I keep hearing, and not understanding, the comparisons of Landmark to a cult -- and particularly, comparisons of Landmark to Scientology.
Landmark did push me to sell itself, which was annoying, to say the least. But that's it. I never saw it pretending to be a religion, brainwashing anyone, or doing anything more than any corporation would do today.
If it's really the CPU throttling down, and not stopping entirely, why can't it stay throttled down when it's something simple, like polling? Why does it have to ramp up to full at the drop of a hat? It's not as if that's a new idea -- neither my desktop nor my laptop run at more than 1ghz, most of the time, because it doesn't take the full 2-2.4 to run background tasks.
And as a customer, I'd rather be able to run an SSH server. Maybe it should warn me that my battery is going to hell if I do that, but instead, Apple is protecting me by refusing to let me do that at all.
Seriously, WTF is with this attitude of letting Apple make your decisions for you, and then claiming after the fact that it was a good decision? Why does Apple get to run a background task, but nobody else does -- because Apple are the only ones who understand how to preserve battery life?
That kind of thinking makes me amazed they have a web browser at all. "The Web can show you pornography, bomb-making, and other evil, evil things, so Apple has decided to not let you view any sites other than apple.com." Or maybe even "JavaScript would drain battery life, so we're turning it off, except on apple.com." I'll bet the fanboys would applaud such a decision from Apple.
It's more the fact that Apple has neglected to provide the kind of freedom and flexibility that comes standard on Windows Mobile phones.
Yes, Microsoft is more open than Apple here.
And yes, Apple is getting criticized. Take a deep breath, it'll be OK.
But seriously, if you want us to believe that it was ever intended to be an open platform, why weren't these issues worked out before launch? Why wasn't there an SDK available at launch? And did anyone but you say "Apple is doomed"?
Really? Because I don't remember hearing them about the iPod at all.
Frankly, there's not much you can do with an iPod. It's a music player. It's barely worth mentioning that it even has a CPU.
However, the iPhone is a bit more than just a phone, at least potentially. It's got a bigger screen, it's networked, it's basically crossed the threshold where for many people, it could actually replace a laptop -- if only it would run the apps we want it to run.
If it was just a phone, would you pay $400 for it?
Don't even worry about Quicktime. There's all sorts of open source video players (VLC is the big one, and on Linux there's Xine, mplayer, etc), and they do have browser plugins.
The real problem is Flash -- which seems to be the defacto evolution of the Web, and is quite disturbing. Anything that contains Flash will have to do so with Adobe's help, because Flash is a proprietary plugin. Unless Gnash catches up...
The drivers contain code licensed from third-parties, such that opening the source would require extensive contracts, negotiations, and more licensing.
That's the biggest problem, I think. However, it would suggest that they could open the parts of it which don't touch that code. In any case, they could at least do what ATI is doing and open (most of) the hardware specs, so an open driver can be written.
Modern video cards (and other hardware too, probably) contain a surprising amount of their logic and "acceleration magic" in the driver.
Interesting. But keep in mind, there are about three competing video card companies now. If the techniques are patented, and the code is released under either no license or a sufficiently restrictive one (GPL or LGPL, say), then none of it is going into their competitors' cards. Worst case, some source code gets into the Intel drivers, which are already open, if the license is compatible -- but Intel is hardly a competitor right now, and I'm pretty sure that's due to a lot of support missing in hardware.
Even if it would be illegal, some people would modify and redistribute the code. Hobbyist hackers would alter the code and recompile. This might allow end-users to bypass restrictions on the card, enable other features (effectively upgrade the card by bypassing lockouts), and so on.
That's disgusting that they're forcing unneeded upgrades this way...
But more importantly, I'd think this would give them a competitive edge. If nVidia had a reputation for having cards which last longer, no way I'm going to buy ATI, and vice versa. And people already do this anyway -- some cards are sold as a "weaker" version merely with some pipelines disabled, and I distinctly remember soldering a card to unlock parts of it.
So, hobbyists will do this anyway. They'll also be the first to upgrade, they'll be voiding their warranty anyway, and there's even a chance they'll fry their cards while messing with them. Last I checked, nVidia seems to actually give away the tools to overclock.
Their code, in all likelihood, violates a large number of competitor patents. As long as the violations are buried inside a binary, no one will notice.
That seems unlikely, mostly because patents cover a way of doing something, not a particular implementation. If they are actually violating patents, that should be easy to tell. And there's the argument that once opened, the improvements to that source code may be worth paying patent royalties.
The company may worry about other liabilities that they become exposed to when users and competitors can peruse the codebase.
Like what? I think you've covered pretty much all of them.
I can tell you that the first video card with an open Linux driver capable of competing with ATI or nVidia has me as a loyal customer for a long time. Right now, it looks like ATI is ahead, but there's always the threat that Intel will actually make some competitive hardware.
I think the main reason is that most Linux drivers either make it into the kernel eventually, and are thus maintained by kernel developers -- and are thus at least as reliable as Linux itself -- or they become entirely userspace, which is both easier to write and less likely to take down the entire system with them.
It's worth mentioning that the most unreliable drivers on my system are the nVidia drivers, which are neither -- they are in the kernel, but they're maintained by nVidia; kernel people don't even get to read the source code.
Web 2.0 was a single name for an amorphous collection of technologies and philosophies. It was even worse than AJAX.
Parallelism is a pretty simple, well-defined problem, and an old one. That doesn't mean it can't turn into a buzzword, but I'm not convinced Web 2.0 can be anything but a buzzword.
It looks to me more like progress is completely stalled.
I mean, yes, there are all kinds of solutions. Most of them are completely unused, and we're back to threads and locks. Nothing's going to be perfect, but I'll buy the "no silver bullet" when we actually have wide adoption of anything -- even multiple things -- other than threads and locks.
Can we invent a new term for sites like these? "Web-based" is misleading -- it makes you think of open standards and compatibility. I propose "Flash-based."
That is: Either give your users truly unlimited service, or cap that at some value, in units we understand.
See, Comcast did ban people at one point for using "too much" bandwidth. They eventually did clarify what "too much" was -- it was a certain number of songs, photos, videos, or emails (different numbers for each). In other words, it was in units of "whatever the fuck we feel like."
You, like many others, are making the mistake of confusing BitTorrent, the protocol, with BitTorrent, Inc.
Comcast is making some sort of deal with the company, hoping people will assume they're playing nice with the protocol. And yes, the company can sell out -- but the protocol can't. Nothing BitTorrent, Inc. can do will make a dent in The Pirate Bay, other than Comcast being nice to BT Inc's torrents, and still throttling TPB torrents.
If I understand it, it's worse than the RIAA giving away MP3s, as that implies that the user deliberately downloaded something, whereas this is part of an automatic update.
I've got a typing style that I'm not sure I've seen duplicated anywhere. It might be due to dvorak, but I suspect it's just a habit learned... I tend to slide my fingers between keys, especially when I need to hit two keys, one right after the other, with the same finger.
Example: Take the word "right" -- or really anything with a 'ght' ending. That involves pressing (on a QWERTY keyboard) the u, j, and k keys, in that order. I tend to press that 'u' key, then my finger slides down to the 'j' key, then my other finger hits 'k'.
Thus, while I do tend to like low-rise, light-touch keyboards (if that makes sense), I do need that feedback. And it might even be difficult to detect such keystrokes properly, let alone make them feel right.
Unbridled "freedom of speech" is not the way to "challenge" liars. By your logic, the way to deal with robbers is to let them steal ALL your shit;
Nope. By that logic, the way to deal with robbers is to steal your shit right back.
while you "tut-tut" them and say "see - I don't do that because I'm a bette person - follow my example!"
Actually, no, the way you use freedom of speech to your advantage is, you throw together a good counterargument. Like I'm doing now.
And no, there are NOT more fundies than there are non-believers.
There are more Christians than there are non-believers. There are also more Muslims than there are non-believers.
Heck, most priests and pastors have never read the whole bible. Want to really piss off a "true believer?" Learn their book, cover to cover, and quote it back at them...
I've been working on it. Makes for great entertainment. "Did you know your God has ordered the Israelites into genocide and rape?"
Anything else is giving your tacit approval by being silent.
Acceptance is not the same as approval.
But again -- notice what you did there. You talked to them. Sure, some of it was literally talking out of your ass, but you exercised your own freedom of counter-speech against their abuse of speech.
Maybe they should have put those up for ISO standardisation.
Because a format designed to be blitted in the days of Windows 3.1 is a great candidate for interoperability and durability! Can I have some of what you're smoking?
"Microsoft irrevocably promises not to assert any Microsoft Necessary Claims against you for making, using, selling, offering for sale, importing or distributing any implementation to the extent it conforms to a Covered Specification"
How well does that hold up, legally? Especially the part about "Microsoft Necessary Claims".
The law only covers the file format you send to the outside world and you can export to it using a converter. I seriously doubt many goverments are going to ban people using.doc internally. Maybe you can get the governments to force people to use your favourite OS and text editor too.
Funny you should mention it -- see, open standards are about forcing people to be able to use whatever OS or editor they want.
And if you can export to it using a converter, then why not write an OOXML->ODF converter and be done with it? You don't exactly need a rubber-stamped OOXML for that to work. Hell, if Microsoft had done this right, there would be a "save as ODT" option in Word! Think of that!
I hope you don't use USB mass storage devices, since that's another de facto standard that's a lot less documented than OOXML. Maybe the FSF should make
Make what?
Free Software Foundation. USB is not software.
Oh, and there is a competing standard -- FireWire -- and there's the ad-hominim -- whether I use something is irrelevant to the discussion of whether it should be considered a standard. Once again -- If USB mass storage devices are truly a de-facto standard, and not a certified standard, then they are no better off than OOXML is, right now. Why do you feel the need to get it certified?
You forgot "Requires Internet access, all the time."
And while searching through all books might be nice, I generally know which book I want to be looking in, if Google isn't helping. And within one PDF, KPDF's search, at least, is far better than Safari's.
My response to all the people who claim what a "problem" the design of WoW is and how much better their pet game is is the same one another poster made in this thread: 10 million users. They are doing something right.
That is an old argument, and not a particularly good one. That they are doing something right doesn't say anything about what they're doing wrong.
Look at MySpace. Tour dates have been broken on band MySpace pages for over a week now, going on two weeks. It seems like every attempted fix just breaks them in different ways -- I suppose MySpace is running a developmestruction environment, because I honestly can't imagine how it would be taking them weeks to fix this feature, let alone why they can't test it all in some staging environment before they screw up the live site.
Yet MySpace is hugely successful. There are better alternatives, yet MySpace still wins out of sheer network effect. The lock-in is worse than Windows -- if you go off MySpace, you lose your MySpace messages, your MySpace friends, everything. The same is true of WoW -- all your epic crap, and your character, and all your in-game friends, skills you've developed (both you and your character) go away if you switch to another game.
I haven't played nearly enough WoW to appreciate what problems there are (or aren't) with it, but merely pointing to the number of users proves nothing.
I'll gladly pay as much for a simple, un-DRM'd PDF as I would for a physical book.
What I don't like is this 45 days free access to some HTML/Javascript monstrosity intended to allow you to read the book (in a standard web browser, no less) without downloading it. And then they have the gall to offer you PDF downloads of a few chapters every month you're subscribed -- yeah, I'll finish the book in less than a month, so that's way too slow, and the single gigantic PDF I pirated was easier to manage and search through.
I'll take the Pragmatic Programmer approach over this any day...
Here's how it works instead, now: The company buys the book, often a hardcopy if there's no decent electronic version. Then we go out and find a PDF version to pirate and share on the local network. It's a small company; it's not as if all of us are going to be trying to read the book at once, but it's much better to simply search through a PDF than to have to go read the index...
There are two ways this can happen. One is that it stays totally undocumented and patent encumbered like the old Office binary format, which is still only fully supported by MS Office. The other is that they publish a standard and get the ISO stamp of approval. That means they publish a specification and allow other people to re implement it without fear of a lawsuit.
How would it not still be patent encumbered?
Well, except that it apparently isn't. The document you pointed to talks about Ecma standardization, not ISO standardization.
Also, I find it disgusting that you, like Microsoft, still seem to think that it's OK to just rubber-stamp something through as part of a means to an end.
The whole Government thing is bogus too. If they kept OOXML proprietary but convenient and provided inconvenient ODF support they can still end up with most people using OOXML.
Unless, y'know, they were required by law to use an open standard? Maybe an ISO standard? Maybe it would allow Ecma too, in which case, you've already got what you want.
Actually, legislation is forcing some government offices to publish documents in open standards. If Microsoft gets to pretend OOXML is an open standard, it's very likely I'll be required (by law, even) to deal with a document in that format.
the fact that you don't like doesn't mean it shouldn't be a standard.
Maybe you're not familiar with BF.
It's not a question of whether I, personally, like it. It's a question of whether it meets the requirements -- and of whether it serves any purpose, when there's already a perfectly legitimate standard out there (OpenDocument).
They have documented it, so it is no longer a trade secret.
Show me where LineSpacingLikeWord95 is documented.
That seems to be what OOXML is doing.
In what way is the actual semantics of LineSpacingLikeWord95 stored in the document?
Oh wait, it's not. Instead, the document just contains a tag called "LineSpacingLikeWord95", and you're expected to know what that means.
The upside to them publishing a standard is that you get some idea of how this stuff works.
Yes, we've gotten that idea. Can they stop pretending it's a standard, though?
If you were writing converters to and from some other format, that's kind of useful, even if it's hard to see what justifyLikeWordPerfect1980 or whatever does. But so what? Just keep the attribute associated with the paragraph and write it into the OOXML file when you save.
In other words, there's going to be some hidden property of a paragraph, that the user can't see in your app, because you don't know WTF it does. But there'll be a nice big surprise when it goes back to MS Office. That, or people will refuse to use your product, because it can't handle their legacy crap properly.
Or peek at MS Office and see how it reacts to it.
In other words, any competing product at least requires that people reverse-engineer MS Office. The whole point of publishing these specs are so people don't have to reverse-engineer them.
The alternative is that you sabotage the standard and they have absolutely no incentive of documenting anything, which seems far worse.
The alternative to what? Letting the standard through because it's Microsoft? Please tell me that's not what you're suggesting, because I thought standards bodies were supposed to consider the technical merits of a standard, not who wrote it.
Oh, and it might give them an incentive of maybe, y'know, supporting ODF, the real standard.
I'd much rather have a few probably unused corner cases I can't support, like justifyLikeWordPerfect1980 rather than a completely undocumented format which is the current case with MS Office.
Except it's been pretty much fully documented, including old binary versions. Do you think they'll take all that back if it doesn't become a standard?
Seriously nagging them for ages about publishing a spec and then complaining that it's full of MS Officeisms just seems pointless politicking to me, especially as 90% of users won't even understand why that's bad.
Let me make this as simple as I can: Publishing spec good, fucking up standards process bad.
Let them publish a spec, but it should not be a standard. If they want to clean it up to the point where it's complete, maybe -- and then there's still the problem where it's over ten times the size of the ODF spec now, and "cleaning it up" would likely grow it.
Your argument seems to be roughly equivalent to: "Yes, he turned in a truly pathetic homework assignment, but please give him an A -- otherwise, you'll just discourage him. He might never do homework again if you don't give him an A this time!"
On the other hand, I really don't like the idea of whitehouse.gov becoming a government-run myspace which encourages people to give the government even more personal information about themselves.
He's talking about doing basically the opposite of what you (and others) seem to be assuming. And it is one of the cooler ideas I have seen in awhile -- one which none of the other candidates seem to have caught on to.
Slashdot Mirror
I keep hearing, and not understanding, the comparisons of Landmark to a cult -- and particularly, comparisons of Landmark to Scientology.
Landmark did push me to sell itself, which was annoying, to say the least. But that's it. I never saw it pretending to be a religion, brainwashing anyone, or doing anything more than any corporation would do today.
But please, tell me. I'm listening.
Alright, here's a question:
If it's really the CPU throttling down, and not stopping entirely, why can't it stay throttled down when it's something simple, like polling? Why does it have to ramp up to full at the drop of a hat? It's not as if that's a new idea -- neither my desktop nor my laptop run at more than 1ghz, most of the time, because it doesn't take the full 2-2.4 to run background tasks.
And as a customer, I'd rather be able to run an SSH server. Maybe it should warn me that my battery is going to hell if I do that, but instead, Apple is protecting me by refusing to let me do that at all.
Seriously, WTF is with this attitude of letting Apple make your decisions for you, and then claiming after the fact that it was a good decision? Why does Apple get to run a background task, but nobody else does -- because Apple are the only ones who understand how to preserve battery life?
That kind of thinking makes me amazed they have a web browser at all. "The Web can show you pornography, bomb-making, and other evil, evil things, so Apple has decided to not let you view any sites other than apple.com." Or maybe even "JavaScript would drain battery life, so we're turning it off, except on apple.com." I'll bet the fanboys would applaud such a decision from Apple.
It's more the fact that Apple has neglected to provide the kind of freedom and flexibility that comes standard on Windows Mobile phones.
Yes, Microsoft is more open than Apple here.
And yes, Apple is getting criticized. Take a deep breath, it'll be OK.
But seriously, if you want us to believe that it was ever intended to be an open platform, why weren't these issues worked out before launch? Why wasn't there an SDK available at launch? And did anyone but you say "Apple is doomed"?
Really? Because I don't remember hearing them about the iPod at all.
Frankly, there's not much you can do with an iPod. It's a music player. It's barely worth mentioning that it even has a CPU.
However, the iPhone is a bit more than just a phone, at least potentially. It's got a bigger screen, it's networked, it's basically crossed the threshold where for many people, it could actually replace a laptop -- if only it would run the apps we want it to run.
If it was just a phone, would you pay $400 for it?
Don't even worry about Quicktime. There's all sorts of open source video players (VLC is the big one, and on Linux there's Xine, mplayer, etc), and they do have browser plugins.
The real problem is Flash -- which seems to be the defacto evolution of the Web, and is quite disturbing. Anything that contains Flash will have to do so with Adobe's help, because Flash is a proprietary plugin. Unless Gnash catches up...
That's the biggest problem, I think. However, it would suggest that they could open the parts of it which don't touch that code. In any case, they could at least do what ATI is doing and open (most of) the hardware specs, so an open driver can be written.
Interesting. But keep in mind, there are about three competing video card companies now. If the techniques are patented, and the code is released under either no license or a sufficiently restrictive one (GPL or LGPL, say), then none of it is going into their competitors' cards. Worst case, some source code gets into the Intel drivers, which are already open, if the license is compatible -- but Intel is hardly a competitor right now, and I'm pretty sure that's due to a lot of support missing in hardware.
That's disgusting that they're forcing unneeded upgrades this way...
But more importantly, I'd think this would give them a competitive edge. If nVidia had a reputation for having cards which last longer, no way I'm going to buy ATI, and vice versa. And people already do this anyway -- some cards are sold as a "weaker" version merely with some pipelines disabled, and I distinctly remember soldering a card to unlock parts of it.
So, hobbyists will do this anyway. They'll also be the first to upgrade, they'll be voiding their warranty anyway, and there's even a chance they'll fry their cards while messing with them. Last I checked, nVidia seems to actually give away the tools to overclock.
That seems unlikely, mostly because patents cover a way of doing something, not a particular implementation. If they are actually violating patents, that should be easy to tell. And there's the argument that once opened, the improvements to that source code may be worth paying patent royalties.
Like what? I think you've covered pretty much all of them.
I can tell you that the first video card with an open Linux driver capable of competing with ATI or nVidia has me as a loyal customer for a long time. Right now, it looks like ATI is ahead, but there's always the threat that Intel will actually make some competitive hardware.
I think the main reason is that most Linux drivers either make it into the kernel eventually, and are thus maintained by kernel developers -- and are thus at least as reliable as Linux itself -- or they become entirely userspace, which is both easier to write and less likely to take down the entire system with them.
It's worth mentioning that the most unreliable drivers on my system are the nVidia drivers, which are neither -- they are in the kernel, but they're maintained by nVidia; kernel people don't even get to read the source code.
Oh, now that's not entirely fair.
Web 2.0 was a single name for an amorphous collection of technologies and philosophies. It was even worse than AJAX.
Parallelism is a pretty simple, well-defined problem, and an old one. That doesn't mean it can't turn into a buzzword, but I'm not convinced Web 2.0 can be anything but a buzzword.
It looks to me more like progress is completely stalled.
I mean, yes, there are all kinds of solutions. Most of them are completely unused, and we're back to threads and locks. Nothing's going to be perfect, but I'll buy the "no silver bullet" when we actually have wide adoption of anything -- even multiple things -- other than threads and locks.
Well, I can't. Cartman says "Get flash, you stupid hippie!"
From TFS:
Except, of course, operating systems or browsers which don't have flash...
Can we invent a new term for sites like these? "Web-based" is misleading -- it makes you think of open standards and compatibility. I propose "Flash-based."
Full disclosure of bandwidth limits.
That is: Either give your users truly unlimited service, or cap that at some value, in units we understand.
See, Comcast did ban people at one point for using "too much" bandwidth. They eventually did clarify what "too much" was -- it was a certain number of songs, photos, videos, or emails (different numbers for each). In other words, it was in units of "whatever the fuck we feel like."
You, like many others, are making the mistake of confusing BitTorrent, the protocol, with BitTorrent, Inc.
Comcast is making some sort of deal with the company, hoping people will assume they're playing nice with the protocol. And yes, the company can sell out -- but the protocol can't. Nothing BitTorrent, Inc. can do will make a dent in The Pirate Bay, other than Comcast being nice to BT Inc's torrents, and still throttling TPB torrents.
You were modded funny, and I assume you were being sarcastic, but actually, the test is designed to make current browsers fail (not just IE).
If I understand it, it's worse than the RIAA giving away MP3s, as that implies that the user deliberately downloaded something, whereas this is part of an automatic update.
I've got a typing style that I'm not sure I've seen duplicated anywhere. It might be due to dvorak, but I suspect it's just a habit learned... I tend to slide my fingers between keys, especially when I need to hit two keys, one right after the other, with the same finger.
Example: Take the word "right" -- or really anything with a 'ght' ending. That involves pressing (on a QWERTY keyboard) the u, j, and k keys, in that order. I tend to press that 'u' key, then my finger slides down to the 'j' key, then my other finger hits 'k'.
Thus, while I do tend to like low-rise, light-touch keyboards (if that makes sense), I do need that feedback. And it might even be difficult to detect such keystrokes properly, let alone make them feel right.
Nope. By that logic, the way to deal with robbers is to steal your shit right back.
Actually, no, the way you use freedom of speech to your advantage is, you throw together a good counterargument. Like I'm doing now.
There are more Christians than there are non-believers. There are also more Muslims than there are non-believers.
I've been working on it. Makes for great entertainment. "Did you know your God has ordered the Israelites into genocide and rape?"
Acceptance is not the same as approval.
But again -- notice what you did there. You talked to them. Sure, some of it was literally talking out of your ass, but you exercised your own freedom of counter-speech against their abuse of speech.
Because a format designed to be blitted in the days of Windows 3.1 is a great candidate for interoperability and durability! Can I have some of what you're smoking?
How well does that hold up, legally? Especially the part about "Microsoft Necessary Claims".
Funny you should mention it -- see, open standards are about forcing people to be able to use whatever OS or editor they want.
And if you can export to it using a converter, then why not write an OOXML->ODF converter and be done with it? You don't exactly need a rubber-stamped OOXML for that to work. Hell, if Microsoft had done this right, there would be a "save as ODT" option in Word! Think of that!
Make what?
Free Software Foundation. USB is not software.
Oh, and there is a competing standard -- FireWire -- and there's the ad-hominim -- whether I use something is irrelevant to the discussion of whether it should be considered a standard. Once again -- If USB mass storage devices are truly a de-facto standard, and not a certified standard, then they are no better off than OOXML is, right now. Why do you feel the need to get it certified?
You forgot "Requires Internet access, all the time."
And while searching through all books might be nice, I generally know which book I want to be looking in, if Google isn't helping. And within one PDF, KPDF's search, at least, is far better than Safari's.
And then there's Safari, whose rendering engine is open source. I don't think it has anything to do with closed source.
That is an old argument, and not a particularly good one. That they are doing something right doesn't say anything about what they're doing wrong.
Look at MySpace. Tour dates have been broken on band MySpace pages for over a week now, going on two weeks. It seems like every attempted fix just breaks them in different ways -- I suppose MySpace is running a developmestruction environment, because I honestly can't imagine how it would be taking them weeks to fix this feature, let alone why they can't test it all in some staging environment before they screw up the live site.
Yet MySpace is hugely successful. There are better alternatives, yet MySpace still wins out of sheer network effect. The lock-in is worse than Windows -- if you go off MySpace, you lose your MySpace messages, your MySpace friends, everything. The same is true of WoW -- all your epic crap, and your character, and all your in-game friends, skills you've developed (both you and your character) go away if you switch to another game.
I haven't played nearly enough WoW to appreciate what problems there are (or aren't) with it, but merely pointing to the number of users proves nothing.
I'll gladly pay as much for a simple, un-DRM'd PDF as I would for a physical book.
What I don't like is this 45 days free access to some HTML/Javascript monstrosity intended to allow you to read the book (in a standard web browser, no less) without downloading it. And then they have the gall to offer you PDF downloads of a few chapters every month you're subscribed -- yeah, I'll finish the book in less than a month, so that's way too slow, and the single gigantic PDF I pirated was easier to manage and search through.
I'll take the Pragmatic Programmer approach over this any day...
Here's how it works instead, now: The company buys the book, often a hardcopy if there's no decent electronic version. Then we go out and find a PDF version to pirate and share on the local network. It's a small company; it's not as if all of us are going to be trying to read the book at once, but it's much better to simply search through a PDF than to have to go read the index...
Bullshit.
How would it not still be patent encumbered?
Well, except that it apparently isn't. The document you pointed to talks about Ecma standardization, not ISO standardization.
Also, I find it disgusting that you, like Microsoft, still seem to think that it's OK to just rubber-stamp something through as part of a means to an end.
Unless, y'know, they were required by law to use an open standard? Maybe an ISO standard? Maybe it would allow Ecma too, in which case, you've already got what you want.
Actually, legislation is forcing some government offices to publish documents in open standards. If Microsoft gets to pretend OOXML is an open standard, it's very likely I'll be required (by law, even) to deal with a document in that format.
Maybe you're not familiar with BF.
It's not a question of whether I, personally, like it. It's a question of whether it meets the requirements -- and of whether it serves any purpose, when there's already a perfectly legitimate standard out there (OpenDocument).
Show me where LineSpacingLikeWord95 is documented.
In what way is the actual semantics of LineSpacingLikeWord95 stored in the document?
Oh wait, it's not. Instead, the document just contains a tag called "LineSpacingLikeWord95", and you're expected to know what that means.
Yes, we've gotten that idea. Can they stop pretending it's a standard, though?
In other words, there's going to be some hidden property of a paragraph, that the user can't see in your app, because you don't know WTF it does. But there'll be a nice big surprise when it goes back to MS Office. That, or people will refuse to use your product, because it can't handle their legacy crap properly.
In other words, any competing product at least requires that people reverse-engineer MS Office. The whole point of publishing these specs are so people don't have to reverse-engineer them.
The alternative to what? Letting the standard through because it's Microsoft? Please tell me that's not what you're suggesting, because I thought standards bodies were supposed to consider the technical merits of a standard, not who wrote it.
Oh, and it might give them an incentive of maybe, y'know, supporting ODF, the real standard.
Except it's been pretty much fully documented, including old binary versions. Do you think they'll take all that back if it doesn't become a standard?
Let me make this as simple as I can: Publishing spec good, fucking up standards process bad.
Let them publish a spec, but it should not be a standard. If they want to clean it up to the point where it's complete, maybe -- and then there's still the problem where it's over ten times the size of the ODF spec now, and "cleaning it up" would likely grow it.
Your argument seems to be roughly equivalent to: "Yes, he turned in a truly pathetic homework assignment, but please give him an A -- otherwise, you'll just discourage him. He might never do homework again if you don't give him an A this time!"
How about one which encourages government officials to give people information about themselves?
He's talking about doing basically the opposite of what you (and others) seem to be assuming. And it is one of the cooler ideas I have seen in awhile -- one which none of the other candidates seem to have caught on to.