Actually, it's kind of fun when you think about it -- name all the standalones as fantastic creatures, then you can come up with other fun names for the integrated all-in-one: Mozilla Menagerie, MozillaZoo, Mozilla Manticore (as a combination of other creatures)... any other good ideas out there?
I can personally vouch for OOo being able to open semi-complicated Excel spreadsheets and translate the formulae without encountering problems. The greater issue is user error -- i.e., when users who are used to Excel sit down and try to manually type in a formula, using commas instead of semicolons (the reason for OOo's semicolons given elsewhere in this thread), OOo cries foul.
So don't worry about having to recreate or tweak any legacy Excel sheets you have -- the comma/semicolon issue is moot when opening existing Excel sheets in OOo, and likewise when saving from OOo for use in Excel.
No troubles. In my more technologically paranoid moments I do my composing in a separate text editor, then copy and paste. Of course, that's usually shortly after a bad experience of the sort you mention...
Anyway, hope you find the opportunity to post again. <g>
One particular problem I have with this issue is precisely where the money comes from, and where it goes. You spoke before of "entitlement", but on the flip side of that is your unspoken assumption that the drug developers are entitled to a profit.
Sure, developing drugs is an expensive business. But how much drug development is actually sponsored by government grants, i.e. by your and my tax money? How much of the massive budgets these drug companies make public are actually going towards non-development costs like advertising, distribution, lobbying, and doctor kickbacks?
When a significant portion of drug development is paid for with government funds, using government facilities being operated in part by government employees, I must say that yes, I do feel entitled to those drugs. And not because I'm some sponger, or because I feel that patents are crap, but because I've already paid for the drugs. I feel no compunction to ensure that these CEOs get their bonuses, or that the shareholders make a mint. What about my return on investment as a taxpayer?
...
So, to bring your question back into scope, I think corporations and government might have a use in this construct, but the undeniably corrupt way in which the pharmaceutical industry is bending the public sector to its will in service of a voracious appetite for profit is becoming a genuine hazard to public well-being. Somehow we need to prune the pharmaceutical industry, find a way to reduce its lobbying clout. Sure, profits are great. How about doing it the way other, less politically connected industries do it -- making a good product as cheaply as possible? Drugs that fill an urgent immediate need, like the AIDS drugs, should receive more public funding, and be sold at a discount as a result -- as they've already been partially paid for.
It galls me extremely to see how much the pharmaceutical companies harp on about profits when they're already so busy sucking on the public teat. Forgive me if this post has been somewhat strident, for it touches a nerve.
I strongly suspect that the linked AG letter is in fact a slightly-reworded draft of what the **AA sent. Notice the complete scaremongering idiocy of the statement about file sharing when the computer is off -- it doesn't take a genius to figure out this is crap; my grandparents (and they are decidedly not geekish in any way) are smart enough to figure out that when the power's off, ain't nothing happening. That's like claiming that your neighbors will be able to listen in on your household conversations via the telephone, when the receiver's on the hook. Or better yet, flat out unplugged.
To wit, sounds suspiciously like raw **AA BS'n'FUD to me. Tack on a couple paragraphs of intro for the AGs explaining how they want the letter formatted, and there you have it.
While I hear your point, I'm left wondering -- if not "all guns are manufactured such that it is intended that they will kill," then what are they manufactured for? I thought guns were precisely for killing; historically there have been few other purposes for which a gun has been used*. Your analogy seems to fall apart here -- a gun is a weapon, period; whereas P2P applications, or Boeing aircraft, are designed for completely different, non-belligerent purposes.
While I am uncertain of the historical wisdom of legislating gun control, from the point of view of safety and what guns are meant to do, I can understand the reasons for attempts to do enact such legislation. We regulate cars, because they are dangerous; we regulate many chemicals for the same reason. There are countless other examples that I could name. Extending this logic to guns is not wholly spurious. Extending it to P2P applications beggars the imagination -- at least, until one brings notice to the underlying unpleasant smell of money politics.
* At least, that I'm aware of. Please correct me if I'm wrong, I'm honestly interested in your point of view.
Methinks "funny" is the wrong category -- "informative" is much more on the mark. As the up-and-coming brownshirts of Middle America are fond of yelling, if you don't like it, leave. Frankly, I'm a bit too cynical to think it can be fixed, so...
Minor quibble, but the usual patent term is 20 years, not 21*. However, this term may be extended in certain circumstances. Per the USPTO's own online information:
Generally, the term of a new patent is 20 years from the date on which the application for the patent was filed in the United States or, in special cases, from the date an earlier related application was filed, subject to the payment of maintenance fees... Under certain circumstances, patent term extensions or adjustments may be available.
* I seem to recall the patent term being 17 years in the not-too-distant past. Ah, yes, a quick Google search shows that the term of a patent seems to be 17 years from the date the patent is issued, but 20 years from the date of filing. I don't know about you all, but allotting three years for what has essentially become a rubber-stamping process seems a bit excessive...
So having work checked by someone other than the one who created it is a good practice for just about any endeavor, not just software.
Amen to that -- it is vital in translation, for instance, where the first translator might misinterpret something, or even have their eyes skip a line, whereas the second will catch the booboo. Even the best of us screws up somewhere.
I think the point about the pipes is not that the people on foot can hear, but rather that the people who insist on driving about in armored, insulated SUVs can hear. I agree, the pedestrians should be able to go about their business "unharmed and with comfortably non-ringing ears," but I can also understand the concern that too many others on the roads pay woefully little attention to their surroundings. The lives the grandparent poster was talking about were most likely of those of the motorcycle riders.
So before you get your dander up, I think it's important to note that, while the argument "Loud Pipes Save Lives" does come across as "arrogant, self-centered, thoughtless, and logically inconsistent" when directed at peds, it takes on a whole different layer of meaning when directed at the modern-day highway-approved personnel carrier with the tinted windows rolled up tight, the sound system blasting, and the cell phone ringing. I find it frightening enough to drive my little '81 Toyota Corolla amidst these behemoths, let alone get on a hog. For that matter, I only dare take my bicycle when I can be sure of a back route off the major thoroughfares. Too many drivers are just plain scary.
Crossover Office... is capable of running Word virtually flawlessly
Not quite. I'm a translator, and I'm stuck using Win2K under VMWare in part because Crossover cannot offer me the Japanese functionality needed. That and the obscure hoops to jump through to get Shift-JIS filename compatibility under Linux. But even given legible filenames, Crossover chokes when it comes to setting Office up with international UI options.
I agree with you in part, but let's be a little more serious here. Congress isn't populated with idiots; one needn't be a genious to get into office, but it does take a certain amount of guile and people-smarts. So no, I don't think we can call them "incompetent morons with the intelligence of the common garden slug."
However, I do wholeheartedly feel they can be called negligent spongers. These people are not doing their jobs. They are not representing their constituents, and they aren't reading the laws they supposedly write. If some whinger claims "well, the laws are too convoluted to read" (a fair enough claim -- anyone actually tried to read the PATRIOT ACT? It's a laundry list of amendments to other laws, apparently crafted specifically to *be* unintelligible), well that's quite frankly the whinger's fault -- they write the laws, don't they? So write them more lucidly.
So no, I don't think the folks in Congress are incompetent morons. They (some of them, at any rate) are sly, mooching, slacking freeloaders instead.
And if any congresspeople happen to read these words, buck up and do your job! Please! Represent!
Looking at the parent's sig, I think it wouldn't be too far off the mark to say the US is over the hill. Over the hill, and on the way down the other side.
I was going to moderate this comment, but I found there's no "sad" category. This is spot-on (heck, I've already left), and the sentiment needs to be better known. Sure, the US has lots going for it -- but so many of the positives seem more like historical legacies slowly being choked to death by the corporate greed and public complacency that has enveloped the country.
And now I embark on some very general theorizing, so bear with me.
Historical comparison:
The Islamic world was a major intellectual force from around 700 to what, 1300 or so? They brought us algebra, among other things. But this drive for knowledge got choked off -- the Powers That Be decided that the spirit of inquisitive examination of the world had learned "enough", and the screws were tightened. And now it seems we are seeing signs of the same choking in the West, driven largely by the US, with greed as the engine.
Suffice it to say I am dismayed. I dearly hope someone (a very many someones) will prove me wrong, but it will take years of very different behavior in the US to bring me around.
I suspect a good reason you still hear so much venom about Clippy is the large number of us stuck 8+ hours a day in corporate environments where the IT departments are not enlightened enough to either let us use our own settings or to not install the Office "assistant" in the first place. Every time I'm using an Office program (and yes, there are many of us drone types in the world at large who have to use such things) and my finger happens to hit F1, up pops Clippy! Ready to Help!
Sure, those of us using our home systems don't have much to complain about in terms of 1998 or 2000 technology. But remember that there are many of us stuck using software chosen by others. So while you haven't had to deal with Clippy "in five years" (lucky bastard), I see him with disgusting, irritating frequency.:p
I'm something of an inveterate language geek, and now a professional linguist (translator), and I read your post and the linked page with some interest.
Coming away from the linked page, I found myself thinking a couple things. For one, if the Latin speakers of the time considered "virus" a non-count noun, this clearly denotes a quite different concept from the modern one. In such a case, it makes sense for the word to change (i.e., to grow a plural when previously it had none).
For two, I find it admittedly unexciting that some English speakers should choose the "us -> i" for the plural. Sure, that might be inconsistent with the original Latin, but then so is the whole concept of the plural "virus" to begin with. (Incidentally, though the linked page was quite scandalised at the thought of anyone using "octopi", nowhere did it say what would be the correct plural; furthermore, Merriam Webster lists both "octopi" and "octopuses" as the plural forms...)
Waxing somewhat philosophical, I ask what is a word, in your view, and posit that languages change. My point is that, ten years ago, "blog" was not a word, while now it is widely understood. "Virii"/"viri" may cause some (considerable) cognitive distress, but if it has common currency, is it not a word? If it isn't, what would it take to make it one? I'm genuinely curious as to what you think, and would appreciate a response.
Seriously, in my first year of Mandarin in college, the back of the textbook had a poem from about 3,000 years ago -- it still rhymed, it still had rhythm, and it still made sense.
So perhaps instead of Python, we should all be coding in Hanyü?
With all those neato wizards and that ever helpful Clippy to get you through, everything will be *just fine*....
Seriously, though, a couple candified demos showing some slick gui for the services, designed to look like a three-year-old could configure NFS, SSH, or whatever else, I can imagine a couple of the dimmer bulbs in the onion patch deciding MS was the new Flavor of the Month.
Quoth Hast: the two "x" variables were in different scopes and thus completely independent
Hello Hast --
I'm actually reading Thinking in Java right now, and your talk of threads has me confused. I'm a complete Java noob, so that may well be the issue. However, once you declare a variable to be "final", isn't there only one by default? Please, clue me in if otherwise.
Try The Eyre Affair, a quite fun read wherein you could just about sell your soul to a book... or at least to the characters in it, be they written in or only visiting...
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, it's kind of fun when you think about it -- name all the standalones as fantastic creatures, then you can come up with other fun names for the integrated all-in-one: ... any other good ideas out there?
Mozilla Menagerie, MozillaZoo, Mozilla Manticore (as a combination of other creatures)
I can personally vouch for OOo being able to open semi-complicated Excel spreadsheets and translate the formulae without encountering problems. The greater issue is user error -- i.e., when users who are used to Excel sit down and try to manually type in a formula, using commas instead of semicolons (the reason for OOo's semicolons given elsewhere in this thread), OOo cries foul.
So don't worry about having to recreate or tweak any legacy Excel sheets you have -- the comma/semicolon issue is moot when opening existing Excel sheets in OOo, and likewise when saving from OOo for use in Excel.
No troubles. In my more technologically paranoid moments I do my composing in a separate text editor, then copy and paste. Of course, that's usually shortly after a bad experience of the sort you mention...
Anyway, hope you find the opportunity to post again. <g>
One particular problem I have with this issue is precisely where the money comes from, and where it goes. You spoke before of "entitlement", but on the flip side of that is your unspoken assumption that the drug developers are entitled to a profit.
Sure, developing drugs is an expensive business. But how much drug development is actually sponsored by government grants, i.e. by your and my tax money? How much of the massive budgets these drug companies make public are actually going towards non-development costs like advertising, distribution, lobbying, and doctor kickbacks?
When a significant portion of drug development is paid for with government funds, using government facilities being operated in part by government employees, I must say that yes, I do feel entitled to those drugs. And not because I'm some sponger, or because I feel that patents are crap, but because I've already paid for the drugs. I feel no compunction to ensure that these CEOs get their bonuses, or that the shareholders make a mint. What about my return on investment as a taxpayer?
...
So, to bring your question back into scope, I think corporations and government might have a use in this construct, but the undeniably corrupt way in which the pharmaceutical industry is bending the public sector to its will in service of a voracious appetite for profit is becoming a genuine hazard to public well-being. Somehow we need to prune the pharmaceutical industry, find a way to reduce its lobbying clout. Sure, profits are great. How about doing it the way other, less politically connected industries do it -- making a good product as cheaply as possible? Drugs that fill an urgent immediate need, like the AIDS drugs, should receive more public funding, and be sold at a discount as a result -- as they've already been partially paid for.
It galls me extremely to see how much the pharmaceutical companies harp on about profits when they're already so busy sucking on the public teat. Forgive me if this post has been somewhat strident, for it touches a nerve.
I strongly suspect that the linked AG letter is in fact a slightly-reworded draft of what the **AA sent. Notice the complete scaremongering idiocy of the statement about file sharing when the computer is off -- it doesn't take a genius to figure out this is crap; my grandparents (and they are decidedly not geekish in any way) are smart enough to figure out that when the power's off, ain't nothing happening. That's like claiming that your neighbors will be able to listen in on your household conversations via the telephone, when the receiver's on the hook. Or better yet, flat out unplugged.
To wit, sounds suspiciously like raw **AA BS'n'FUD to me. Tack on a couple paragraphs of intro for the AGs explaining how they want the letter formatted, and there you have it.
While I hear your point, I'm left wondering -- if not "all guns are manufactured such that it is intended that they will kill," then what are they manufactured for? I thought guns were precisely for killing; historically there have been few other purposes for which a gun has been used*. Your analogy seems to fall apart here -- a gun is a weapon, period; whereas P2P applications, or Boeing aircraft, are designed for completely different, non-belligerent purposes.
While I am uncertain of the historical wisdom of legislating gun control, from the point of view of safety and what guns are meant to do, I can understand the reasons for attempts to do enact such legislation. We regulate cars, because they are dangerous; we regulate many chemicals for the same reason. There are countless other examples that I could name. Extending this logic to guns is not wholly spurious. Extending it to P2P applications beggars the imagination -- at least, until one brings notice to the underlying unpleasant smell of money politics.
* At least, that I'm aware of. Please correct me if I'm wrong, I'm honestly interested in your point of view.
And here I thought we'd simply found a way to agree with Shakespeare...
"First thing we do, is kill all the lawyers." -- Henry VI
Methinks "funny" is the wrong category -- "informative" is much more on the mark. As the up-and-coming brownshirts of Middle America are fond of yelling, if you don't like it, leave. Frankly, I'm a bit too cynical to think it can be fixed, so ...
Minor quibble, but the usual patent term is 20 years, not 21*. However, this term may be extended in certain circumstances. Per the USPTO's own online information:
* I seem to recall the patent term being 17 years in the not-too-distant past. Ah, yes, a quick Google search shows that the term of a patent seems to be 17 years from the date the patent is issued, but 20 years from the date of filing. I don't know about you all, but allotting three years for what has essentially become a rubber-stamping process seems a bit excessive...
I seem to recall they had those blankets for sale on Think Geek... Happy hunting, though.
I think the point about the pipes is not that the people on foot can hear, but rather that the people who insist on driving about in armored, insulated SUVs can hear. I agree, the pedestrians should be able to go about their business "unharmed and with comfortably non-ringing ears," but I can also understand the concern that too many others on the roads pay woefully little attention to their surroundings. The lives the grandparent poster was talking about were most likely of those of the motorcycle riders.
So before you get your dander up, I think it's important to note that, while the argument "Loud Pipes Save Lives" does come across as "arrogant, self-centered, thoughtless, and logically inconsistent" when directed at peds, it takes on a whole different layer of meaning when directed at the modern-day highway-approved personnel carrier with the tinted windows rolled up tight, the sound system blasting, and the cell phone ringing. I find it frightening enough to drive my little '81 Toyota Corolla amidst these behemoths, let alone get on a hog. For that matter, I only dare take my bicycle when I can be sure of a back route off the major thoroughfares. Too many drivers are just plain scary.
Lovely! Actually makes me think of something more between a caulking product and Fixodent.
I guess you could also get Windows ME/NT OS, the Freshmaker! Hmm, the possiblities abound!
Well, it is called WinCE, now, isn't it? Seems rather apt to me ...
Not quite. I'm a translator, and I'm stuck using Win2K under VMWare in part because Crossover cannot offer me the Japanese functionality needed. That and the obscure hoops to jump through to get Shift-JIS filename compatibility under Linux. But even given legible filenames, Crossover chokes when it comes to setting Office up with international UI options.
Just my ¥2...
I agree with you in part, but let's be a little more serious here. Congress isn't populated with idiots; one needn't be a genious to get into office, but it does take a certain amount of guile and people-smarts. So no, I don't think we can call them "incompetent morons with the intelligence of the common garden slug."
However, I do wholeheartedly feel they can be called negligent spongers. These people are not doing their jobs. They are not representing their constituents, and they aren't reading the laws they supposedly write. If some whinger claims "well, the laws are too convoluted to read" (a fair enough claim -- anyone actually tried to read the PATRIOT ACT? It's a laundry list of amendments to other laws, apparently crafted specifically to *be* unintelligible), well that's quite frankly the whinger's fault -- they write the laws, don't they? So write them more lucidly.
So no, I don't think the folks in Congress are incompetent morons. They (some of them, at any rate) are sly, mooching, slacking freeloaders instead.
And if any congresspeople happen to read these words, buck up and do your job! Please! Represent!
Looking at the parent's sig, I think it wouldn't be too far off the mark to say the US is over the hill. Over the hill, and on the way down the other side.
I was going to moderate this comment, but I found there's no "sad" category. This is spot-on (heck, I've already left), and the sentiment needs to be better known. Sure, the US has lots going for it -- but so many of the positives seem more like historical legacies slowly being choked to death by the corporate greed and public complacency that has enveloped the country.
And now I embark on some very general theorizing, so bear with me.
Historical comparison:
The Islamic world was a major intellectual force from around 700 to what, 1300 or so? They brought us algebra, among other things. But this drive for knowledge got choked off -- the Powers That Be decided that the spirit of inquisitive examination of the world had learned "enough", and the screws were tightened. And now it seems we are seeing signs of the same choking in the West, driven largely by the US, with greed as the engine.
Suffice it to say I am dismayed. I dearly hope someone (a very many someones) will prove me wrong, but it will take years of very different behavior in the US to bring me around.
I suspect a good reason you still hear so much venom about Clippy is the large number of us stuck 8+ hours a day in corporate environments where the IT departments are not enlightened enough to either let us use our own settings or to not install the Office "assistant" in the first place. Every time I'm using an Office program (and yes, there are many of us drone types in the world at large who have to use such things) and my finger happens to hit F1, up pops Clippy! Ready to Help!
Sure, those of us using our home systems don't have much to complain about in terms of 1998 or 2000 technology. But remember that there are many of us stuck using software chosen by others. So while you haven't had to deal with Clippy "in five years" (lucky bastard), I see him with disgusting, irritating frequency. :p
I'm something of an inveterate language geek, and now a professional linguist (translator), and I read your post and the linked page with some interest.
Coming away from the linked page, I found myself thinking a couple things. For one, if the Latin speakers of the time considered "virus" a non-count noun, this clearly denotes a quite different concept from the modern one. In such a case, it makes sense for the word to change (i.e., to grow a plural when previously it had none).
For two, I find it admittedly unexciting that some English speakers should choose the "us -> i" for the plural. Sure, that might be inconsistent with the original Latin, but then so is the whole concept of the plural "virus" to begin with. (Incidentally, though the linked page was quite scandalised at the thought of anyone using "octopi", nowhere did it say what would be the correct plural; furthermore, Merriam Webster lists both "octopi" and "octopuses" as the plural forms...)
Waxing somewhat philosophical, I ask what is a word, in your view, and posit that languages change. My point is that, ten years ago, "blog" was not a word, while now it is widely understood. "Virii"/"viri" may cause some (considerable) cognitive distress, but if it has common currency, is it not a word? If it isn't, what would it take to make it one? I'm genuinely curious as to what you think, and would appreciate a response.
Tell that to the Chinese.
Seriously, in my first year of Mandarin in college, the back of the textbook had a poem from about 3,000 years ago -- it still rhymed, it still had rhythm, and it still made sense.
So perhaps instead of Python, we should all be coding in Hanyü?
With all those neato wizards and that ever helpful Clippy to get you through, everything will be *just fine*....
Seriously, though, a couple candified demos showing some slick gui for the services, designed to look like a three-year-old could configure NFS, SSH, or whatever else, I can imagine a couple of the dimmer bulbs in the onion patch deciding MS was the new Flavor of the Month.
If you build it, they will be dumb.
Hello Hast --
I'm actually reading Thinking in Java right now, and your talk of threads has me confused. I'm a complete Java noob, so that may well be the issue. However, once you declare a variable to be "final", isn't there only one by default? Please, clue me in if otherwise.
Cheers
Try The Eyre Affair , a quite fun read wherein you could just about sell your soul to a book... or at least to the characters in it, be they written in or only visiting...
Cheers
Egad, that was his? Oof, nevermind then...