What, you mean you don't have innocuous beakers full of sulfuric acid sitting around waiting to be accidentally drank in your cube farm? Maybe I should check our OSHA cert again...
All the South wanted was to break off and form their own national government, as is their right.
This right of self determination not extending to the slaves, of course. Funny how when we personify something like a nation or region we tend to forget certain groups.
It was the Yanks who came down and invaded. That's what caused the violence.
This is true. I am not crediting the Union with moral superiority. Lincoln didn't start the war to free slaves; they were used as strategic leverage in the war, and in the process Lincoln used extra-constitutional powers.
This has no bearing at all on the fact that anyone, including the would-be Confederate government, who claims that secession represented the will of the people of the South is a liar.
No, "Charter attacks criticism" is neutral enough. The line between "responding" and "attacking" is the C&D letter. If some of that criticism is in fact actionable libel, then that's fine, but by trying to remove an entire discussion board through the threat of legal action they are without a doubt "attacking criticism".
So let me get this straight: you're complaining that MS changes the.doc format so that competitors can't use it? Heaven forbid they change the format without first consulting with companies competing for market share!
Funny. But of course you've nailed it -- MS does it so that competitors have a harder time stealing marketshare, not because it gives benefit to users. Spare me the "MS has a right to do this" -- my question is do we as users have to put up with this, and can we as free software advocates hope that enough people won't put up with it that being incompatibile with the latest MS office version won't be seen as a fatal flaw of free alternatives?
I don't know if you actually use Word, but I can open.doc files from as far back as 95 in Word 2003 without a hitch.
Yeah, that's called "backward compatability", and is a completely separate issue. Now try to open a Word 2003 document in '95. Yes you can save in the backward-compatible Word95 format from Word 2003, but how many Word 2003 users do this, even though as you point out very little is actually lost when using the old format?
So when you say the "current, working versions of the.doc format," what you really mean is a.doc format written by Word *97* or newer.
What I really meant when I said that was versions of Word format that OpenOffice supports well enough to obviate the need for Word to work with those versions. That may be Word97, but is probably not Word 2003, and definitely not the next version of Word, unless OOo wants to keep chasing MS compatability forever into the future. That is the point I'm making.
Are you really complaining because they're not making their product completely backwards compatible with products released over nine years ago?
No, I'm not. I am stating that MS makes their products future incompatabile, and this creates an obstacle for broad-based OOo usage. The question is when and if compatability with.doc format 20xx is no longer an obstacle because enough people use.doc format [OOo supported version]. Have I made myself clear now?
OOo is simply emulating MS Office, which is doomed to failure because there's no way that they can ever meet or exceed Microsoft, except by price.
Only as long as OOo has to catch up with recurring versions of Word. When they no longer have to do that, the chance to exceed exists.
So, aside from the difficulty of supporting.doc in the first place, there's the obvious problem that MS likes to change the.doc format with every Word release. This makes it effectively impossible for OpenOffice to guarantee compatability with Word at any given point in time.
However, every time MS releases a Word update, not everyone upgrades. The same format pressure that keeps OO out of the running in many places also forces upgrades, but not everyone does.
I suppose my open-ended question is: At what point will there be enough of a population that uses versions of Word (or other word processors) that are well supported by OpenOffice that the.doc version treadmill no longer becomes a relevent obstacle because the network effect will favor the current, working versions of the.doc format?
In this vein, I can only hope that Microsoft continues to shoot themselves in the foot with things like Licensing 6.0 (sounds like a parody of MS software) that makes people stop and reconsider whether a treadmill with handcuffs and no 'stop' button is something they want to jump on. I doubt we'll be that lucky, though.
Yeah, I've resigned myself to it. The way I see it: I was suckered in by the first two movies and payed full price. I made my bed when I chose to see Attack of the CG, and now I should sleep in it. Now I still believe the 3rd movie is probably crap, but hey, I'm a sucker. And on the off-chance that it actually isn't crap, how would I feel if I saw the two crappy movies in the theatre and then skipped out on the only good one? Like a sucker.
Now I will go and soak in bleach for awhile, in the hopes that if I wash enough of the dork smell off that my wife will come near me again.
That's not dork smell. That's "haven't taken a shower in a while" smell. Which, okay, is a kind of dork smell, but not related to talking about Star Wars. Unless you do it while wearing a wookie outfit, because then you'll sweat and smell greatly of dork.
The most critical information that I as an employee would want to know about my company -- i.e. massive layoffs, moving across town, spinning off part of the business, etc -- has been discovered by reading the paper.
The truly hilarious part is that once something appears in the paper and the suits are forced to admit it to us, they will then tell us to "disregard any rumors that appear in the paper". Why? Because we might find out other things that are true that you didn't want to tell us? I'll be sure to follow that advice, oh straightforward and honest executive, sir!
I'm a fan of the atomic commits, with a single revision number for the repository. This makes it trivial to find a group of files that were checked in together and thus theoretically work together. This is important -- it isn't enough to just say "give me the version of foo.c two checkins back" without knowing what other files changed and what version of those files that foo.c was tested with. With CVS we would hack this functionality on top of it (you could use tags, but that was clumsy). Subversion gives it to us for free.
Oh, and "svn log | less" doesn't lock the database preventing others from checking in/out.:)
I also said Unless, of course, the only tax payers involved are your local, fellow rural citizens... which, if true, I have no issue with.
So how exactly are people in a town you don't live in going to vote to increase your taxes? Unless it is a state-wide initiative I don't see what you're complaining about then. If it is state-wide, the city folk such as yourself should outnumber the rural folk well enough to vote it down.
I just find that I am being asked to pay for more and more stuff, apparently just because I can.
Typically, yes, and typically those extra taxes don't do anything as productive as providing a useful service to everyone that the people actually want, but a gift to a select few who are friends with a politician.
I am seriously thinking of retiring early, and becoming a non-producer, because more and more, I am thinking, for every dollar I don't make, that is about $.56 in taxes I don't pay...
Whoa! Them's some high taxes! Not that it makes $0 a better deal than $.44, strictly speaking.:)
I'll be honest: I have no clue what the hell you're on about.
Proposition 42: City-provided community wi-fi internet access. [ ] Yes. [ ] No.
You're saying "Yes" and "No" are "two evils" one must choose the lesser of? And what does "that lesser of two evils voting for whatever pet program puts profits in their pocket" mean? "No" can't vote!
I'd say the majority of Groklaw's readership has no legal background or training, though it does attract some folks who do. PJ consistantly explains or links to explanations of legal terms and their significance. If anything, she's putting herself down for assuming someone would understand what she was getting at.
This is exactly the same as if I were explaining something about computers to a non-computer person without giving them the necessary background. The failure is then mine, not theirs. PJ understands this, and is seeking to correct it, because she is a responsible person.
Example 1: human eye. The nerves are connected to the photoreceptors from the outside - the blind spot is where they go through the retina. An engineer would obviously connect them from the outside.
I love this example for when people say "only something intelligent could design us so perfectly!" Plus the fact that cephalopods don't have this problem while all land vertebrates do indicates to me a common lineage and diversifying genes.
And consider how difficult it would be to change this feature once it was designed this way. Would it be worth it? The design, while sub-optimal, works pretty well. The blind spot turns out not be that big a deal, and we've dealt with it by evolving to move our eyes constantly. I'd reckon precious few creatures have perished because of this particular flaw, so evolution (which only cares about survival, not a human notion of optimality or design elegance) has no impetus to change.
Which, on the other hand, isn't that unlike human engineering, actually. You could liken it to the sub-optimal bootup process and scheduled process running of Unix. Sure, it could be done better, but why change something that works? You have to have a reason to want to put in the effort.
I'll start by saying I'm a Christian who thinks speciation is an observable fact and than evolutionary theory explains the observation quite well, just so you know where I'm coming from.
Intellegent design does not mean it was God who did it.
ID makes zero sense unless the Intelligent Designer is a supernatural entity, a god if not the Christian God. Pretending otherwise, particularly when the advocate is a Christian who wants ID to be taught in schools, strikes me as the kind of disengeniousness that goes against what I've been taught about our religion. I have yet to meet a Christian ID proponent who wasn't implicitly assuming that the Designer was the God of Abraham.
It could be God, it could be alians,
How do aliens make any sense at all as the "Designers"? How did the aliens arise and become intelligent? If aliens could develop, become intelligent and powerful enough to traverse the galaxy and create new life on a lifeless planet, wouldn't that be evidence that intelligent life like us could have also arisen without any help from a designer? Saying "aliens could have done it" contradicts the fundamental premise of ID, which is that intelligent life couldn't have risen on its own!
No, ID makes no sense unless "Intelligent Designer" is a synonym for God. ID proponents use "Designer" as a synonym for God, but are hoping that the rational non-Christian listener won't notice and accept it as a valid theory. It is that duplicity which pisses me off about ID.
Now if you'll come out and admit that ID = God, then I'll say that I believe completely in ID, I agree whole-heartedly that God is the Intelligent Designer, and that I believe God used the laws of physics (which He created) as His CAD program to design us.
But at that point you've done nothing more than say "Christianity and evolutionary theory are compatible", which I agree with, but doesn't motivate any changes to school curriculum. Since changing school curriculum to stop the spread of non-religious scientific thought is what all this nonsese is about, fundie ID proponents will not admit that ID = GOD.
It never fails to amaze me how many Christians believe that the Bible must be taken literally while Christ taught many of his lessons by telling symbolic stories.
Wait, wait, wait...
So you're saying the Kingdom of Heaven isn't literally the estate of a rich guy who is going to give us some form of ancient currency for us to invest while he's visiting in another land?
Great. Now I've got to completely redo my Heavenly Investment Portfolio.
Slashdot Mirror
What, you mean you don't have innocuous beakers full of sulfuric acid sitting around waiting to be accidentally drank in your cube farm? Maybe I should check our OSHA cert again...
All the South wanted was to break off and form their own national government, as is their right.
This right of self determination not extending to the slaves, of course. Funny how when we personify something like a nation or region we tend to forget certain groups.
It was the Yanks who came down and invaded. That's what caused the violence.
This is true. I am not crediting the Union with moral superiority. Lincoln didn't start the war to free slaves; they were used as strategic leverage in the war, and in the process Lincoln used extra-constitutional powers.
This has no bearing at all on the fact that anyone, including the would-be Confederate government, who claims that secession represented the will of the people of the South is a liar.
No, "Charter attacks criticism" is neutral enough. The line between "responding" and "attacking" is the C&D letter. If some of that criticism is in fact actionable libel, then that's fine, but by trying to remove an entire discussion board through the threat of legal action they are without a doubt "attacking criticism".
So let me get this straight: you're complaining that MS changes the .doc format so that competitors can't use it? Heaven forbid they change the format without first consulting with companies competing for market share!
.doc files from as far back as 95 in Word 2003 without a hitch.
.doc format," what you really mean is a .doc format written by Word *97* or newer.
.doc format 20xx is no longer an obstacle because enough people use .doc format [OOo supported version]. Have I made myself clear now?
Funny. But of course you've nailed it -- MS does it so that competitors have a harder time stealing marketshare, not because it gives benefit to users. Spare me the "MS has a right to do this" -- my question is do we as users have to put up with this, and can we as free software advocates hope that enough people won't put up with it that being incompatibile with the latest MS office version won't be seen as a fatal flaw of free alternatives?
I don't know if you actually use Word, but I can open
Yeah, that's called "backward compatability", and is a completely separate issue. Now try to open a Word 2003 document in '95. Yes you can save in the backward-compatible Word95 format from Word 2003, but how many Word 2003 users do this, even though as you point out very little is actually lost when using the old format?
So when you say the "current, working versions of the
What I really meant when I said that was versions of Word format that OpenOffice supports well enough to obviate the need for Word to work with those versions. That may be Word97, but is probably not Word 2003, and definitely not the next version of Word, unless OOo wants to keep chasing MS compatability forever into the future. That is the point I'm making.
Are you really complaining because they're not making their product completely backwards compatible with products released over nine years ago?
No, I'm not. I am stating that MS makes their products future incompatabile, and this creates an obstacle for broad-based OOo usage. The question is when and if compatability with
OOo is simply emulating MS Office, which is doomed to failure because there's no way that they can ever meet or exceed Microsoft, except by price.
Only as long as OOo has to catch up with recurring versions of Word. When they no longer have to do that, the chance to exceed exists.
So, aside from the difficulty of supporting .doc in the first place, there's the obvious problem that MS likes to change the .doc format with every Word release. This makes it effectively impossible for OpenOffice to guarantee compatability with Word at any given point in time.
.doc version treadmill no longer becomes a relevent obstacle because the network effect will favor the current, working versions of the .doc format?
However, every time MS releases a Word update, not everyone upgrades. The same format pressure that keeps OO out of the running in many places also forces upgrades, but not everyone does.
I suppose my open-ended question is: At what point will there be enough of a population that uses versions of Word (or other word processors) that are well supported by OpenOffice that the
In this vein, I can only hope that Microsoft continues to shoot themselves in the foot with things like Licensing 6.0 (sounds like a parody of MS software) that makes people stop and reconsider whether a treadmill with handcuffs and no 'stop' button is something they want to jump on. I doubt we'll be that lucky, though.
In the meantime, go OpenOffice!
Yet Slashdotters (and worse, the Slashdot editors) manage to read all these stories without learning anything about how the courts work.
;)
But Slashdotters so rarely read the stories! And the editors barely read the blurbs. So it isn't surprising.
Yeah, I've resigned myself to it. The way I see it: I was suckered in by the first two movies and payed full price. I made my bed when I chose to see Attack of the CG, and now I should sleep in it. Now I still believe the 3rd movie is probably crap, but hey, I'm a sucker. And on the off-chance that it actually isn't crap, how would I feel if I saw the two crappy movies in the theatre and then skipped out on the only good one? Like a sucker.
you still have to be going 8km/s to orbit the earth
Erm, duh. You mean you're not done once you get to 600km? Yah, I'll think more next time.
Now I will go and soak in bleach for awhile, in the hopes that if I wash enough of the dork smell off that my wife will come near me again.
That's not dork smell. That's "haven't taken a shower in a while" smell. Which, okay, is a kind of dork smell, but not related to talking about Star Wars. Unless you do it while wearing a wookie outfit, because then you'll sweat and smell greatly of dork.
The most critical information that I as an employee would want to know about my company -- i.e. massive layoffs, moving across town, spinning off part of the business, etc -- has been discovered by reading the paper.
The truly hilarious part is that once something appears in the paper and the suits are forced to admit it to us, they will then tell us to "disregard any rumors that appear in the paper". Why? Because we might find out other things that are true that you didn't want to tell us? I'll be sure to follow that advice, oh straightforward and honest executive, sir!
The velocity required to reach low earth orbit (LEO) is about 8km/sec.
Pedant alert: That's not true for powered flight. For powered flight, all that is required is acceleration > 1g.
Which doesn't change your point about the energy for LEO and SS1 not being even close.
Yeah, because the rural towns that are considering municipal wi-fi are up to their necks in competing ISPs...
Do you really think that context-based ads on old newspaper stories can match $55 million per year?
With the traffic NYT gets? Yeah, yeah I do.
I'm a fan of the atomic commits, with a single revision number for the repository. This makes it trivial to find a group of files that were checked in together and thus theoretically work together. This is important -- it isn't enough to just say "give me the version of foo.c two checkins back" without knowing what other files changed and what version of those files that foo.c was tested with. With CVS we would hack this functionality on top of it (you could use tags, but that was clumsy). Subversion gives it to us for free.
:)
Oh, and "svn log | less" doesn't lock the database preventing others from checking in/out.
Hey, that's neat, you can use SVN as a pointy-haired-boss detector!
Sorry about yours, by the way.
Mine was independently developed in a clean-room environment, I swear!
I also said Unless, of course, the only tax payers involved are your local, fellow rural citizens... which, if true, I have no issue with.
:)
So how exactly are people in a town you don't live in going to vote to increase your taxes? Unless it is a state-wide initiative I don't see what you're complaining about then. If it is state-wide, the city folk such as yourself should outnumber the rural folk well enough to vote it down.
I just find that I am being asked to pay for more and more stuff, apparently just because I can.
Typically, yes, and typically those extra taxes don't do anything as productive as providing a useful service to everyone that the people actually want, but a gift to a select few who are friends with a politician.
I am seriously thinking of retiring early, and becoming a non-producer, because more and more, I am thinking, for every dollar I don't make, that is about $.56 in taxes I don't pay...
Whoa! Them's some high taxes! Not that it makes $0 a better deal than $.44, strictly speaking.
I'll be honest: I have no clue what the hell you're on about.
Proposition 42: City-provided community wi-fi internet access.
[ ] Yes.
[ ] No.
You're saying "Yes" and "No" are "two evils" one must choose the lesser of? And what does "that lesser of two evils voting for whatever pet program puts profits in their pocket" mean? "No" can't vote!
why should the tax payers subsidize your lack of ISP choices.
BECAUSE THEY VOTED IN FAVOR OF DOING SO.
Next question.
I hear their next lawsuit is on behalf of building contractors against Habitat for Humanity. Stallman and Carter: two sides of the same Commie coin.
I'd say the majority of Groklaw's readership has no legal background or training, though it does attract some folks who do. PJ consistantly explains or links to explanations of legal terms and their significance. If anything, she's putting herself down for assuming someone would understand what she was getting at.
This is exactly the same as if I were explaining something about computers to a non-computer person without giving them the necessary background. The failure is then mine, not theirs. PJ understands this, and is seeking to correct it, because she is a responsible person.
Example 1: human eye. The nerves are connected to the photoreceptors from the outside - the blind spot is where they go through the retina. An engineer would obviously connect them from the outside.
I love this example for when people say "only something intelligent could design us so perfectly!" Plus the fact that cephalopods don't have this problem while all land vertebrates do indicates to me a common lineage and diversifying genes.
And consider how difficult it would be to change this feature once it was designed this way. Would it be worth it? The design, while sub-optimal, works pretty well. The blind spot turns out not be that big a deal, and we've dealt with it by evolving to move our eyes constantly. I'd reckon precious few creatures have perished because of this particular flaw, so evolution (which only cares about survival, not a human notion of optimality or design elegance) has no impetus to change.
Which, on the other hand, isn't that unlike human engineering, actually. You could liken it to the sub-optimal bootup process and scheduled process running of Unix. Sure, it could be done better, but why change something that works? You have to have a reason to want to put in the effort.
I'll start by saying I'm a Christian who thinks speciation is an observable fact and than evolutionary theory explains the observation quite well, just so you know where I'm coming from.
Intellegent design does not mean it was God who did it.
ID makes zero sense unless the Intelligent Designer is a supernatural entity, a god if not the Christian God. Pretending otherwise, particularly when the advocate is a Christian who wants ID to be taught in schools, strikes me as the kind of disengeniousness that goes against what I've been taught about our religion. I have yet to meet a Christian ID proponent who wasn't implicitly assuming that the Designer was the God of Abraham.
It could be God, it could be alians,
How do aliens make any sense at all as the "Designers"? How did the aliens arise and become intelligent? If aliens could develop, become intelligent and powerful enough to traverse the galaxy and create new life on a lifeless planet, wouldn't that be evidence that intelligent life like us could have also arisen without any help from a designer? Saying "aliens could have done it" contradicts the fundamental premise of ID, which is that intelligent life couldn't have risen on its own!
No, ID makes no sense unless "Intelligent Designer" is a synonym for God. ID proponents use "Designer" as a synonym for God, but are hoping that the rational non-Christian listener won't notice and accept it as a valid theory. It is that duplicity which pisses me off about ID.
Now if you'll come out and admit that ID = God, then I'll say that I believe completely in ID, I agree whole-heartedly that God is the Intelligent Designer, and that I believe God used the laws of physics (which He created) as His CAD program to design us.
But at that point you've done nothing more than say "Christianity and evolutionary theory are compatible", which I agree with, but doesn't motivate any changes to school curriculum. Since changing school curriculum to stop the spread of non-religious scientific thought is what all this nonsese is about, fundie ID proponents will not admit that ID = GOD.
It never fails to amaze me how many Christians believe that the Bible must be taken literally while Christ taught many of his lessons by telling symbolic stories.
Wait, wait, wait...
So you're saying the Kingdom of Heaven isn't literally the estate of a rich guy who is going to give us some form of ancient currency for us to invest while he's visiting in another land?
Great. Now I've got to completely redo my Heavenly Investment Portfolio.
Just in case I really did get your hopes up, I should let you know that I totally made all of that up. :)