I assume that you are claiming that ODF is the StarOffice format and that OpenOffice.org is the open source fork of StarOffice. The problem with this is that the format did change significantly when OASIS took over and sought input from many organizations. ODF has been adopted by the KOffice team, the folks writing Goolge web apps, IBM, etc. But don't be swayed by name dropping, just look at documents in the format, they are worlds apart from OOXML in terms of readability and conformance with existing XML standards. MS took existing binary formats and converted them to XML, this is quite different from taking existing XML tools/standards and combining them when possible and adding to them as needed. Its a completely different mindset and it leads to completely different results, even if both are superficially similar 'zipped XML' formats.
I can come up with two reasons they should provide user tools for Linux.
They make money by selling the new "Expression Studio" which sounds like Visual Studio for multimedia. They are giving the client away.
It would allow Microsoft to state that they have turned over a new leaf, which may help them to establish more good will. They are in a very high stakes game getting OOXML approved by the ISO, if they could use Silverlight to reduce fears of 'global domination' it might help get OOXML approved. That would be much more important to MS than a new 'Flash Killer'
One question that I have, is it time to revisit Java applets for multimedia? Sun's JVM is going GPL, so installing Java won't require the hassle of registering with Sun. (ANY hassle reduces market acceptance) Applets work fine, they can do anything AJAX can do, Swing is mature & good looking, Java Media Framework exists and works fine. There are some beautiful applets for data visualization. There is a nice example of a java applet at http://www.idyll-on-the-rocks.com/tour/index.html, which is a virtual tour of a home The photographer should learn about a Zeiss Biogon, there is no reason for this level of barrel distortion, but its still pretty cool to move around a house like that.
HTML and CSS are a great solution for screen displays, an OK solution for printing (assuming CSS 2.1). So, HTML/CSS would be a great solution for presentation software. But they are not particularly good at expressing structured documents like a spreadsheets, relational data and rich text documents. I don't seem how HTML tables would be a natural starting point for a spreadsheet, for example.
The original use of HTML was to create links to rich content, which in the case of CERN would be things like postscript files generated by LaTeX. Postscript has been effectively replaced by PDF files, and LaTeX has been (in)effectively replaced by word processors. The original model is still pretty good, hypertext for linking documents that are written in a markup language that expresses content and document structure and displayed in a portable display format. These are three rather different needs, although I will agree that HTML has become much better as a display language, it still isn't the equal for PDFs for print.
The Opera CTO, Hakon Wium Lie, also stated of OOXML and ODF, 'Both are basically memory dumps with angle brackets around them'. If this was true, why did the KOffice team adopt ODF before it was an ISO standard? Surely they could find more enjoyable coding problems than making KOffice able to read and write OpenOffice.org memory dumps. To me, ODF looks a lot less like a memory dump and a lot more like markup (HTML) than does OOXML.
I agree that the term Fascist is thrown about too liberally to insult anyone on the right with whom the liberal disagrees. (play on liberal was intended) I find the term Isalmofascist to be such a meaningless term. I suppose if you consider Fascism's essential feature to be the binding together of different sources of power, then I suppose you could call someone that wants to combine the Islamic faith with political power an 'Islamofascist', but I find this to be a bastardization of the term Fascist. IMO, this is much like calling anyone who is liberal a Communist, even if they don't advocate public ownership of all means of production.
Rather than reading Orwell, read Umberto Ecco's view on Fascism. He lived through Fascism in Italy. I do not think that the US is Fascist in the sense of Mussolini's Italy or Hitler's Germany, this would be a rather absurd comparison. But I do think that we are moving toward one key feature of Fascism, the synthesis of corporate and government power. We do have private armies, they are the 'security consultants' in Iraq. But you point is correct that there are no private armies operating within the US. I was careful to state that we are moving toward Fascism, not that we are Fascist. In the mid-Twentieth Century, a reasonable person could see the primary danger to the US as coming from the left, I don't feel that way today. Corporations are claiming the rights of humans, but they don't accept the same limits. A person convicted of a crime cannot own a television station within the US. However, GE has been convicted and they still are allowed to own television networks. This is literally a double standard, with the corporations being at an advantage over people.
No, Communists abolish corporations (and all other forms of private ownership). Of course, since the factories still need to run, Communists still run the factories, but they are now like any other government office. Its egalitarian, but incredibly inefficient. Thus, Communism fell under its own weight. But Fascism fell because they picked a fight with the Allies of WWII. Communism is quite different that Fascism.
It like the old joke Q:"What's the difference between an elephant and a peanut butter sandwich" reply (I don't know, what is the difference?) A."If you don't know, I am NEVER sending you to the grocery store."
This is truly what Fascism is, the binding together of corporate and governmental power. The corporations prosper and the power of their capital is fused with the power of the state to govern. Viewing fascism as corporations serving the government is only half of the story, the other half is that that power of the state is made available to corporations. This is almost a textbook example of the latter.
Fascism, which Mussolini wanted to call corporativismo, or 'Corporatism' in English, is the binding together of Political and corporate power. Read Umberto Eco's "Eternal Fascism" or "Ur-Fascism and let's discuss what countries are sliding toward Fascism. This welding of state (SWAT team) and corporate (MPAA) power is characteristic of Fascism.
ODF has its origins with StarOffice/OpenOffice.org, but ODF is not 'owned' by OpenOffice.org. OpenOffice.org controls the source code for one of several software suites that use ODF. OASIS submitted ODF, as discussed in the Cover Pages. ODF had signficant revisions during the approval process, and it continues to evolve as a result of efforts by concerned parties. However, in the case of ODF, the concerned parties are not third parties, but active participants. Handicapped users expressed concerns about the format's accessibility. They were empowered to change the standard, because ODF is a public standard.
This emphasis on ODF is to strengthen the parent post's claim on the importance of ODF being unencumbered.
There is sufficient profit to be made in generic medicines. There are plenty of companies that choose to make generics. Besides if the research is in the public interest, why not expect the public to pay. By 1981, Robin Waren had determined that H. Pylori was the cause of most ulcers. However, ulcers results in 14 Billion in Tagament sales for SmithKline. Waren's solution was generic antibiotics with bismuth. It was not until after 1994, when the patent expired that Waren's work revolutionized ulcer treatment. Ulcers are painful, so people were suffering from the delay. The profit motive is not the only thing that drives people - why should we structure a society so that only greed, which is one of the seven deadly sins, can motivate us to action?
This statement is so confused. The Constitution grants individuals all rights not specifically enumerated (Ninth Amendment). So we have the right to use the privy (how our Founding Fathers used 'privacy' - a 'moment of privacy' was time to use the outhouse). We also have the right to have children, eat, sleep, drink and so forth. None of these are specifically enumerated and not of these are applicable to a corporation.
Giving corporations HUMAN rights is completely messed up. They should enjoy the same rights as any group of people, but they should never be given human rights. Microsoft is allowed to have internal documents that it can protect. But when these documents are demanded by a court, the court can allow the documents to be made public. The judge has allowed Roxanne Connlin to release all of these documents on the website. Microsoft has petitioned to keep some documents out of the public domain, and these documents are not on the site.
Curiously, this is the first time that Bill Gates testimony to the DOJ is viewable by the public. This case is shining a great deal of light on Microsoft business practices.
Yes, I'm afraid US food is dead. Go to any US supermarket and all you see is food in plastic bags. Once you leave the produce section, the whole supermarket looks like a morgue full of sealed body bags that contain once living foodstuffs that have been killed/hydrogenated/frozen/sealed/irradiated to extend their shelf life. Man I miss the open air market in Gif sur Yvette.
To strengthen this arguement, the product of the phase velocity and the group velocity is the speed of light squared. Or alteratively, the speed of light is the geometric mean of the phase velocity and the group velocity. So passing the light through Cesium must speed up the phase velocity by the same ratio that it speeds up the group velocity.
Somewhat off topic... The last page of Physical Review is accelerating down the book shelf at a rate limited by the ability of the physics community to publish papers. At the current acceleration, the last page will exceed the speed of light in about 85 years. As no information will be transferred in this process, this is not a violation of relativity. It is unfortunate that only the on-line version of Physical Review is likey to survived 85 years, since it would have been an interesting change if Physical Review was actually the subject of at least one experiment.
The use of reflection is a relatively new advance in object-oriented programming. This looks like another case where the hardware is finally caching up with the software;-) BTW, physicists have been slowing light for years, since the speed of light in any media is c/n, where n is the index of refraction.
There is an article, and it has many references. How is a 'Captain Obvious' sort of comment labeled Insightful? The insightful part is in the article. The first author, Michael Stonebraker, architected Ingres and Postgres. He looked at OLAP databases, which is a market that is much larger than a special case. He proposed storing the data in columns rather than in rows. He tested this, it works. In fact it works so well that he can clobber a $300,000 server cluster with a $800 dollar PC. I know that I would be pretty happy to spend a year porting to his database if I could pocket half of that annual hardware cost savings. The savings in electricty would be enough to pay for several pretty serious Starbucks addictions. His key insight seems to be that he can vastly improve OLAP performance by storing the data in columns rather than in rows. This change could be quite transparent to the end users & developers, except for the massive speed-up and cost savings, of course. This paper describes a general solution for a common problem. Stonebraker has developed Vertica , which is still support ad-hoc querries in SQL. This seems like a pretty general purpose solution for OLAP.
I have also noticed a huge improvement in KDE's stability. With the recent Coverity scans, we see that KDE is on and off the 0 defect list. KDE seems to be the most active projects on the Coverity scan, I notice more more week to week change in KDE than in any other project. In 3.4 million lines of code, Coverity has uncovered over 1,200 bugs. All bugs have been identified and all but 10 have been closed. KDE has been on the zero defect list, but there is new development going on so new bugs do appear. Not only is KDE gaining the features you mention, but they are doing it while cleaning up the code base. KDE development seems to have a great deal of momentum, especially in Europe.
I agree that open source is only part of the process. But certainly open source is visible to anyone that cares to view the code. So if we assume that a visible process is required, doesn't it follow that the source code needs to be visible to an auditor? What is open source if not visible? It seems to me that open source is a consequence of having a visible process, so a claim that open source has nothing to do with the openness of a ballot process is contradictory.
Lets look and see what http://www.mict.go.th/ is running. Hmmm, thats funny the Ministry website is listed as running LINUX. Dig a little deeper (by looking at the netcraft site report), we see that the site is running IIS 6.0. Since 30 September 2006, they have added some security layer running linux. This probably means something like Akamai proxies in front of the web server.
So, while the mouthpiece is attacking open source, the people at the Ministry that acutally have to address secuirty are choosing Linux. This undercuts his 'buggy' attack on open source. Any time you hear an attack about 'buggy' open source, point out the fact that Coverity runs scans on both Open Source and Commercial software. To my knowledge, very few commercial companies will share the number of 'Coverity bugs' that were discovered, nor will they dislose the rate at which they are being fixed. So basically the closed source projects lack the balls to share their defect rates. This strongly suggests to me that they have numbers which are quite inferior to those of open source projects listed at http://scan.coverty.com/
In summary, let the mouthpiece talk. But pay more attention to the results of people who do more than the empty wind of the mouthpieces who pretend to lead.
There are huge differences. People have been making alcohol from grain quite successfully since the beginning of civilization. Hydrogen is completely different. HYDROGEN IS NOT AN ENERGY SOURCE. Hydrogen is a storage and transportation medium. But hydrogen gas has the following problems
It permiates through steel. You can use aluminum, but it is a PITA (just ask any welder) so you drive up the cost of building and maintaining both containment vessels and pipelines.
It has a low energy per volume. It may have a reasonable (but by no means excellent) KJoule/Kg value, but who cares if the high pressure container weighs 20x more than the gas in it. So its hard to use hyrogen as a fuel in a vehicle. Forget about aircraft, they cannot affort to lift the weight of the tanks.
It has a low energy per volume. So you have to make larger pipelines (or run them at higher pressure). Either tactic makes them more expensive.
So at some point, you have to ask yourself why you are choosing such a low density fuel for transportation. This is Joseph Romm's question. If you can produce an excess of hydrogen, you might be better off having some competent Chem E's produce hydrocarbons and transport the hydrocarbons. You are still carbon neutral so this is still a zero net emmission solution.
I did see the results of a turbo pump failure & heard about the results of a time of flight chopper failure. These were blades of 10s of centimeters. They were considerably larger than the turbines being described, but both were potentially lethal. I also saw a much smaller pump fail & it made a bang & turned the insides blades into scrap metal but didn't do anything dangerous. The amount of kinetic energy is proportional to product of the mass and the the square of the radius, so little turbines become a lot safer than big turbines. All of these turbines are probably designed to run about as fast as material strength will allow, so overdriving them can be catastrophic. (e.g., the blade flies appart.) But if these are sub centimeter and in descently heavy containers, they ought to be safe. I just don't have any intution about the needed shielding & if I want to carry that in my pocket.
Slashdot Mirror
I assume that you are claiming that ODF is the StarOffice format and that OpenOffice.org is the open source fork of StarOffice. The problem with this is that the format did change significantly when OASIS took over and sought input from many organizations. ODF has been adopted by the KOffice team, the folks writing Goolge web apps, IBM, etc. But don't be swayed by name dropping, just look at documents in the format, they are worlds apart from OOXML in terms of readability and conformance with existing XML standards. MS took existing binary formats and converted them to XML, this is quite different from taking existing XML tools/standards and combining them when possible and adding to them as needed. Its a completely different mindset and it leads to completely different results, even if both are superficially similar 'zipped XML' formats.
- They make money by selling the new "Expression Studio" which sounds like Visual Studio for multimedia. They are giving the client away.
- It would allow Microsoft to state that they have turned over a new leaf, which may help them to establish more good will. They are in a very high stakes game getting OOXML approved by the ISO, if they could use Silverlight to reduce fears of 'global domination' it might help get OOXML approved. That would be much more important to MS than a new 'Flash Killer'
One question that I have, is it time to revisit Java applets for multimedia? Sun's JVM is going GPL, so installing Java won't require the hassle of registering with Sun. (ANY hassle reduces market acceptance) Applets work fine, they can do anything AJAX can do, Swing is mature & good looking, Java Media Framework exists and works fine. There are some beautiful applets for data visualization. There is a nice example of a java applet at http://www.idyll-on-the-rocks.com/tour/index.htmlYah, I saw that too. Is Dell trying to tell us something or do they just have a default page head on their portal?
The original use of HTML was to create links to rich content, which in the case of CERN would be things like postscript files generated by LaTeX. Postscript has been effectively replaced by PDF files, and LaTeX has been (in)effectively replaced by word processors. The original model is still pretty good, hypertext for linking documents that are written in a markup language that expresses content and document structure and displayed in a portable display format. These are three rather different needs, although I will agree that HTML has become much better as a display language, it still isn't the equal for PDFs for print.
The Opera CTO, Hakon Wium Lie, also stated of OOXML and ODF, 'Both are basically memory dumps with angle brackets around them'. If this was true, why did the KOffice team adopt ODF before it was an ISO standard? Surely they could find more enjoyable coding problems than making KOffice able to read and write OpenOffice.org memory dumps. To me, ODF looks a lot less like a memory dump and a lot more like markup (HTML) than does OOXML.
Rather than reading Orwell, read Umberto Ecco's view on Fascism. He lived through Fascism in Italy. I do not think that the US is Fascist in the sense of Mussolini's Italy or Hitler's Germany, this would be a rather absurd comparison. But I do think that we are moving toward one key feature of Fascism, the synthesis of corporate and government power. We do have private armies, they are the 'security consultants' in Iraq. But you point is correct that there are no private armies operating within the US. I was careful to state that we are moving toward Fascism, not that we are Fascist. In the mid-Twentieth Century, a reasonable person could see the primary danger to the US as coming from the left, I don't feel that way today. Corporations are claiming the rights of humans, but they don't accept the same limits. A person convicted of a crime cannot own a television station within the US. However, GE has been convicted and they still are allowed to own television networks. This is literally a double standard, with the corporations being at an advantage over people.
It like the old joke Q:"What's the difference between an elephant and a peanut butter sandwich" reply (I don't know, what is the difference?) A."If you don't know, I am NEVER sending you to the grocery store."
This is truly what Fascism is, the binding together of corporate and governmental power. The corporations prosper and the power of their capital is fused with the power of the state to govern. Viewing fascism as corporations serving the government is only half of the story, the other half is that that power of the state is made available to corporations. This is almost a textbook example of the latter.
Fascism, which Mussolini wanted to call corporativismo, or 'Corporatism' in English, is the binding together of Political and corporate power. Read Umberto Eco's "Eternal Fascism" or "Ur-Fascism and let's discuss what countries are sliding toward Fascism. This welding of state (SWAT team) and corporate (MPAA) power is characteristic of Fascism.
This emphasis on ODF is to strengthen the parent post's claim on the importance of ODF being unencumbered.
Gates explains that implementing AWT was a disaster for Microsoft because Java apps look as good as windows applications, see http://www.iowaconsumercase.org/122106/PLEX0_5879. pdf
Read how Gates dislikes JFC at http://www.iowaconsumercase.org/122106/PLEX0_6109. pdf
Read about plans to 'undermine Sun' at http://www.iowaconsumercase.org/122106/PLEX0_6114. pdf
Then read Microsoft's view on implementing JDK 1.2 (to quote 'no fucking way') at http://www.iowaconsumercase.org/010807/PLEX_2708.p df
So who limited the JDK to 1.1.18 ?
There is sufficient profit to be made in generic medicines. There are plenty of companies that choose to make generics. Besides if the research is in the public interest, why not expect the public to pay. By 1981, Robin Waren had determined that H. Pylori was the cause of most ulcers. However, ulcers results in 14 Billion in Tagament sales for SmithKline. Waren's solution was generic antibiotics with bismuth. It was not until after 1994, when the patent expired that Waren's work revolutionized ulcer treatment. Ulcers are painful, so people were suffering from the delay. The profit motive is not the only thing that drives people - why should we structure a society so that only greed, which is one of the seven deadly sins, can motivate us to action?
These documents are SCANNED. Many of them have handwriting in the margins. Plain text of the original email would loose information.
Giving corporations HUMAN rights is completely messed up. They should enjoy the same rights as any group of people, but they should never be given human rights. Microsoft is allowed to have internal documents that it can protect. But when these documents are demanded by a court, the court can allow the documents to be made public. The judge has allowed Roxanne Connlin to release all of these documents on the website. Microsoft has petitioned to keep some documents out of the public domain, and these documents are not on the site.
Curiously, this is the first time that Bill Gates testimony to the DOJ is viewable by the public. This case is shining a great deal of light on Microsoft business practices.
Yes, I'm afraid US food is dead. Go to any US supermarket and all you see is food in plastic bags. Once you leave the produce section, the whole supermarket looks like a morgue full of sealed body bags that contain once living foodstuffs that have been killed/hydrogenated/frozen/sealed/irradiated to extend their shelf life. Man I miss the open air market in Gif sur Yvette.
Somewhat off topic... The last page of Physical Review is accelerating down the book shelf at a rate limited by the ability of the physics community to publish papers. At the current acceleration, the last page will exceed the speed of light in about 85 years. As no information will be transferred in this process, this is not a violation of relativity. It is unfortunate that only the on-line version of Physical Review is likey to survived 85 years, since it would have been an interesting change if Physical Review was actually the subject of at least one experiment.
The use of reflection is a relatively new advance in object-oriented programming. This looks like another case where the hardware is finally caching up with the software ;-) BTW, physicists have been slowing light for years, since the speed of light in any media is c/n, where n is the index of refraction.
There is an article, and it has many references. How is a 'Captain Obvious' sort of comment labeled Insightful? The insightful part is in the article. The first author, Michael Stonebraker, architected Ingres and Postgres. He looked at OLAP databases, which is a market that is much larger than a special case. He proposed storing the data in columns rather than in rows. He tested this, it works. In fact it works so well that he can clobber a $300,000 server cluster with a $800 dollar PC. I know that I would be pretty happy to spend a year porting to his database if I could pocket half of that annual hardware cost savings. The savings in electricty would be enough to pay for several pretty serious Starbucks addictions. His key insight seems to be that he can vastly improve OLAP performance by storing the data in columns rather than in rows. This change could be quite transparent to the end users & developers, except for the massive speed-up and cost savings, of course. This paper describes a general solution for a common problem. Stonebraker has developed Vertica , which is still support ad-hoc querries in SQL. This seems like a pretty general purpose solution for OLAP.
I have also noticed a huge improvement in KDE's stability. With the recent Coverity scans, we see that KDE is on and off the 0 defect list. KDE seems to be the most active projects on the Coverity scan, I notice more more week to week change in KDE than in any other project. In 3.4 million lines of code, Coverity has uncovered over 1,200 bugs. All bugs have been identified and all but 10 have been closed. KDE has been on the zero defect list, but there is new development going on so new bugs do appear. Not only is KDE gaining the features you mention, but they are doing it while cleaning up the code base. KDE development seems to have a great deal of momentum, especially in Europe.
I agree that open source is only part of the process. But certainly open source is visible to anyone that cares to view the code. So if we assume that a visible process is required, doesn't it follow that the source code needs to be visible to an auditor? What is open source if not visible? It seems to me that open source is a consequence of having a visible process, so a claim that open source has nothing to do with the openness of a ballot process is contradictory.
So, while the mouthpiece is attacking open source, the people at the Ministry that acutally have to address secuirty are choosing Linux. This undercuts his 'buggy' attack on open source. Any time you hear an attack about 'buggy' open source, point out the fact that Coverity runs scans on both Open Source and Commercial software. To my knowledge, very few commercial companies will share the number of 'Coverity bugs' that were discovered, nor will they dislose the rate at which they are being fixed. So basically the closed source projects lack the balls to share their defect rates. This strongly suggests to me that they have numbers which are quite inferior to those of open source projects listed at http://scan.coverty.com/
In summary, let the mouthpiece talk. But pay more attention to the results of people who do more than the empty wind of the mouthpieces who pretend to lead.
I had mono in high school, I really don't recommend it since I was tired all the time.
I have no aptitude for remembering a command this long.
Apple is selling morality? Is everything for sale? ;-)
- It permiates through steel. You can use aluminum, but it is a PITA (just ask any welder) so you drive up the cost of building and maintaining both containment vessels and pipelines.
- It has a low energy per volume. It may have a reasonable (but by no means excellent) KJoule/Kg value, but who cares if the high pressure container weighs 20x more than the gas in it. So its hard to use hyrogen as a fuel in a vehicle. Forget about aircraft, they cannot affort to lift the weight of the tanks.
- It has a low energy per volume. So you have to make larger pipelines (or run them at higher pressure). Either tactic makes them more expensive.
So at some point, you have to ask yourself why you are choosing such a low density fuel for transportation. This is Joseph Romm's question. If you can produce an excess of hydrogen, you might be better off having some competent Chem E's produce hydrocarbons and transport the hydrocarbons. You are still carbon neutral so this is still a zero net emmission solution.I did see the results of a turbo pump failure & heard about the results of a time of flight chopper failure. These were blades of 10s of centimeters. They were considerably larger than the turbines being described, but both were potentially lethal. I also saw a much smaller pump fail & it made a bang & turned the insides blades into scrap metal but didn't do anything dangerous. The amount of kinetic energy is proportional to product of the mass and the the square of the radius, so little turbines become a lot safer than big turbines. All of these turbines are probably designed to run about as fast as material strength will allow, so overdriving them can be catastrophic. (e.g., the blade flies appart.) But if these are sub centimeter and in descently heavy containers, they ought to be safe. I just don't have any intution about the needed shielding & if I want to carry that in my pocket.