OpenOffice isn't an 'open standard' any more than Microsoft's product. Perhaps the file format isn't 'closed source' and you can save your files to formats that aren't the default proprietary-to-OpenOffice formats. But you're just as trapped into using OpenOffice to view and edit your work as you are trapped into using Office, if you save your work in the native format.
Spare me the lecture on 'open standards'. I've worked with a lot of ANSI standards in the past. Lowest-common-denominator makes everything work together nice, but it also stifles innovation. For instance, you don't find commercial UNIXes toeing slavishly to the POSIX standard. They comply and go beyond it.
You don't seem to understand there can be more than one 'good' web browser. I'm typing this into a form on Mozilla 1.5, which I like very much as a browser. I also use *gasp* I.E. sometimes. And even hoary old browsers like mMosaic over on the NetBSD box, for some purposes. And Lynx once in awhile when I'm stuck in an terminal session and need to check something.
You don't have to worry about seeing my mp3 collection. I'm one of those icky people who don't share.
Maybe I'm just really bad with spreadsheets, but I've never gotten a five year projection on Windows v Linux to come out in favor of Windows and positively never had OpenOffice come in as more expensive than Office on Windows.
How can you do a five-year projection on a product ('OpenOffice') which is fairly new on the scene? I mean, five years ago it was owned by StarDivision and where's that company now? Now it comes from a codebase owned by Sun Microsystems. Where will they be five years from now? Their core strength is in Server market, and this 'desktop' redheaded stepchild they purchased from a failed German company is the 'flagship' that people are supposed to choose instead of Microsoft Office?
There are a lot of loose ends you'd better tie up in your arguement.
The fact of the matter is that most of the issues revolve around backing out of having used Microsoft propriatary solutions, such as VB, instead of open standards solutions,
When an open-standards 'solution' doesn't exist, that becomes a problem, not a 'solution.' And there just aren't viable open-standard products out there to replace a lot of good stuff Microsoft sells.
(yes, scream and shout and moderate if you must)
And standards committees are not particularly responsive to actual needs. They plod along their merry way, since they're often mired in theory and weighed down by 'experts' from academia.
This point can't be emphasized enough. Microsoft is an 'alpha' company that is hyper competetive. They needed Netscape to egg them into making Internet Explorer as good as it now is. They need Linux to egg them on as well. And Microsoft's stuff since 'the rise of Linux' has been vastly superior. Honestly, they were mired in NT 4.0 service packs and pasted-onto-16-bit 'Millenium Editions' before.
This can be considered good or bad by different people. For the customer, it is pretty good.
Well, I sold a digital recording cable converter right on ebay last month. One that normally has a hard drive. I mentioned right on the bid page that the hard drive was removed and that it didn't have a smartcard.
This morning I got email from the buyer 'where's the hard drive? where's the smart card?'
Never underestimate the intelligence of somebody willing to give you money.
And no, the flip-down rump access flaps on NASA space suits were omitted from the final design. I think you're referring to the 'open source' spacesuit design, as proposed by the scary bearded older dude who hangs out at LUG meetings in the back.
Maybe the dummy will save the station from any debris that would hit it.
Perhaps all space stations should be surrounded by these dummies. Even, perhaps, they could be dummies with sound producing mechanisms in them that intone, at seven second intervals, the sound 'Mmkay.'
Here's an unrelated question I have about space being a vacuum.
Could we have equipment out in space that used vacuum tubes without the glass envelope? If space itself is a vacuum is it possible that electron tubes could be simply fabricated in the 'open' as part of electronics equipment? Maybe it's time to revive the old tube-type computer designs from the 50's.
Back in the day, with even the highest quality most expensive analog scopes, you didn't trust any measurements off them before at least a twenty minute warmup.
Boy, have things gotten twitchy in tech these days, if a 30 second startup isn't fast enough. Nintendo has spoiled a whole generation.
Generally, good oscilloscopes need to be of a significantly higher quality than the usual electronics most people are exposed to. Therefore, they are expensive. It also helps keep the price up that they're a much lower-volume product than consumer electronics.
What I'm amazed at is how cheap older 'scopes are these days. I got a fast 7000 series mainframe, a few fast dual trace plugins, and even the fast differential-comparator plugin recently at auction. The mainframe was $5 and the plugins were $5 apiece. I sold off a half dozen of the plugins on eBay for more than that and paid for the whole purchase.\
I remember us paying more than $13,000 for a similar medium-end 7000 series scope back in the 80's.
I guess I like it that they're not teaching the twitch-generation how to use good old analog scopes, since it means they're considered 'worthless' in today's commercial labs, and I get them for almost nothing. Still it's sad, because digital 'scopes suck at so many things.
Noooo! Noooo! LabView is kinda the Visual Basic of automated instrumentation.
It looks slick on the surface, and you can do a heck of a lot with it, but it's layer-ware, meaning that people start something, then just glop more on top of it. Makes it a horrible nightmare to have to go in after-the-fact and figure out what the hell they were doing. And it's like 100% GUI-diddle. You have to poke around with your mouse to use it.
There are good free software alternatives based on regular coding. Use Gnuplot for waveform display, for instance.
None of the Tek 2400 series scopes are worth buying unless you already have one you're trying to keep going. The line that produced the Integrated Circuits in the 2400 series was shut down years ago and none of the custom ICs in that series have been available for that many years. You see people on sci.electronics.equipment once in awhile trying to keep a Tek 24xx 'scope going. Why bother? They were nice, as in 'slick while on a maintenance contract at a business', but a nightmare and a serious mistake for a hobbyist to have anything to do with. Unless, as I said, you've got a storeroom full of them.
At work back in the mid 80's my boss got the great idea of using the money budgeted for a Digital Storage Oscilloscope on an ISA card 'scope and a PC instead. He figured 'we get a PC out of the deal, then, too.'
The software that came with the card was really pathetic. I remember it having sluggish response and just sorta jumping the resolution by big increments.
And the PC that we got with it was a very overpriced AST 10 MHz 286 job. Obsolete within a year of us getting it.
If we'd bought a real DSO it would probably still be being used somewhere. Instead we bought a junk card (which I actually have stored away somewhere). The card was like $4000 when it was new.
I don't care about linux for the desktop. Really, I'm lately not caring about Linux at all. But that's an aside.
UNIX-like systems work well for what I want, and will continue to do so. I would call it 'workstation' grade, rather than 'desktop.' Desktop implies that it's a total solution. Workstation implies that it does real work, is a tool, but doen't crowd out other stuff on your desk.
It's far from certain that people are going to buy into 'mobile multimedia content' on portable phones. Right now it's as iffy as Java itself was in 1995, when the 'growth industry' was in writing hyped books and columns about Java.
It could be that people will grow tired of paying for cellphone capacity just to do 'multimedia' nonsense. There is definitely an opening for a cluefull company to clean up on sales of cheaper no-frills communications.
Slashdot Mirror
where the files must be painstakingly reverse-engineered,
Or you can log onto MSDN and download the file format info.
Lots of big words, and a condescending attitude.
Impressive.
I bet you wish it was twenty years ago, because you reek of the 'white coated dude from IT who knows better' bullshit, with your DBA comments.
Of course I've downloaded and tried OpenOffice. I even noticed it has a pathetic little 'clippy' clone thing now.
They really need to get beyond snorting Microsoft's tailpipe fumes.
Well, to start with, Microsoft Office.
OpenOffice isn't an 'open standard' any more than Microsoft's product. Perhaps the file format isn't 'closed source' and you can save your files to formats that aren't the default proprietary-to-OpenOffice formats. But you're just as trapped into using OpenOffice to view and edit your work as you are trapped into using Office, if you save your work in the native format.
Spare me the lecture on 'open standards'. I've worked with a lot of ANSI standards in the past. Lowest-common-denominator makes everything work together nice, but it also stifles innovation. For instance, you don't find commercial UNIXes toeing slavishly to the POSIX standard. They comply and go beyond it.
You don't seem to understand there can be more than one 'good' web browser. I'm typing this into a form on Mozilla 1.5, which I like very much as a browser. I also use *gasp* I.E. sometimes. And even hoary old browsers like mMosaic over on the NetBSD box, for some purposes. And Lynx once in awhile when I'm stuck in an terminal session and need to check something.
You don't have to worry about seeing my mp3 collection. I'm one of those icky people who don't share.
It is better to not hit the 'beneath your threshold' link than to read the drivel and bromide comments beneath it. But anyway. . .
And yes, at present, AOL is the best ISP for many people to use, because it's very user-friendly.
I certainly wouldn't use it. But I'm glad my mother-in-law does, because it's hard enough even getting her set up to use something that 'foolproof.'
Yugo doesn't 'dominate' the sports car market.
In fact, there aren't many Yugos still on the road.
Have you checked the browser usage statistics published by any credible Web research firm?
Still, what you typed looks clever and stuff.
Maybe I'm just really bad with spreadsheets, but I've never gotten a five year projection on Windows v Linux to come out in favor of Windows and positively never had OpenOffice come in as more expensive than Office on Windows.
How can you do a five-year projection on a product ('OpenOffice') which is fairly new on the scene? I mean, five years ago it was owned by StarDivision and where's that company now? Now it comes from a codebase owned by Sun Microsystems. Where will they be five years from now? Their core strength is in Server market, and this 'desktop' redheaded stepchild they purchased from a failed German company is the 'flagship' that people are supposed to choose instead of Microsoft Office?
There are a lot of loose ends you'd better tie up in your arguement.
The fact of the matter is that most of the issues revolve around backing out of having used Microsoft propriatary solutions, such as VB, instead of open standards solutions,
When an open-standards 'solution' doesn't exist, that becomes a problem, not a 'solution.' And there just aren't viable open-standard products out there to replace a lot of good stuff Microsoft sells.
(yes, scream and shout and moderate if you must)
And standards committees are not particularly responsive to actual needs. They plod along their merry way, since they're often mired in theory and weighed down by 'experts' from academia.
thanks to the competition of Linux.
This point can't be emphasized enough. Microsoft is an 'alpha' company that is hyper competetive. They needed Netscape to egg them into making Internet Explorer as good as it now is. They need Linux to egg them on as well. And Microsoft's stuff since 'the rise of Linux' has been vastly superior. Honestly, they were mired in NT 4.0 service packs and pasted-onto-16-bit 'Millenium Editions' before.
This can be considered good or bad by different people. For the customer, it is pretty good.
Well, I sold a digital recording cable converter right on ebay last month. One that normally has a hard drive. I mentioned right on the bid page that the hard drive was removed and that it didn't have a smartcard.
This morning I got email from the buyer 'where's the hard drive? where's the smart card?'
Never underestimate the intelligence of somebody willing to give you money.
The problem was likely all the feral dogs who started hanging around the auto crash test sites.
Reminds me of the one Farside comic the did get self-censored. Apparently it featured a dog hanging around an operating table begging for scraps.
My cheap Shuttle 'Spacewalker' PC Clone motherboard ended prematurely all on it's own, thankyouverymuch.
You're thinking of Michael Jackson.
And no, the flip-down rump access flaps on NASA space suits were omitted from the final design. I think you're referring to the 'open source' spacesuit design, as proposed by the scary bearded older dude who hangs out at LUG meetings in the back.
Why clone anything?
It sounds like a perfect use for liberal ex-congressmen/women.
Maybe the dummy will save the station from any debris that would hit it.
Perhaps all space stations should be surrounded by these dummies. Even, perhaps, they could be dummies with sound producing mechanisms in them that intone, at seven second intervals, the sound 'Mmkay.'
Here's an unrelated question I have about space being a vacuum.
Could we have equipment out in space that used vacuum tubes without the glass envelope? If space itself is a vacuum is it possible that electron tubes could be simply fabricated in the 'open' as part of electronics equipment? Maybe it's time to revive the old tube-type computer designs from the 50's.
Back in the day, with even the highest quality most expensive analog scopes, you didn't trust any measurements off them before at least a twenty minute warmup.
Boy, have things gotten twitchy in tech these days, if a 30 second startup isn't fast enough. Nintendo has spoiled a whole generation.
Generally, good oscilloscopes need to be of a significantly higher quality than the usual electronics most people are exposed to. Therefore, they are expensive. It also helps keep the price up that they're a much lower-volume product than consumer electronics.
What I'm amazed at is how cheap older 'scopes are these days. I got a fast 7000 series mainframe, a few fast dual trace plugins, and even the fast differential-comparator plugin recently at auction. The mainframe was $5 and the plugins were $5 apiece. I sold off a half dozen of the plugins on eBay for more than that and paid for the whole purchase.\
I remember us paying more than $13,000 for a similar medium-end 7000 series scope back in the 80's.
I guess I like it that they're not teaching the twitch-generation how to use good old analog scopes, since it means they're considered 'worthless' in today's commercial labs, and I get them for almost nothing. Still it's sad, because digital 'scopes suck at so many things.
Noooo! Noooo! LabView is kinda the Visual Basic of automated instrumentation.
It looks slick on the surface, and you can do a heck of a lot with it, but it's layer-ware, meaning that people start something, then just glop more on top of it. Makes it a horrible nightmare to have to go in after-the-fact and figure out what the hell they were doing. And it's like 100% GUI-diddle. You have to poke around with your mouse to use it.
There are good free software alternatives based on regular coding. Use Gnuplot for waveform display, for instance.
None of the Tek 2400 series scopes are worth buying unless you already have one you're trying to keep going. The line that produced the Integrated Circuits in the 2400 series was shut down years ago and none of the custom ICs in that series have been available for that many years. You see people on sci.electronics.equipment once in awhile trying to keep a Tek 24xx 'scope going. Why bother? They were nice, as in 'slick while on a maintenance contract at a business', but a nightmare and a serious mistake for a hobbyist to have anything to do with. Unless, as I said, you've got a storeroom full of them.
At work back in the mid 80's my boss got the great idea of using the money budgeted for a Digital Storage Oscilloscope on an ISA card 'scope and a PC instead. He figured 'we get a PC out of the deal, then, too.'
The software that came with the card was really pathetic. I remember it having sluggish response and just sorta jumping the resolution by big increments.
And the PC that we got with it was a very overpriced AST 10 MHz 286 job. Obsolete within a year of us getting it.
If we'd bought a real DSO it would probably still be being used somewhere. Instead we bought a junk card (which I actually have stored away somewhere). The card was like $4000 when it was new.
I don't care about linux for the desktop. Really, I'm lately not caring about Linux at all. But that's an aside.
UNIX-like systems work well for what I want, and will continue to do so. I would call it 'workstation' grade, rather than 'desktop.' Desktop implies that it's a total solution. Workstation implies that it does real work, is a tool, but doen't crowd out other stuff on your desk.
It's far from certain that people are going to buy into 'mobile multimedia content' on portable phones. Right now it's as iffy as Java itself was in 1995, when the 'growth industry' was in writing hyped books and columns about Java.
It could be that people will grow tired of paying for cellphone capacity just to do 'multimedia' nonsense. There is definitely an opening for a cluefull company to clean up on sales of cheaper no-frills communications.
So, really, what you're saying is that Java can use up all the new hardware performance we've paid for.
Maybe, but you'd better accept that said 'cryptic C-like languages' run rocket fast on said hardware.
It's amusing how the advocates of bloatware make their compromises.
And two platforms to test each release against.