I once saw a spreadsheet containing the whole financial details for a sports club at my uni. They asked me to double-check the numbers and make sure it all balanced. It was a mammoth spreadsheet. There were something like 10 sheets jam-packed with various data on them.
A previous poster said everything starts to look like a nail when you have a hammer. It's true. A proper financial package would have made the task so easy; just find a transaction in the list of all transations, make sure I have the appropriate paper trail for it and then set the transaction to cleared.
That would be much easier than finding every instance of the transaction in this mammoth sheet and manually checking it off in several places.
Despite being shown a proper financial tool (Gnucash) the treasurer for the club persisted on labouring over the books in Excel.
The ironic part is that the person in question was a Linux user and only had Windows to use Excel! Crazy!
If SCO isn't allowed to spread FUD then wouldn't commissioning other companies to do it also not be allowed?
The only way it would be legal is if the other company was acting on its own. If SCO paid them to say they were not acting on behalf of SCO, wouldn't that be illegal too?
The settlement disallows employees of SCO making claims agains Linux, but by commissioning an advertising company the company becomes employeed by SCO in some sort of sense... the article said that it was a borderline tactic, but methinks that if it wound up in court SCO would be penalised.
These have existed since way back.. In the early days they consisted of a very high tech piece of wood. The user simply had to club people with the wood until they went away.
More recently the event of the phased plasma rifle (in the 40W range) has reduced the effort required to making someone go away. In fact, if you have a phased plasma rifle you will need to do very little to make people go away, except for those really pesky ones that can't take a hint.
Don't you love technology? Always making things easier to do.
They discredit the reports because they're trying to get the law makers on their side. With the law they can impose a "starving artist" levy on blank CDs, they can sue more people, they can put people in gaol, etc.
They may be shooting themselves in the foot in the short term, but they can make more money by discrediting these reports. Eventually, they'll have their starving artist tax on everything including sliced bread, and be embracing file sharing technology to increase their profits. It's a win-win for them unfortunately.
I posted in the slashdot thread yesterday about these sort of studies in http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/03/29/019227 &tid=
It's nice to finally see a study on music downloading that doesn't appear to be sponsored by the [RM][IP]AA. Hopefully this will encourage the lawmakers to think about what's going on instead of just passing laws to help the poor starving execs of the music industry at the expense of the rich blue collar criminals that download music.
I support prettying up the docs. They are accessible and functional as they are, but a little prettying up can't hurt. CSS is pretty well supported in the major browsers now.
I know a great-many people that focus on aesthetics over functionality. They spend all day theming their Windows desktop only to find out that their new animated icons and desktop wallpapers make their machine run like a dog.
It may be especially useful to keep noobs interested while they're learning how to do things.
Well the way some browsers have handled CSS lately, you could be mistaken for thinking it was Content Scrambling System. The situation has improved though, hasn't it?
Keep in mind that there will likely never be any truly unbiassed research into this matter.
The record companies do the research to prove their point that file sharing reduces sales. The people that are pro-filesharing are generally individuals who don't want to pay for the research, and the rest of the world doesn't really care enough.
It's the sad truth, but until some unbiassed reseach is done the record companies will keep spouting the same old dribble as gospel.
I don't know why subduction zone disposal has disappeared off the map and in my searching all I found were documents showing the technique in theory (such as):
It mentions subsuduction zone disposal. If anything, it's an interesting read to see how it works and the length of time that the waste is burried in sediment at the bottom of the ocean before it's taken further down.
There is tonnes of information on radioactive waste disposal at http://www.radwaste.org.
For the electrincal engineers here, the IEEE had a series of articles on nuclear power in one of their Spectrum publications last year (can't remember the issue and I don't have them at hand). They covered a lot of ground including types of nuclear plants, power generation and waste disposal. It was a very informative, well written series of articles.
I, for one, am very interested in long-term safe disposal of nuclear waste. Living in SA, we have heard talks by the Howard govt about building an international waste dump in South Australia. I'd like to see a better solution to the problem than dumping it all in our backyard.
The articles state that the reactor core is small enough that it will never be able to get out of control and melt down. You feed in liquid water and out comes steam to power your electricity generation turbines.
Essentially what they are doing is building a set and forget reactor core that will power a small-scale reactor for 30 years. When you're done, you put it in a hole and fill the hole with concrete. Removes the chance of meltdown and the problems of waste disposal.
Especially on the suckers game of roulette. To win big, you either have to spend a very long time and be very lucky, or bet against 35:1 odds and be incredibly lucky.
We were working on a thesis document for our undergraduate course. The seamless exchange of information is a fallacy. I lost count of the number of times I saved the document and came back to it an hour later (on the same PC) to find that when Word opened the document, it threw out all the formatting and set the style of everything on about 100 pages to "Normal". If only it wasn't a requirement to submit the document as a Word file!
That said, all the default styles in Word are derived from the Normal template style. That style is user-editable, and changes depending on the user, the printer attached to the machine, the phase of the moon and how you hold your mouth while Word opens. It can be the cause of some serious headaches when loading a document on a computer that it wasn't created on, specially when the L-user that uses the computer regularly decided to set the default font to some 24 point script font.
I have had more luck, sometimes, opening documents in OpenOffice than in the same version of Word the document was created in on a different machine.
There are similar issues in Powerpoint with fonts and colour schemes. The only saving grace of that is that it has an export presentation function that dumps nearly everything into the.ppt file so that it will run on almost any machine with a compatible version of Powerpoint.
The only program I haven't had much trouble with is Excel. It's actually somewhat of a joy to use when compared to the other programs in the Office Suite.
I was joyous when OpenOffice incorporated the print to PDF option. Saved all the jerking about with printing to a postscript file and running ps2pdf.
'I want to make sure (a user) can't get through... an online experience without hitting a Microsoft ad.'
Just curiously, why would the software giant need to advertise? I presume that it would be the only company that has true world-wide penetration. Just about everybody knows of Microsoft and what products they make. Those that don't know only recently emerged from their cave.
Advertising the more specialist stuff they make to the Joe User when he searches for his favorite band's webpage doesn't make sense either. The people that want to use that have a specific need and would know about it through other means anyway.
So I fail to see the point of them advertising. Those that don't use MS selected alternative software for a reason. Presumably they won't switch to a MS product just because they know it exists.
SCO may not be able to go after the BSDs, which is good, but they can still go after others.
You pin a lot of hope on SCO losing the SCO/Linux case. They present a convincing argument to they layperson that they were the original owners of said lines of code. There are other factors influencing the case, which I am not fully aware, so hopefully the Linux community has its facts in order and presents a strong counter argument in the courts.
I should get down off my soapbox and let others post their views.
Ok, I am calm. I am just not happy about the matter.
It's an unfortunate case of "their word against ours", and SCO being the big respectable company will be favoured for that.
That's the unfortunate way the world is. The big respectable company that works hard and makes millions is more trustworthy than the little guy who gives his work away on the street for a pittance.
I really just don't want to see the world go the way it is going. The *AAs are walking over the rights of legitimite purchassers of content, and trying to press their views outside the US. SCO appears to be stealing code from Linux and claiming it as their own. What next?
SCO suck. I am a Linux user. I know lots of Linux users. But I'll sooner go without a computer than pay them for a license to Linux, and I would rather avoid EvilOS (TM). I've nothing against paying for software, just SCO can't claim ownership of EveryInvention (TM), and the serious competition on PC isn't that great. I know about BSDs and other opensource operating systems, but I see SCO going after them eventually as well.
This is a dodgy business practice. It looks to me like SCO has grabbed a few hundred lines of code from Linux, backported them in to their ShittyOS and is now claiming ownership of everything under the sun, including my DNA, because of it.
The future of opensource is really at stake here if SCO win a lawsuit anywhere in the world about this. What's to stop other litigous bastards grabbing some opensource code and sticking it into a version of their software then claiming that they wrote all the code? If SCO win there will be a legal precident for them to do it too. Something similar happened to the Mplayer guys a while back, but I forget the exact details.
Beware people, the future is uncertain. If you don't make a point of fighting (and winning) this SCO thing we're going to see more of it happening.
Sounds like a good idea to me. Now I can go blast my (virtual) enemies instead of my (not-so virtual) ones.
At least I know I can blast the virtual ones over and over. The not-so virtual ones are only really good for one fatal beating. After that, they aren't as much fun.
If only my mouse had these. I'd have no need for the significant other! I could actually enjoy sitting in front of my computer for work (moreso than I do now).
I see this as more justification for the extreme cooling I wanted to apply to my machine. The SO only sees the bottom-line, and not the computing benefits ("why do you want to overclock your machine to 9GHz? It works well at its normal speed! It's too expensive!").
Now I finally have the means to justify it when the PC burns down!
... is to add yet another useless feature to an outdated CODEC to ensure it retains its market share. There are a lot of people that encode movies with Xvid/Divx/etc, and would like to get a lower bitrate surround sound format than the original AC3 into their files. Many of them don't even know what OGG or AAC are. They just select MP3 because they know that encodes audio.
Ogg, and other formats already support this, and are gaining market share. Lots of video encding software for Unix, Apple, and EvilOS(TM) support Ogg out of the box. There was a point when Redhat (and I presume others) stopped shipping MP3 support in their distros because of the shitty licensing structure. They never stopped shipping Ogg support (encoders, players, xmms plugins, etc).
It's like car manufacturers putting 8 channel sound systems into their new cars. Somebody will buy it over the competitors car simply because it has 8 speakers in it. No real benefit in the grand scheme of things, but a useless feature.
If you add another useless feature people will want to get hold of it, even though most of them will never understand how the new feature benefits them, nor use it.
People will use it because it's MP3. The glorious masses don't know the difference between OGG, AAC and MP3. They just double-click the filename and *amp (or possibly Media Player) opens and plays the file. They know not, and care not about what format the file is.
I want to rant about this, but I haven't the energy. MP3 is crap. I stopped using it along time ago, when I found out that 128kbps Ogg generally sounded better than 128k MP3 on my hard disk "jukebox" (I rip all my new CDs into the jukebox partition and play them back using Linux/XMMS through my soundsystem. I'm going to upgrade to something with a remote control interface and a pretty GUI that will work on the TV pretty soon).
If only everyone would do the same as me and use Ogg. It's not going to happen, and competition fuels innovation, but when companies blatantly copy what the OS community is doing its not good.
*going to get drunk and forget and `find / -name \*.[mM][pP]3 -exec rm -f \{\} \;
I found the occasional bug with Mozilla. When you visit lots of pages the memory allocated doesn't seem to free up all of the time. If you spend a day browsing continuously (I have done on occasion) then Mozilla ends up using a tonne of memory. I haven't tested it with 1.6 because I haven't had occasion to spend the whole day browsing since I installed it.
It wouldn't surprise me if the Evil Empire products hung around in memory longer than something that competes with them. I've noticed that (on XP) Mozilla and Open Office seem to get swapped out regularly, while IE and M$ Office seem to be pre-loaded at boot (one some machines) and have a "startup" time that is almost insignificant. That was one of the selling points for IE and Office that M$ were making, wasn't it? That they load faster...
I suspect that it is not Moz playing fair, rather than the Evil Empire playing unfair.
Slashdot Mirror
I once saw a spreadsheet containing the whole financial details for a sports club at my uni. They asked me to double-check the numbers and make sure it all balanced. It was a mammoth spreadsheet. There were something like 10 sheets jam-packed with various data on them.
A previous poster said everything starts to look like a nail when you have a hammer. It's true. A proper financial package would have made the task so easy; just find a transaction in the list of all transations, make sure I have the appropriate paper trail for it and then set the transaction to cleared.
That would be much easier than finding every instance of the transaction in this mammoth sheet and manually checking it off in several places.
Despite being shown a proper financial tool (Gnucash) the treasurer for the club persisted on labouring over the books in Excel.
The ironic part is that the person in question was a Linux user and only had Windows to use Excel! Crazy!
If SCO isn't allowed to spread FUD then wouldn't commissioning other companies to do it also not be allowed?
The only way it would be legal is if the other company was acting on its own. If SCO paid them to say they were not acting on behalf of SCO, wouldn't that be illegal too?
The settlement disallows employees of SCO making claims agains Linux, but by commissioning an advertising company the company becomes employeed by SCO in some sort of sense... the article said that it was a borderline tactic, but methinks that if it wound up in court SCO would be penalised.
These have existed since way back.. In the early days they consisted of a very high tech piece of wood. The user simply had to club people with the wood until they went away.
More recently the event of the phased plasma rifle (in the 40W range) has reduced the effort required to making someone go away. In fact, if you have a phased plasma rifle you will need to do very little to make people go away, except for those really pesky ones that can't take a hint.
Don't you love technology? Always making things easier to do.
They discredit the reports because they're trying to get the law makers on their side. With the law they can impose a "starving artist" levy on blank CDs, they can sue more people, they can put people in gaol, etc.
7 &tid=
They may be shooting themselves in the foot in the short term, but they can make more money by discrediting these reports. Eventually, they'll have their starving artist tax on everything including sliced bread, and be embracing file sharing technology to increase their profits. It's a win-win for them unfortunately.
I posted in the slashdot thread yesterday about these sort of studies in http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/03/29/01922
It's nice to finally see a study on music downloading that doesn't appear to be sponsored by the [RM][IP]AA. Hopefully this will encourage the lawmakers to think about what's going on instead of just passing laws to help the poor starving execs of the music industry at the expense of the rich blue collar criminals that download music.
I support prettying up the docs. They are accessible and functional as they are, but a little prettying up can't hurt. CSS is pretty well supported in the major browsers now.
I know a great-many people that focus on aesthetics over functionality. They spend all day theming their Windows desktop only to find out that their new animated icons and desktop wallpapers make their machine run like a dog.
It may be especially useful to keep noobs interested while they're learning how to do things.
Well the way some browsers have handled CSS lately, you could be mistaken for thinking it was Content Scrambling System. The situation has improved though, hasn't it?
Keep in mind that there will likely never be any truly unbiassed research into this matter.
The record companies do the research to prove their point that file sharing reduces sales. The people that are pro-filesharing are generally individuals who don't want to pay for the research, and the rest of the world doesn't really care enough.
It's the sad truth, but until some unbiassed reseach is done the record companies will keep spouting the same old dribble as gospel.
I don't know why subduction zone disposal has disappeared off the map and in my searching all I found were documents showing the technique in theory (such as):
a r2 .htm
http://www.etsu.edu/writing/3120f99/zctb3/nucle
It mentions subsuduction zone disposal. If anything, it's an interesting read to see how it works and the length of time that the waste is burried in sediment at the bottom of the ocean before it's taken further down.
There is tonnes of information on radioactive waste disposal at http://www.radwaste.org.
For the electrincal engineers here, the IEEE had a series of articles on nuclear power in one of their Spectrum publications last year (can't remember the issue and I don't have them at hand). They covered a lot of ground including types of nuclear plants, power generation and waste disposal. It was a very informative, well written series of articles.
I, for one, am very interested in long-term safe disposal of nuclear waste. Living in SA, we have heard talks by the Howard govt about building an international waste dump in South Australia. I'd like to see a better solution to the problem than dumping it all in our backyard.
Toshiba have announced a "meltdown-proof" reactor.
See the stories here and here.
The articles state that the reactor core is small enough that it will never be able to get out of control and melt down. You feed in liquid water and out comes steam to power your electricity generation turbines.
Essentially what they are doing is building a set and forget reactor core that will power a small-scale reactor for 30 years. When you're done, you put it in a hole and fill the hole with concrete. Removes the chance of meltdown and the problems of waste disposal.
Especially on the suckers game of roulette. To win big, you either have to spend a very long time and be very lucky, or bet against 35:1 odds and be incredibly lucky.
This page sums it up nicely.
We were working on a thesis document for our undergraduate course. The seamless exchange of information is a fallacy. I lost count of the number of times I saved the document and came back to it an hour later (on the same PC) to find that when Word opened the document, it threw out all the formatting and set the style of everything on about 100 pages to "Normal". If only it wasn't a requirement to submit the document as a Word file!
That said, all the default styles in Word are derived from the Normal template style. That style is user-editable, and changes depending on the user, the printer attached to the machine, the phase of the moon and how you hold your mouth while Word opens. It can be the cause of some serious headaches when loading a document on a computer that it wasn't created on, specially when the L-user that uses the computer regularly decided to set the default font to some 24 point script font.
I have had more luck, sometimes, opening documents in OpenOffice than in the same version of Word the document was created in on a different machine.
There are similar issues in Powerpoint with fonts and colour schemes. The only saving grace of that is that it has an export presentation function that dumps nearly everything into the .ppt file so that it will run on almost any machine with a compatible version of Powerpoint.
The only program I haven't had much trouble with is Excel. It's actually somewhat of a joy to use when compared to the other programs in the Office Suite.
I was joyous when OpenOffice incorporated the print to PDF option. Saved all the jerking about with printing to a postscript file and running ps2pdf.
Just curiously, why would the software giant need to advertise? I presume that it would be the only company that has true world-wide penetration. Just about everybody knows of Microsoft and what products they make. Those that don't know only recently emerged from their cave.
Advertising the more specialist stuff they make to the Joe User when he searches for his favorite band's webpage doesn't make sense either. The people that want to use that have a specific need and would know about it through other means anyway.
So I fail to see the point of them advertising. Those that don't use MS selected alternative software for a reason. Presumably they won't switch to a MS product just because they know it exists.
Just my $0.02 + GST
SCO may not be able to go after the BSDs, which is good, but they can still go after others.
You pin a lot of hope on SCO losing the SCO/Linux case. They present a convincing argument to they layperson that they were the original owners of said lines of code. There are other factors influencing the case, which I am not fully aware, so hopefully the Linux community has its facts in order and presents a strong counter argument in the courts.
I should get down off my soapbox and let others post their views.
Ok, I am calm. I am just not happy about the matter.
It's an unfortunate case of "their word against ours", and SCO being the big respectable company will be favoured for that.
That's the unfortunate way the world is. The big respectable company that works hard and makes millions is more trustworthy than the little guy who gives his work away on the street for a pittance.
I really just don't want to see the world go the way it is going. The *AAs are walking over the rights of legitimite purchassers of content, and trying to press their views outside the US. SCO appears to be stealing code from Linux and claiming it as their own. What next?
And to further what I just wrote, SCO only target corporations using Linux because there is more money to be had.
They can't target the home user on IP grounds because they would have to prove that their IP was being used in a profitable manner by the home user.
BE VERY WARE!!!!!
PS. I forgot to select plain text for the prev posting, so all my paragraphs disappeared.
SCO suck. I am a Linux user. I know lots of Linux users. But I'll sooner go without a computer than pay them for a license to Linux, and I would rather avoid EvilOS (TM). I've nothing against paying for software, just SCO can't claim ownership of EveryInvention (TM), and the serious competition on PC isn't that great. I know about BSDs and other opensource operating systems, but I see SCO going after them eventually as well. This is a dodgy business practice. It looks to me like SCO has grabbed a few hundred lines of code from Linux, backported them in to their ShittyOS and is now claiming ownership of everything under the sun, including my DNA, because of it. The future of opensource is really at stake here if SCO win a lawsuit anywhere in the world about this. What's to stop other litigous bastards grabbing some opensource code and sticking it into a version of their software then claiming that they wrote all the code? If SCO win there will be a legal precident for them to do it too. Something similar happened to the Mplayer guys a while back, but I forget the exact details. Beware people, the future is uncertain. If you don't make a point of fighting (and winning) this SCO thing we're going to see more of it happening.
Sounds like a good idea to me. Now I can go blast my (virtual) enemies instead of my (not-so virtual) ones.
At least I know I can blast the virtual ones over and over. The not-so virtual ones are only really good for one fatal beating. After that, they aren't as much fun.
If only my mouse had these. I'd have no need for the significant other! I could actually enjoy sitting in front of my computer for work (moreso than I do now).
But isn't the point of being a geek that you never get outside to see the trees?
Why not cut down several and fashion them into a PC. Then you can love nature from your desk!
I see this as more justification for the extreme cooling I wanted to apply to my machine. The SO only sees the bottom-line, and not the computing benefits ("why do you want to overclock your machine to 9GHz? It works well at its normal speed! It's too expensive!").
Now I finally have the means to justify it when the PC burns down!
... is to add yet another useless feature to an outdated CODEC to ensure it retains its market share. There are a lot of people that encode movies with Xvid/Divx/etc, and would like to get a lower bitrate surround sound format than the original AC3 into their files. Many of them don't even know what OGG or AAC are. They just select MP3 because they know that encodes audio.
Ogg, and other formats already support this, and are gaining market share. Lots of video encding software for Unix, Apple, and EvilOS(TM) support Ogg out of the box. There was a point when Redhat (and I presume others) stopped shipping MP3 support in their distros because of the shitty licensing structure. They never stopped shipping Ogg support (encoders, players, xmms plugins, etc).
It's like car manufacturers putting 8 channel sound systems into their new cars. Somebody will buy it over the competitors car simply because it has 8 speakers in it. No real benefit in the grand scheme of things, but a useless feature.
If you add another useless feature people will want to get hold of it, even though most of them will never understand how the new feature benefits them, nor use it.
People will use it because it's MP3. The glorious masses don't know the difference between OGG, AAC and MP3. They just double-click the filename and *amp (or possibly Media Player) opens and plays the file. They know not, and care not about what format the file is.
I want to rant about this, but I haven't the energy. MP3 is crap. I stopped using it along time ago, when I found out that 128kbps Ogg generally sounded better than 128k MP3 on my hard disk "jukebox" (I rip all my new CDs into the jukebox partition and play them back using Linux/XMMS through my soundsystem. I'm going to upgrade to something with a remote control interface and a pretty GUI that will work on the TV pretty soon).
If only everyone would do the same as me and use Ogg. It's not going to happen, and competition fuels innovation, but when companies blatantly copy what the OS community is doing its not good.
*going to get drunk and forget and `find / -name \*.[mM][pP]3 -exec rm -f \{\} \;
I found the occasional bug with Mozilla. When you visit lots of pages the memory allocated doesn't seem to free up all of the time. If you spend a day browsing continuously (I have done on occasion) then Mozilla ends up using a tonne of memory. I haven't tested it with 1.6 because I haven't had occasion to spend the whole day browsing since I installed it.
It wouldn't surprise me if the Evil Empire products hung around in memory longer than something that competes with them. I've noticed that (on XP) Mozilla and Open Office seem to get swapped out regularly, while IE and M$ Office seem to be pre-loaded at boot (one some machines) and have a "startup" time that is almost insignificant. That was one of the selling points for IE and Office that M$ were making, wasn't it? That they load faster...
I suspect that it is not Moz playing fair, rather than the Evil Empire playing unfair.