should they call it? NetProfitBSD and ClosedBSD both seem like accurate options, but the market-driods may object. My bet is on BSD.Net.
I started this as a joke, but it does seem to be a workable idea. Thank goodness there are some massive egos that will make this impossible.
If I set up the electric grid so that everyone in town used the same transformer, a single terrorist with a TOW rocket could leave everyone without electricity. We cannot prevent all terrorists from ever getting a TOW rocket. How on Earth can we provide reliable electricity? We have redundancy in the grid.
I'll bet its easier/faster/cheaper to launch a backup balloon than it is to splice a fibre optic that was cut by a backhoe (the natural preditor of LANS.)
Sort of. These were not normal pnumonia. The pnumonia was most severe in young adults and the autopsies found lungs that were dark and very heavy, almost liver-like. We certainly can do better with oxygen tents and what not to get people over the worst stages. BUT, if this is a 1918 like pandemic, it will spread about as fast as people can travel. With jet travel common, it may spread within a few weeks to the entire planet. People are contagous before they are sympomatic, and some people are contagous and never become symptomatic. So any quaranteen are almost certain to fail, but it may buy a little time.
Most of the world will not have the level of care we have in the US, Western Europe and other advanced nations. They will be SOL and they will not get the treatments you describe. In 1918, the medical facilities in the US were completely overwhelmed. Even if we are able to handle a few dozen severe cases of pnumonia in a modern urban hospital, they cannot handle hundreds of sinultanious cases. So, the worst case could be truely terrible. Hopefully, we won't see a worst case, but I find it useful to overestimate how complexy nature can be and underestimate our 'power' over nature.
Slashdot Mirror
This is clearly a case of state Seantors attempting to alter the executive branch's good faith efforts to run IT in the interests of the citizens. So mod this up, the grandparent post was wrong to blame the executive branch.
Why should software be different than nuts and bolts? Large detailed standards are not a bad thing. Now, if you can show that ODF is poorly designed compared with Microsoft's format, then I will listen. From the review of the two formats on Groklaw, I am actually inclined to prefer ODF to Microsoft's Office XML. ODF uses XLink, rather than reinventing that wheel, and ODF allows for mixed content (text and tags within the same parent tag) just like (X)HTML.
it's a mythtery known only to Slashdot editors (With apologies to Robert Asprin)
There is also the classic question, who did Cain marry? Hopefully, not his sister. Perhaps he is the original hillbilly, but it seems like he found a woman who was not his sister. So, I can only conclude that there were parents other than Adam and Eve by the time Cain was ready to marry.
My kids are sick and tired about hearing about my stories from grad school. There are only so many things you can do with liquid nitrogen to stave of the bordom of collecting data. They know all my rubber nail in 2x4, frozen cricket (they really do stop chirping if they are cold enough) & exploding pop bottle stories (a 2 liter plastic bottle with a few tens of milliliters of LN will completely vaporize if you put on the cap and wait for the LN to evaporate. It leaves a cloud of frozen water vapor too.) By now, you probably understand why they are sick of my stories.
Fundimentalists that insist on a literal interpretation should be called to task as Heretics. I will argue that a Fundimentalist that reject his intellect is rejecting one of God's greatest gifts.
But seriously, how is Microsoft or Google going to move the world to AJAX if they cannot count on a browser to implement Javascript? I suppose Google can say "Firefox", but what is Microsoft going to do?
And if you play football in high school, you can look forward to five and a half centuries of bad knees.
1. Perhaps 'hypocritical' would suit you better. But ironic is less hostile, and 'Poignantly contrary to what was expected' seems like a reasonable description of a group that champions handicap accessibility in a Office product but accepts tools that make handicap accessible web applications quite difficult to produce.
2. The attacks on OpenOffice are not coming from Slashdot. Go to Groklaw and look at the transcripts of the ongoing battles between the 'pro-Microsoft' camp and the 'open standards' camp.
3. Yes, of course. But if Microsoft was committed to handicap accessablity, rather than access to government markets, they would have given us tools to support 508 before Visual Studio 2005. The ADA has been around longer than the web, so this isn't exactly a new requirement for applications.
4. It is the nature of Microsoft technology to suck you into a morass of tools that seem to be intentionally designed for lock-in. One of the nominal advantages of office 12 is the use of XML. It isn't hard to use ASP or ASP.Net to generate XML. So you could use ASP to generate ODF or Office 12 documents. But, we probably can't do this easily if Office 12 has the same sort of 'binary key' data as the current Office 2005 XML formats. But if you get the next set of really cool Microsoft developer tools, it will proabably quite easy to develop Office documents on the fly. This was not my original point, but Microsoft seems to avoid standards just so you have to get the latest tools in order to benefit from the 'promise of the web'. If they would just implement the standards in the first place, it would be easier for everyone to benefit from web standards.
5. My point is that the parent post discussed 508 compliance, and it seems to me that Microsoft is in a funny position of advocating handicap acessiblity while not supporting (at least until VisualStudio 2005) Section 508. This seems hypocritical. (See 1)
By the way, what version of Javascript does VS 2005 support. I also read that Microsoft is going to be pushing AJAX developement. Will that be part of VS 2005, if not when will this be integrated with the mothership, aka Visual Studio?
So what? The truckers don't need to design the truck, they just drive it. By this logic, I suppose that I can't use Linux because I'm too much of a 'hillbilly' to have written an operating system on my own. Who cares about the education and social status of the truckers, as long as they can add fuel and water, they can use this system.
The Microsoft camp seems to be rather oportunistic in when they choose to extol the virtue of handicap-accessiblity
Don't forget Polythene Pam, who really was attractively built.
Unzip the odf. (rename it filename.zip and doubleclick). Now, look at the XML file named content.xml
Finally, look at the license:
This isn't what I would call a BSD license. For an example of a BSD license, open ftp.exe (in C:\Windows\System32) and read the license as written by the University of California.
There is a binary XML format called bxml. If OpenOffice were to use BXML for the internal representation of the data, there is reason to believe that parsing XML documents could be significantly faster. In fact, there are performance comparisons using XML from OpenOffice.org's Writer. It looks like a speed up of 4x to 6x would be possible if bxml were to replace xml. This is still an open format and it can be (trivially) converted back to XML. This would be a natural way to have the portablity of XML with an efficient binary data strructure. And it can be done with open source libraries, hopefully with only small changes to the existing code.
The corner cube idea is brilliant, so thanks for the post. I'm starting to understand why the test of a truely excellent machinist is to make a nearly perfect cube. It means they can work for the spooks making 'innocent' items to the precision needed to turn frames into corner cube reflectors with one face so thin it oscillates.
Katanas are used to cut others. The wakizashi is used for Seppuku,as well as cutting others that get too close. See the wikipedia article on Seppuku for details...
When OS/X runs on a standard x86 this is a solution for the masses. Until then, you have to buy a new box to do this. That adds a great deal to the cost, even if Macs are not overpriced as in past years. I can take an old box and test any BSD, Linux distro or a version of Windows. I can't do that with OS/X, so I have to 'take the plunge' or else I'll never use a Mac. The 'transition barrier' for OS/X is very high. Even if the final state is very high, a high activation energy can be rate limiting. In this case, marketing follows chemistry :-)
I agreed with everything until the last sentence. The astronauts left behind a lander in shinny gold foil. If that catches sunlight, you should be able to see the 'glint' even if you cannot resolve it. Of course, showing Buba a hot pixel in a Hubble image is not going to convice him that the Apollo missions were not fakes.
I started this as a joke, but it does seem to be a workable idea. Thank goodness there are some massive egos that will make this impossible.
I'll bet its easier/faster/cheaper to launch a backup balloon than it is to splice a fibre optic that was cut by a backhoe (the natural preditor of LANS.)
Most of the world will not have the level of care we have in the US, Western Europe and other advanced nations. They will be SOL and they will not get the treatments you describe. In 1918, the medical facilities in the US were completely overwhelmed. Even if we are able to handle a few dozen severe cases of pnumonia in a modern urban hospital, they cannot handle hundreds of sinultanious cases. So, the worst case could be truely terrible. Hopefully, we won't see a worst case, but I find it useful to overestimate how complexy nature can be and underestimate our 'power' over nature.