sorta depends on your point of view
in the human beings are disposable wipes capitilist society we live in, sales force looks good...by any reasoanble std, they still look like shit..., or saddam hussien may look good compared to stalin, but that don't make him good (hyperbole hear )
Lets take calculus, which has not reallly changed in, say , 200 years...
I could buy a nice, acid free paper reprint, which will last for years without batteries for a few dollars from dover, or I could spend 100s of $$ to have something which only works out of the rain, in the right light....
This is an example of not focusing on the problem. The problem is not the delivery technology (print vs online), or the need for updating on a 5 yr cycle (does heat transfer really change that much ?). The problem is the (a) the greed inspired by our capitlist system, which winds up screwing the students, and (b) the complicity of professors, educators and boards of education, which in many states mandate texts.... To restate the point, if you ask, not is it neat technology, but how would I best serve the students. I think that a co-operative, nonprofit publisher, organized over the net with cvs like software, putting out nice high quality texts on acid free paper, would be a better solution for high school and entry college texts.
Even in fast moving fields ( I am familiar with molecular biology, genomics and genetics) most of what gets taught is old; you only need a small handout each year for updating.
Even on a strict environmental basis, if only 10% of the "free" heat transfer texts get printed out, is that a plus, considering that home printers are probably environmental disasters, compared to commercial plants ?
"as long as linux.." correct, imho. the replie(s) that there is nothing new to do in spreadsheets are idiotic - there are so many major things wrong with excell it isnt funny
"when people send me..."
are you a flaming AH, or just having an off day ?
For nigh on 15 years now, nerds, geeks and jealous competitors have been blasting MS for bloat and requiring $$ hardware upgrades with each new OS generation.
I can see it has really hurt MS sale and market leadership.
You think the people who SELL hardware are exactly unhappy about this
why is small imp ? last time I checked, hardrives are ~ 1 dollar per gig.
So an extra 0.2 gig of office "bloat" is..r u ready... 20 cents of harddirve ?
as for typesetting... get a life. Not one person in 100 cares, so why shd MS ? go get latex if u want typesetting
More generally, as for "feature bloat" (a) this is wrong and (b) its wrong - (a) there is no feature bloat because you dont have to even see it in default,and (b) features is what makes MS succefull.
PEOPLE LIKE FEATURES MORE THEN "TECHNICAL SUPERIORITY" in the real world, a program that supplies things people need will always win out over crap like typesetting; understanding this is part of the MS success story
polyethylene glycol is a misnomer; the product is actually peo, polyethylene oxide
it is WIDELY used in food, cosmetics etc and accepted as non toxix
the nomenclature of PEG is completely misleading, and u r right that ethylene glycol is toxic
interestingly, peo (=peg) is made from oxirane, an extreemely toxic gas
still true after all these years: unix is the system of the future; always has been , always will be untill geeks wake up and smell the coffee: stupid marketing drives sales, not tehcnical chops
the posters who note that moving clinical trials offshore will not help (you still have to get thru fda, and they will have problems with third world data, at least for a couple of years)
however, pharma and biotech do a lot of basic research
I am a 45 year old PH.D., with training at MIT.. there is nothing I can do that could not be done by a young chinese scientist at 1/10 my salary. There are probably 10 - 30 thousand such jobs that could go over seas, and this will give them the money and infrastructure to start moving up the food chain to drug trials
In a way it is kinda funny, all the middle/upper middle class professionals did nothing while the rust belt was decimated, now they are whining
that tired old excuse of the fda.. I work in biotech to; the reason it cost so much to get thru the fda is that the clincal index (ratio of good/harm) is usually not much greater then one, if even that
if drugs actually WORKED development costs would be lower.
also, if you make a drug for a non threatening condition (such as acne) and it causes death in x% of the patients, since acne is usually not life threatening, x has to be pretty low
also , these figures on development are not independent - the socalled independent cente at tufts, which generates the "standard" figures on drug costs is both industry funded and sleazy (sleazy - they have press releases on their studies before the studies are either publically available or thru peer review; by def sleazy)
I think th eproblem is that biotech is funded by biz types, who are both very convervative - they only give money to people who are conservative - and also suable - a large VC fund has several hundred MM, so they are worht a large lawsuit. this combo prevents biotech from just going for it
the other problem is that most new drugs and treatmetns dont work, so "just going for it" causes a lot of harm. eg, stem cells - lots a promise, no actuall real world working therapys
RNAi for late stage cancer (eg, RNAi for mutant cip1 or p53 alleles) is perhaps the first example of a technology with enough promise to make it worht the while
also, there are a few garages around that do just go for it; i was told that milken, when he had cancer, was paying for stuff from a garage in wobourn massachusettes...a little room for scam artists there maybe (sarcasm)
The idea that most kids need to learn math and science is idiotic.
We will NEVER repeat NEVER "win" any sort of job contest with india or china by educating ourselves more - only a profession as idiotic as economics would even bring up the idea
Whny cant most people use calculators ?
This idea that math needs to be learnt by a majority of the studentry is a geek bias. If yuou ask physiscists, they will bemoan the total ignorance of the studentry, unable to grasp the concept of the trnasistor. similarly, biologist think you need to know about dna, muscicians think you need to know about scales, etc
Would we even be having this/. discussion if the topic was music ? But music is far more importatn toa HAPPY life for more people then math.
I think the reason math is not kid friendly is because for most people it us useless and boring, about as important as knowing about the Sung dynasty of china. You really don't need math in real life - I would wager dollars to donuts that a knowledge of cosines is required by 5% of the populace.
The only reason we have math is to serve as a separtor, becuase we have a competitive rewards based society.
Predictions of how the weather or climate will change are made with the aid of very complicated computer models.
Part of what goes into these models are equations that describe how a change in one thing (such as the amount of sunlight rreaching the earth, or the amount of greenhouse gas produced by natural and human sources) affects the climate.
The parent asserted that a recent scientific paper in one of the most respected (and hard to get published in) scientific journals asserted that one of the key parameters was wrong by a factor of 10 (the parameter is how much CO2 gets absorbed by the ocean; this parameter is very sensitive to air water mixing, which in turn requires a detailed knowledge of the size of large and small waves over the whole ocean)
Now, if u have a very complicated mathematical model, with hundeds of linked equations, and one of the key constants is offf by 10 fold, what does that say about the ability of the model to predict something? E.g., if you had a computer program tht predicted the number of logins/hour, and had an adjustment for change over the weekend, and that adjustment was off by 10 fold...
what would you say about the ability of tha t program to predict changes inlogins over the weekend ?
A major part of climate change is the amount of CO2 in the air (CO2, carbon dioxide, is the major greenhouse gas)
In figuring out how CO2 levels will change, a major term is the exchange between gas and water over the oceans; this is a key parameter in all the super complicated computer models from places like NOAA
a few years ago, in SCIENCE magazine, turns out this term was wrong by an order of magnitude
CONCLUSION: the models are crap
why ?
u r an administrator, testifying before congress on why u need 200 large. YOu could say, well we made major progress in FFT algorythmns usefull in modeling, and our understanding of image recognition to model cloud patterns...(congress falling asleep)
OR
u cd say GLOBAL WARMING !!! NYC underwater !!!!
it is not that it is bad science, it is just that the quality of the models is not that high - noone has the lsightest idea of how our climate will change in response to any significant perturbation - sort a like MS stuff, no ?
If any other computer company had so many crappy products, they would long ago have been reduced to the cult (neg) status of the K car
but somehow, apple keeps surviving lousy productsm and is still considered "cool.
Why ?
AS a practicing scientist, all i can say is tht you r wrong.
You do get tenure, or promotion or whatever for work that is not interesting or novel or worth reading - its not tht this sort of work is wrong, it is just that it is not worth the effort of reading either because it is mostly repetitive, or boring or whatever.
lot of science falls in this catagory
proof: most of the literature is never cited in another paper
Actually, you are more wrong then that: frequently th purpose ofpublication is in fact precisely promotion of the authors.
sorry, scientist are people - they are often vain and self promoting
because they r 4 profit and can...the publishers know that ANY "scientific" journal, no matter how bad or worhtless, will be carried by a certain number of librarys that buy anything
most of the scientific lit is garbage, whose sole purpose is promotion of the authors; not a great game, but no worse then all theothers
which is they start from the premise that you have to mimic MS to gain acceptance.
How on earth can you win when you accept the enemys rules as the playing field ? OO will never be as good as MS at MS defined things.... People will only use OO when it can really do somehting that office cant
From where I sit in my cube, this whole discussion is kinda unreal. We are a 200 person company making scientific instruments; 2/3 of the employees are engineers, scientists or senior mgt. So far as I can tell, no one cares that much about MSoffice vs OO; it is just not an issue (you could say we are all brainwashed stupid MSslaves, but that is kind of an arrogant [liberal pay taxes cause its good; conservative obey my morals]point of view. So, like it or not, cares about offic software or the evil empire are irrelevant - we have concerns like shipping product, supporting customers, etc, and MS is just off the screen. I could probably suggest that we swithc to OO because MS is bad, but I'm a known wierdo scientist type - if one of the biz people suggestd this, they would probably be fired.
Again, you might not like it, but we are happy with office - it works for us. This change occured with office 2000; the idea that there is better software out there is simply not known, and the discussions i see on/. and elsewhere on the beneifts of OO leave me underwhelmed; office works for us - and the first rule of any bizness is dont fix what aint broke. And since it is working, all the arguments about bug fix in open software, online help community, etc are irrelavent - it is a null argument (logic here guys, you do undstand logic? if problem = 0, fix to problem =0)
The cost of office license is simply not an issue; maybe we r lucky there; the 350 bucks per person once every three or four years is just not a biggie
But there is a lot of downside to open office swithc. For instance, I tried the word program last night, and it took me 5 minutes to figure out the dic feature for docs; multiply that by 200 features, over our company, we would probably go out of biz if we swithced to open office, due to loss of time. That is us - again, call us stupid, but this is what we are facing. We use a lot of scientific software; it is all in windows and office compataible; loss of compat with a single office program wd doom open office. we have NO it staff to write scripts - no budget for that and not going to get approved int eh future (for a company our size, cost of IT support > cost of office licenses) we constantly exchange docs with customers, all using office; loss of a single sale cause customer got irrateted at wierd.sxw file > cost of office; actually, loss of a single sale due to customer irratation >> entire IT budget !!! In short: in our company, no upside, lots of down side
From where I sit in my cube, this whole discussion is kinda unreal. We are a 200 person company making scientific instruments; 2/3 of the employees are engineers, scientists or senior mgt. So far as I can tell, no one cares that much about MSoffice vs OO; it is just not an issue (you could say we are all brainwashed stupid MSslaves, but that is kind of an arrogant [liberal pay taxes cause its good; conservative obey my morals]point of view. So, like it or not, cares about the evil empire are irrelevant - we have concerns like shipping product, supporting customers, etc, and MS is just off the screen. I could probably suggest that we swithc to OO because MS is bad, but I'm a known wierdo scientist type - if one of the biz people suggestd this, they would probably be fired.
Again, you might not like it, but we are happy with office - it works for us. This change occured with office 2000; the idea that there is better software out there is simply not known, and the discussions i see on/. and elsewhere on the beneifts of OO leave me underwhelmed; office works for us - and the first rule of any bizness is dont fix what aint broke. And since it is working, all the arguments about bug fix in open software, online help community, etc are irrelavent - it is a null argument (logic here guys, you do undstand logic? if problem = 0, fix to problem =0)
cost of office license simply not an issue; maybe we r lucky there (honestly; teh 350 bucks per person once every three or four years is just not a biggie)
But there is a lot of downside to open office swithc. For instance, I tried the word program last night, and it took me 5 minutes to figure out the dic feature for docs; multiply that by 200 features, over our company, we would probably go out of biz if we swithced to open office, due to loss of time. That is us - again, call us stupid, but this is what we are facing.
We use a lot of scientific software; it is all in windows and office compataible; loss of compat with a single office program wd doom open office.
we have NO it staff to write scripts - no budget for that and not going to get approved int eh future (for a company our size, cost of IT support > cost of office licenses)
we constantly exchange docs with customers, all using office; loss of a single sale cause customer got irrateted at wierd.sxw file > cost of office; actually, loss of a single sale due to customer irratation >> entire IT budget !!!
In short: in our company, no upside, lots of down side.
If u read the paper carefully, u will c that these arepretty difficultmeasurements; it is possiblethat there is no effect,and the "effect" they report is just some artifact, say an eager experimenter was not unbaised inmaking measuerments...inany event,ifit is true,it will be confirmed soon.
the techique of lysing cells in agarose, and running these mini gels is fairly straightforward. However, measuring of these small absolute migration values (~ 100 microns,very small for biology) and smaller deltas, is pretty hairy,and the measuringof very small migration values,and evensmalleraverage differences is pretty hairy stuff.
Excellent post. One thing you left out - you cant have "open" software and freedom from scum - it is a tragedy of hte commons sort of thing, long known to people with interests outside of silicon. YOu cant provide a free resource like the internet without having people trash it; in our society freedom = freedom to create spyware, popups, spam, etc
I'm sorry if I sound peeved, but I really think the Open community has made a major error in thinking: you dont get lazy people like me to switch by saying, hey,its better, but you have to undergo some pain and suffering, because pain and suffering are good for you. Yes, linux is like spinach: eatup because you need to learn about tarballs or whatever.
So, I'm really frustrated, cause i hate windows, but i think the open com. for whatever reason, refuses to do a few minutes extra work that would make a LOT of people more inclinded to try their product..
re replies..ur all programming for programmers..glad to c u dont get it..since programmers are ~ 1% of total market, u will get ~ 1% total dollars involved.. I will be handing out cookies at dept of employment security
Seriously: what if GM said you had to adjust the fuel injectior timing when the weather changed, and that this was a superior feature, and quit your whining for a car u cd just start..I'm sad, cause i hate windows more then u (i have to use it!!) and, for whatever reason, you just dont go the extra 5 steps to make it easy, sort of like there is some moral superiority in spending extra time to install software. Think about your 401-K plan: are lots of options a good thing ? If you are over forty like me, are lots of choices at the supermarket a good thing ?
tried to get it last week; could not make head nor tail of the "instructions" at he download site. I mean, where is the button that says "click to install on windows"...and that is all you need to do. I went to the "source tarballs" - what on earth is all this garbage ?? YOu dont seriously expect me to wade thru this list do you ? this is not a flame or a troll: I just think you dont want or understand what people like me want or expect (programming for users..)
Slashdot Mirror
sorta depends on your point of view in the human beings are disposable wipes capitilist society we live in, sales force looks good. ..by any reasoanble std, they still look like shit. .., or saddam hussien may look good compared to stalin, but that don't make him good (hyperbole hear )
Lets take calculus, which has not reallly changed in, say , 200 years... I could buy a nice, acid free paper reprint, which will last for years without batteries for a few dollars from dover, or I could spend 100s of $$ to have something which only works out of the rain, in the right light.... This is an example of not focusing on the problem. The problem is not the delivery technology (print vs online), or the need for updating on a 5 yr cycle (does heat transfer really change that much ?). The problem is the (a) the greed inspired by our capitlist system, which winds up screwing the students, and (b) the complicity of professors, educators and boards of education, which in many states mandate texts. ... To restate the point, if you ask, not is it neat technology, but how would I best serve the students. I think that a co-operative, nonprofit publisher, organized over the net with cvs like software, putting out nice high quality texts on acid free paper, would be a better solution for high school and entry college texts.
Even in fast moving fields ( I am familiar with molecular biology, genomics and genetics) most of what gets taught is old; you only need a small handout each year for updating.
Even on a strict environmental basis, if only 10% of the "free" heat transfer texts get printed out, is that a plus, considering that home printers are probably environmental disasters, compared to commercial plants ?
"as long as linux.." correct, imho. the replie(s) that there is nothing new to do in spreadsheets are idiotic - there are so many major things wrong with excell it isnt funny "when people send me..." are you a flaming AH, or just having an off day ?
For nigh on 15 years now, nerds, geeks and jealous competitors have been blasting MS for bloat and requiring $$ hardware upgrades with each new OS generation. I can see it has really hurt MS sale and market leadership. You think the people who SELL hardware are exactly unhappy about this
why is small imp ? last time I checked, hardrives are ~ 1 dollar per gig. So an extra 0.2 gig of office "bloat" is ..r u ready... 20 cents of harddirve ?
as for typesetting... get a life. Not one person in 100 cares, so why shd MS ? go get latex if u want typesetting
More generally, as for "feature bloat" (a) this is wrong and (b) its wrong - (a) there is no feature bloat because you dont have to even see it in default,and (b) features is what makes MS succefull.
PEOPLE LIKE FEATURES MORE THEN "TECHNICAL SUPERIORITY" in the real world, a program that supplies things people need will always win out over crap like typesetting; understanding this is part of the MS success story
polyethylene glycol is a misnomer; the product is actually peo, polyethylene oxide it is WIDELY used in food, cosmetics etc and accepted as non toxix the nomenclature of PEG is completely misleading, and u r right that ethylene glycol is toxic interestingly, peo (=peg) is made from oxirane, an extreemely toxic gas
still true after all these years: unix is the system of the future; always has been , always will be untill geeks wake up and smell the coffee: stupid marketing drives sales, not tehcnical chops
the posters who note that moving clinical trials offshore will not help (you still have to get thru fda, and they will have problems with third world data, at least for a couple of years) however, pharma and biotech do a lot of basic research I am a 45 year old PH.D., with training at MIT.. there is nothing I can do that could not be done by a young chinese scientist at 1/10 my salary. There are probably 10 - 30 thousand such jobs that could go over seas, and this will give them the money and infrastructure to start moving up the food chain to drug trials In a way it is kinda funny, all the middle/upper middle class professionals did nothing while the rust belt was decimated, now they are whining
that tired old excuse of the fda.. I work in biotech to; the reason it cost so much to get thru the fda is that the clincal index (ratio of good/harm) is usually not much greater then one, if even that if drugs actually WORKED development costs would be lower. also, if you make a drug for a non threatening condition (such as acne) and it causes death in x% of the patients, since acne is usually not life threatening, x has to be pretty low also , these figures on development are not independent - the socalled independent cente at tufts, which generates the "standard" figures on drug costs is both industry funded and sleazy (sleazy - they have press releases on their studies before the studies are either publically available or thru peer review; by def sleazy)
I think th eproblem is that biotech is funded by biz types, who are both very convervative - they only give money to people who are conservative - and also suable - a large VC fund has several hundred MM, so they are worht a large lawsuit. this combo prevents biotech from just going for it the other problem is that most new drugs and treatmetns dont work, so "just going for it" causes a lot of harm. eg, stem cells - lots a promise, no actuall real world working therapys RNAi for late stage cancer (eg, RNAi for mutant cip1 or p53 alleles) is perhaps the first example of a technology with enough promise to make it worht the while also, there are a few garages around that do just go for it; i was told that milken, when he had cancer, was paying for stuff from a garage in wobourn massachusettes...a little room for scam artists there maybe (sarcasm)
The idea that most kids need to learn math and science is idiotic. We will NEVER repeat NEVER "win" any sort of job contest with india or china by educating ourselves more - only a profession as idiotic as economics would even bring up the idea Whny cant most people use calculators ? This idea that math needs to be learnt by a majority of the studentry is a geek bias. If yuou ask physiscists, they will bemoan the total ignorance of the studentry, unable to grasp the concept of the trnasistor. similarly, biologist think you need to know about dna, muscicians think you need to know about scales, etc Would we even be having this /. discussion if the topic was music ? But music is far more importatn toa HAPPY life for more people then math.
I think the reason math is not kid friendly is because for most people it us useless and boring, about as important as knowing about the Sung dynasty of china. You really don't need math in real life - I would wager dollars to donuts that a knowledge of cosines is required by 5% of the populace.
The only reason we have math is to serve as a separtor, becuase we have a competitive rewards based society.
Predictions of how the weather or climate will change are made with the aid of very complicated computer models. Part of what goes into these models are equations that describe how a change in one thing (such as the amount of sunlight rreaching the earth, or the amount of greenhouse gas produced by natural and human sources) affects the climate. The parent asserted that a recent scientific paper in one of the most respected (and hard to get published in) scientific journals asserted that one of the key parameters was wrong by a factor of 10 (the parameter is how much CO2 gets absorbed by the ocean; this parameter is very sensitive to air water mixing, which in turn requires a detailed knowledge of the size of large and small waves over the whole ocean) Now, if u have a very complicated mathematical model, with hundeds of linked equations, and one of the key constants is offf by 10 fold, what does that say about the ability of the model to predict something? E.g., if you had a computer program tht predicted the number of logins/hour, and had an adjustment for change over the weekend, and that adjustment was off by 10 fold... what would you say about the ability of tha t program to predict changes inlogins over the weekend ?
A major part of climate change is the amount of CO2 in the air (CO2, carbon dioxide, is the major greenhouse gas) In figuring out how CO2 levels will change, a major term is the exchange between gas and water over the oceans; this is a key parameter in all the super complicated computer models from places like NOAA a few years ago, in SCIENCE magazine, turns out this term was wrong by an order of magnitude CONCLUSION: the models are crap why ? u r an administrator, testifying before congress on why u need 200 large. YOu could say, well we made major progress in FFT algorythmns usefull in modeling, and our understanding of image recognition to model cloud patterns...(congress falling asleep) OR u cd say GLOBAL WARMING !!! NYC underwater !!!! it is not that it is bad science, it is just that the quality of the models is not that high - noone has the lsightest idea of how our climate will change in response to any significant perturbation - sort a like MS stuff, no ?
If any other computer company had so many crappy products, they would long ago have been reduced to the cult (neg) status of the K car but somehow, apple keeps surviving lousy productsm and is still considered "cool. Why ?
AS a practicing scientist, all i can say is tht you r wrong. You do get tenure, or promotion or whatever for work that is not interesting or novel or worth reading - its not tht this sort of work is wrong, it is just that it is not worth the effort of reading either because it is mostly repetitive, or boring or whatever. lot of science falls in this catagory proof: most of the literature is never cited in another paper Actually, you are more wrong then that: frequently th purpose ofpublication is in fact precisely promotion of the authors. sorry, scientist are people - they are often vain and self promoting
because they r 4 profit and can...the publishers know that ANY "scientific" journal, no matter how bad or worhtless, will be carried by a certain number of librarys that buy anything most of the scientific lit is garbage, whose sole purpose is promotion of the authors; not a great game, but no worse then all theothers
anyone who puts text like that on a colored background don't know jack
which is they start from the premise that you have to mimic MS to gain acceptance.
/. and elsewhere on the beneifts of OO leave me underwhelmed; office works for us - and the first rule of any bizness is dont fix what aint broke. And since it is working, all the arguments about bug fix in open software, online help community, etc are irrelavent - it is a null argument (logic here guys, you do undstand logic? if problem = 0, fix to problem =0)
.sxw file > cost of office; actually, loss of a single sale due to customer irratation >> entire IT budget !!! In short: in our company, no upside, lots of down side
How on earth can you win when you accept the enemys rules as the playing field ? OO will never be as good as MS at MS defined things....
People will only use OO when it can really do somehting that office cant
From where I sit in my cube, this whole discussion is kinda unreal. We are a 200 person company making scientific instruments; 2/3 of the employees are engineers, scientists or senior mgt. So far as I can tell, no one cares that much about MSoffice vs OO; it is just not an issue (you could say we are all brainwashed stupid MSslaves, but that is kind of an arrogant [liberal pay taxes cause its good; conservative obey my morals]point of view. So, like it or not, cares about offic software or the evil empire are irrelevant - we have concerns like shipping product, supporting customers, etc, and MS is just off the screen. I could probably suggest that we swithc to OO because MS is bad, but I'm a known wierdo scientist type - if one of the biz people suggestd this, they would probably be fired.
Again, you might not like it, but we are happy with office - it works for us. This change occured with office 2000; the idea that there is better software out there is simply not known, and the discussions i see on
The cost of office license is simply not an issue; maybe we r lucky there; the 350 bucks per person once every three or four years is just not a biggie
But there is a lot of downside to open office swithc. For instance, I tried the word program last night, and it took me 5 minutes to figure out the dic feature for docs; multiply that by 200 features, over our company, we would probably go out of biz if we swithced to open office, due to loss of time. That is us - again, call us stupid, but this is what we are facing. We use a lot of scientific software; it is all in windows and office compataible; loss of compat with a single office program wd doom open office. we have NO it staff to write scripts - no budget for that and not going to get approved int eh future (for a company our size, cost of IT support > cost of office licenses) we constantly exchange docs with customers, all using office; loss of a single sale cause customer got irrateted at wierd
From where I sit in my cube, this whole discussion is kinda unreal. We are a 200 person company making scientific instruments; 2/3 of the employees are engineers, scientists or senior mgt. So far as I can tell, no one cares that much about MSoffice vs OO; it is just not an issue (you could say we are all brainwashed stupid MSslaves, but that is kind of an arrogant [liberal pay taxes cause its good; conservative obey my morals]point of view. So, like it or not, cares about the evil empire are irrelevant - we have concerns like shipping product, supporting customers, etc, and MS is just off the screen. I could probably suggest that we swithc to OO because MS is bad, but I'm a known wierdo scientist type - if one of the biz people suggestd this, they would probably be fired. Again, you might not like it, but we are happy with office - it works for us. This change occured with office 2000; the idea that there is better software out there is simply not known, and the discussions i see on /. and elsewhere on the beneifts of OO leave me underwhelmed; office works for us - and the first rule of any bizness is dont fix what aint broke. And since it is working, all the arguments about bug fix in open software, online help community, etc are irrelavent - it is a null argument (logic here guys, you do undstand logic? if problem = 0, fix to problem =0)
cost of office license simply not an issue; maybe we r lucky there (honestly; teh 350 bucks per person once every three or four years is just not a biggie)
But there is a lot of downside to open office swithc. For instance, I tried the word program last night, and it took me 5 minutes to figure out the dic feature for docs; multiply that by 200 features, over our company, we would probably go out of biz if we swithced to open office, due to loss of time. That is us - again, call us stupid, but this is what we are facing.
We use a lot of scientific software; it is all in windows and office compataible; loss of compat with a single office program wd doom open office.
we have NO it staff to write scripts - no budget for that and not going to get approved int eh future (for a company our size, cost of IT support > cost of office licenses)
we constantly exchange docs with customers, all using office; loss of a single sale cause customer got irrateted at wierd .sxw file > cost of office; actually, loss of a single sale due to customer irratation >> entire IT budget !!!
In short: in our company, no upside, lots of down side.
If u read the paper carefully, u will c that these arepretty difficultmeasurements; it is possiblethat there is no effect,and the "effect" they report is just some artifact, say an eager experimenter was not unbaised inmaking measuerments...inany event,ifit is true,it will be confirmed soon. the techique of lysing cells in agarose, and running these mini gels is fairly straightforward. However, measuring of these small absolute migration values (~ 100 microns,very small for biology) and smaller deltas, is pretty hairy,and the measuringof very small migration values,and evensmalleraverage differences is pretty hairy stuff.
its not that knowing assembley makes one a better programmer; its that better programmers know assembley cause they harder working and brighter people
Excellent post. One thing you left out - you cant have "open" software and freedom from scum - it is a tragedy of hte commons sort of thing, long known to people with interests outside of silicon. YOu cant provide a free resource like the internet without having people trash it; in our society freedom = freedom to create spyware, popups, spam, etc
I'm sorry if I sound peeved, but I really think the Open community has made a major error in thinking: you dont get lazy people like me to switch by saying, hey,its better, but you have to undergo some pain and suffering, because pain and suffering are good for you. Yes, linux is like spinach: eatup because you need to learn about tarballs or whatever. So, I'm really frustrated, cause i hate windows, but i think the open com. for whatever reason, refuses to do a few minutes extra work that would make a LOT of people more inclinded to try their product..
re replies..ur all programming for programmers..glad to c u dont get it..since programmers are ~ 1% of total market, u will get ~ 1% total dollars involved.. I will be handing out cookies at dept of employment security
Seriously: what if GM said you had to adjust the fuel injectior timing when the weather changed, and that this was a superior feature, and quit your whining for a car u cd just start..I'm sad, cause i hate windows more then u (i have to use it!!) and, for whatever reason, you just dont go the extra 5 steps to make it easy, sort of like there is some moral superiority in spending extra time to install software. Think about your 401-K plan: are lots of options a good thing ? If you are over forty like me, are lots of choices at the supermarket a good thing ?
tried to get it last week; could not make head nor tail of the "instructions" at he download site.
I mean, where is the button that says "click to install on windows"...and that is all you need to do.
I went to the "source tarballs" - what on earth is all this garbage ?? YOu dont seriously expect me to wade thru this list do you ?
this is not a flame or a troll: I just think you dont want or understand what people like me want or expect (programming for users..)