I did a year and a half of an engineering degree at the University of Western Australia in the mid 1980s before deciding it wasn't my thing. A few years later I went back to school and did a BA in sociology, and am now doing a PhD in medical sociology at the University of California, San Francisco.
I'll say this - engineering was indeed hard. It required a lot of discipline, had a *huge* number of contact hours per week and an equally huge load of homework. To do well required that you not merely do a lot of work, but that you were bright and had a high degree of comfort and fluency with mathematics.
Having said that, undergraduate sociology was also hard, but in a different way. The contact hours were less, and the workload tended to be compressed at the end of the semester (I remember cranking out four papers in one 36 hour bender one particularly poorly-planned semester..), however to do well also required a lot of hard work, as well as being bright and having a particular fluency with the manipulation and communication of complex ideas. The real kicker is that sociology (as with 90% of the social sciences) also requires that you do an advanced degree to actually work in the field, and to get into grad school you have to do very well at it as an undergraduate. And by the time you're finished you've had 8-10 years of training.
Finally, if you manage to limp through an engineering degree with barely passing grades, you're still employable as an engineer (ok, you might not get the most amazing job on offer straight out of school, but you will get a job). If you limp through a sociology degree with barely passing grades, you have a nice piece of toilet paper as a reward.
I don't think either route is a soft option. Doing well at either requires a lot of hard work and discipline, and both require brains and a high degree of fluency with a particular kind of thinking.
The Japanese Constitution explicitly forbids torture, in fact. The American lawyers who wrote most of it in 1947 made a number of such improvements on the US document that provided a lot of the template. Too bad they couldn't roll their patches back into the source document.. : )
Well what do you expect from a Supreme Court ruling based on a constitution written by US lawyers?
Having said that, at least the Japanese Constitution explicitly bans torture. So it's at least an improvement on the US document that inspired it in that respect. Someone should show it to the current US President.
Because 90% of stuff labeled 'mission critical' actually isn't. Think about it - for most of us, being able to receive or send cellphone calls or emails at any time seems super important, but the number of hours in any given month where it really *was* super important (the grant application was due in two hours; your mother was sick; your partner was about to go into labor; whatever) is generally pretty low - our real tolerance for occasional downtime is therefore quite high.
Oh hell, I joined Slashdot in 1998 due to an anti-Microsoft story in The Australian (New York Times equivalent for reach/impact in Australia) on Geoffrey Bennett successfully coaxing a cheque out of Toshiba Australia for the Microsoft tax - it was the first time I'd even heard of Linux. The idea of a) a free functional alternative/improvement to Windows (a hardware-agnostic equivalent, before any 1990s Mac fans chime in); and b) someone sticking it to a company that was painfully arrogant to deal with even at that point was kind of liberating..
Ack, no, my bad. She bought a bunch of music she did not already possess from iTunes. Then got grumpy because she couldn't move that music around to other devices etc due to the drm limitations. One of the other posters made the suggestion that she burn the tracks she'd bought on iTunes to cd and rip the resultant cds to mp3/ogg to get rid of the drm. I was just saying she didn't want to take the time needed to burn them, let alone burn and rip them - she quite reasonably expected that the whole point of buying them digitally in the first place was to skip any screwing around with physical media in the first place. The "50 cds" came from my rough guess as to how many cds she'd need to burn to hold all the music she bought, and only ever had in iTunes format (50 is probably an overestimation, but hey, this is an idle conversation on slashdot). And you're right - she would have been a lot better off simply buying the music on cd in the first place & paying for someone to rip it to an unencumbered format.
Alas, she started this bad habit before we met. Now, as the household's resident geek & thus somehow responsible for anything computer-related which Does Not Work As Desired, I have to deal with the consequence regardless : )
"(tell GF to burn it to cd and rip it back. it'll be fine.)"
Notwithstanding the other 6,000 posts in this thread jabbering about quality degradation, the real problem is she actually has a life and burning and ripping 50 or so cds (and ensuring the resultant files are tagged properly) means wasting a lot of time, time she thought she'd saved by buying the music in a digital as opposed to physical form in the first place..
My girlfriend didn't know it. And is now rather annoyed that (much of) the music she bought on iTunes can't be used on the server I set up to handle our entire ripped cd collection.
I can't actually talk - I started an engineering degree & an exam question at the end of the first year was 'calculate the wind speed which would knock over a structure with the following characteristics'. After much sweat of brow my answer came out as -5km/hr. Yes, that's a minus sign, and yes, I changed majors : )
Meh. For those too lazy to telnet, Google hpsetdisp.pl for a quick perl script to change the lcd display of any HP with JetDirect (ie most modern ones)
5) If your software is arranged on some client/server model, offer server hosting services for those who don't want to (or lack the in-house technical skills) to deal with setting up and maintaining the server side of the setup.
I think it's even worse from McFee's point of view:
1. You create a program for detecting viruses, it's written for Microsoft Windows 2. 40% of your important customers (government) switches to Linux 3. Because you want to keep you clients, you port your application to Linux. 4. Your clients ignore your linux port because viruses aren't really an issue under linux 5. You try various desperate delaying tactics like fud and lawsuits as your business model collapses beneath you, and mainly just succeed in annoying your own (former) customers. (think RIAA) 6. You shut down your business, and live on welfare for the rest of your life.
I agree that it's possible that OO will change the way it'll render documents (I *personally* don't care about formulas and macros - I'm a sociologist, and 99% of my output is text, but you're definitely making a good point), however, the two advantages of an open document format are a) there's more likely to be more than one software package out there that reads and writes it (which we're seeing already with OO's ODT format), making it more likely there'll be something around which opens it 'appropriately' in 10 or 20 years; and secondly (and far far more importantly for my original problem with word format documents), I can always extract the *content* of an open format document (regardless of whether its ODF, PDF, or some other published format). Exact layout is nice, but if all I want is the content of that transcript of an interview I did with someone 10 years ago, I'm probably going to reformat it anyway. With those word 5.1a documents I mentioned in the original post, I had binary garbage and occasional out-of-order partial strings, and that was it. Unzip an ODT file and there's a nice handy 'content.xml' file inside.
That said, my personal slow slide into the world of open source and open document formats led me eventually to latex, which I don't think is going to become unusable in the future. Not within the 20-30 years of the average academic career anyway. Although latex is not exactly the solution to most people's writing and collaborating needs.. : )
For what it's worth, I think your comments on the current and future role of VMs for accessing older document formats should be modded insightful. I do wonder however what it's going to be like trying to get some circa 2007 'dial home for activation' operating system to play nice in a VM in 20 years time so you can recover the documents you wrote in some proprietary document format..
Funnily enough, the thing that finally, permanently, won me over to open document formats (I first used things like openoffice simply because they were free) was discovering I couldn't open my dissertation (written in word 5.1a for mac) on a standard install of office for windows. Yes, I know there's converters, and yes, I know current versions of word for mac can still open 5.1a documents, but I didn't have a mac at the time, and laboriously 'converting' the large numbers of transcripts, notes, papers, and all the other ephemera of writing a dissertation was a huge, timewasting PITA..
After that, the penny dropped. Using open document formats wasn't simply a way to save money, it was an actual necessity for anyone planning to have a career lasting more than 5 years where writing is a core part of your work.
If you're an academic, having a bunch of publications come up when someone googles your real name is actually helpful to your career.
Alas, my real name is pretty common (and is shared with a TV character) so you have to add "drugs" or "heroin" after it before I show up on the first page (hey, it's what I study, honest) : P
Australian lawyers used to use the boilerplate "100 years after the death of the last decedent of the Ming Emperors" for things like end dates for trust funds where the law required *something* and they really wanted to say 'never'. But I hear they switched to "When Duke Nukem is released" a couple of years ago. : )
you have to return cafedvd rentals within 8 days though - not quite the joy of never having to think about 'is it due?' from netflix.
but yeah, it's a good service for someone who doesn't need a monthly stream of dvds but still wants access to a more eclectic range than ye old local video store.
I've used writer2latex (0.4 - haven't used the 0.5 release that just came out today yet : ) a couple of times when I've discovered I needed to incorporate chunks of a word or OO document into something else I was writing in latex. My experience was that it's a great effort, and simplifies the process a lot, but that you inevitably need to do varying amounts of post-conversion cleanup (particularly if using natbib or jurabib).
ie it's a valuable tool to assist when you need to convert something, but no way in hell would you deliberately start out a project with the idea of 'drafting it in OO and converting to latex later' unless you like makework.
I use latex a lot (texshop for mac to be precise), and love it. It is perfect for any document where a) I don't have to collaborate with other people ("What are all these slashes and curly brackets? Can you resend this to me as a.doc file please?"); and either b) there's an existing class file which meets the needs of the project (eg many but far from all academic journals) or c) this is a big enough project for me to justify sitting down with 'the latex companion' and editing (never had to write one from scratch yet, touch wood..) a class file to get something that actually meets the specific needs of the project (eg my doctoral dissertation..).
For documents which fail a or (b and c), which is unfortunately about 80% of the documents I write, latex (and lyx) are, alas, useless, and openoffice is unfortunately pretty much the best thing out there.
Slashdot Mirror
I did a year and a half of an engineering degree at the University of Western Australia in the mid 1980s before deciding it wasn't my thing. A few years later I went back to school and did a BA in sociology, and am now doing a PhD in medical sociology at the University of California, San Francisco.
I'll say this - engineering was indeed hard. It required a lot of discipline, had a *huge* number of contact hours per week and an equally huge load of homework. To do well required that you not merely do a lot of work, but that you were bright and had a high degree of comfort and fluency with mathematics.
Having said that, undergraduate sociology was also hard, but in a different way. The contact hours were less, and the workload tended to be compressed at the end of the semester (I remember cranking out four papers in one 36 hour bender one particularly poorly-planned semester..), however to do well also required a lot of hard work, as well as being bright and having a particular fluency with the manipulation and communication of complex ideas. The real kicker is that sociology (as with 90% of the social sciences) also requires that you do an advanced degree to actually work in the field, and to get into grad school you have to do very well at it as an undergraduate. And by the time you're finished you've had 8-10 years of training.
Finally, if you manage to limp through an engineering degree with barely passing grades, you're still employable as an engineer (ok, you might not get the most amazing job on offer straight out of school, but you will get a job). If you limp through a sociology degree with barely passing grades, you have a nice piece of toilet paper as a reward.
I don't think either route is a soft option. Doing well at either requires a lot of hard work and discipline, and both require brains and a high degree of fluency with a particular kind of thinking.
A [citation needed] sticker campaign for your viewing pleasure : )
"Their government does not .. endorse torture"
The Japanese Constitution explicitly forbids torture, in fact. The American lawyers who wrote most of it in 1947 made a number of such improvements on the US document that provided a lot of the template. Too bad they couldn't roll their patches back into the source document.. : )
Well what do you expect from a Supreme Court ruling based on a constitution written by US lawyers?
Having said that, at least the Japanese Constitution explicitly bans torture. So it's at least an improvement on the US document that inspired it in that respect. Someone should show it to the current US President.
Because 90% of stuff labeled 'mission critical' actually isn't. Think about it - for most of us, being able to receive or send cellphone calls or emails at any time seems super important, but the number of hours in any given month where it really *was* super important (the grant application was due in two hours; your mother was sick; your partner was about to go into labor; whatever) is generally pretty low - our real tolerance for occasional downtime is therefore quite high.
Oh hell, I joined Slashdot in 1998 due to an anti-Microsoft story in The Australian (New York Times equivalent for reach/impact in Australia) on Geoffrey Bennett successfully coaxing a cheque out of Toshiba Australia for the Microsoft tax - it was the first time I'd even heard of Linux. The idea of a) a free functional alternative/improvement to Windows (a hardware-agnostic equivalent, before any 1990s Mac fans chime in); and b) someone sticking it to a company that was painfully arrogant to deal with even at that point was kind of liberating..
That's not a troll - it's a lucid summary of the situation.
Ack, no, my bad. She bought a bunch of music she did not already possess from iTunes. Then got grumpy because she couldn't move that music around to other devices etc due to the drm limitations. One of the other posters made the suggestion that she burn the tracks she'd bought on iTunes to cd and rip the resultant cds to mp3/ogg to get rid of the drm. I was just saying she didn't want to take the time needed to burn them, let alone burn and rip them - she quite reasonably expected that the whole point of buying them digitally in the first place was to skip any screwing around with physical media in the first place. The "50 cds" came from my rough guess as to how many cds she'd need to burn to hold all the music she bought, and only ever had in iTunes format (50 is probably an overestimation, but hey, this is an idle conversation on slashdot). And you're right - she would have been a lot better off simply buying the music on cd in the first place & paying for someone to rip it to an unencumbered format.
Alas, she started this bad habit before we met. Now, as the household's resident geek & thus somehow responsible for anything computer-related which Does Not Work As Desired, I have to deal with the consequence regardless : )
"(tell GF to burn it to cd and rip it back. it'll be fine.)"
Notwithstanding the other 6,000 posts in this thread jabbering about quality degradation, the real problem is she actually has a life and burning and ripping 50 or so cds (and ensuring the resultant files are tagged properly) means wasting a lot of time, time she thought she'd saved by buying the music in a digital as opposed to physical form in the first place..
My girlfriend didn't know it. And is now rather annoyed that (much of) the music she bought on iTunes can't be used on the server I set up to handle our entire ripped cd collection.
I can't actually talk - I started an engineering degree & an exam question at the end of the first year was 'calculate the wind speed which would knock over a structure with the following characteristics'. After much sweat of brow my answer came out as -5km/hr. Yes, that's a minus sign, and yes, I changed majors : )
"what kind of scientist designed this thing"
from the article: "Clay Moulton of Springfield, Va., who received his master of science degree in architecture (concentration in industrial design)"
He's not a scientist, he's a pretentious drafting monkey who thinks he's an artist : )
Meh. For those too lazy to telnet, Google hpsetdisp.pl for a quick perl script to change the lcd display of any HP with JetDirect (ie most modern ones)
5) If your software is arranged on some client/server model, offer server hosting services for those who don't want to (or lack the in-house technical skills) to deal with setting up and maintaining the server side of the setup.
I think it's even worse from McFee's point of view:
1. You create a program for detecting viruses, it's written for Microsoft Windows
2. 40% of your important customers (government) switches to Linux
3. Because you want to keep you clients, you port your application to Linux.
4. Your clients ignore your linux port because viruses aren't really an issue under linux
5. You try various desperate delaying tactics like fud and lawsuits as your business model collapses beneath you, and mainly just succeed in annoying your own (former) customers. (think RIAA)
6. You shut down your business, and live on welfare for the rest of your life.
I agree that it's possible that OO will change the way it'll render documents (I *personally* don't care about formulas and macros - I'm a sociologist, and 99% of my output is text, but you're definitely making a good point), however, the two advantages of an open document format are a) there's more likely to be more than one software package out there that reads and writes it (which we're seeing already with OO's ODT format), making it more likely there'll be something around which opens it 'appropriately' in 10 or 20 years; and secondly (and far far more importantly for my original problem with word format documents), I can always extract the *content* of an open format document (regardless of whether its ODF, PDF, or some other published format). Exact layout is nice, but if all I want is the content of that transcript of an interview I did with someone 10 years ago, I'm probably going to reformat it anyway. With those word 5.1a documents I mentioned in the original post, I had binary garbage and occasional out-of-order partial strings, and that was it. Unzip an ODT file and there's a nice handy 'content.xml' file inside.
That said, my personal slow slide into the world of open source and open document formats led me eventually to latex, which I don't think is going to become unusable in the future. Not within the 20-30 years of the average academic career anyway. Although latex is not exactly the solution to most people's writing and collaborating needs.. : )
For what it's worth, I think your comments on the current and future role of VMs for accessing older document formats should be modded insightful. I do wonder however what it's going to be like trying to get some circa 2007 'dial home for activation' operating system to play nice in a VM in 20 years time so you can recover the documents you wrote in some proprietary document format..
Funnily enough, the thing that finally, permanently, won me over to open document formats (I first used things like openoffice simply because they were free) was discovering I couldn't open my dissertation (written in word 5.1a for mac) on a standard install of office for windows. Yes, I know there's converters, and yes, I know current versions of word for mac can still open 5.1a documents, but I didn't have a mac at the time, and laboriously 'converting' the large numbers of transcripts, notes, papers, and all the other ephemera of writing a dissertation was a huge, timewasting PITA..
After that, the penny dropped. Using open document formats wasn't simply a way to save money, it was an actual necessity for anyone planning to have a career lasting more than 5 years where writing is a core part of your work.
If you're an academic, having a bunch of publications come up when someone googles your real name is actually helpful to your career.
Alas, my real name is pretty common (and is shared with a TV character) so you have to add "drugs" or "heroin" after it before I show up on the first page (hey, it's what I study, honest) : P
yeah, that.
Australian lawyers used to use the boilerplate "100 years after the death of the last decedent of the Ming Emperors" for things like end dates for trust funds where the law required *something* and they really wanted to say 'never'. But I hear they switched to "When Duke Nukem is released" a couple of years ago. : )
So fix it. That's what the edit link is there for : )
you have to return cafedvd rentals within 8 days though - not quite the joy of never having to think about 'is it due?' from netflix.
but yeah, it's a good service for someone who doesn't need a monthly stream of dvds but still wants access to a more eclectic range than ye old local video store.
I've used writer2latex (0.4 - haven't used the 0.5 release that just came out today yet : ) a couple of times when I've discovered I needed to incorporate chunks of a word or OO document into something else I was writing in latex. My experience was that it's a great effort, and simplifies the process a lot, but that you inevitably need to do varying amounts of post-conversion cleanup (particularly if using natbib or jurabib).
ie it's a valuable tool to assist when you need to convert something, but no way in hell would you deliberately start out a project with the idea of 'drafting it in OO and converting to latex later' unless you like makework.
I use latex a lot (texshop for mac to be precise), and love it. It is perfect for any document where a) I don't have to collaborate with other people ("What are all these slashes and curly brackets? Can you resend this to me as a .doc file please?"); and either b) there's an existing class file which meets the needs of the project (eg many but far from all academic journals) or c) this is a big enough project for me to justify sitting down with 'the latex companion' and editing (never had to write one from scratch yet, touch wood..) a class file to get something that actually meets the specific needs of the project (eg my doctoral dissertation..).
For documents which fail a or (b and c), which is unfortunately about 80% of the documents I write, latex (and lyx) are, alas, useless, and openoffice is unfortunately pretty much the best thing out there.