Natural gas is an unfortunate side effect of the procedures involved.
Now if only we could find some sane and humane way of harvesting natural gas from natural digestive fermentation. Just imagine, an energy-self-sufficient Taco Bell franchise!
In all seriousness, what about finding a way of harvesting methane from cattle? They're pretty much farting all day long anyway, and that's an enormous amount of potential energy going to waste.
Word counts are probably a commonly used feature where the writing itself is the product. Most business use is probably closer to my use because the writing is merely a by-product of the business.
Good point, and succinctly put.
I guess the only way to know for sure how many people use a given feature would be for the package to maintain use counts of the various features and report them back at regular intervals.
I wonder if anyone has seriously done any such implementation? MSO and Firefox both have their "phone home after a crash" optional functionality, but I've never delved too deeply into these. Do either of them include data on program usage, in addition to a simple dump at crash time?
Then everybody here on/. could all have a good moan about how evil {insert package name here} is because it phones home and reports stuff about you once a week.:)
But then that would probably depend on who made the app, and how easy it is to opt out of phoning home.:)
Wow, you actually found documentation? I tried writing an OO.o macro once. I have almost gotten back my sanity now. =)
Start at the API project homepage, and dig down from there. But it's still rather hideously organized, all apparently put together not to be useful for coders, but rather from a software architect perspective, with modules, services, and interfaces all separately documented so that it's nearly impossible to figure out what you can do once you have an object of type X -- basic questions are left unanswered, such as what are its properties or methods. I find it a rather glaring shortcoming that after so many years, the best tool for figuring out the OOo API is still a third-party macro (the X-Ray tool by Bernard Marcelly).
But anyway, there's one part where OO.o differs from Word: Documents are not coupled to the application. You don't have to use OO.o to process OpenDocument.
<... snip.../>
I've written a word count tool for my own use for LaTeX text myself in 15 minutes... and there's a bunch of libraries for parsing OO.o. How hard can it be? =)
I may look into that, thanks. I'm a sole-prop and thus have precious little free time, but I am *very* interested in getting myself completely free of the MS tax. The lack of any sane counting functionality in OOo has been one major stumbling block, so it'd be quite nice indeed to remove that particular obstacle.:)
Most people in the Americas, Europe, Australia, Middle East and Africa have no use for Asian characters, so this bug doesn't affect us.
Fair enough. But if OOo really wants to eat MSO's lunch, it needs to cover at least the same bases. And don't forget, the number of people worldwide using these Asian languages comes to somewhere around 20% of the global population. That's a rather large chunk of the potential userbase to ignore. OOo already seems to have some sort of language detection built in; extending the counting functionality to break down Western vs Asian counts similarly to MS Word would theoretically be relatively trivial -- count up the double-byte chars in the document and exclude spaces. Issue 17964 itself has been on the books for almost five years now, and the CJK-specific comments have been part of the public record for over three years. No dev has even deigned to comment on when this relatively simple enhancement might be added, aside from marking the issue with the extremely vague "later" category. Plus, IBM's Lotus Symphony, which is apparently based to a significant extent on OOo code, appropriately breaks down counts to show Western vs Asian stats (and accurately does not include whitespace in the Asian character count). This makes me think the problem is not in the OOo codebase itself, so much as in some other aspect of how the OOo project is put together -- perhaps the poorly organized API docs, internal dev organization, prioritization, or politics, or some other factors.
I can definitely understand the decision to ignore certain areas of functionality when a project is young and still getting its foundation put in place. But OOo itself has been around for almost eight years, and the preceding StarOffice app was begun back in 1994, with the still-older ancestor StarWriter stretching all the way back to well before even the IBM PC. I'd say it's bloody well time OOo moved beyond core functionality. If the core is such a mess that this is still impossible so many years later, that speaks very poorly of the project...
Unfortunately, you're actually getting into a very grey area here. The generally accepted rule is that 80% of your users will only ever use 20% of the functionality. The problem is that while 15 of that 20% is the same for everybody, the last 5% is different.
So you might consider word counts to be a basic feature. I, on the other hand, have been using various flavours of word processors for something like 20 years and have never used a word count. Nor do I anticipate ever having to use one.
Judging from your comment here, you are very likely not engaged in any professional or academic field related to writing. Academically speaking, to stretch my memory a bit, my college profs required that papers be so long in terms of word counts rather than page counts, as page counts can be more easily munged by futzing with font sizes and line widths. My Japanese academic work required that papers / translations be within or at least so many characters. Professionally speaking, my own field of J-E translation requires that I bill based on either the source Japanese character count, or the target English word count (depends on the client). Many other professional types of writing either bill or have other constraints on documentation based on word / character counts. I could well be wrong, but I strongly suspect that these areas constitute more than just 20% of any potential word processor userbase. One might also make the point that, since these areas are by definition more specific to getting serious work done (i.e. not just casual use), they might be worth a heavier weighting when prioritizing the development of word processor functionality.
If they said that feature was being removed from 00o (or Word) to reduce bloat, I wouldn't miss it.
It beggars the imagination how something as simple as word / character counting could possibly constitute "bloat", given how uncomplicated the code should be.:) In my mind, bloat would be something more like Clippy, or the research "helper" functions in Word, or "smart" tags -- complicated functionality of rather limited utility that attempts to second-guess the user's intent. Second-guessing by its very nature is code-intensive, as you basically have to try to come up with all kinds of possible user scenarios and code them in. Counting is dumb-monkey straightforward by comparison.
Chinese, Japanese, and Korean texts are pretty much never counted by word -- they are counted by character (or syllable in the case of Korean), not including whitespace. This is standard in both academic and professional settings. MS Word appropriately separates Asian and Western counts, and the Asian count does not include whitespace. OOo's character count does include whitespace, rendering it stupidly error-prone even for Asian-only text samples.
If you're at all interested in how the two counts work out, even just in terms of idle curiosity, please look at the.odt file included in the bug report (links: Issue 17964 bug report, Asian Count Sample.odt)
...it's just that for most people compatibility no longer an issue.
Plus, there's one feature that really belongs more in the "Basic Functionality" category, and that's accurate word and character counting. As documented on the OOo bug list for some years now, any combination of double-byte Asian text + regular single-byte alphanumeric text results in "word" counts that are worse than useless. A number of Asian languages do not count by "word" so much as by character (and for that matter there still isn't much agreement as to what exactly is a "word" in Japanese). OOo gives a total "word" count for either the document or selection, but does not break out any included Asian text -- which MS Word does, and has done for longer than I can clearly remember (starting maybe with MSO 97?). This makes OOo a non-starter for anyone working with such Asian languages in any situation that requires counts -- which includes just about all academic and professional use.
There's a sample.odt file included in the bug report (direct linky) that clearly spells out the differences in how the two apps count from a UI perspective (can't speak to the internals). I'd love to pitch in with the coding, but I sadly cannot afford the time and energy required to dig through OOo's extraordinarily convoluted API documentation to figure out how to update the source code myself; I started the process, but gave up in disgust at how the docs are organized. I've still got MSO, so until such time as the OOo team can get around to fixing this long-standing bug, and / or produce more sensible API docs, I'll keep using Word.
Being well informed about the basics of economics should be considered a civic duty.
There's just entirely too much noise and nonsense about how policy should work out that is ultimately based on terrible misconceptions of how economics work out.
On the flip side, it's also important to note that a lot of economic theory out there is pure bollocks, so it's hard sometimes to know what to read. It seems like the more recent authors (not pundits, but actual economics geeks like the pop author Steven Levitt of Freakonomics, the heavier-duty Amartya Sen, or Samual Bowles and Herbert Gintis of Democracy and Capitalism) might have a better handle on the way things actually operate in messy and chaotic human systems, rather than just in non-existent ideal conceptual models à la mode de Modernism...
Mostly, I was surprised that the recipes actually called for spices like cumin and coriander -- spices which I'm sure my parents never cooked with at home. Some really interesting spice mixes that I honestly thought would have been outside of what was available in North America back then.
I won't make sausage with it, but I can likely find a few things that want some of the spice mixes. =)
Any chance you'd be willing to share any of the mix recipes?:-D I've taught myself the joys of making curries from scratch over the past few years, and very much enjoy the crazy alchemy of cooking. Anyway, drop a line at z33b0b [hyphen] sd at that Yahoo company if you're willing to share or swap recipes or anything.
I can only assume you're trolling, and I *know* I shouldn't feed the trolls, but I have a personal beef against Office 2007 thanks to one "just ride the gravy train and do / know jack" schmuck of an IT guy...
Its slow
Faster than all its competition.
Maybe, on high-end hardware. My wife's school has a bunch of old Dells, and Office 2003 was sluggish, but acceptable on them. The school's IT guy decided in the middle of the school year to install Office 2007 school-wide, without telling anyone. Nice. So the software is slower than a dying dog, and now the UI's so different that all the teachers who had only finally figured out where everything was under the old Office paradigm are crippled in their productivity by this weird "ribbon" garbage. Which, incidentally, is quite the hog in terms of screen real estate when you've only got 1024x768 or less to play with.
bloated
Nope.
Based on what? If it's slower to load, and includes things you don't need, that would seem to be bloat...?
ugly
Matter of opinion, I guess. I think you're thinking of Office 2003, which was most certainly ugly.
No more so than Office 2000, which, while no winner of any beauty awards, at least we were used to. And see my comment above about the unusability of the ribbon interface on smaller monitors.
difficult to use
Nope, Office 2007 has a new interface that's easier to use than any Office version before it. Thus the innovation.
This New! Improved! And Innovative! interface resulted in numerous half-bald teachers at my wife's school. Due to tearing their hair out trying to get things done, I mean.
and buggy
Nope.
I hesitate to even get into this one much, but the troubles with MSO 2007 file incompatibility with older installations, or the problems with "compatibility" mode using older file formats within MSO 2007, has been documented to some length elsewhere on the web.
So there. Food for the troll, maybe, but at least I've gotten some things off my chest.:)
... at least so I can find out what he's smokin' and get me some of that. I mean, whah??? If OOOXML is garbage, and not an open standard given the really big implementation holes, and not apparently implemented *anywhere* (nor, some might argue, implement*able*), why is it in anyone's interest to have it passed? Aside from Microsoft's, of course.
could it be that the DRM-stripping application now b0rks when used in conjunction with the latest version of iTunes for entirely different reasons?
This is entirely possible. I claim no DRM-related announcements from Apple, rather simply that every time they update iTunes, existing methods of stripping DRM seem to break. Since that plays in Apple's favor in terms of lock-in, and since it's pretty consistent, it's hard to view it as wholly accidental.
That's happened about twice - certainly not that many times. I don't like the fact that they do that, but they are not usually related....
The majority of updates tend to be related to compatibility with new players - such as the iPod, iPhone and Apple TV - and for compatibility with new firmware updates for those players.
Interesting. I specifically recall at least three updates that have seemed to include a lot of DRM-related measures (somewhere around v5, v6, and even now with v7.6.1), which I've most frustratingly run full into when attempting at these varying points to carry out batch unlockings of iTunes purchased files, but maybe that's just been how my own observations have played out.
I disagree. By mixing up "new stuff you may or may not want" with "stuff you really, really, really need to install immediately to keep your already installed software safe from exploits" is just a bad, bad idea.
There's a rub here in your statement, bolded by me. I find that iTunes minor version update releases are very closely correlated to announcements of new ways of breaking iTunes DRM to allow folks to play purchased music via non-Apple hardware / software. This makes me highly suspicious that said minor version updates have exactly jack to do with security, at least in terms of security for the end user, and much more to do with the loathsome bullshit of a major corporation disallowing anything it dislikes regardless of ethics or legality.
Seriously folks, the parent's post here is "Informative" if anything. The only possible reason to mod it "Troll" is if the modders themselves are acting trollish and seeking to repress something they disagree with.
Futurepower(r) is quoting the Congressional Research Service for all love, people! This is part of the blooming Congress! How is it even remotely trollish to quote the findings of a body of the legislative branch of the US government? As noted on Wikipedia, "Congress created CRS in order to have its own source of nonpartisan, objective analysis and research on all legislative issues" (emphasis mine). Hello mods, the cluephone is ringing and y'all done flaked out...
Well, if you want to get technical about it, haikus are set as 5-7-5 mora, not syllables. They are different. In fact, I would argue that most English haiku fail because they should be even shorter than 5-7-5 syllables. One great thing about haiku is that Japanese words have a lot of syllables, relatively speaking, making haiku short, with very dense meaning. English has a great number of monosyllabic words, making writing pleasant English haiku easier than composing Japanese haiku. Furthermore, Japanese haiku typically are two phrases in length, either of the form PHRASE_ONE//PHRASE//TWO or PHRASE//ONE//PHRASE_TWO.
Beyond that, haiku must have a seasonal word in them; otherwise, it probably is a senryu instead.
...
I'm not an authority on the subject, but I've always thought the best way to translate the requite for 5-7-5 moras (that's the plural of "mora", unless you want to get classical and say "moræ"--it's a Latin word, not Japanese) is with 5-7-5 stressed syllables. That's traditionally how entity-counting is done in English poetry: For instance, Old English poetry had four stressed syllables per line (with a variable number of unstressed syllables), whereas in Shakespeare's iambic pentameter, there's five feet of unstressed-stressed pairs per line.
This makes logical sense, because in Japanese, each mora has approximately the same length of time when spoken, whereas in English, there's approximately the same length of time from stressed syllable to stressed syllable...
Blarg! One thing I really must protest is this unfounded insistence among the English teachers of the US that students write "haiku" in English. I put the word here in quotes because so often the actual requirements of a haiku (such as the seasonal theme) are usually omitted, let alone any serious discussion of the social and historical context -- all I and anyone I've talked to was taught when forced through this paltry "lesson" was the supposedly syllabic counting requirements, which later in life I learned was bunkum anyway since Japanese linguistically doesn't operate in terms of syllables but rather moras. Meh!
And anyway, what's the blooming point of writing one in English? It simply doesn't work very well. I may as well try to write limericks in Japanese -- anyone who's familiar with the language will understand what a silly idea that is. The underlying fundamental phonological structures of the two languages are so different that trying to graft the poetic rules of the one onto the other strikes me a bit like training a penguin to jump through a flaming hoop, or a lion to swim through an underwater obstacle course. While both are theoretically possible, they also both beggar the imagination to find a compelling reason why.
Translation of existing highly regarded poetic texts, fine, I can get with that to some extent (not least because I'm a translator myself). More power to anyone working on Basho. But "haiku" written afresh in English generally just leave me scratching my head and eager to move on to something else.
The mismatch between the respective poetic conventions of the two languages reminds me of a T-shirt I found over at Beaver and Steve, that says:
SHOES!! They are like HATS for FEET!!
Sure, haiku in English can be made to work, but...
</rant>
Sorry about that tirade there. But if any readers of this post happen to be English teachers, or know or otherwise have contact / influence with English teachers, *PLEASE* do what you can to either a) drop haiku from the English curriculum altogether -- it simply isn't an English poetic form!, or b) at the very least explain more about what they are, the seasonal elements, the way moras functio
Of course, I'd have to give you a "+1 - Ironic" for managing to turn a discussion of Hollywood accounting around to a discussion of why love is an action, not an emotion...
You make me laugh!:-D
But in all seriousness, that irony belongs to the poster I was replying to -- they're the one that managed that particular turnabout.
Some of us believe the love is an action, not an emotion. As such, we don't necessarily believe such things are impossible to achieve.
Very well put. One thing that struck me after studying German for a while is that, much like "sit" and "set" or "lie" and "lay" are intransitive/transitive verb pairs differentiated by the central vowel ("sitzen" and "setzen" / "liegen" and "legen" in the German), so too are "live" and "love" ("leben" and "lieben") -- "love" is the transitive form of "live". So in that sense, loving someone is helping them live well, helping them grow and be healthy. Romance doesn't *have* to enter into this picture, which is why you can just as well love your siblings even despite a very rocky growing up. Which is also why I know that I'm loving my wife the most not when I'm feeling all lovey-dovey, but when she's annoying the crap out of me or I'm pissed as hell at her, but *still* try my damnedest to make things work.
Love is work. Marriage is work. And the truer measure of how much you love your partner/spouse doesn't happen during the easy times -- it's how you behave and how you work at it during the rough times, even if you happen to hate each other's guts right at that moment. *That's* when you fulfill whatever promises or vows you've made.
So you honestly think its better to leave IPv6 turned off?
What I'd actually written in the post you replied to (emphasis mine):
it makes simple sense to ensure that any attempt at IPv6 resolution will fail *gracefully* with an attempt at IPv4 resolution as the backup... Other posts in this same thread have likewise suggested similar fallback measures.
I must conclude that a) your reading comprehension is abysmal, b) you didn't read the post you replied to, or c) I've been dumb and fed a troll. Whatever the case, I see no benefit in continuing this not-quite-a-conversation, and will leave you to do what you will -- I'm done.
Right now I'm living on about $1250 a month US, which is $15000 a year.
I'm quite interested -- Is that net, or gross? And where in Japan do you live?
I lived in Tokyo for three years, and was appalled upon moving back to the US at how bloody expensive everything is -- and what crappy quality you get for all that extra cost.
Take my internet connection, for instance -- I was paying $20 / month in Tokyo for 12Mbps DSL, the most basic package available when I signed up. By the time I left, I was paying -- see if you can guess -- $20 / month. The only thing that had changed was that the ground-level basic package had upgraded to 18Mbps. Meanwhile, the additional monthly landline telephone bill came to $22 / month. Here in the "We're Number One!" US, the best I can get is 5Mbps (on paper, usually more like 3-4Mbps on a good day), for $35 / month (up from $30 / month). It's been 5Mbps for all three years I've been back, with no speed upgrades at all. The additional landline connection fee also weighs in at $35 / month, and seems to include all these unexplained additional fees and taxes -- which investigation shows were part of that terrible congressional handout to the telcos, ostensibly to upgrade the infrastructure but actually just to pad their profit margins.:-\
Japan: $42 / month, 12Mbps -> 18Mbps
CA: $70 / month, 5Mbps (more like 3-4Mbps)
67% increase in cost, ~75% decrease in service
Or how about mobile phone service (extravagant, I know, but I actually need mine for business). In Japan, our combined monthly bill for two cell phones came to $92 / month, and we had very good service, even down in the tunnels of the Tokyo subway system. Here, we pay $150 / month and can't even keep a phone call going along arterial highway 101 between Palo Alto and San Mateo, right in the blooming heart of Geek Central -- driving right past Google's headquarters at Moffett Field.
Japan: $92 / month, good service even underground
CA: $150 / month, calls dropping even in wide-open urban areas
63% increase in cost, decrease in service
Or we could look at rent, an area where Tokyo is usually regarded as mind-bogglingly expensive. We pay 20% *more* in CA than we did in Tokyo, for a place that is just a biscuit bigger, but less centrally located and more inconvenient by almost any measure (shopping, amenities, entertainment, hiking, etc) -- and yet still cheaper than most other possibilities in the area. Hmm, what was all that talk again about Tokyo being so expensive...?
Japan: $1,500 / month, everything walkable or train-able
CA: $1,800 / month, very little walkable or train-able
20% increase in cost, decrease in service
And these are only a few examples. I'm not even going to really get into transportation -- about how it's pretty impossible to live in the US without a car, about how that's largely thanks to car company efforts to kill public transportation, combined with bad zoning and growth policies over the past several decades leading to community layouts that make cars a requirement, etc etc. Or healthcare -- about how prevalent pharmaceutical ads are, about how US healthcare seems to be all about covering the symptoms and less about fixing the underlying issue, about how private insurance for two healthy married people in our mid-30s costs more than our rent, etc etc. If it weren't for my job, and my naïveté about how expensive it actually is here, I'd have stayed in Tokyo. As it is, we'll be moving out this summer, in search of somewhere we can afford.
One of the central conclusions I come to after sifting through my bills and various media (both USian and otherwise) is that the upper echelons of the American power structure, both corporate and governmental, are packed with crooks. Yes, power corrupts and all that, but it sure don't look like the US is going to be number one at much of anything (well, anything positive) for a while to come.
I envy you your ability to function at lower income levels. I don't think that would work quite so well here in the US given the distorted economy.
Dude, chill. I'm not saying Facebook didn't screw up; they did. You're right on the money there. But Microsoft *also* screwed up in changing something in Vista in a way that is opaque to the casual user and that increases the possibilities of failure. IPv6 is a new standard, and one that is not fully implemented. The web is in a transition phase from IPv4 to IPv6. Ergo, it makes simple sense to ensure that any attempt at IPv6 resolution will fail *gracefully* with an attempt at IPv4 resolution as the backup -- much as smart web design precepts dictate that accessible websites will fail gracefully back to simple HTML if fancy JavaScript and Flash and whatnot don't work properly for a given user. Other posts in this same thread have likewise suggested similar fallback measures.
Facebook in specific not working in Vista is not Microsoft's fault, sure. But *any* site that loads properly in XP but not in Vista jolly bloody well is Microsoft's fault, from the normal end user's perspective. You and I might know the specifics of *why* Facebook didn't load in this particular instance, and therefore have some clue about how to fix the issue, but we are also decidedly *not* the average garden-variety users. For Joe Schmoe, if a website works in the one flavor of Windows, it should work in the other -- full stop.
I can see on the one hand why you call the article author an ass, but to play the devil's advocate, he has a valid point -- if something doesn't work on Vista but *does* on XP, from the user's perspective it logically must be Vista that's the problem. Frankly, the internal whys and wherefores don't enter into it for any but the geekishly inclined.
I couldn't get past the part where he figured out it wasn't MS' fault facebook didn't work, but still blamed Vista anyway.
Facebook not resolving via IPv6 does seem to have been Facebook's fault. But Facebook not showing up on Vista while it does on XP is indeed MS's fault. Facebook hasn't changed at all just because an individual user has a different OS; it's the OS that's different.
And no, avoiding this particular Facebook issue would not require MS to check the full IPv6 spectrum, as you suggest, but rather to gracefully fall back to IPv4 if IPv6 resolution fails. This should be the default setup anyway given that IPv6 still hasn't been fully implemented, while even those sites that already use IPv6 might not have the bugs worked out (case in point). And since the browser timing out might take a while, once IPv6 lookup times out, show the user some message to placate them and let them know that something at least is happening while the browser tries to resolve via IPv4.
(like facebook, because they are too incompetent to setup IPv6 correctly for their site)
Have you set up IPv6 for any sites? Is it easy at first try? I'm very much a noob when it comes to DNS, but after setting up my own IPv4 DNS intranet server this weekend, I can certainly say that it isn't intuitively obvious. IPv6 looks even less so. And given the relative novelty of the standard as well, I somehow doubt there's as much easily gained expertise floating around the net, as compared to IPv4.
Wow, by changing words in a paragraph you have changed its meaning to be related to the words you changed them to! Well done, you've cracked that conspiracy wiiiide open.
Dude, don't be a twit. I'm not talking conspiracy, I'm talking similarity. As MS has grown larger and less accountable as to what it does with its resources, it begins to vaguely resemble the US government -- as possibly any huge human system would do. It's a simple observation, intimating that market forces are no longer evident in Vista's overly bloated, everything-and-the-Bridge-to-Nowhere-included, current form.
If Microsoft wanted to reduce Vista's bloat, they'd just reduce it.
They might, if they had any good faith about it, analyze and SQA vLite and license it or offer an approved version. Or structure the present Vista so that it installs a reasonable core and allows you to "opt in" to the extra stuff.
What's likely happening is a turf battle between all the managers that want their bloat in the product, are threatened by any suggestions that it be trimmed, and will fight it's being trimmed to the death--or at least for a couple of years when they move on to their next assignment.
Maybe I'm just being Beltway-Bandit cynical, but good lord it sounds like you're talking about the gubmint. Let's change a few things:
If politicians wanted to reduce the gubmint's bloat, they'd just reduce it.
They might, if they had any good faith about it, analyze and SQA Budget Lite (TM) and ratify it or offer an [im]proved version. Or structure the present gubmint so that it functions on a reasonable tax base and allows you to "opt in" to the extra stuff.
What's likely happening is a turf battle between all the politicians and SIGs that want their bloat in the budget, are threatened by any suggestions that it be trimmed, and will fight it's being trimmed to the death--or at least for a couple of years when they move on to their next assignment.
Hmm, yep, that's about what I thought. Scary when MS really begins to resemble a government agency. Now how did *that* happen?
I looked at Dexpot some time ago, and while it looks lovely, I also note that the last release was a year and a half ago, with no news items on the website since then. Is this project dead? Though I am happy to note that the site actually loads now -- last time I looked it took *ages* to come up, and that was even without the benefit of a slashdotting.
Then again, I happen to be using Virtual Dimension, which likewise seems to be dead, with no releases since July 2005. I contracted this particular VD:) only after my previous love, Virtual Desktop Toolbox, went belly-up when the website disappeared and the sole dev vanished into thin air.
Slashdot Mirror
Now if only we could find some sane and humane way of harvesting natural gas from natural digestive fermentation. Just imagine, an energy-self-sufficient Taco Bell franchise!
In all seriousness, what about finding a way of harvesting methane from cattle? They're pretty much farting all day long anyway, and that's an enormous amount of potential energy going to waste.
Cheers,
Good point, and succinctly put.
I wonder if anyone has seriously done any such implementation? MSO and Firefox both have their "phone home after a crash" optional functionality, but I've never delved too deeply into these. Do either of them include data on program usage, in addition to a simple dump at crash time?
But then that would probably depend on who made the app, and how easy it is to opt out of phoning home. :)
Cheers,
Start at the API project homepage, and dig down from there. But it's still rather hideously organized, all apparently put together not to be useful for coders, but rather from a software architect perspective, with modules, services, and interfaces all separately documented so that it's nearly impossible to figure out what you can do once you have an object of type X -- basic questions are left unanswered, such as what are its properties or methods. I find it a rather glaring shortcoming that after so many years, the best tool for figuring out the OOo API is still a third-party macro (the X-Ray tool by Bernard Marcelly).
I may look into that, thanks. I'm a sole-prop and thus have precious little free time, but I am *very* interested in getting myself completely free of the MS tax. The lack of any sane counting functionality in OOo has been one major stumbling block, so it'd be quite nice indeed to remove that particular obstacle. :)
Cheers,
Fair enough. But if OOo really wants to eat MSO's lunch, it needs to cover at least the same bases. And don't forget, the number of people worldwide using these Asian languages comes to somewhere around 20% of the global population. That's a rather large chunk of the potential userbase to ignore. OOo already seems to have some sort of language detection built in; extending the counting functionality to break down Western vs Asian counts similarly to MS Word would theoretically be relatively trivial -- count up the double-byte chars in the document and exclude spaces. Issue 17964 itself has been on the books for almost five years now, and the CJK-specific comments have been part of the public record for over three years. No dev has even deigned to comment on when this relatively simple enhancement might be added, aside from marking the issue with the extremely vague "later" category. Plus, IBM's Lotus Symphony, which is apparently based to a significant extent on OOo code, appropriately breaks down counts to show Western vs Asian stats (and accurately does not include whitespace in the Asian character count). This makes me think the problem is not in the OOo codebase itself, so much as in some other aspect of how the OOo project is put together -- perhaps the poorly organized API docs, internal dev organization, prioritization, or politics, or some other factors.
I can definitely understand the decision to ignore certain areas of functionality when a project is young and still getting its foundation put in place. But OOo itself has been around for almost eight years, and the preceding StarOffice app was begun back in 1994, with the still-older ancestor StarWriter stretching all the way back to well before even the IBM PC. I'd say it's bloody well time OOo moved beyond core functionality. If the core is such a mess that this is still impossible so many years later, that speaks very poorly of the project...
Cheers,
Judging from your comment here, you are very likely not engaged in any professional or academic field related to writing. Academically speaking, to stretch my memory a bit, my college profs required that papers be so long in terms of word counts rather than page counts, as page counts can be more easily munged by futzing with font sizes and line widths. My Japanese academic work required that papers / translations be within or at least so many characters. Professionally speaking, my own field of J-E translation requires that I bill based on either the source Japanese character count, or the target English word count (depends on the client). Many other professional types of writing either bill or have other constraints on documentation based on word / character counts. I could well be wrong, but I strongly suspect that these areas constitute more than just 20% of any potential word processor userbase. One might also make the point that, since these areas are by definition more specific to getting serious work done (i.e. not just casual use), they might be worth a heavier weighting when prioritizing the development of word processor functionality.
It beggars the imagination how something as simple as word / character counting could possibly constitute "bloat", given how uncomplicated the code should be. :) In my mind, bloat would be something more like Clippy, or the research "helper" functions in Word, or "smart" tags -- complicated functionality of rather limited utility that attempts to second-guess the user's intent. Second-guessing by its very nature is code-intensive, as you basically have to try to come up with all kinds of possible user scenarios and code them in. Counting is dumb-monkey straightforward by comparison.
Cheers,
Chinese, Japanese, and Korean texts are pretty much never counted by word -- they are counted by character (or syllable in the case of Korean), not including whitespace. This is standard in both academic and professional settings. MS Word appropriately separates Asian and Western counts, and the Asian count does not include whitespace. OOo's character count does include whitespace, rendering it stupidly error-prone even for Asian-only text samples.
If you're at all interested in how the two counts work out, even just in terms of idle curiosity, please look at the .odt file included in the bug report (links: Issue 17964 bug report, Asian Count Sample.odt)
I'll ditto encoderer here:
Plus, there's one feature that really belongs more in the "Basic Functionality" category, and that's accurate word and character counting. As documented on the OOo bug list for some years now, any combination of double-byte Asian text + regular single-byte alphanumeric text results in "word" counts that are worse than useless. A number of Asian languages do not count by "word" so much as by character (and for that matter there still isn't much agreement as to what exactly is a "word" in Japanese). OOo gives a total "word" count for either the document or selection, but does not break out any included Asian text -- which MS Word does, and has done for longer than I can clearly remember (starting maybe with MSO 97?). This makes OOo a non-starter for anyone working with such Asian languages in any situation that requires counts -- which includes just about all academic and professional use.
There's a sample .odt file included in the bug report (direct linky) that clearly spells out the differences in how the two apps count from a UI perspective (can't speak to the internals). I'd love to pitch in with the coding, but I sadly cannot afford the time and energy required to dig through OOo's extraordinarily convoluted API documentation to figure out how to update the source code myself; I started the process, but gave up in disgust at how the docs are organized. I've still got MSO, so until such time as the OOo team can get around to fixing this long-standing bug, and / or produce more sensible API docs, I'll keep using Word.
I particularly liked this bit:
There's just entirely too much noise and nonsense about how policy should work out that is ultimately based on terrible misconceptions of how economics work out.
On the flip side, it's also important to note that a lot of economic theory out there is pure bollocks, so it's hard sometimes to know what to read. It seems like the more recent authors (not pundits, but actual economics geeks like the pop author Steven Levitt of Freakonomics , the heavier-duty Amartya Sen, or Samual Bowles and Herbert Gintis of Democracy and Capitalism ) might have a better handle on the way things actually operate in messy and chaotic human systems, rather than just in non-existent ideal conceptual models à la mode de Modernism...
Cheers,
Any chance you'd be willing to share any of the mix recipes? :-D I've taught myself the joys of making curries from scratch over the past few years, and very much enjoy the crazy alchemy of cooking. Anyway, drop a line at z33b0b [hyphen] sd at that Yahoo company if you're willing to share or swap recipes or anything.
Cheers,
I can only assume you're trolling, and I *know* I shouldn't feed the trolls, but I have a personal beef against Office 2007 thanks to one "just ride the gravy train and do / know jack" schmuck of an IT guy...
Maybe, on high-end hardware. My wife's school has a bunch of old Dells, and Office 2003 was sluggish, but acceptable on them. The school's IT guy decided in the middle of the school year to install Office 2007 school-wide, without telling anyone. Nice. So the software is slower than a dying dog, and now the UI's so different that all the teachers who had only finally figured out where everything was under the old Office paradigm are crippled in their productivity by this weird "ribbon" garbage. Which, incidentally, is quite the hog in terms of screen real estate when you've only got 1024x768 or less to play with.
Based on what? If it's slower to load, and includes things you don't need, that would seem to be bloat...?
No more so than Office 2000, which, while no winner of any beauty awards, at least we were used to. And see my comment above about the unusability of the ribbon interface on smaller monitors.
This New! Improved! And Innovative! interface resulted in numerous half-bald teachers at my wife's school. Due to tearing their hair out trying to get things done, I mean.
I hesitate to even get into this one much, but the troubles with MSO 2007 file incompatibility with older installations, or the problems with "compatibility" mode using older file formats within MSO 2007, has been documented to some length elsewhere on the web.
So there. Food for the troll, maybe, but at least I've gotten some things off my chest. :)
Cheers,
... at least so I can find out what he's smokin' and get me some of that. I mean, whah??? If OOOXML is garbage, and not an open standard given the really big implementation holes, and not apparently implemented *anywhere* (nor, some might argue, implement*able*), why is it in anyone's interest to have it passed? Aside from Microsoft's, of course.
Confused,
This is entirely possible. I claim no DRM-related announcements from Apple, rather simply that every time they update iTunes, existing methods of stripping DRM seem to break. Since that plays in Apple's favor in terms of lock-in, and since it's pretty consistent, it's hard to view it as wholly accidental.
Cheers,
Interesting. I specifically recall at least three updates that have seemed to include a lot of DRM-related measures (somewhere around v5, v6, and even now with v7.6.1), which I've most frustratingly run full into when attempting at these varying points to carry out batch unlockings of iTunes purchased files, but maybe that's just been how my own observations have played out.
Cheers,
There's a rub here in your statement, bolded by me. I find that iTunes minor version update releases are very closely correlated to announcements of new ways of breaking iTunes DRM to allow folks to play purchased music via non-Apple hardware / software. This makes me highly suspicious that said minor version updates have exactly jack to do with security, at least in terms of security for the end user, and much more to do with the loathsome bullshit of a major corporation disallowing anything it dislikes regardless of ethics or legality.
But maybe that's just me. :-|
Cheers,
Seriously folks, the parent's post here is "Informative" if anything. The only possible reason to mod it "Troll" is if the modders themselves are acting trollish and seeking to repress something they disagree with.
Futurepower(r) is quoting the Congressional Research Service for all love, people! This is part of the blooming Congress! How is it even remotely trollish to quote the findings of a body of the legislative branch of the US government? As noted on Wikipedia, "Congress created CRS in order to have its own source of nonpartisan, objective analysis and research on all legislative issues" (emphasis mine). Hello mods, the cluephone is ringing and y'all done flaked out...
Color me disappointed.
Blarg! One thing I really must protest is this unfounded insistence among the English teachers of the US that students write "haiku" in English. I put the word here in quotes because so often the actual requirements of a haiku (such as the seasonal theme) are usually omitted, let alone any serious discussion of the social and historical context -- all I and anyone I've talked to was taught when forced through this paltry "lesson" was the supposedly syllabic counting requirements, which later in life I learned was bunkum anyway since Japanese linguistically doesn't operate in terms of syllables but rather moras. Meh!
And anyway, what's the blooming point of writing one in English? It simply doesn't work very well. I may as well try to write limericks in Japanese -- anyone who's familiar with the language will understand what a silly idea that is. The underlying fundamental phonological structures of the two languages are so different that trying to graft the poetic rules of the one onto the other strikes me a bit like training a penguin to jump through a flaming hoop, or a lion to swim through an underwater obstacle course. While both are theoretically possible, they also both beggar the imagination to find a compelling reason why.
Translation of existing highly regarded poetic texts, fine, I can get with that to some extent (not least because I'm a translator myself). More power to anyone working on Basho. But "haiku" written afresh in English generally just leave me scratching my head and eager to move on to something else.
The mismatch between the respective poetic conventions of the two languages reminds me of a T-shirt I found over at Beaver and Steve, that says:
Sure, haiku in English can be made to work, but...
</rant>
Sorry about that tirade there. But if any readers of this post happen to be English teachers, or know or otherwise have contact / influence with English teachers, *PLEASE* do what you can to either a) drop haiku from the English curriculum altogether -- it simply isn't an English poetic form!, or b) at the very least explain more about what they are, the seasonal elements, the way moras functio
You make me laugh! :-D
But in all seriousness, that irony belongs to the poster I was replying to -- they're the one that managed that particular turnabout.
Cheers,
Very well put. One thing that struck me after studying German for a while is that, much like "sit" and "set" or "lie" and "lay" are intransitive/transitive verb pairs differentiated by the central vowel ("sitzen" and "setzen" / "liegen" and "legen" in the German), so too are "live" and "love" ("leben" and "lieben") -- "love" is the transitive form of "live". So in that sense, loving someone is helping them live well, helping them grow and be healthy. Romance doesn't *have* to enter into this picture, which is why you can just as well love your siblings even despite a very rocky growing up. Which is also why I know that I'm loving my wife the most not when I'm feeling all lovey-dovey, but when she's annoying the crap out of me or I'm pissed as hell at her, but *still* try my damnedest to make things work.
Love is work. Marriage is work. And the truer measure of how much you love your partner/spouse doesn't happen during the easy times -- it's how you behave and how you work at it during the rough times, even if you happen to hate each other's guts right at that moment. *That's* when you fulfill whatever promises or vows you've made.
Cheers,
Um, did you really read my post? You ask:
What I'd actually written in the post you replied to (emphasis mine):
I must conclude that a) your reading comprehension is abysmal, b) you didn't read the post you replied to, or c) I've been dumb and fed a troll. Whatever the case, I see no benefit in continuing this not-quite-a-conversation, and will leave you to do what you will -- I'm done.
Cheers,
I'm quite interested -- Is that net, or gross? And where in Japan do you live?
I lived in Tokyo for three years, and was appalled upon moving back to the US at how bloody expensive everything is -- and what crappy quality you get for all that extra cost.
Take my internet connection, for instance -- I was paying $20 / month in Tokyo for 12Mbps DSL, the most basic package available when I signed up. By the time I left, I was paying -- see if you can guess -- $20 / month. The only thing that had changed was that the ground-level basic package had upgraded to 18Mbps. Meanwhile, the additional monthly landline telephone bill came to $22 / month. Here in the "We're Number One!" US, the best I can get is 5Mbps (on paper, usually more like 3-4Mbps on a good day), for $35 / month (up from $30 / month). It's been 5Mbps for all three years I've been back, with no speed upgrades at all. The additional landline connection fee also weighs in at $35 / month, and seems to include all these unexplained additional fees and taxes -- which investigation shows were part of that terrible congressional handout to the telcos, ostensibly to upgrade the infrastructure but actually just to pad their profit margins. :-\
Or how about mobile phone service (extravagant, I know, but I actually need mine for business). In Japan, our combined monthly bill for two cell phones came to $92 / month, and we had very good service, even down in the tunnels of the Tokyo subway system. Here, we pay $150 / month and can't even keep a phone call going along arterial highway 101 between Palo Alto and San Mateo, right in the blooming heart of Geek Central -- driving right past Google's headquarters at Moffett Field.
Or we could look at rent, an area where Tokyo is usually regarded as mind-bogglingly expensive. We pay 20% *more* in CA than we did in Tokyo, for a place that is just a biscuit bigger, but less centrally located and more inconvenient by almost any measure (shopping, amenities, entertainment, hiking, etc) -- and yet still cheaper than most other possibilities in the area. Hmm, what was all that talk again about Tokyo being so expensive...?
And these are only a few examples. I'm not even going to really get into transportation -- about how it's pretty impossible to live in the US without a car, about how that's largely thanks to car company efforts to kill public transportation, combined with bad zoning and growth policies over the past several decades leading to community layouts that make cars a requirement, etc etc. Or healthcare -- about how prevalent pharmaceutical ads are, about how US healthcare seems to be all about covering the symptoms and less about fixing the underlying issue, about how private insurance for two healthy married people in our mid-30s costs more than our rent, etc etc. If it weren't for my job, and my naïveté about how expensive it actually is here, I'd have stayed in Tokyo. As it is, we'll be moving out this summer, in search of somewhere we can afford.
One of the central conclusions I come to after sifting through my bills and various media (both USian and otherwise) is that the upper echelons of the American power structure, both corporate and governmental, are packed with crooks. Yes, power corrupts and all that, but it sure don't look like the US is going to be number one at much of anything (well, anything positive) for a while to come.
I envy you your ability to function at lower income levels. I don't think that would work quite so well here in the US given the distorted economy.
Dude, chill. I'm not saying Facebook didn't screw up; they did. You're right on the money there. But Microsoft *also* screwed up in changing something in Vista in a way that is opaque to the casual user and that increases the possibilities of failure. IPv6 is a new standard, and one that is not fully implemented. The web is in a transition phase from IPv4 to IPv6. Ergo, it makes simple sense to ensure that any attempt at IPv6 resolution will fail *gracefully* with an attempt at IPv4 resolution as the backup -- much as smart web design precepts dictate that accessible websites will fail gracefully back to simple HTML if fancy JavaScript and Flash and whatnot don't work properly for a given user. Other posts in this same thread have likewise suggested similar fallback measures.
Facebook in specific not working in Vista is not Microsoft's fault, sure. But *any* site that loads properly in XP but not in Vista jolly bloody well is Microsoft's fault, from the normal end user's perspective. You and I might know the specifics of *why* Facebook didn't load in this particular instance, and therefore have some clue about how to fix the issue, but we are also decidedly *not* the average garden-variety users. For Joe Schmoe, if a website works in the one flavor of Windows, it should work in the other -- full stop.
I can see on the one hand why you call the article author an ass, but to play the devil's advocate, he has a valid point -- if something doesn't work on Vista but *does* on XP, from the user's perspective it logically must be Vista that's the problem. Frankly, the internal whys and wherefores don't enter into it for any but the geekishly inclined.
Facebook not resolving via IPv6 does seem to have been Facebook's fault. But Facebook not showing up on Vista while it does on XP is indeed MS's fault. Facebook hasn't changed at all just because an individual user has a different OS; it's the OS that's different.
And no, avoiding this particular Facebook issue would not require MS to check the full IPv6 spectrum, as you suggest, but rather to gracefully fall back to IPv4 if IPv6 resolution fails. This should be the default setup anyway given that IPv6 still hasn't been fully implemented, while even those sites that already use IPv6 might not have the bugs worked out (case in point). And since the browser timing out might take a while, once IPv6 lookup times out, show the user some message to placate them and let them know that something at least is happening while the browser tries to resolve via IPv4.
Have you set up IPv6 for any sites? Is it easy at first try? I'm very much a noob when it comes to DNS, but after setting up my own IPv4 DNS intranet server this weekend, I can certainly say that it isn't intuitively obvious. IPv6 looks even less so. And given the relative novelty of the standard as well, I somehow doubt there's as much easily gained expertise floating around the net, as compared to IPv4.
Cheers,
Dude, don't be a twit. I'm not talking conspiracy, I'm talking similarity. As MS has grown larger and less accountable as to what it does with its resources, it begins to vaguely resemble the US government -- as possibly any huge human system would do. It's a simple observation, intimating that market forces are no longer evident in Vista's overly bloated, everything-and-the-Bridge-to-Nowhere-included, current form.
Cheers,
Maybe I'm just being Beltway-Bandit cynical, but good lord it sounds like you're talking about the gubmint. Let's change a few things:
Hmm, yep, that's about what I thought. Scary when MS really begins to resemble a government agency. Now how did *that* happen?
Cheers,
I looked at Dexpot some time ago, and while it looks lovely, I also note that the last release was a year and a half ago, with no news items on the website since then. Is this project dead? Though I am happy to note that the site actually loads now -- last time I looked it took *ages* to come up, and that was even without the benefit of a slashdotting.
Then again, I happen to be using Virtual Dimension, which likewise seems to be dead, with no releases since July 2005. I contracted this particular VD :) only after my previous love, Virtual Desktop Toolbox, went belly-up when the website disappeared and the sole dev vanished into thin air.
Cheers,