I'm using Google Project Fi for my carrier, and they're identifying about 80-90% of robocalls correctly as SPAM. The phone still rings, but the phone's screen turns red and says "Suspected SPAM caller". They also give you an easy way to report calls as SPAM from within the phone app.
It sounds like he was being pedantic. 1 USD =~ 1 CAD these days. It's been trading in such a narrow band (0.96 - 1.04) for over a year now. Just fill out the paperwork, and get on with life. Don't upset the pencil pushers. They're goons with badges and guns.
The Intel CPU is made in the USA. The Hard Drives in Japan, Korea, or Taiwan. The RAM in Japan or Korea. The "Gorilla Glass" for tablets and phones is made by Corning in the USA. Many times with electronics, China's role is to assemble parts that were sourced globally.
"A man with one clock knows what time it is, goes the old saw, a man with two is never sure."
That's why the sailor's adage is to take one clock or three to sea. With one, well, that's all you've got to go on. With two, you never know which one is right. With three, usually at least two agree.
Re:Since when did quality become optional?
on
The Duct Tape Programmer
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
Good enough means good enough. It's not 50%. It's not 80%. It's whatever is the powers that be decide is the appropriate trade-off between competing interests (i.e. time to market, cost of deployment, $ paid to developers, estimates of the cost of future bug fixes,...). If the market doesn't accept the product, it only means that their definition of "good enough" was wrong, not that there isn't a different "good enough" that the market will embrace.
"Good enough" for the software that runs a nuclear reactor or the space shuttle is probably near 100%. Pace-makers, surgeries, and pharmaceuticals failing? It's been known to happen. Sure, maybe only in 1/10000 cases, and only if you don't have a pre-existing condition. So, good enough is maybe five nines there. "Good enough" for that $1 umbrella you bought at Wal-Mart probably means something entirely different.
Windows is a plenty good enough platform to deliver e-Books on. And Windows runs enough trendy OSS programming languages on (eg. python), that the kiddos could've gotten a kick out of it plus a crash course in programming. Also, there's a lot of educational software out there that only runs on Windows that these governments could potentially leverage on day 1.
Microsoft would've had plenty of incentive to keep it up to date, plus keep the price low. Besides, OPLC had potential customers who insisted that the device run Windows. What's Negroponte going to say - "no, your *country's* children can't have inexpensive educational tools because I insist that they run Linux!"? If the goal is to get educational materials into children's hands, sometimes compromises must be made.
I say this as someone who has a substantial amount of code on the XO - the XO failed largely on its own merits. The project was (in-large) done in a fishbowl and came in at 2x its promised price. Plus, we've seen time and again that top-down approaches toward helping poverty-stricken areas (unfortunately) seldom work.
Their working with MS amounted to, what - adding a $2 MD card reader to the XO? I think that's all that it changed in terms of the hardware plan, anyway.
I have an XO. The card reader is bloody useful, if you ask me.
even iCab -a browser developed by one person- beat them to full compliance by months
That's disingenuous. The version of iCab (4.6) that passed the Acid3 test uses the same WebKit rendering engine as Safari and Chrome. And it beat Safari 4 to market by 1 day.
Personally, I blame GTK2's obsession with double buffering everything.
Clearly, the Mozilla developers just forgot to call 'gtk_widget_set_double_buffered(false);'. That's what's been gumming up the works. Much appreciated, and thanks for your informed opinion on the matter!
My laptop: Fry Wife's: Leela Wife's old laptop: Amy Printer: Zoidberg (dispenses ink) Router: Bender ("bends" packets) OLPC XO Laptop: Kiff (both small and green) Car: Planet Express Ship (with which the 2006 Honda Civic shares a striking resemblance) Cat: Zapp (cavalier, not too bright, doesn't wear pants).
I've been told by wifie that future pet names will include "Nibbler" and "Scruffy".
If the Yuan were always allowed to float, we wouldn't be in the same situation that we are today. You'd see a lot fewer Chinese imports and more US exports. And yes, if China unloaded its currency reserves in one fell swoop, we'd both be screwed, along with the rest of the world. Their (and everyone else's) dollar-backed investments would become ~worthless. Which is why they're working through investment funds like Berkshire to unload some of their US currency in favor of hard assets.
Also, there's the 'patriotic' view of this and the fact that the U.S. owes China dearly as a trade partner. Import import import import and export nothing. This would be further propagating that, thus hurting the dollar a tiny bit more.
Hardly. The US exports $1.15 trillion of goods and services per year. It's true that the US imports $700bln more than it exports. Exports recently rose sharply when the dollar's value was relatively depressed versus European and Asian currencies.
If China would more aggressively re-circulate the $1.5 trillion in reserves it's holding rather than hoarding dollars, the dollar's value would fall relative to the Yuan (which is being artificially under-valued, which China can due to its massive currency reserves). This would make Chinese imports more expensive and US exports less expensive. But then, China's export-driven economy wouldn't be growing at an insane 11% per year.
The current trade imbalance is as much China's "fault" as it is the US'. Maybe things aren't so unilaterally bad. There's some truth in the old saying that "if you owe the bank $100, you have a problem. If you owe the bank $1 million, the bank has a problem."
First, software other than Open Office can simply change any explicit "true" value for text:display to "hidden" if the document was emitted by Open Office.
The problem is that software other than OpenOffice.org generates the documents, and then OpenOffice.org (the canonical implementation of ODF) opens them. There appears to be data-loss, but in fact, it's an OpenOffice.org bug. But your suggestion (at best) works until OpenOffice.org 3.0 is released, in which case, application vendors have to go back to following the ODF standard again.
But I wonder why it's ok for application vendors to implement "quirks" to work around OpenOffice.org ODF bugs, but not ok to work around OOXML quirks. What's good for the goose is good for the gander.
As for saving documents for use by Open Office, the AbiWord page you linked to suggests a partial workaround (by not emitting 'text:display="true"', which is the default). In any case, how does this show that AbiWord isn't compliant? The "bug" report is for compatibility with Open Office, not ODF.
The fact that there is, for some set of documents, a work-around is irrelevant to my point. The bug report is not showing that AbiWord isn't compliant with ODF. It's showing that OpenOffice.org isn't compliant with the ODF standard. This story is about Microsoft Office generated documents not being compliant with the OOXML standard, and that being intrinsically "bad".
What makes this even worse is that vendors will still have to support the actual Microsoft Office 2007 format regardless of the specification, and Microsoft offers absolutely no patent protection in that regard, since it's own format is non-compliant and thus not covered by its own patent covenant.
If you think that MSFT is going to sue you for implementing a few quirks (because the documents they've generated differ from the actual OOXML standard), I've got a bridge to sell you...
Thus, OOXML is not only massive and poorly written, but it's also useless
That's quite a leap. ODF is massive too, and I contest your point that the OOXML spec is poorly written. But these points alone do not make the format useless. The measure of usefulness is how well the format describes your data and ultimately how many people adopt it by authoring documents using the format. The market will decide that, not you.
FFS, I'm just pointing out an error in the headline, as it seems that the submitter is intentionally trying to spread misinformation. There's enough wrong with OOXML and how Microsoft's behaved themselves without having to make shit up and distort the facts. You've got 'em dead to rights without needing to distort the truth...
Both AbiWord and OpenOffice.org support hidden text. According to the ODF spec, if you say 'text:display="true"', you're supposed to see the text. However, OpenOffice.org uses "true" to mean "hide the text" and "none" to mean "show the text". Or, the inverse of its correct meaning (or what you'd expect from the CSS && specs). This will supposedly be corrected in OO.o 3.0, which is due out soonish. However, this leaves a problem with a bunch of documents that won't render "as intended" (either by the user or by the ODF spec).
Speaking as an OOX implementer, this is pretty bad. But it's not quite as bad as the headline makes it seem - the meat of the story is linked a few blogs deep:
The expectation is therefore that an MS Office 2007 document should be pretty close to valid according to the TRANSITIONAL schema.
Sure enough (again) the result is as expected: relatively few messages (84) are emitted and they are all of the same type.
<m:degHide m:val="on"/> where "val's" values are supposed to be "true|false".
[snip]
Making them conform to the TRANSITIONAL will require less of the same sort of surgery (since they're quite close to conformant as-is)
In other words, if you're validating against the TRANSITIONAL spec, the OOX documents aren't horribly far off. And it's wrong in such a way that's easy to compensate for in code (i.e. check for "true|on" for a truth value). That's a markedly different situation than described by the headline's "'somewhat less' with the transitional OOXML schema" claim.
And in case anyone claims that ODF doesn't have the same sort of problem, I refer you to AbiWord bug 11359/OpenOffice bug 64237. This one is a show-stopper.
"Article 3, Section 1: The judicial power of the United States, shall be vested in one Supreme Court, and in such inferior courts as the Congress may from time to time ordain and establish."
Nothing in Article 3 (or anywhere else in the US Constitution) affirmatively creates a federal court system inferior to the Supreme Court. The U.S. federal courts system only exists if Congress says it does. Further, the federal courts are only capable of hearing cases "arising under this Constitution [and] the laws of the United States". If congress changes a "law of the United States" (say, to give telcos immunity from violating their contractual obligations to you, their customers), presumably, that act strips the federal court of any jurisdiction to hear a case regarding the telcos' improper behavior. Remember, the telcos didn't violate the 5th Amendment - only the State can do that. The telcos violated your terms of service.
The recourse is to sue the feds, arguing that the law Congress just passed is unconstitutional (which it isn't). Or, just skip the middle-man and sue the Feds for telling the telcos to violate your 5th Amendment right against unwarranted search and seizure. Which is who you really want to be angry at anyway.
Not to say that I support this immunity - both the Feds and the Telcos deserve to be reamed for violating the 5th Amendment and their contractual obligations, respectively.
Article 1, Section 9 really prohibits you from making something *illegal* and then prosecuting people for their past transgressions. It doesn't address the inverse.
Then there's Article 3, Section 2:
"In all the other cases before mentioned, the Supreme Court shall have appellate jurisdiction, both as to law and fact, with such exceptions, and under such regulations as the Congress shall make."
That is, Congress can prevent a case like this from ever being heard by the Federal Courts System. Which is precisely what they're attempting to do with this amendment.
Slashdot Mirror
It's a subtle dig at the FCC/Ajit Pai. 6.33 = "FCC", based on where the characters appear in the English alphabet.
I'm using Google Project Fi for my carrier, and they're identifying about 80-90% of robocalls correctly as SPAM. The phone still rings, but the phone's screen turns red and says "Suspected SPAM caller". They also give you an easy way to report calls as SPAM from within the phone app.
It sounds like he was being pedantic. 1 USD =~ 1 CAD these days. It's been trading in such a narrow band (0.96 - 1.04) for over a year now. Just fill out the paperwork, and get on with life. Don't upset the pencil pushers. They're goons with badges and guns.
The Intel CPU is made in the USA. The Hard Drives in Japan, Korea, or Taiwan. The RAM in Japan or Korea. The "Gorilla Glass" for tablets and phones is made by Corning in the USA. Many times with electronics, China's role is to assemble parts that were sourced globally.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_PC_hardware_manufacturers
"A man with one clock knows what time it is, goes the old saw, a man with two is never sure."
That's why the sailor's adage is to take one clock or three to sea. With one, well, that's all you've got to go on. With two, you never know which one is right. With three, usually at least two agree.
So, go use LaTeX then.
that they'd test, it'd be Eclipse.
Good enough means good enough. It's not 50%. It's not 80%. It's whatever is the powers that be decide is the appropriate trade-off between competing interests (i.e. time to market, cost of deployment, $ paid to developers, estimates of the cost of future bug fixes, ...). If the market doesn't accept the product, it only means that their definition of "good enough" was wrong, not that there isn't a different "good enough" that the market will embrace.
"Good enough" for the software that runs a nuclear reactor or the space shuttle is probably near 100%. Pace-makers, surgeries, and pharmaceuticals failing? It's been known to happen. Sure, maybe only in 1/10000 cases, and only if you don't have a pre-existing condition. So, good enough is maybe five nines there. "Good enough" for that $1 umbrella you bought at Wal-Mart probably means something entirely different.
Windows is a plenty good enough platform to deliver e-Books on. And Windows runs enough trendy OSS programming languages on (eg. python), that the kiddos could've gotten a kick out of it plus a crash course in programming. Also, there's a lot of educational software out there that only runs on Windows that these governments could potentially leverage on day 1.
Microsoft would've had plenty of incentive to keep it up to date, plus keep the price low. Besides, OPLC had potential customers who insisted that the device run Windows. What's Negroponte going to say - "no, your *country's* children can't have inexpensive educational tools because I insist that they run Linux!"? If the goal is to get educational materials into children's hands, sometimes compromises must be made.
I say this as someone who has a substantial amount of code on the XO - the XO failed largely on its own merits. The project was (in-large) done in a fishbowl and came in at 2x its promised price. Plus, we've seen time and again that top-down approaches toward helping poverty-stricken areas (unfortunately) seldom work.
Their working with MS amounted to, what - adding a $2 MD card reader to the XO? I think that's all that it changed in terms of the hardware plan, anyway.
I have an XO. The card reader is bloody useful, if you ask me.
That's disingenuous. The version of iCab (4.6) that passed the Acid3 test uses the same WebKit rendering engine as Safari and Chrome. And it beat Safari 4 to market by 1 day.
Not so much. You probably don't find Qt to be too inefficient, but Arthur does double buffering by default too. And for good reason.
Clearly, the Mozilla developers just forgot to call 'gtk_widget_set_double_buffered(false);'. That's what's been gumming up the works. Much appreciated, and thanks for your informed opinion on the matter!
My laptop: Fry
Wife's: Leela
Wife's old laptop: Amy
Printer: Zoidberg (dispenses ink)
Router: Bender ("bends" packets)
OLPC XO Laptop: Kiff (both small and green)
Car: Planet Express Ship (with which the 2006 Honda Civic shares a striking resemblance)
Cat: Zapp (cavalier, not too bright, doesn't wear pants).
I've been told by wifie that future pet names will include "Nibbler" and "Scruffy".
They updated the version of WebKit that they're using to one that passes the ACID3 test. That's something.
And here I thought that Air Supply could only produce soft rock. You learn something new every day.
In order to peg a currency to another one, you strategically hoard and release reserves, using the money to buy back your own currency.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fixed_exchange_rate#Maintaining_a_fixed_exchange_rate
If the Yuan were always allowed to float, we wouldn't be in the same situation that we are today. You'd see a lot fewer Chinese imports and more US exports. And yes, if China unloaded its currency reserves in one fell swoop, we'd both be screwed, along with the rest of the world. Their (and everyone else's) dollar-backed investments would become ~worthless. Which is why they're working through investment funds like Berkshire to unload some of their US currency in favor of hard assets.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sovereign_wealth_fund
Hardly. The US exports $1.15 trillion of goods and services per year. It's true that the US imports $700bln more than it exports. Exports recently rose sharply when the dollar's value was relatively depressed versus European and Asian currencies.
If China would more aggressively re-circulate the $1.5 trillion in reserves it's holding rather than hoarding dollars, the dollar's value would fall relative to the Yuan (which is being artificially under-valued, which China can due to its massive currency reserves). This would make Chinese imports more expensive and US exports less expensive. But then, China's export-driven economy wouldn't be growing at an insane 11% per year.
The current trade imbalance is as much China's "fault" as it is the US'. Maybe things aren't so unilaterally bad. There's some truth in the old saying that "if you owe the bank $100, you have a problem. If you owe the bank $1 million, the bank has a problem."
The problem is that software other than OpenOffice.org generates the documents, and then OpenOffice.org (the canonical implementation of ODF) opens them. There appears to be data-loss, but in fact, it's an OpenOffice.org bug. But your suggestion (at best) works until OpenOffice.org 3.0 is released, in which case, application vendors have to go back to following the ODF standard again.
But I wonder why it's ok for application vendors to implement "quirks" to work around OpenOffice.org ODF bugs, but not ok to work around OOXML quirks. What's good for the goose is good for the gander.
The fact that there is, for some set of documents, a work-around is irrelevant to my point. The bug report is not showing that AbiWord isn't compliant with ODF. It's showing that OpenOffice.org isn't compliant with the ODF standard. This story is about Microsoft Office generated documents not being compliant with the OOXML standard, and that being intrinsically "bad".
If you think that MSFT is going to sue you for implementing a few quirks (because the documents they've generated differ from the actual OOXML standard), I've got a bridge to sell you...
That's quite a leap. ODF is massive too, and I contest your point that the OOXML spec is poorly written. But these points alone do not make the format useless. The measure of usefulness is how well the format describes your data and ultimately how many people adopt it by authoring documents using the format. The market will decide that, not you.
FFS, I'm just pointing out an error in the headline, as it seems that the submitter is intentionally trying to spread misinformation. There's enough wrong with OOXML and how Microsoft's behaved themselves without having to make shit up and distort the facts. You've got 'em dead to rights without needing to distort the truth...
I'm aware of at least one - see AbiWord bug 11359/OpenOffice bug 64237.
Both AbiWord and OpenOffice.org support hidden text. According to the ODF spec, if you say 'text:display="true"', you're supposed to see the text. However, OpenOffice.org uses "true" to mean "hide the text" and "none" to mean "show the text". Or, the inverse of its correct meaning (or what you'd expect from the CSS && specs). This will supposedly be corrected in OO.o 3.0, which is due out soonish. However, this leaves a problem with a bunch of documents that won't render "as intended" (either by the user or by the ODF spec).
In other words, if you're validating against the TRANSITIONAL spec, the OOX documents aren't horribly far off. And it's wrong in such a way that's easy to compensate for in code (i.e. check for "true|on" for a truth value). That's a markedly different situation than described by the headline's "'somewhat less' with the transitional OOXML schema" claim.
And in case anyone claims that ODF doesn't have the same sort of problem, I refer you to AbiWord bug 11359/OpenOffice bug 64237. This one is a show-stopper.
"Article 3, Section 1: The judicial power of the United States, shall be vested in one Supreme Court, and in such inferior courts as the Congress may from time to time ordain and establish."
Nothing in Article 3 (or anywhere else in the US Constitution) affirmatively creates a federal court system inferior to the Supreme Court. The U.S. federal courts system only exists if Congress says it does. Further, the federal courts are only capable of hearing cases "arising under this Constitution [and] the laws of the United States". If congress changes a "law of the United States" (say, to give telcos immunity from violating their contractual obligations to you, their customers), presumably, that act strips the federal court of any jurisdiction to hear a case regarding the telcos' improper behavior. Remember, the telcos didn't violate the 5th Amendment - only the State can do that. The telcos violated your terms of service.
The recourse is to sue the feds, arguing that the law Congress just passed is unconstitutional (which it isn't). Or, just skip the middle-man and sue the Feds for telling the telcos to violate your 5th Amendment right against unwarranted search and seizure. Which is who you really want to be angry at anyway.
Not to say that I support this immunity - both the Feds and the Telcos deserve to be reamed for violating the 5th Amendment and their contractual obligations, respectively.
Article 1, Section 9 really prohibits you from making something *illegal* and then prosecuting people for their past transgressions. It doesn't address the inverse.
Then there's Article 3, Section 2:
"In all the other cases before mentioned, the Supreme Court shall have appellate jurisdiction, both as to law and fact, with such exceptions, and under such regulations as the Congress shall make."
That is, Congress can prevent a case like this from ever being heard by the Federal Courts System. Which is precisely what they're attempting to do with this amendment.
Not that I like it, but them's the rules...
Which is kinda aggravating, considering that you'd think she'd be in the area doing last-minute campaigning for today's 3 "Potomac Primaries"...