You can use batteries or hydrogen fuel cells (or both) for storage, but a fuel cell is not a battery.
Then again, it is probably reasonable to call a collection of fuel cells a battery for the same reason that 'battery' is really short for 'battery of galvanic cells.'
But then, the hydrogen you make and store still wouldn't be the battery any more than the gasoline you put in your car is the engine.
I hated Waking Life, too. But then the bong made it around to me, and a few minutes later, I realized why everyone liked it so much.
But then I tried to show it to someone else. There was no bong this time. I quickly apologized for ever suggesting the movie, and we both agreed to watch the Disney Channel because it's more mentally stimulating.
If the GIS data in question is anything like the stuff I work with, there is absolutely no information that I can think of which a)is useful to terrorists b)couldn't be easily discovered with a quick drive around the neighborhood. Information about bridge architecture, maybe, but not much else.
This 'terrorism' straw man is getting ridiculous - it's encouraging government offices to keep things a secret just because they want to. Granted, if you're running a government office, this is probably a good idea. I won't name names, but I can say that there are states with D.O.T.s out there with records that are inexcusably inaccurate or horribly out of date (cue '40s radio drama organ because everyone is surprised). Being beauraucracies, the natural solution to this kind of situation is to keep anyone from finding the problem by limiting flow of information as much as possible rather than to simply fix the problem.
Of course, doing this requires that you start keeping as many secrets as possible - you see, if the American public ever found out how terrorists actually operate, they would realize that all of thse terrorism-related justifications for huge wastes of money, freedom, integrity, and time are just one huge bullshit excuse, and the whole thing would come tumbling down. We can't have that, because then every government official from the lowest county clerk all the way up to George "Paid Vacation" Bush would have to actually put time into carefully considering policy decisions and competently piloting the areas they govern rather than smoking rock and blaming hippies and muslims for their mistakes like they do now.
--
Politics: coming from the Latin roots 'poly', meaning many, and 'tics', meaning small blood sucking parasites.
Apparently. Especially since two of the items on their list are on the market right now - GT4 just came out in Japan, and TivoToGo has been out since the beginning of this week.
Last I checked, the entire crew is composed of full time maintenance people. Aren't they spending only a couple hours a day conducting actual experiments?
No, this would be lock-in if the iPod suddenly got a firmware update that only allowed it to play music from iTMS or that was encoded in AAC using iTunes.
If it is the only one that runs on a Mac, that just means that Apple is the only vendor who felt it was worthwhile to make their MP3 player work on a Mac. Really, Mac users should be rather used to having only one choice for a particular device or application - it happens often enough. (AirPort, anyone?)
Of course, if it were the only one that ran on a Mac because Apple was deliberately breaking compatibility with competitors' products, that would be lock-in.
Irony would also be NPR distributing the report on the last plant that produces professional reel-to-reel audio tape on professional reel-to-reel audio tape, because they always do, because it is still in common use or because it has just experienced a resurgence in popularity or something.
But they don't. Because barely anybody uses it anymore. Because we've all gone to either digital or higher quality analog media. Which is why nobody is making the stuff anymore.
--
Next time on Slashdot: People talking about what a deus ex machina it is that Hamm's Light tastes like aged butt.
Here in the US, it's the same story. A lot of people have heard of Firefox, but most people I know are sticking with IE for a variety of reasons such as sloth and a general uncomfortableness about installing new software on their computer.
(Unless it it involves a purple gorilla or something like that. I _really_ don't understand this, but I have a feeling that hidden somewhere in the amazing pervasiveness of spyware - despite all the privacy and spam memes floating around the Net - is the secret to OSS on the desktop.)
Anyway, I think the best way to get people using Firefox is to convince PC manufacturers (Dell being the Holy Grail) to bundle Firefox on their new PCs, with a nice link to it on the desktop or something like that. It would think that, considering all the useless crap they _pay_ to bundle with their compuers, they would love to be able to bundle a buzzword for free.
If you fear that teaching your kids Flash leaves them too many chances to stray from nice safe animutations to actually doing something useful (I'm being sarcastic here), another thing you could try is one of the many programming games that are out there.
Free ones like GNU Robots and Core Wars are a good no-cost option, but I imagine that with their lack of flashy graphics, they would fail to capture the interest of most kids nowadays. I would suggest instead tracking down Mind Rover (out for both PC and Mac), or an obscure Playstation game called Carnage Heart.
Both feature a drag-and-drop approach to programming. In Mind Rover, this is done via a flowchart, and you program the robots to do just about anything there has ever been a competition to pogram robots to do except soccer. (blow out a candle, battle to the death, etc.)
Carnage Heart, on the other hand, is really a turn-based strategy game with mechanics reminiscent of Axis & Allies or Risk. I personally prefer the way its programming is done, though, simply because the programming is very grid-based - strict 2D control flow with absolutely no subroutines or GOTOs. This limitation means it isn't going to take a kid very far towards learning to use modern programming languages, but it turns the game into a very interesting mental exercise as you work out nifty tricks for packing as much logic as you can into a rectangle that can only hold 10x10 instruction units.
In the early '90s, when I was dialing into BBSes, my downloads generally took an hour, sometimes as many as four or five hours. Nowadays, with my cable modem, downloads still generally take an hour, sometimes as many as four or five hours. You're right that the bandwidth has increased a whole lot over the past few decades, but the amount of bandwidth we consume to get pretty much the same thing (more pictures, higher resolutions, same content) has kept pace.
As far as interacting with computers over a network, it seems that our bandwidth consumption is actually increasing faster than the amount of available bandwidth. In the early '90s, I was logging into remote systems using text terminal software, and it was pretty snappy. In the late '90s, I started using X11 pretty regularly, and it was a bit slower (despite increasing bandwidth by a factor of 40). Nowadays, most OSes give you beasts along the lines of Terminal Services and VNC for your remote use pleasure, and it's even slower yet.
When I'm connected to the remote machine with a 10baseT connection using terminal services, things are a bit slow. Move off the network and use a cable modem or DSL connection (1/10 the bandwidth, depending, and a lot more latency), and it's not the way I prefer to work from day to day, to say the least. Put me in camp with the majority of the world with a dialup connection, and it'd be impossible to get anything done.
Not to mention that nobody with a laptop wants to end up unable to use their computer while on an airplane or generally away from their ISP. Heck, let's say they can still get to their ISP, anyway - there's still the issue of the speed of light making it impossible to keep the service snappy once you get far enough from home (as business travelers are wont to do), and we've still got a huge problem.
Even if we pause for the moment to agree that "the network is the computer" wasn't an idea that belongs with the ranks of "helicopters will replace cars" and "Dyson sphere," you still have to jump over the bandwidth hurdle (which is taller than you think, and growing), the latency hurdle (which Einstein says you can't jump without leaving some very important and wealthy and above all necessary friends behind), and the "the vast majority of computer users still aren't connected to a network all the time" hurdle.
I think what the parent is suggesting is that if you have a choice between having your net income be -2% of your remaining assets and having it be -1% of your remaining assets, you damn well better take the -1% option.
How can you honestly tell your investors, "We've hit some hard times so we're just going to give the fuck up. So long, and thanks for all the cash" when you could have sold your seats at a loss and tried to bring the company back?
The study found that kids who watched TV were indeed more aggressive than kids who didn't.
What I meant to say is, the study found that kids who watched violent TV were more aggressive than kids who didn't watch TV at all.
Re:News flash: people are impressionable
on
GTA Blamed for Graffiti
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· Score: 3, Insightful
Sadly, I don't have a reference to give you about this as the moment, but I do remember reading about a psychological study where kids were separated into a group that was allowed to watch violent TV, a group that was only allowed to watch children's education programming, and a group that was not allowed to watch TV at all.
The study found that kids who watched TV were indeed more aggressive than kids who didn't. They also found that kids who watched Sesame Street were just as aggressive as the violent TV group.
I don't know if there have been any follow-up studies, but this seems to me to be a very big clue that the problem isn't strictly violence on television, but instead that there's something inherent in the mass media that goes much deeper than violence that is harming people's (or at least children's) socialization.
Just another of the little tidbits that leads me to believe that the reason why we've separated into two camps - one screaming about violent TV and video games and the other screaming about crappy parents - is that nobody really wants to admit that both of these are just symptoms of the core problem. Namely, our entire crappy, violent culture.
There is no law saying minors can't see or play mature games or movies. There may be laws in some areas (mostly municipalities at this point) saying that mature games or movies can't be sold or rented to minors, but I don't think those laws really matter since most the time when I see video games being bought for 12 year olds, the person horking up the cash is the parent, not the kid.
Right, but I'm not sure anyone has really succeeded in building a business based on selling the software itself under the GPL. There are certainly companies that have sold the software but really make their money ons support contracts (Red Hat), and companies that are making money by dual-licensing the code (MySQL), but the GPL makes the software itself incompatible with the usual 'sell-the-software-for-profit" model.
Freeware and Free Software are two very different things. The standard similies are "free as in beer" vs. "free as in freedom."
As it stands, Free Software refers to software that is distributed under a GPL-like license, but I think that this is a poor definition. I have seen BSD projects that I would consider much more free than many GPL projects, and I'm sure there are folks out there who think that the GPL's restrictions with respect to redistribution and linking constitute restrictions on freedom.
Of course, I think when RMS says "freedom" he means, "freedom from capitalism." I also think that that definition has been demonstrated to be moot by groups like MySQL AB and TrollTech.
I saved myself a whole bunch of money and bought some in-ear headphones that use foam earplugs to block out noise.
Mine is a pair of Koss The Plug headphones. Honestly, they're not very good by themselves, because the foam earplugs that come with them are very poor - it's impossible to get a good seal with them. I replaced them with a pair of my own earplugs modified with a hole through the middle (for the 'acoustic tube' that channels the sound into your ear). With that one change, they become a decent pair of headphones. The sound is still weak comparied to some professional in-ear headphones that you can get for 10-20 times as much money, but they are better than your standard earbud.
But on the upside, they also block out background noise much better than my friend's Bose noise canceling headphones that also cost 10-20 times as much money.
If Java is not slow, then how come every Java app I use at work just frickin' CRAWLS compared to similar software written in native code, and generally takes up at least twice as much RAM to boot?
My real world example for showing why I don't like Java at work: Step 1: Start up Excel. Load about 20 massive spreadsheets. Also start up Safari and Firefox. And get some MP3s playing on iTunes. And start XCode and tell it to start compiling the app I've been working on. Go back to Excel, and start futzing with the spreadsheets. Did I mention that those spreadsheets have multiple worksheets and cascades of formulas all over the place? Anyway, notice how the computer is slowing down, but it's not ready to die or anything.
Step 2: Quit EVERYTHING. Load up the Java PDF viewer whose name escapes me because I got rid of it a couple months ago. Watch the program take about 40 seconds to load. Open a 20-page PDF file, watch it take even longer to display. Listen to the hard drive make a bunch of unholy noise the whole time. When it comes up, scroll the PDF. While it's struggling to draw the next page, try clicking on the Finder and see if a Finder window comes up anytime soon.
Yeah, I've heard that the OS X JVM is slow. I think that it's still a hit against Java, because the only strong reason I can think of to use Java for things other than applets is its platform-independence. For that to be a good argument, Java has to be viable on a whole host of platforms, not just Windows and (I assume), Solaris. So if you want multiple platforms, Java is slow because it sucks on most platforms, and if you only want one platform, Java is slow because you might as well be writing native code.
=P count me out. Having to look away from the TV, take a hand off the controller, take the stylus out of its silo, look at the touchscreen, tap on it a few times, put the stylus back in the silo, put the hand back in its original position, and look back at the T.V. is way too disruptive to maintain any sort of immersion.
When I play RPGs and tactics games, I want to be thinking about nothing but what's happening on the T.V. screen and whether or not I'm eating too many Doritos.
On the A and B buttons: Maybe it's that the only Nintendo systems I have ever owned are the original cream-of-spinach Game Boy and the GBA, but I'm not exactly mourning the loss of these two letters as button names. Am I missing something here?
On the D-pad: Fine with me, as long as every single game on the next-gen system is a 3D platform jumper or shooter, and not a single puzzle game or RPG with lots of menus or what have you comes out. I was only content with the loss of the paddle controller after they quit making games like Arkanoid.
Why not set up an OSS code signing system? Set up a plugin for the browser (or a standalone app) that contacts a server with a set of MD5 sums for various known filenames. With the big complicated OSS filenames being the standard, we shouldn't find too many conflicts for the name, "frobnitz-stable-0.4-RC1.tar.bz2." Make it a secure connection, and we can even one-up VeriSign by having the sytem pop up known security flaws for the software you just downloaded.
If I'm going to go through all the trouble of putting a payload in FireFox and then masquerading it as the real McCoy, it's not really any extra effort (at all) for me to take out the checksum phase of the install, or to fake it.
Slashdot Mirror
You can use batteries or hydrogen fuel cells (or both) for storage, but a fuel cell is not a battery.
Then again, it is probably reasonable to call a collection of fuel cells a battery for the same reason that 'battery' is really short for 'battery of galvanic cells.'
But then, the hydrogen you make and store still wouldn't be the battery any more than the gasoline you put in your car is the engine.
I hated Waking Life, too. But then the bong made it around to me, and a few minutes later, I realized why everyone liked it so much.
But then I tried to show it to someone else. There was no bong this time. I quickly apologized for ever suggesting the movie, and we both agreed to watch the Disney Channel because it's more mentally stimulating.
If the GIS data in question is anything like the stuff I work with, there is absolutely no information that I can think of which a)is useful to terrorists b)couldn't be easily discovered with a quick drive around the neighborhood. Information about bridge architecture, maybe, but not much else.
This 'terrorism' straw man is getting ridiculous - it's encouraging government offices to keep things a secret just because they want to. Granted, if you're running a government office, this is probably a good idea. I won't name names, but I can say that there are states with D.O.T.s out there with records that are inexcusably inaccurate or horribly out of date (cue '40s radio drama organ because everyone is surprised). Being beauraucracies, the natural solution to this kind of situation is to keep anyone from finding the problem by limiting flow of information as much as possible rather than to simply fix the problem.
Of course, doing this requires that you start keeping as many secrets as possible - you see, if the American public ever found out how terrorists actually operate, they would realize that all of thse terrorism-related justifications for huge wastes of money, freedom, integrity, and time are just one huge bullshit excuse, and the whole thing would come tumbling down. We can't have that, because then every government official from the lowest county clerk all the way up to George "Paid Vacation" Bush would have to actually put time into carefully considering policy decisions and competently piloting the areas they govern rather than smoking rock and blaming hippies and muslims for their mistakes like they do now.
--
Politics: coming from the Latin roots 'poly', meaning many, and 'tics', meaning small blood sucking parasites.
Apparently. Especially since two of the items on their list are on the market right now - GT4 just came out in Japan, and TivoToGo has been out since the beginning of this week.
Last I checked, the entire crew is composed of full time maintenance people. Aren't they spending only a couple hours a day conducting actual experiments?
(To the first example, I agree with the second)
No, this would be lock-in if the iPod suddenly got a firmware update that only allowed it to play music from iTMS or that was encoded in AAC using iTunes.
If it is the only one that runs on a Mac, that just means that Apple is the only vendor who felt it was worthwhile to make their MP3 player work on a Mac. Really, Mac users should be rather used to having only one choice for a particular device or application - it happens often enough. (AirPort, anyone?)
Of course, if it were the only one that ran on a Mac because Apple was deliberately breaking compatibility with competitors' products, that would be lock-in.
That's fine with me, but count me out when it morphs into the Low-Carb Autocannibalism Diet when they really really run out of food.
Irony would also be NPR distributing the report on the last plant that produces professional reel-to-reel audio tape on professional reel-to-reel audio tape, because they always do, because it is still in common use or because it has just experienced a resurgence in popularity or something.
But they don't. Because barely anybody uses it anymore. Because we've all gone to either digital or higher quality analog media. Which is why nobody is making the stuff anymore.
--
Next time on Slashdot: People talking about what a deus ex machina it is that Hamm's Light tastes like aged butt.
Here in the US, it's the same story. A lot of people have heard of Firefox, but most people I know are sticking with IE for a variety of reasons such as sloth and a general uncomfortableness about installing new software on their computer.
(Unless it it involves a purple gorilla or something like that. I _really_ don't understand this, but I have a feeling that hidden somewhere in the amazing pervasiveness of spyware - despite all the privacy and spam memes floating around the Net - is the secret to OSS on the desktop.)
Anyway, I think the best way to get people using Firefox is to convince PC manufacturers (Dell being the Holy Grail) to bundle Firefox on their new PCs, with a nice link to it on the desktop or something like that. It would think that, considering all the useless crap they _pay_ to bundle with their compuers, they would love to be able to bundle a buzzword for free.
If you fear that teaching your kids Flash leaves them too many chances to stray from nice safe animutations to actually doing something useful (I'm being sarcastic here), another thing you could try is one of the many programming games that are out there.
Free ones like GNU Robots and Core Wars are a good no-cost option, but I imagine that with their lack of flashy graphics, they would fail to capture the interest of most kids nowadays. I would suggest instead tracking down Mind Rover (out for both PC and Mac), or an obscure Playstation game called Carnage Heart.
Both feature a drag-and-drop approach to programming. In Mind Rover, this is done via a flowchart, and you program the robots to do just about anything there has ever been a competition to pogram robots to do except soccer. (blow out a candle, battle to the death, etc.)
Carnage Heart, on the other hand, is really a turn-based strategy game with mechanics reminiscent of Axis & Allies or Risk. I personally prefer the way its programming is done, though, simply because the programming is very grid-based - strict 2D control flow with absolutely no subroutines or GOTOs. This limitation means it isn't going to take a kid very far towards learning to use modern programming languages, but it turns the game into a very interesting mental exercise as you work out nifty tricks for packing as much logic as you can into a rectangle that can only hold 10x10 instruction units.
In the early '90s, when I was dialing into BBSes, my downloads generally took an hour, sometimes as many as four or five hours. Nowadays, with my cable modem, downloads still generally take an hour, sometimes as many as four or five hours. You're right that the bandwidth has increased a whole lot over the past few decades, but the amount of bandwidth we consume to get pretty much the same thing (more pictures, higher resolutions, same content) has kept pace.
As far as interacting with computers over a network, it seems that our bandwidth consumption is actually increasing faster than the amount of available bandwidth. In the early '90s, I was logging into remote systems using text terminal software, and it was pretty snappy. In the late '90s, I started using X11 pretty regularly, and it was a bit slower (despite increasing bandwidth by a factor of 40). Nowadays, most OSes give you beasts along the lines of Terminal Services and VNC for your remote use pleasure, and it's even slower yet.
When I'm connected to the remote machine with a 10baseT connection using terminal services, things are a bit slow. Move off the network and use a cable modem or DSL connection (1/10 the bandwidth, depending, and a lot more latency), and it's not the way I prefer to work from day to day, to say the least. Put me in camp with the majority of the world with a dialup connection, and it'd be impossible to get anything done.
Not to mention that nobody with a laptop wants to end up unable to use their computer while on an airplane or generally away from their ISP. Heck, let's say they can still get to their ISP, anyway - there's still the issue of the speed of light making it impossible to keep the service snappy once you get far enough from home (as business travelers are wont to do), and we've still got a huge problem.
Even if we pause for the moment to agree that "the network is the computer" wasn't an idea that belongs with the ranks of "helicopters will replace cars" and "Dyson sphere," you still have to jump over the bandwidth hurdle (which is taller than you think, and growing), the latency hurdle (which Einstein says you can't jump without leaving some very important and wealthy and above all necessary friends behind), and the "the vast majority of computer users still aren't connected to a network all the time" hurdle.
I think what the parent is suggesting is that if you have a choice between having your net income be -2% of your remaining assets and having it be -1% of your remaining assets, you damn well better take the -1% option.
How can you honestly tell your investors, "We've hit some hard times so we're just going to give the fuck up. So long, and thanks for all the cash" when you could have sold your seats at a loss and tried to bring the company back?
The study found that kids who watched TV were indeed more aggressive than kids who didn't.
What I meant to say is, the study found that kids who watched violent TV were more aggressive than kids who didn't watch TV at all.
Sadly, I don't have a reference to give you about this as the moment, but I do remember reading about a psychological study where kids were separated into a group that was allowed to watch violent TV, a group that was only allowed to watch children's education programming, and a group that was not allowed to watch TV at all.
The study found that kids who watched TV were indeed more aggressive than kids who didn't. They also found that kids who watched Sesame Street were just as aggressive as the violent TV group.
I don't know if there have been any follow-up studies, but this seems to me to be a very big clue that the problem isn't strictly violence on television, but instead that there's something inherent in the mass media that goes much deeper than violence that is harming people's (or at least children's) socialization.
Just another of the little tidbits that leads me to believe that the reason why we've separated into two camps - one screaming about violent TV and video games and the other screaming about crappy parents - is that nobody really wants to admit that both of these are just symptoms of the core problem. Namely, our entire crappy, violent culture.
There is no law saying minors can't see or play mature games or movies. There may be laws in some areas (mostly municipalities at this point) saying that mature games or movies can't be sold or rented to minors, but I don't think those laws really matter since most the time when I see video games being bought for 12 year olds, the person horking up the cash is the parent, not the kid.
Right, but I'm not sure anyone has really succeeded in building a business based on selling the software itself under the GPL. There are certainly companies that have sold the software but really make their money ons support contracts (Red Hat), and companies that are making money by dual-licensing the code (MySQL), but the GPL makes the software itself incompatible with the usual 'sell-the-software-for-profit" model.
Freeware and Free Software are two very different things. The standard similies are "free as in beer" vs. "free as in freedom."
As it stands, Free Software refers to software that is distributed under a GPL-like license, but I think that this is a poor definition. I have seen BSD projects that I would consider much more free than many GPL projects, and I'm sure there are folks out there who think that the GPL's restrictions with respect to redistribution and linking constitute restrictions on freedom.
Of course, I think when RMS says "freedom" he means, "freedom from capitalism." I also think that that definition has been demonstrated to be moot by groups like MySQL AB and TrollTech.
blah blah blah blah blah
On the other hand, if I could run my car off of the sludge of used grains left over after making the wort, I'd probably be making a lot more beer.
I saved myself a whole bunch of money and bought some in-ear headphones that use foam earplugs to block out noise.
Mine is a pair of Koss The Plug headphones. Honestly, they're not very good by themselves, because the foam earplugs that come with them are very poor - it's impossible to get a good seal with them. I replaced them with a pair of my own earplugs modified with a hole through the middle (for the 'acoustic tube' that channels the sound into your ear). With that one change, they become a decent pair of headphones. The sound is still weak comparied to some professional in-ear headphones that you can get for 10-20 times as much money, but they are better than your standard earbud.
But on the upside, they also block out background noise much better than my friend's Bose noise canceling headphones that also cost 10-20 times as much money.
If Java is not slow, then how come every Java app I use at work just frickin' CRAWLS compared to similar software written in native code, and generally takes up at least twice as much RAM to boot?
My real world example for showing why I don't like Java at work:
Step 1: Start up Excel. Load about 20 massive spreadsheets. Also start up Safari and Firefox. And get some MP3s playing on iTunes. And start XCode and tell it to start compiling the app I've been working on. Go back to Excel, and start futzing with the spreadsheets. Did I mention that those spreadsheets have multiple worksheets and cascades of formulas all over the place? Anyway, notice how the computer is slowing down, but it's not ready to die or anything.
Step 2: Quit EVERYTHING. Load up the Java PDF viewer whose name escapes me because I got rid of it a couple months ago. Watch the program take about 40 seconds to load. Open a 20-page PDF file, watch it take even longer to display. Listen to the hard drive make a bunch of unholy noise the whole time. When it comes up, scroll the PDF. While it's struggling to draw the next page, try clicking on the Finder and see if a Finder window comes up anytime soon.
Yeah, I've heard that the OS X JVM is slow. I think that it's still a hit against Java, because the only strong reason I can think of to use Java for things other than applets is its platform-independence. For that to be a good argument, Java has to be viable on a whole host of platforms, not just Windows and (I assume), Solaris. So if you want multiple platforms, Java is slow because it sucks on most platforms, and if you only want one platform, Java is slow because you might as well be writing native code.
=P count me out. Having to look away from the TV, take a hand off the controller, take the stylus out of its silo, look at the touchscreen, tap on it a few times, put the stylus back in the silo, put the hand back in its original position, and look back at the T.V. is way too disruptive to maintain any sort of immersion.
When I play RPGs and tactics games, I want to be thinking about nothing but what's happening on the T.V. screen and whether or not I'm eating too many Doritos.
On the A and B buttons: Maybe it's that the only Nintendo systems I have ever owned are the original cream-of-spinach Game Boy and the GBA, but I'm not exactly mourning the loss of these two letters as button names. Am I missing something here?
On the D-pad: Fine with me, as long as every single game on the next-gen system is a 3D platform jumper or shooter, and not a single puzzle game or RPG with lots of menus or what have you comes out. I was only content with the loss of the paddle controller after they quit making games like Arkanoid.
They're working on it.
OO.o is so non-Mac-friendly that it has been a huge undertaking to get NeoOffice even this far.
Why not set up an OSS code signing system? Set up a plugin for the browser (or a standalone app) that contacts a server with a set of MD5 sums for various known filenames. With the big complicated OSS filenames being the standard, we shouldn't find too many conflicts for the name, "frobnitz-stable-0.4-RC1.tar.bz2." Make it a secure connection, and we can even one-up VeriSign by having the sytem pop up known security flaws for the software you just downloaded.
If I'm going to go through all the trouble of putting a payload in FireFox and then masquerading it as the real McCoy, it's not really any extra effort (at all) for me to take out the checksum phase of the install, or to fake it.