I was under the impression that many of the hijackers, and indeed all of the passengers, believed that the aircraft and its passengers would be held hostage for a period of time and eventually ransomed. Some checking today shows that it is uncertain, but doubtful, that any of the hijackers were unaware of the ultimate goal of the attack.
Fair enough.
Except in the whole of aviation history, about 98% of hijacks have ended up with the hijackers face down on the tarmac, optionally with a bullet through their head.
Ah. Spot the person who's not really been paying attention.
So does that mean every XBox 360 now has just a plain DVD drive? Okayyy..... I can understand Nintendo doing that because they were never aiming to have some super high-powered games machine that can do everything but make tea, but Microsoft?
Something like 14 of the 19 September 11th hijackers had no idea theirs was a suicide mission.
Even assuming that's true (which I have a lot of trouble believing), you're expecting me to believe that these people thought that after they flew the plane into a building they'd climb out of the wreckage, dust themselves off and report back for debriefing?
With HD-DVD being more or less dead, we can safely assume that consumer HDDVD writers will never happen, and the number of plants around the world capable of mastering HD-DVDs will be very few. What better way to drastically reduce the amount of piracy on a platform than by using a media format that relatively few people are able to produce?
OOXML cant kill ODF, because ODF is open, and OOXML isnt.People who want to guarantee access to their documents in perpetuity (eg legitimate governments) cannot use OOXML because it cannot meet their needs. It is full of rabbit holes.
It may take a while for the smoke and mirrors to clear, but in the end, the truth will out.
I wish I shared your faith.
To my mind, governments mandating that documents are stored using an open standard are doing so with good intention - so they can't be held to ransom by an arbitrary company in order to continue to read their own documents. But when they made that mandate, nobody ever imagined that it would be necessary to add "an open standard which has more than one implementation and doesn't have more holes than a Swiss cheese".
My concern is that the people who actually evaluate software will see it as a box-ticking exercise, and provided documents are stored in something that follows some sort of ISO standard, the fact that it is a completely meaningless standard won't even be discussed.
"To uninstall a program, select it from the list and click "Uninstall"" Not really that big a deal...
That's a bit like saying "people who receive spam can just click Delete".
It doesn't work very well when there are loads of things to uninstall, and it doesn't address the fact that it shouldn't be necessary in the first place.
Lately I bought XP and was then treated as a criminal by MS because I accidentally thrashed the installation. When I installed XP the second time it didn't want to 'activate' anymore. Next time I'll just download a corporate edition somewhere.
Let me get this clear in my mind:
You bought a product.
The manufacturer of said product accused you of fraud.
You decided that next time, you'll still use the product but you won't pay for it. As opposed to, I dunno, using somebody else's product?
The RIAA doesn't have a cool theme song. And they wouldn't have to pay royalties if they did.
I don't know about the theme, but Journey's "Don't stop Believin'" at the end of the final episode of the Sopranos is from an album on the Columbia label - and Columbia are part of Sony BMG.
Actually, your way's slightly better because the CPU won't have to do two comparison/branch operations. Not that it matters that much these days, but back then every little CPU cycle you could squeeze out was worth it.
Though you'd probably have been even less popular with your teacher for pointing that one out.
IMHO, the Beeb always seemed a bit dull. It was what you used at school, when you had to peck through dull basic programs under the watchful eye of teacher.
That was probably more the schools' fault than anything else. Back then your teacher was often a maths teacher who didn't really understand the computers so they did all they could - which generally amounted to "have the children type in this program line by line, they must get it all typed in right and must be punished for attempting to learn anything outside of what this program does" - and generally the program was something pretty simple like a 20-line guess the number game.
There was a thriving games industry back in the day, with much more than just the educational stuff available. Repton (similar programs existed on other platforms - Boulder Dash springs to mind) and Elite both started out on the BBC.
I accept that these cases are the exception, not the rule. But the OP's question was "what's in it for me?". My answer is "One or two things, but probably not if you've already gone out and bought Office" and that is what it remains.
"Free" is a pretty good value, and for people in the situations I discussed it merits further investigation.
However, you said yourself that you already have Office 2007. Unless you're using a pirated copy and you're uncomfortable with that, then it's fair to say that there's little to tempt you away and all the documents in.docx format to keep you there. It's fair to say that OpenOffice is still playing catchup with Microsoft.
Having said that, Mozilla was playing catchup for years and look where it is now that Firefox and Thunderbird have been split into separate projects. In two or three years time, who knows?
Maybe, but sid's the unstable repository and is intended for exactly this kind of thing. Even the Debian maintainers strongly recommend against using Sid on a production system because things are far more likely to break and they may stay broken for some time.
You really have absolutely no idea how Gentoo works, do you?
Yes, actually. I've run a whole bunch of servers running it.
I found the amount of handholding required in order to turn it into a serious system for server use relative to Debian (such as setting up your own private portage repository, custom holding back of packages, updates which are known in forums to break functionality but don't have the good grace to warn you in the ebuild first, updates which completely restructure a package into different component parts, updates which haven't been tested for backward compatability and so break things subtly, meaning that what should be a simple emerge -U <package name> winds up becoming a complex mix of emerge --sync, editing/etc/portage/package.use and package.keywords, editing USE flags, finally emerging the updated package, the fact that you can't easily avoid this unless you're prepared to forsake security updates) really didn't gel with my idea of running a solid system.
Granted, a major update to GCC will almost certainly wind up in a slot of its own. But sooner or later the version that you're using now will be obsoleted and removed from portage altogether, at which point you either have to put the ebuild in your own private portage repository lest future emerge --update's break things or recompile anything which is at risk.
Now, most of these issues can be minimised by following practices that any good sysadmin should be anyway - for instance, setting up a test environment and making changes there first before putting them live. All this does, however, is move the risk from the live system to the test environment. It doesn't eliminate any of the work.
Microsoft will not clean up its act without a BIG stick on the nose. So far, it's only got a rolled up newspaper,
If you must use doggy analogies, then I'm afraid that Microsoft have spent so long tasting blood that they'll never make a good pet now. They're known to be dangerous around children and other pets, and have been known to go after adults as well.
I'm sorry, but there's only one thing to do - put them to sleep. I know it sounds cruel, but it's the best option of a pretty bad bunch - the alternatives involve too many more people getting hurt.
They'll go to doggy heaven, where they can chase all the cats they want and we'll get you a new doggy.
Debian, RedHat et al aren't going to release new packages compiled with GCC 4.3.0 for every damn binary. Instead, they'll hold back on providing an update to GCC and they won't compile any updated packages with the updated GCC until the next major release.
Of course, that's not very helpful if you depend on closed-source software and the vendor won't tell you what compiler they use. Neither is it particularly helpful if you run Gentoo (which sooner or later will expect you to upgrade compiler) or if you're in the habit of compiling packages from scratch using a compiler other than the one that shipped with your distro. But for most of us in the real world, that's not really a huge deal.
Unless your employer is prepared to pay for code to be written specifically for every little business requirement that no half-decent Free solution exists for, I defy you to avoid vendor lock-in. Commercial applications with fully documented data schemas are more or less non-existent.
Email solutions are easy. They've been done to death. So have office applications - wordprocessors, spreadsheets, that kind of stuff.
Groupware is harder, but not impossible. It becomes much harder, however, if "seamless Outlook or similarly featureful client app integration" is a requirement.
Accounting solutions aren't easy either - they're boring to write and have to account for every nations' tax legislation in their localisation - and they need to be updated rapidly if that legislation changes. Neither is payroll for much the same reason. Even if the app vendor hasn't tied their app to a specific database (unlikely), they'll have the most horrendous schema with zero documentation.
As soon as you get into the realm of particularly specialist software for a given market, forget it. The goal of business is to make money for the investors, not a bunch of unknown software developers, so if something off the shelf can be purchased for a quarter of what it'll cost for something to be custom written, guess what will happen. Vendor lockin is a bridge that shall be crossed when it is reached.
One of my ex girlfriends was all into making my "chart" to see what was rising in what sign, and all sorts of other BS. So I lied - told her I was born on Feb 30 (there is no Feb 30 - ever). Got a "reading" of all sorts of things that she thought I was like - "See it fits you"
You told a girl that your birthday was Feb. 30 and she didn't stop and say "Be serious"?
No offence, buddy, but I don't think you were dating the sharpest tool in the box back then.
Get rid of the television, restrict your own internet usage to cut off social, networking and other "non-work related" sites (I include/. in that list). Don't go down to the pub after work.
Unless you're a junior doctor, you have plenty of free time. If your work is "expecting" you to put in 90 hour weeks, I've got news for you: They won't sack you for putting in 40 hours and you don't do anyone any good by introducing more problems than you solve by continuing to work when you're exhausted and you should have gone home hours ago.
Very few people in business got promoted through 90 hour weeks. Plenty, on the other hand, got promoted by talking to people across the company, learning what it was made their employers business tick and figuring out how to direct their skills towards helping this. You might call this brown-nosing, but a business sells more products by getting to know their customers.
I didn't realise that public speaking was an IT skill.
No, but communication is a business skill. And a very important one - without it, it is almost certain you will never advance very far.
You know, I started university only a year before you. By your terms, I was one of the fantastically lucky ones. I didn't pay fees, and my loans were never more than about £5,000. About a year ago I took on a lad who's just graduated, and of course he does owe a lot of money. But he is technically adept, he gets on well with other people, he listens to their problems and works very hard to find them solutions.
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I was under the impression that many of the hijackers, and indeed all of the passengers, believed that the aircraft and its passengers would be held hostage for a period of time and eventually ransomed. Some checking today shows that it is uncertain, but doubtful, that any of the hijackers were unaware of the ultimate goal of the attack.
Fair enough.
Except in the whole of aviation history, about 98% of hijacks have ended up with the hijackers face down on the tarmac, optionally with a bullet through their head.
Ah. Spot the person who's not really been paying attention.
So does that mean every XBox 360 now has just a plain DVD drive? Okayyy..... I can understand Nintendo doing that because they were never aiming to have some super high-powered games machine that can do everything but make tea, but Microsoft?
Something like 14 of the 19 September 11th hijackers had no idea theirs was a suicide mission.
Even assuming that's true (which I have a lot of trouble believing), you're expecting me to believe that these people thought that after they flew the plane into a building they'd climb out of the wreckage, dust themselves off and report back for debriefing?
With HD-DVD being more or less dead, we can safely assume that consumer HDDVD writers will never happen, and the number of plants around the world capable of mastering HD-DVDs will be very few. What better way to drastically reduce the amount of piracy on a platform than by using a media format that relatively few people are able to produce?
OOXML cant kill ODF, because ODF is open, and OOXML isnt.People who want to guarantee access to their documents in perpetuity (eg legitimate governments) cannot use OOXML because it cannot meet their needs. It is full of rabbit holes.
It may take a while for the smoke and mirrors to clear, but in the end, the truth will out.
I wish I shared your faith.
To my mind, governments mandating that documents are stored using an open standard are doing so with good intention - so they can't be held to ransom by an arbitrary company in order to continue to read their own documents. But when they made that mandate, nobody ever imagined that it would be necessary to add "an open standard which has more than one implementation and doesn't have more holes than a Swiss cheese".
My concern is that the people who actually evaluate software will see it as a box-ticking exercise, and provided documents are stored in something that follows some sort of ISO standard, the fact that it is a completely meaningless standard won't even be discussed.
The amount of work involved depends on the OEM and what they're installing this week.
Right now HP aren't too bad. But I've seen some Dells which have so much crap installed it's not 30 minutes - it's more like 2 hours.
"To uninstall a program, select it from the list and click "Uninstall""
Not really that big a deal...
That's a bit like saying "people who receive spam can just click Delete".
It doesn't work very well when there are loads of things to uninstall, and it doesn't address the fact that it shouldn't be necessary in the first place.
Let me get this clear in my mind:
You really showed them, eh?
Heh.
She'd have caused more trouble had she typed "unplug adfs". (Though not, I hasten to add, anything insurmountable).
The RIAA doesn't have a cool theme song. And they wouldn't have to pay royalties if they did.
I don't know about the theme, but Journey's "Don't stop Believin'" at the end of the final episode of the Sopranos is from an album on the Columbia label - and Columbia are part of Sony BMG.
Actually, your way's slightly better because the CPU won't have to do two comparison/branch operations. Not that it matters that much these days, but back then every little CPU cycle you could squeeze out was worth it.
Though you'd probably have been even less popular with your teacher for pointing that one out.
I wondered how they did that.
Mad. I doubt there are many people left today who could abuse the systems they're given quite so creatively.
Whether this is a good or a bad thing I leave to the imagination.
IMHO, the Beeb always seemed a bit dull. It was what you used at school, when you had to peck through dull basic programs under the watchful eye of teacher.
That was probably more the schools' fault than anything else. Back then your teacher was often a maths teacher who didn't really understand the computers so they did all they could - which generally amounted to "have the children type in this program line by line, they must get it all typed in right and must be punished for attempting to learn anything outside of what this program does" - and generally the program was something pretty simple like a 20-line guess the number game.
There was a thriving games industry back in the day, with much more than just the educational stuff available. Repton (similar programs existed on other platforms - Boulder Dash springs to mind) and Elite both started out on the BBC.
BBC BASIC had support for named procedures
Only after version 2, IIRC. Mind you, I've never seen a BBC micro with version 1 fitted.
The MS Office system includes components not to be found in OpenOffice.org. Outlook is simply the most visible example.
I know. Yet still some organisations seem to think they can get on quite allright without those components. cf. Ernie Ball, Bristol City Council and Munich Council.
I accept that these cases are the exception, not the rule. But the OP's question was "what's in it for me?". My answer is "One or two things, but probably not if you've already gone out and bought Office" and that is what it remains.
"Free" is a pretty good value, and for people in the situations I discussed it merits further investigation.
.docx format to keep you there. It's fair to say that OpenOffice is still playing catchup with Microsoft.
However, you said yourself that you already have Office 2007. Unless you're using a pirated copy and you're uncomfortable with that, then it's fair to say that there's little to tempt you away and all the documents in
Having said that, Mozilla was playing catchup for years and look where it is now that Firefox and Thunderbird have been split into separate projects. In two or three years time, who knows?
Where OO.o has the potential to come into its own is:
Maybe, but sid's the unstable repository and is intended for exactly this kind of thing. Even the Debian maintainers strongly recommend against using Sid on a production system because things are far more likely to break and they may stay broken for some time.
You really have absolutely no idea how Gentoo works, do you?
/etc/portage/package.use and package.keywords, editing USE flags, finally emerging the updated package, the fact that you can't easily avoid this unless you're prepared to forsake security updates) really didn't gel with my idea of running a solid system.
Yes, actually. I've run a whole bunch of servers running it.
I found the amount of handholding required in order to turn it into a serious system for server use relative to Debian (such as setting up your own private portage repository, custom holding back of packages, updates which are known in forums to break functionality but don't have the good grace to warn you in the ebuild first, updates which completely restructure a package into different component parts, updates which haven't been tested for backward compatability and so break things subtly, meaning that what should be a simple emerge -U <package name> winds up becoming a complex mix of emerge --sync, editing
Granted, a major update to GCC will almost certainly wind up in a slot of its own. But sooner or later the version that you're using now will be obsoleted and removed from portage altogether, at which point you either have to put the ebuild in your own private portage repository lest future emerge --update's break things or recompile anything which is at risk.
Now, most of these issues can be minimised by following practices that any good sysadmin should be anyway - for instance, setting up a test environment and making changes there first before putting them live. All this does, however, is move the risk from the live system to the test environment. It doesn't eliminate any of the work.
Microsoft will not clean up its act without a BIG stick on the nose. So far, it's only got a rolled up newspaper,
If you must use doggy analogies, then I'm afraid that Microsoft have spent so long tasting blood that they'll never make a good pet now. They're known to be dangerous around children and other pets, and have been known to go after adults as well.
I'm sorry, but there's only one thing to do - put them to sleep. I know it sounds cruel, but it's the best option of a pretty bad bunch - the alternatives involve too many more people getting hurt.
They'll go to doggy heaven, where they can chase all the cats they want and we'll get you a new doggy.
Most vehicle accidents are caused by driver problems, so... Wait. Does that mean that a car analogy here might actually work?
NO CARRIER
Debian, RedHat et al aren't going to release new packages compiled with GCC 4.3.0 for every damn binary. Instead, they'll hold back on providing an update to GCC and they won't compile any updated packages with the updated GCC until the next major release.
Of course, that's not very helpful if you depend on closed-source software and the vendor won't tell you what compiler they use. Neither is it particularly helpful if you run Gentoo (which sooner or later will expect you to upgrade compiler) or if you're in the habit of compiling packages from scratch using a compiler other than the one that shipped with your distro. But for most of us in the real world, that's not really a huge deal.
Three (two?) words: Vendor lock-in.
Unless your employer is prepared to pay for code to be written specifically for every little business requirement that no half-decent Free solution exists for, I defy you to avoid vendor lock-in. Commercial applications with fully documented data schemas are more or less non-existent.
Email solutions are easy. They've been done to death. So have office applications - wordprocessors, spreadsheets, that kind of stuff.
Groupware is harder, but not impossible. It becomes much harder, however, if "seamless Outlook or similarly featureful client app integration" is a requirement.
Accounting solutions aren't easy either - they're boring to write and have to account for every nations' tax legislation in their localisation - and they need to be updated rapidly if that legislation changes. Neither is payroll for much the same reason. Even if the app vendor hasn't tied their app to a specific database (unlikely), they'll have the most horrendous schema with zero documentation.
As soon as you get into the realm of particularly specialist software for a given market, forget it. The goal of business is to make money for the investors, not a bunch of unknown software developers, so if something off the shelf can be purchased for a quarter of what it'll cost for something to be custom written, guess what will happen. Vendor lockin is a bridge that shall be crossed when it is reached.
One of my ex girlfriends was all into making my "chart" to see what was rising in what sign, and all sorts of other BS. So I lied - told her I was born on Feb 30 (there is no Feb 30 - ever). Got a "reading" of all sorts of things that she thought I was like - "See it fits you"
You told a girl that your birthday was Feb. 30 and she didn't stop and say "Be serious"?
No offence, buddy, but I don't think you were dating the sharpest tool in the box back then.
Must be nice to have had free time.
/. in that list). Don't go down to the pub after work.
Get rid of the television, restrict your own internet usage to cut off social, networking and other "non-work related" sites (I include
Unless you're a junior doctor, you have plenty of free time. If your work is "expecting" you to put in 90 hour weeks, I've got news for you: They won't sack you for putting in 40 hours and you don't do anyone any good by introducing more problems than you solve by continuing to work when you're exhausted and you should have gone home hours ago.
Very few people in business got promoted through 90 hour weeks. Plenty, on the other hand, got promoted by talking to people across the company, learning what it was made their employers business tick and figuring out how to direct their skills towards helping this. You might call this brown-nosing, but a business sells more products by getting to know their customers.
I didn't realise that public speaking was an IT skill.
No, but communication is a business skill. And a very important one - without it, it is almost certain you will never advance very far.
You know, I started university only a year before you. By your terms, I was one of the fantastically lucky ones. I didn't pay fees, and my loans were never more than about £5,000. About a year ago I took on a lad who's just graduated, and of course he does owe a lot of money. But he is technically adept, he gets on well with other people, he listens to their problems and works very hard to find them solutions.