I think a "we do business in your state and we are basing some of that business on ODF" message might be EXACTLY what Romney needs to hear. He's clearly business friendly.
Besides most polititians automatically assume that *everybody* has alterior motives when they do something good.
That being said, you are correct that this issue is not about price. It's about the tightening of the screws by the religious right in this country to stamp out anything they consider indecent.
Considering the market that porn enjoys I think that per-channel pricing could end up doing the opposite. New offerings will have 50 XXX rated channels, 30 cartoon channels (for children and stoners), 30 sports/WWF/NASCAR channels, 10 news channels, 10 "movies for women" channels, 5 educational/discovery type channels, 5 DIY type channels and 1 tech channel. (And no, 24 hours of gaming and game reviews is NOT a tech channel.)
Don't wake up one day and realize that somebody can program a 4-function calculator, or something more malicious, in your config file format that started out as... just a config file. Plan for it.
How about if you just keep the file's purpose and use as... a config file. If something more is needed use a different file or format that you actually planned out.
This idea has proven itself false to me three times now in my dealings with open source.
The first time was with a product that was great but didn't work well on low resolution monitors due to some choices made by the developers. I contacted the lead developer, added a user preference choice and code to adjust the display to be more low-res freindly and submitted it back. Within a week the changes were part of the main code base and I now had a fully supported program that worked correctly on the systems I needed to run it on.
The second and third times involved bugs that were fairly minor. Unfortunately they were things which couldn't be easily worked around or ignored in my environment. In the 2nd case I fixed the bug, submitted a patch back and it was accepted. In the 3rd I fixed the bug, my patch wasn't accepted but a different (and I admit better) patch was accepted from someone else.
In all three cases the problems were not things that were likely to affect a large percentage of the user base for the programs in question. As such a software company looking at the ROI would decide that it would cost less to simply not fix/patch the bugs or make the other changes than it would to just leave them in. The fact that, at least in one case, it would have meant losing a sale the cost of fixing it would likely offset that small lost sale.
Honestly it makes sense from a software developer business point of view to only have your programmers work on things that will at least pay for their time. Whether that is by gaining extra sales or preventing attrition of your market share doesn't matter a lot. Bottom line is does the money we are going to spend fixing bug A or adding feature Z become a loss or an investment?
From the customer's point of view, however, things are much different. We want software that is as bug free as possible. If the bug affects your company enough it may very well make sense to have your own developer fix it or to pay someone to fix it. At least with F/OSS you have that option.
in the marketplace, outperforming other Windows office suites will be much more interesting than being multi-OS.
Not if you happen to be someone who uses multiple OSes or an enterprise which uses multiple OSes. Also, if you are an enterprise considering saving $250,000/yr on MS licenses by not using Windows everywhere then you also probably care a great deal about cross-platform compatibility.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. They laughed at Einstein, they laughed at Edison, but they also laughed at Bozo the Clown.
I think historicaly the major advances which were "laughed at" were laughed at primarily by those who were ignorant. Most scientists who take a reasonable look at claims and data can accept new ideas. The ones without personal agendas or ego issues anyhow.
Bingo! When a science teacher ready to retire is making $60k+/yr and hasn't even updated their curriculum in 15 YEARS then something is wrong.
Should a student have answers marked as incorrect simply because they know the correct scientific answer? I have actually seen this happen. (Actually an intern was lividly upset about it happening to him.) The explenation? The answer does not match the book. The fact that the book is 10 years old and some "facts" have been proven wrong since it was published did not matter.
This just in: We have a late breaking intergalactic news story.
Today, the citizens of earth have set themselves on a course leading to the destruction of their planet and the end of their species. Scientists from the Rizer system confirm that earthlings nudged an asteroid from the course it was placed on by the PSPG (Primitive Species Preservation Group.) The new course will subject the asteroid to various gravitational fields of other celestial objects ending with unavoidable impacts to the planet from at least three asteroids and a comet over the next 500 earth years.
Normaly the PSPG would just correct the orbits of other bodies as neccessary to prevent the destruction of a populated planet. Unfortunately earth is not yet advanced enough to become a member of the United Worlds Consortium at this time. (See sidebar.)
UWC laws do not permit interference with the actions of non-member worlds. According to UWC commissioner Flark, "Because the earth altered the course of the asteroid the PSPG can not and will not correct it's orbit. Nor can we alter the orbits of any other celestial object which could interact with it."
The IHTC (Intergalactic Hyperspace Tourism Council) would like to remind everyone that this may be their last chance for a trip to earth. Chairman Vorzok cautions visitors to "remember to limit your visit to unpopulated areas. It's fine for earthlings to belive that some of their rural inhabitants are crazy but verifiable sightings could be viewed by authorities as intefering with the species." Vorzok also asks that visitors "keep cattle rendings to a minimum."
(Sidebar:) UWC laws declare that a planet may not obtain membership until they have met these minium criteria: - The dominant species on the planet must colonize an off-planet body and maintain the colony for at least 3 UTP years. - War, famine and poverty must be virtually eliminated on the planet. - The species must develope or fully understand the concepts needed for hyperspace (or other faster-than-light) travel.
Aside from religious preconceptions, the only reason to not mine Mars is if it somehow makes our survival less likely
When we've nearly made ourselves extinct on the Earth I'd hate to find out the mining operations on Mars have eliminated it as a place to colonize.
BUT, I'd also hate to find out it was too late to begin colonization because nobody had gone up there and started the critical infrastructure needed to thrive in the hostile Martian environment.
Whether or not we will ever colonize Mars is probably the least of the problems with this plan.
How do you generate the energy required to convert raw ores into something that is valuable enough to justify the cost of sending it off planet? You'd better have a cheap energy source.
But what will you use? Solar? There is 1/16th the solar energy at that distance (http://www.firstscience.com/site/articles/sunshin e.asp) so probably not. Besides you'd have to bring the panels with you so it would be pretty hard to build a large solar array.
Oil or coal? Considering how little luck we've had finding signs of life on Mars, is it likely that enough bio-mass existed in the past to form these fossil fules? Even if it did how long/deep would someone have to dig to get it... and exactly what kind of mining equipment can you take with you on a trip to Mars? (It can't run on gas/diesel... at least not until you can extract and refine enough for your own mining equipment.)
Nuclear Fission? Hope there is a good supply of plutonium or uranium on Mars that is easy to access. Lets not forget the need to process it to a purity needed for a sustained reaction.
Nuclear fusion? Measurements of Mars's hydrogen levels (http://fuse.pha.jhu.edu/wpb/sci_mars.html) only show levels in the 16ppm range. Besides we'll need a fairly portable reactor or at least something that can be hauled to Mars and assembled there.
But, if you create such an energy source (portable fusion backpacks?) then why go to Mars? Surely with abundant cheap energy we could continue to mine our own planet for a very long time before costs would make going to a distant planet feasable.
The only way it pays to haul stuff into space from a planet is when the substance is extremely rare and extremely valuable. Now, if they were going to set up a spice mining colony... well then that would be different!
Yep, you're right zerblat. I went to search.cpan.org and did a search for Mork. And I have to agree law inforcement couldn't possibly come up with a perl prog like this one:
------------ #!/usr/bin/perl -w
use File::Mork;
my $mork = File::Mork->new('history.dat', verbose=> 1)
|| die $File::Mork::ERROR."\n";
foreach my $entry ($mork->entries) {
while (my($key,$val) = each %$entry) {
print "$key = $val\n";
}
print "\n"; }
------------ BTW, I do realize that your post was sarcastic... as is this one.
Works perfectly if run in the same directory as history.dat and produces output like:
ID = 388D URL = http://www.google.com/ Hostname = google.com LastVisitDate = 1125064549 FirstVisitDate = 1125064549 Name = Google
It should be left to guru perl coders making $500,000/yr or more to do fancy things like convert timestamps to dates.
I guess it's a good thing that there are no tools available for Windows that auto-clear IE history, cookies or cache files! What would law enforcement do??
Unlike Linux machines that need regular patching to prevent them being rooted? There's no difference between any OS when it comes to a security hole, you patch it or you run the risk of being hacked.
True enough on the surface. One difference, however, is that I rarely think twice before installing a patch/update to my Linux systems because the chances of it breaking something are virtually non existent and backing them out is almost trivial.
I a bit less aprehensive of rolling out patches on netware. Things do break sometimes but fixing them is often little more than an inconvinience.
The Windows servers, however, make me want to say a prayer, draw numerous rune symbols on the server room door and rub a lucky rabits foot when I patch them. Oh, most of the time they patch just fine. That's *most* of the time. When something breaks, it usually breaks spectacularly and puts the system down for hours.
Exactly. I rarely take the time to block an ad with adblock. Even flashy annoying ads aren't immediately killed off all the time.
There are only three times I usually bother to AdBlock an annoying ad. One is if it is flash-based (because I can't use the nuke-everything plugin to simply right-click and remove it.) The 2nd is if it is poorly done flash which sucks up most of my CPU time. The 3rd is for excessivly annoying ads (such as those that obscure content.) For the last catagory I'll even edit the AdBlock pattern to try to block everything from that company.
A final note.. I really hate flash ads. I'm ready to install the FlashBlock extension. You can't use the wheel on your mouse to scroll if it happens to bring a flash ad up under the cursor. You can't simply nuke them (since right-clicking doesn't allow you to do anything but what the flash plugin wants you to do.)
Re:reason for, reason not for
on
Blank Keyboard
·
· Score: 1
I find the most useful reason to learn to type fast is that you can post to/. before you have time to actually RTFA or even stop and think about your comments.
Being less impaired while driving than people expect is not the same as being unimpaired. Sure, it may not matter much when everything is moving along just fine, but decreased reaction time matters a hell of a lot if some kid rides his bicycle out in front of you or a deer bolts across the road.
I would rather be in the car with a driver who is somewhat high (vs stoned out of his freakin gourd) then a drunk. But I would avoid either if at all possible. A relative of mine used to smoke pot and felt he would be a better driver stoned than drunk... but he still didn't get behind the wheel if he was either.
For most drives, speeding will usually only save you a few minutes. Personally, I'd rather arrive a few minutes later and remain relaxed with less stress.
Agreed. Take the time to actually calculate the difference and it rarely makes sense to speed... especially if you consider the risks.
I'll admit, there are times when traffic load are high that going the speed limit might put you and others in danger... but that doesn't meen you have to speed by as much as everyone around you.
If it is really that congested and unsafe consider getting off the road. If you can't how about going just a few miles an hour slower than the general traffic. It takes a surprisingly small number of cars doing that before at least the slow lane ends up back down near the posted limits.
It's probably not as hard a sell as all that. Public schools accross the country are desperately hurting for money. In my state we have a fixed percentage we are allowed to raise taxes for the school district. This percentage is WAY below the rate that things like electricty, gas and health insurance are rising.
Go to the board and explain that you would like to free up $1/4 million for use to pay more teachers and fill other educational needs. (Depending on how many PCs "thousands" are, it could very easilly be that much $.)
This is one reason I get such a kick out of people trying to point out the "costs" of transitioning to OOo. Need more tech staff to do the migration... well a small piece of that $250,000 would easilly pay the yearly salaray of a couple extra techs. Need to do inservices or curriculum training for your teachers? Again... minor expenses compared to what you can save on the licensing. (Remember people... 3000 PCs does NOT equal 3000 teachers to be trained... it's probably more like 900 or less.)
We regularly use OOo as a recovery tool for our MS-Office users. If a user has a corrupt document (PPT, DOC or XLS) the first step is usually to try to open it with OOo. Most times that's all that is needed... open it and re-save it. Then MS Office can once again read the file.
At home I use 'Office' suites maybe once every month, so a 10 second startup time doesn't bother me there.
And students aren't going in and out of OOo repeatedly. They go into class or a lab, start it and use it until the end of the class. If they have to spend a whopping 15 seconds out of 53 minutes waiting for it to start it really doesn't matter. (They waste a lot more time than that visiting and chatting with each other each period.)
Slashdot Mirror
A network with 100+ PCs on hubs is almost always a good reason to get switches. Collisions get to be a problem by then in most cases.
Like I said you wouldn't want to ruin a "good" CD. That automatically excludes all Windows-{whatever} install CDs.
Good catch! You wouldn't want to ruin an important CD!
If you don't have an hour try 15 minutes in a microwave.
I think a "we do business in your state and we are basing some of that business on ODF" message might be EXACTLY what Romney needs to hear. He's clearly business friendly.
Besides most polititians automatically assume that *everybody* has alterior motives when they do something good.
Considering the market that porn enjoys I think that per-channel pricing could end up doing the opposite. New offerings will have 50 XXX rated channels, 30 cartoon channels (for children and stoners), 30 sports/WWF/NASCAR channels, 10 news channels, 10 "movies for women" channels, 5 educational/discovery type channels, 5 DIY type channels and 1 tech channel. (And no, 24 hours of gaming and game reviews is NOT a tech channel.)
How about if you just keep the file's purpose and use as... a config file. If something more is needed use a different file or format that you actually planned out.
This idea has proven itself false to me three times now in my dealings with open source.
The first time was with a product that was great but didn't work well on low resolution monitors due to some choices made by the developers. I contacted the lead developer, added a user preference choice and code to adjust the display to be more low-res freindly and submitted it back. Within a week the changes were part of the main code base and I now had a fully supported program that worked correctly on the systems I needed to run it on.
The second and third times involved bugs that were fairly minor. Unfortunately they were things which couldn't be easily worked around or ignored in my environment. In the 2nd case I fixed the bug, submitted a patch back and it was accepted. In the 3rd I fixed the bug, my patch wasn't accepted but a different (and I admit better) patch was accepted from someone else.
In all three cases the problems were not things that were likely to affect a large percentage of the user base for the programs in question. As such a software company looking at the ROI would decide that it would cost less to simply not fix/patch the bugs or make the other changes than it would to just leave them in. The fact that, at least in one case, it would have meant losing a sale the cost of fixing it would likely offset that small lost sale.
Honestly it makes sense from a software developer business point of view to only have your programmers work on things that will at least pay for their time. Whether that is by gaining extra sales or preventing attrition of your market share doesn't matter a lot. Bottom line is does the money we are going to spend fixing bug A or adding feature Z become a loss or an investment?
From the customer's point of view, however, things are much different. We want software that is as bug free as possible. If the bug affects your company enough it may very well make sense to have your own developer fix it or to pay someone to fix it. At least with F/OSS you have that option.
Actually... isn't that EXACTLY like /. ?
OOo v2.0.0 uses 15.1Mb (-/+ buffers/cache) RAM when I start it on Linux.
Startup without loading a document was 6.5 seconds first time and 2 seconds once cached. Yeah.. I think I can live with all of that.
Not if you happen to be someone who uses multiple OSes or an enterprise which uses multiple OSes. Also, if you are an enterprise considering saving $250,000/yr on MS licenses by not using Windows everywhere then you also probably care a great deal about cross-platform compatibility.
Bingo! When a science teacher ready to retire is making $60k+/yr and hasn't even updated their curriculum in 15 YEARS then something is wrong.
Should a student have answers marked as incorrect simply because they know the correct scientific answer? I have actually seen this happen. (Actually an intern was lividly upset about it happening to him.) The explenation? The answer does not match the book. The fact that the book is 10 years old and some "facts" have been proven wrong since it was published did not matter.
This just in: We have a late breaking intergalactic news story.
Today, the citizens of earth have set themselves on a course leading to the destruction of their planet and the end of their species. Scientists from the Rizer system confirm that earthlings nudged an asteroid from the course it was placed on by the PSPG (Primitive Species Preservation Group.) The new course will subject the asteroid to various gravitational fields of other celestial objects ending with unavoidable impacts to the planet from at least three asteroids and a comet over the next 500 earth years.
Normaly the PSPG would just correct the orbits of other bodies as neccessary to prevent the destruction of a populated planet. Unfortunately earth is not yet advanced enough to become a member of the United Worlds Consortium at this time. (See sidebar.)
UWC laws do not permit interference with the actions of non-member worlds. According to UWC commissioner Flark, "Because the earth altered the course of the asteroid the PSPG can not and will not correct it's orbit. Nor can we alter the orbits of any other celestial object which could interact with it."
The IHTC (Intergalactic Hyperspace Tourism Council) would like to remind everyone that this may be their last chance for a trip to earth. Chairman Vorzok cautions visitors to "remember to limit your visit to unpopulated areas. It's fine for earthlings to belive that some of their rural inhabitants are crazy but verifiable sightings could be viewed by authorities as intefering with the species." Vorzok also asks that visitors "keep cattle rendings to a minimum."
(Sidebar:)
UWC laws declare that a planet may not obtain membership until they have met these minium criteria:
- The dominant species on the planet must colonize an off-planet body and maintain the colony for at least 3 UTP years.
- War, famine and poverty must be virtually eliminated on the planet.
- The species must develope or fully understand the concepts needed for hyperspace (or other faster-than-light) travel.
When we've nearly made ourselves extinct on the Earth I'd hate to find out the mining operations on Mars have eliminated it as a place to colonize.
BUT, I'd also hate to find out it was too late to begin colonization because nobody had gone up there and started the critical infrastructure needed to thrive in the hostile Martian environment.
Whether or not we will ever colonize Mars is probably the least of the problems with this plan.
n e.asp) so probably not. Besides you'd have to bring the panels with you so it would be pretty hard to build a large solar array.
How do you generate the energy required to convert raw ores into something that is valuable enough to justify the cost of sending it off planet? You'd better have a cheap energy source.
But what will you use? Solar? There is 1/16th the solar energy at that distance (http://www.firstscience.com/site/articles/sunshi
Oil or coal? Considering how little luck we've had finding signs of life on Mars, is it likely that enough bio-mass existed in the past to form these fossil fules? Even if it did how long/deep would someone have to dig to get it... and exactly what kind of mining equipment can you take with you on a trip to Mars? (It can't run on gas/diesel... at least not until you can extract and refine enough for your own mining equipment.)
Nuclear Fission? Hope there is a good supply of plutonium or uranium on Mars that is easy to access. Lets not forget the need to process it to a purity needed for a sustained reaction.
Nuclear fusion? Measurements of Mars's hydrogen levels (http://fuse.pha.jhu.edu/wpb/sci_mars.html) only show levels in the 16ppm range. Besides we'll need a fairly portable reactor or at least something that can be hauled to Mars and assembled there.
But, if you create such an energy source (portable fusion backpacks?) then why go to Mars? Surely with abundant cheap energy we could continue to mine our own planet for a very long time before costs would make going to a distant planet feasable.
The only way it pays to haul stuff into space from a planet is when the substance is extremely rare and extremely valuable. Now, if they were going to set up a spice mining colony... well then that would be different!
Yep, you're right zerblat. I went to search.cpan.org and did a search for Mork. And I have to agree law inforcement couldn't possibly come up with a perl prog like this one:
------------
#!/usr/bin/perl -w
use File::Mork;
my $mork = File::Mork->new('history.dat', verbose=> 1)
|| die $File::Mork::ERROR."\n";
foreach my $entry ($mork->entries) {
while (my($key,$val) = each %$entry) {
print "$key = $val\n";
}
print "\n";
}
------------
BTW, I do realize that your post was sarcastic... as is this one.
Works perfectly if run in the same directory as history.dat and produces output like:
ID = 388D
URL = http://www.google.com/
Hostname = google.com
LastVisitDate = 1125064549
FirstVisitDate = 1125064549
Name = Google
It should be left to guru perl coders making $500,000/yr or more to do fancy things like convert timestamps to dates.
I guess it's a good thing that there are no tools available for Windows that auto-clear IE history, cookies or cache files! What would law enforcement do??
True enough on the surface. One difference, however, is that I rarely think twice before installing a patch/update to my Linux systems because the chances of it breaking something are virtually non existent and backing them out is almost trivial.
I a bit less aprehensive of rolling out patches on netware. Things do break sometimes but fixing them is often little more than an inconvinience.
The Windows servers, however, make me want to say a prayer, draw numerous rune symbols on the server room door and rub a lucky rabits foot when I patch them. Oh, most of the time they patch just fine. That's *most* of the time. When something breaks, it usually breaks spectacularly and puts the system down for hours.
There are only three times I usually bother to AdBlock an annoying ad. One is if it is flash-based (because I can't use the nuke-everything plugin to simply right-click and remove it.) The 2nd is if it is poorly done flash which sucks up most of my CPU time. The 3rd is for excessivly annoying ads (such as those that obscure content.) For the last catagory I'll even edit the AdBlock pattern to try to block everything from that company.
A final note.. I really hate flash ads. I'm ready to install the FlashBlock extension. You can't use the wheel on your mouse to scroll if it happens to bring a flash ad up under the cursor. You can't simply nuke them (since right-clicking doesn't allow you to do anything but what the flash plugin wants you to do.)
I find the most useful reason to learn to type fast is that you can post to /. before you have time to actually RTFA or even stop and think about your comments.
I would rather be in the car with a driver who is somewhat high (vs stoned out of his freakin gourd) then a drunk. But I would avoid either if at all possible. A relative of mine used to smoke pot and felt he would be a better driver stoned than drunk... but he still didn't get behind the wheel if he was either.
Agreed. Take the time to actually calculate the difference and it rarely makes sense to speed... especially if you consider the risks.
I'll admit, there are times when traffic load are high that going the speed limit might put you and others in danger... but that doesn't meen you have to speed by as much as everyone around you.
If it is really that congested and unsafe consider getting off the road. If you can't how about going just a few miles an hour slower than the general traffic. It takes a surprisingly small number of cars doing that before at least the slow lane ends up back down near the posted limits.
Go to the board and explain that you would like to free up $1/4 million for use to pay more teachers and fill other educational needs. (Depending on how many PCs "thousands" are, it could very easilly be that much $.)
This is one reason I get such a kick out of people trying to point out the "costs" of transitioning to OOo. Need more tech staff to do the migration... well a small piece of that $250,000 would easilly pay the yearly salaray of a couple extra techs. Need to do inservices or curriculum training for your teachers? Again... minor expenses compared to what you can save on the licensing. (Remember people... 3000 PCs does NOT equal 3000 teachers to be trained... it's probably more like 900 or less.)
We regularly use OOo as a recovery tool for our MS-Office users. If a user has a corrupt document (PPT, DOC or XLS) the first step is usually to try to open it with OOo. Most times that's all that is needed... open it and re-save it. Then MS Office can once again read the file.
And students aren't going in and out of OOo repeatedly. They go into class or a lab, start it and use it until the end of the class. If they have to spend a whopping 15 seconds out of 53 minutes waiting for it to start it really doesn't matter. (They waste a lot more time than that visiting and chatting with each other each period.)