Oracle wouldn't make any money out of Open Office and now ( or soon ) they will not have the burden of it.
They won't have a diversity of products anymore either. Nothing but an overly expensive database, being squeezed at the top by DB2 and squeezed at the bottom by all the open source projects. Eventually, inevitably, they'll go "poof" and disappear. IMHO couldn't happen fast enough. They are actually in the same position Sun was, squeeze at both ends until they go poof. Maybe that sort of organizational knowledge of how to ride a sinking ship is why they wanted to buy Sun?
Now if they had kept the office suite, they could have sponsored a MS Access clone-ish solution inside OO.org that transparently and trivially at a click could upgrade from something free like mysql to their flagship Oracle database for a backend. Or maybe pay to integrate Oracles feelers as deeply as possible into the rest of OO.org. After all an application that had to swallow java web applet language and "survive" could probably have Oracle DBMS shoved down its throat. That could monetize quite profitably, but now it'll never happen...
I know there's an election tomorrow (we get to select which side of the same corporate purchased coin we want, yay for us) but I think the killer app for this isn't "right" "left" or "liberal" "conservative" but more for Pr0n, like "blondes" "redheads" and uh, many other not safe for work tags, you get the idea.
But the iPhone is not an alarm clock, it HAS an alarm clock function thou. I think the question here is which functions are essential (Phone, for example) and which are just supporting apps and should work as best effort (everything else IMHO).
In general you'd be correct, but the problem with this market is an ipod touch is an iphone without the phone. So both the phone and "supporting apps" need to work.
In my case I needed a small PDA like device, and already have a nice roughly $100/year prepaid phone. An iphone is about $3000 and an ipod touch was $180, so the decision was pretty simple.
While the Apple handsets automatically adjusted to daylight savings time, a bug in the alarm system meant many were woken up an hour later than they should have been, after clocks rolled back over the weekend.
How does this bug work?
OK lets work it inductively and assume the phone stores all times internally as local time and trusts the time the cellphone providers send out. So, "spring forward fall back" so your 5am wakeup remains at... 5am.
Well lets try option 2. Maybe they store it all internally as UTC and get local time from the cellphone tower. So your 5am local daylight time is X UTC. "fall back" to regular time and that wakeup is now X-0100 UTC. The alarm program reads the local time, converts to UTC, and you sleep in one hour. oops.
What mystifies me is that Apple would store the time internally as UTC instead of going pure local time. Not owning an iphone, if you travel east/west across a few timezones, do you have to reprogram all your alerts to the new local timezone which has a new UTC offset?
The other oddity is people use their phone as an alarmclock? A smartphone with a battery life measured in hours, probably dead by wakeup time? I'm with the modern generation in that I haven't worn a wristwatch in over a decade, but is it a generational thing that people don't own/use alarm clocks? What do you glance at, at 2am, when you just want to see the time if you momentarily wake up, etc? Get the tiny little phone, unlock it, put on the glasses/contacts, and read the time?
This paper describes a Perl module -- Lingua::Romana::Perligata -- that makes it possible to write Perl programs in Latin. A plausible rationale for wanting to do such a thing is provided
... and no, the rationale is not deploying Perl programs in "Latin America".
I believe I read about this in Perl Journal sometime last century.
You end up with stuff like this
sic
loco ianitori.
dato fonti perlegementum da. cis
There is no particular reason why you couldn't implement the same idea in Kanji instead of Latin.
The problem with non-verbal languages is most human beings are only capable of verbal collaboration using verbal-compatible languages.
Trying to discuss a non-trivial visual program at the water cooler or over the cube wall would "literally" (bad pun, sorry) be impossible. Just imagine how bad it would sound. Bug fixing would be extremely slow.
Finally you can't grep pictures. No typing / and searching for that interesting function API. It would truely become the first intentionally write only language.
Your ratio is about a factor of 50 too low, but symptoms sound similar to my relatives with celiac disease, although guessing over the net is almost as pointless as making a purely symptom based diagnosis vs the blood tests and biopsies that my relatives went thru... Anyway think of the conceptual difference between the trigger and the reaction. I don't think this type of therapy would help celiac folks since you'd still have the gliadin reaction trigger messing with your intestinal walls, its just that the immune system would no longer react. Help some symptoms but not necessarily a 100% cure of future cancer risk etc.
Not to mention nobody will even be able to guess at how to pronounce the symbols. I can just imagine the conversations now:
Can you look at this, it keeps crashing right around here. OK, lets see...What is that called? Which one? The one that looks kinda like a constipated duck. Hrmm, don't know. Well, anyway, moving along, constipated duck = surprised platypus times ruptured squirrel plus empire state building divided by yacking eagle...hrmm, can yacking eagle ever equal 0? I don't know, search for it. How do you type that one? I don't know, look it up. HOW?!? I'm sure it's not actually listed under yacking eagle! Screw it, lets just rewrite this steaming pile. Hey, I know that one....
Why stop with funny symbols, perhaps we can express our programs as finger painting or interpretive dance?
Users have had to put up with this kind of BS from GUI designers for decades now. Oh, you say mail-merge is the icon that looks like mating centipedes? Oh obviously. And nothing intuitively says "internet browser" like orange comet wrapping itself around an Arrakis/Dune blue eyeball. Then there's the retro stuff like icons of 5.25 inch diskettes, where my kids ask what the heck that is.
Little company makes something that turns out to be quite dangerous.
Big company buys little company and immediately strips the assets, sells off the division that make dangerous stuff.
Is the big company liable for everything the little company's dangerous division ever did if they never directly actually did anything dangerous?
Lots of paperwork and billable hours burned there.
Idiots hear the words "possession is nine tenths of the law" and don't realize they look stupid claiming that means whomever holds something gets to keep it regardless of how they got it or something equally dumb. What that phrase actually means, is nine tenths of the law is about whom exactly owns what, under the weirdest imaginable situations.
So as we can see, it's a rather dull case concerning asbestos.
A slightly more interesting interpretation is its a case about retroactively applying laws.
In a world where the laws are purchased by corporations acting as people, and almost no biological people can afford professional representation/interpretation of the law, the finer details of the rule of law are kind of irrelevant or uninteresting to the populous. But in a less apathetic world its an interesting situation.
Why would I bother developing something if I wasn't going to distribute it, either myself or someone I work for?
At home, because I want to use it?
At work, because the purpose of my work was to hyper-customize it, with the side effect that it would be useless anywhere else in the rest of the world?
went to ISPs and had killswitches installed there.
ALL isps? All sites for all ISPs? All racks of all data centers for all ISPs? Basically a kill switch on every router or layer-2 switch that has ever been installed?
The next mystery is how to control the switches. I know, over the internet! Oh wait. Hmm how about telephone lines? Oops, mine run over the internet now. Hmm.
You just block the routing between two network segments, by giving a command to the router doing the routing.
The how part is the mystery as we've put a lot of money and effort into blocking people outside of our network engineers from doing exactly that.
Mystery #2 is how to scale it up to "all routers that are currently in use" without making it a huge security hole, you know, the kind that creates disasters requiring an internet kill switch. Wait, that seems like a circular loop.
If the nukes the "terrists" have planted on U.S. soil can't ping one another through the net... they go off.
So, boss, you know that stupid VRML plugin for nagios that no one uses? Well, I've got a proposal for a somewhat more spectacular network monitoring system. No not clunky HP openview. See you gits yourself some webcams and some nukes, and then...
Core routers go down all the time, no one cares. Rerouting is what BGP does best. What are the "core routers"? You have to basically EMP every NAP every data center and every "carrier hotel". Simpler just to nuke the whole thing from orbit.
Kill the root servers I won't care until the cache expires... in about 86400 seconds. Well, half that on average. Oh you meant.com or.us. OK I guess.uk might be convinced to cave in.
I suppose a lot of this comes from the fact that not EVERYONE is aware of what a killswitch would even mean.
I've been on the net since 92 and in the biz since 97 and I have utterly no idea what it means.
Do they mean the fedgov would inject a 0/0 route into BGP? Morons used to do that occasionally so I have prefix lists to filter them out.
To they mean getting the biggest "tier 1" ISPs in the DFZ to... "shut off" or whatever? Those guys can just barely, on a good day, eventually coordinate a simple router software update in a day or two. OK, thats not me and I have plenty of peering at the local NAPs.
Its like the concept of an all-motor-vehicles kill switch, so we can press it every time there is a divorce custody dispute and somebody issues an Amber alert. Uh, we don't got that kind of tech, at least not yet. Not even sure if its theoretically possible from a technical standpoint.
Its not as simple as "send in the troops to chop the fiber with a fire axe" because that means shutting down the SCADA electrical grid, all telephones, all nuke power plants, all fedgov fiber would also be chopped, etc.
Heck of a lot closer to 0.5%, but the real answer is what percentage of the population has a friend / relative / coworker / neighbor ham radio guy... Probably 10%?
Oh, its technology, just 1940s technology. I think laundry "soaps" have been sulfonate detergents since the earliest days of the baby boom at the latest.
Slashdot Mirror
Oracle wouldn't make any money out of Open Office and now ( or soon ) they will not have the burden of it.
They won't have a diversity of products anymore either. Nothing but an overly expensive database, being squeezed at the top by DB2 and squeezed at the bottom by all the open source projects. Eventually, inevitably, they'll go "poof" and disappear. IMHO couldn't happen fast enough. They are actually in the same position Sun was, squeeze at both ends until they go poof. Maybe that sort of organizational knowledge of how to ride a sinking ship is why they wanted to buy Sun?
Now if they had kept the office suite, they could have sponsored a MS Access clone-ish solution inside OO.org that transparently and trivially at a click could upgrade from something free like mysql to their flagship Oracle database for a backend. Or maybe pay to integrate Oracles feelers as deeply as possible into the rest of OO.org. After all an application that had to swallow java web applet language and "survive" could probably have Oracle DBMS shoved down its throat. That could monetize quite profitably, but now it'll never happen...
Whats even creepier than that, playing Eliza or connecting to IRC...
Palm OS Graffiti input. Enjoyed it for many years.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graffiti_(Palm_OS)
I know there's an election tomorrow (we get to select which side of the same corporate purchased coin we want, yay for us) but I think the killer app for this isn't "right" "left" or "liberal" "conservative" but more for Pr0n, like "blondes" "redheads" and uh, many other not safe for work tags, you get the idea.
But the iPhone is not an alarm clock, it HAS an alarm clock function thou. I think the question here is which functions are essential (Phone, for example) and which are just supporting apps and should work as best effort (everything else IMHO).
In general you'd be correct, but the problem with this market is an ipod touch is an iphone without the phone. So both the phone and "supporting apps" need to work.
In my case I needed a small PDA like device, and already have a nice roughly $100/year prepaid phone. An iphone is about $3000 and an ipod touch was $180, so the decision was pretty simple.
While the Apple handsets automatically adjusted to daylight savings time, a bug in the alarm system meant many were woken up an hour later than they should have been, after clocks rolled back over the weekend.
How does this bug work?
OK lets work it inductively and assume the phone stores all times internally as local time and trusts the time the cellphone providers send out. So, "spring forward fall back" so your 5am wakeup remains at ... 5am.
Well lets try option 2. Maybe they store it all internally as UTC and get local time from the cellphone tower. So your 5am local daylight time is X UTC. "fall back" to regular time and that wakeup is now X-0100 UTC. The alarm program reads the local time, converts to UTC, and you sleep in one hour. oops.
What mystifies me is that Apple would store the time internally as UTC instead of going pure local time. Not owning an iphone, if you travel east/west across a few timezones, do you have to reprogram all your alerts to the new local timezone which has a new UTC offset?
The other oddity is people use their phone as an alarmclock? A smartphone with a battery life measured in hours, probably dead by wakeup time? I'm with the modern generation in that I haven't worn a wristwatch in over a decade, but is it a generational thing that people don't own/use alarm clocks? What do you glance at, at 2am, when you just want to see the time if you momentarily wake up, etc? Get the tiny little phone, unlock it, put on the glasses/contacts, and read the time?
It does, however the comments aren't. I'm not sure how useful this is since you still need to use ASCII characters for programming.
The article, and many of the comments, strike me as guys whom have never used a serious hard core preprocessor.
How bout Lingua::Romana::Perligata?
http://www.csse.monash.edu.au/~damian/papers/HTML/Perligata.html
This paper describes a Perl module -- Lingua::Romana::Perligata -- that makes it possible to write Perl programs in Latin. A plausible rationale for wanting to do such a thing is provided
... and no, the rationale is not deploying Perl programs in "Latin America".
I believe I read about this in Perl Journal sometime last century.
You end up with stuff like this
sic
loco ianitori.
dato fonti perlegementum da.
cis
There is no particular reason why you couldn't implement the same idea in Kanji instead of Latin.
The problem with non-verbal languages is most human beings are only capable of verbal collaboration using verbal-compatible languages.
Trying to discuss a non-trivial visual program at the water cooler or over the cube wall would "literally" (bad pun, sorry) be impossible. Just imagine how bad it would sound. Bug fixing would be extremely slow.
Finally you can't grep pictures. No typing / and searching for that interesting function API. It would truely become the first intentionally write only language.
Your ratio is about a factor of 50 too low, but symptoms sound similar to my relatives with celiac disease, although guessing over the net is almost as pointless as making a purely symptom based diagnosis vs the blood tests and biopsies that my relatives went thru... Anyway think of the conceptual difference between the trigger and the reaction. I don't think this type of therapy would help celiac folks since you'd still have the gliadin reaction trigger messing with your intestinal walls, its just that the immune system would no longer react. Help some symptoms but not necessarily a 100% cure of future cancer risk etc.
Not to mention nobody will even be able to guess at how to pronounce the symbols. I can just imagine the conversations now:
Can you look at this, it keeps crashing right around here. OK, lets see...What is that called? Which one? The one that looks kinda like a constipated duck. Hrmm, don't know. Well, anyway, moving along, constipated duck = surprised platypus times ruptured squirrel plus empire state building divided by yacking eagle...hrmm, can yacking eagle ever equal 0? I don't know, search for it. How do you type that one? I don't know, look it up. HOW?!? I'm sure it's not actually listed under yacking eagle! Screw it, lets just rewrite this steaming pile. Hey, I know that one....
Why stop with funny symbols, perhaps we can express our programs as finger painting or interpretive dance?
Users have had to put up with this kind of BS from GUI designers for decades now. Oh, you say mail-merge is the icon that looks like mating centipedes? Oh obviously. And nothing intuitively says "internet browser" like orange comet wrapping itself around an Arrakis/Dune blue eyeball. Then there's the retro stuff like icons of 5.25 inch diskettes, where my kids ask what the heck that is.
Little company makes something that turns out to be quite dangerous.
Big company buys little company and immediately strips the assets, sells off the division that make dangerous stuff.
Is the big company liable for everything the little company's dangerous division ever did if they never directly actually did anything dangerous?
Lots of paperwork and billable hours burned there.
Idiots hear the words "possession is nine tenths of the law" and don't realize they look stupid claiming that means whomever holds something gets to keep it regardless of how they got it or something equally dumb. What that phrase actually means, is nine tenths of the law is about whom exactly owns what, under the weirdest imaginable situations.
So as we can see, it's a rather dull case concerning asbestos.
A slightly more interesting interpretation is its a case about retroactively applying laws.
In a world where the laws are purchased by corporations acting as people, and almost no biological people can afford professional representation/interpretation of the law, the finer details of the rule of law are kind of irrelevant or uninteresting to the populous. But in a less apathetic world its an interesting situation.
Why would I bother developing something if I wasn't going to distribute it, either myself or someone I work for?
At home, because I want to use it?
At work, because the purpose of my work was to hyper-customize it, with the side effect that it would be useless anywhere else in the rest of the world?
went to ISPs and had killswitches installed there.
ALL isps? All sites for all ISPs? All racks of all data centers for all ISPs? Basically a kill switch on every router or layer-2 switch that has ever been installed?
The next mystery is how to control the switches. I know, over the internet! Oh wait. Hmm how about telephone lines? Oops, mine run over the internet now. Hmm.
You just block the routing between two network segments, by giving a command to the router doing the routing.
The how part is the mystery as we've put a lot of money and effort into blocking people outside of our network engineers from doing exactly that.
Mystery #2 is how to scale it up to "all routers that are currently in use" without making it a huge security hole, you know, the kind that creates disasters requiring an internet kill switch. Wait, that seems like a circular loop.
Are we moving the call centers back to the USA??
Won't help with all the voice over the internet providers, I'll have no dialtone...
If the nukes the "terrists" have planted on U.S. soil can't ping one another through the net... they go off.
So, boss, you know that stupid VRML plugin for nagios that no one uses? Well, I've got a proposal for a somewhat more spectacular network monitoring system. No not clunky HP openview. See you gits yourself some webcams and some nukes, and then...
Once the core routers and DNS servers are down.
Core routers go down all the time, no one cares. Rerouting is what BGP does best. What are the "core routers"? You have to basically EMP every NAP every data center and every "carrier hotel". Simpler just to nuke the whole thing from orbit.
Kill the root servers I won't care until the cache expires... in about 86400 seconds. Well, half that on average. Oh you meant .com or .us. OK I guess .uk might be convinced to cave in.
I suppose a lot of this comes from the fact that not EVERYONE is aware of what a killswitch would even mean.
I've been on the net since 92 and in the biz since 97 and I have utterly no idea what it means.
Do they mean the fedgov would inject a 0/0 route into BGP? Morons used to do that occasionally so I have prefix lists to filter them out.
To they mean getting the biggest "tier 1" ISPs in the DFZ to ... "shut off" or whatever? Those guys can just barely, on a good day, eventually coordinate a simple router software update in a day or two. OK, thats not me and I have plenty of peering at the local NAPs.
Its like the concept of an all-motor-vehicles kill switch, so we can press it every time there is a divorce custody dispute and somebody issues an Amber alert. Uh, we don't got that kind of tech, at least not yet. Not even sure if its theoretically possible from a technical standpoint.
Its not as simple as "send in the troops to chop the fiber with a fire axe" because that means shutting down the SCADA electrical grid, all telephones, all nuke power plants, all fedgov fiber would also be chopped, etc.
Heck of a lot closer to 0.5%, but the real answer is what percentage of the population has a friend / relative / coworker / neighbor ham radio guy... Probably 10%?
or
"In case of yet another microsoft windows security hole the president will shut down all computers, including macs"
And English, or French, or Asians somehow have special knowledge the excludes them from this group? Really?
They are not addicted to the viewpoint "if its not in The Bible, I don't need to know it".
Not so much a gain of "special knowledge" as a lack of "special knowledge"
but consider: would you be willing to invest YOUR time for just 1/13 of it? I wouldn't.
Yet they only did 1/13th of the work... seems fair.
Also, the vanity press market-segment disagrees with your assessment that no "expert" would write a book for free.
In terms of pricing and content, one should thus consider this more of a White Paper.
Isn't marketing spam supposed to be free?
Oh, for goodness sake, a typo in the first sentence of a $189 book!
Its only $189 instead of $190 for a reason, you know.
Oh, its technology, just 1940s technology. I think laundry "soaps" have been sulfonate detergents since the earliest days of the baby boom at the latest.