Micorsoft is a monopoly -- they have been found so in both the EU and US. They still have a stranglehold on corporate and home desktops, and produce the only office productivity software that you can use in a lot of business environments.
There is nothing wrong or illegal about being a monopoly. If you make the best baskets and control 90 percent of the market, then good on you. What is illegal is using your dominant position in one market to abuse another. If, for example, you colluded with vendors to make sure your baskets were the only ones buyers saw, or forced vendors to pay you even for every basket sold that wasn't yours, or that (for some inexplicable reason) your baskets could only hold fruit from your orchards -- that would be illegal.
So the question more properly is: Is Microsoft sill abusing its monopoly position?
The answer would appear to be that they're trying awfully hard to. Rather than giving existing security vendors more transparent help, they're building (buying) their own AV and security units. We'll see what it looks like in Longvista I guess, but it sure sound to me like using their OS monopoly to leverage a position in the security market.
Sounds kinda like what they did with WMP -- not because they care about the player but because they want to own the format. More leveraging the OS to squeeze into another market. Feel free to use whatever media player you want, but you'll need their proprietary codec from WMP (free download!) to play all the Super Media Content (TM) (which will, of course, require DRM licenses and other license fees from producers who use the format; you'll have paid for them in your Genuine Windows(TM) License). They don't want the player, they want the pipe -- and the OS can help them lock it up.
MS says they will move Office documents to xml to allow for interoperability, but not to the specification that they helped write. They will open the format to a degree slightly less than their customers want and the law requires, and deal will legal consequences as standard operating costs. Same song different decade. Bill don't care as long as those $400/seat licenses keep rolling in,
MS certainly has more competition these days, in every area the tentacles have expanded. However, it still has its original monopoly in PC desktop operating systems (and office productivity software), and is still actively leveraging that position to help itself in other markets.
But, there were rumours that like radio airplay, the promoters had figured out a way to rig the charts as well. Something like spend a large sums of money on buying back your albums and then sell them back. That way the albums climb the chart even though no-one is buying the CDs.
Yup. It also helps them fiddle the books -- if they ship eg 300,000 copies of a title (that they know is crappy and won't sell) before Christmas, those go in the books as a plus, money that will be coming in. It's not until the 250,000 unsold copies are returned by the retailers that the studio has to account for the loss, which is in the next fiscal year.
This was the standard operation for disco kings Casablanca Records back in the late 70s. It also lead directly to the music industry crash of the late 70s, early 80s as other labels emulated the strategy. The companies all started shipping far more copies than they could possibly hope to sell, which backfired on them once they weren't able to ship enough to offset unsold returns.
Dirty, dirty, dirty business. Read this book to find out just how slimy the business is, and how it's been slimy (and infested with mobsters) from the very beginning.
Musicians no longer come out of art school wanting to do something novel for their own niche audience; greed has overcome artistic integrity.
Close, but not quite. There's a big BIG difference between a pop star and a musician. The break really happened between the mid to late 80s and mid 90s as video meant a star had to be pretty, and predecessors of devices like this meant singing ability was a much lesser concern. Paula Abdul for example, according to a guy who played for her, is tone deaf, and depended on pitch correction devices for recording. She didn't do much actual singing in concerts -- woulda got in the way of the dancing.
All the sudden it became much easier to sign young, cheap talent for short run with a catchy tune. All the pop stars had to do look cute and a little rebellious, learn a few dance moves, sing into the magic box, and try not to get caught doing something that would harm record sales. I would bet there are few pop stars now who don't use pitch correction.
Putting together pop bands had been done before, of course. The Monkees, the Sex Pistols, all the bubblegum bands in the 60s, most of Mowtown, were hired and directed perfomers. But still the music of those times was dominated by singers -- and fantastic ones at that.
Lots of pop singers these days start using microphones much earlier, and don't learn to project their voices the way singers used to -- by singing loud in churches and such. With some exceptions, there's just not a lot of power behind the voices these days -- they can shout and screech, but they don't project.
Before MTV and pitch correction, pop stars may have been a lot of things, but they were very, very, very good singers. Even (and especially) the cheesey ones -- put on Lionel Ritchie's 'All Night Long' sometime and really listen to the composition and his voice.
But as I said, singing ability is much less important when everything's going to be pitch-corrected and compressed to hell anyway. What matters is a tight ass. People like Aretha Franklin and Etta James would never have a chance today.
As far as musicians go, they still come out of music school. The real musicians in the business are the ones who play in the pop stars' tour bands and studio bands, the ones who make mad hourly rates to tweak your amp settings. Some try their hand with pop outfits, others are content to make a good living as studio guys. On most record deals the studio musicians are much better off than the act -- payment up front + hourly rate + points on the record (maybe). The act is loaned the money to make the record and then has to pay it back through sales before they get anything.
Last spring I was working on contract in a former defense contractor office (the office is former, not the company). It had a SCIF , and those things are hard-core.
The whole building, 8 stories IIRC, had the SCIF structure built into it from the foundation up, and each floor's room was reinforced. Just by eyeball and memory, the floor was around 10cm higher than the surrounding floor, and the ceiling around 10 cm lower.
I never looked above the normal ceiling panels and have no idea how much space was between floors. The wall with the door, the only one you can see, was 35 - 40 cm thick of heavy, reinforced metal, The door was at least 30 cm thick and had bank-vault bolts on three (maybe four) sides, each 5-7cm thick. I never saw it in the locked position, but the holes looked to go back at least 10 cm.
Inside the room was allegedly soundproof, but with the server there I never got to find out. It was definitely radio-free. There was even a switch on the room control that would make CRT displays all fuzzy (not the original intent, but nifty). It didn't seem to affect LCDs, but I wouldn't want to make my laptop the guinea pig. I don't know what was doing it, but I am certainly not cleared to find out.
When the door was locked the room had its own air circulation system. Also, the room is on its own power grid (with backup generator, though I don't know where) and a different telephone network that features a direct line to the Pentagon (now inactive).
I remember we had to run some cat5 so we could put the server in there, and it took the buildings guys around 3 hours to drill the holes we needed. I also remember that we were using it as a conference room but one night the cleaning people closed it by accident and the auto-lock feature kicked in.
That's also when I noticed the lock -- a mechanical six-button job. It took a four-number combination, but I have no idea how it worked -- I know it could repeat numbers, and the combination could be more or fewer digits, at least I was told.
It was quite a room though, and most definitely secure when it needed to be. Somebody would notice 3 hours of drilling, and the lock can't be picked. I suppose it could be brute-forced, but that's not exactly practical. Those power and hotline cables have to come out somewhere, but logically it's at the bottom of the foundation.
When I build a house I think I'll put one in just for kicks.
Let me make sure I understand this properly. You purchase something at a price that you know was mistaken. You justify your action by claiming that it's the stores fault, and sort of a retribution for the way they treat their employees?
It's not that he knew the price was mistaken per se, it's that the price was far lower than the going rate. He confirmed on the spot that the listed price was correct (It was, the salesguy's barcode reader confirmed it as did the checkout).
If CompUSA made a mistake somewhere in their distribution chain (God forbid), then it's CompUSA's problem. CompUSA may have made a mistake but they were given two chances to catch it. They did not.
What the GP did was neither dishonest, nor unethical, nor immoral in any way -- he completed an agreed upon transaction after repeatedly clarifying the terms. There was no attempt to decieve, nor any premeditation. They said it cost $x, and he paid $x.
The fact that the average CompUSA employee is dumber than dirt is maybe an explanation for how the mishap occured, but no justification is necessary.
The problem with rebates is that the vendor/retailer is trying to make you think you're a smart customer by saving (belatedly) on some purchase -- let's say a $150 printer with a $60 rebate.
So you can get a printer worth $150 for $90 -- good deal, right? Pretty smart, right?
Except the fact that there's a rebate tells me that the vendor knows damn well that the printer is only worth $90. Why else would they be selling it for $90 after rebate?
Further, accepting that the vendor and I both know damn well the printer is only worth $90, they are asking me to pay an extra $60 (plus tax) up front that I may or may not get back at some time in the future. Why can't the shop grant the rebate on the spot and send whatever info to the vendor?
You're not saving $60 from the rebate, you're 'loaning' $60 to the vendor with basically no guarantee that you'll ever see it again. That doesn't sound very smart at all.
Whenever I'm offered a rebate I tell the salesdrone that they must think I'm stupid. I'm not, and so I avoid rebates whenever possible, making sure to tell the shop why I won't buy anything with a rebate other than instant.
I am rather hard on the Times at times, mainly because their editorial opinion seems to drastically shape (distort) their news reporting, particularly on international and political matters. I simply cannot read their opinion pages without becoming angry, for example. (Then again, I find some of the shrill liberal comentators in the Post, like Ariana Huffington, just as insufferable as some of the Times' resident knuckleheads, like Pat Buchanan).
But you are right that their local reporting is often good, and at times a damn sight better than the Post's. The coverage of DC's baseball saga is a perfect example this -- the Post never seems to question why Mayor Williams gave MLB the biggest sweetheart deal in the history of the game, and last year treated Linda Cropp as an obstructionist who wanted to kill baseball in DC.
The Times consistently, and quite rightly, pointed out that no city had ever offered anywhere near what DC was offering for an MLB team, and that the deal required DC to raise all the money, assume all the financial risk, and hand the profits over to the Nationals' new owners.
The Times also quite effectively belittled William's assertion that the city could throw $500+ million at the team and new stadium without affecting other city programs or raising taxes.
So you're right, there is no question that there are good journalists who work for the Times, and on the whole they do a good job with local coverage.
But I still don't think that changes my original point that their political coverage is weak and biased, and as a result the Times is not a particularly respected paper, at least not outside of certain ideological camps, and certainly not outside of the DC area. I am also extremely suspicious when they run front-page stories that rely on a single, often unnamed source -- this a no-no that they teach you the first day of journalism school, but something the Times does with alarming frequency.
All the same, I'm happy that we do have more than one local paper. I don't subscribe to either, but read both in fairly equal measure -- mostly picking up discarded copies on the Metro.
Re:Melinda Gates on Board of Directors
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Reining in Google
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· Score: 1, Interesting
Excuse me Mr. Dumbass, this op-ed piece is in the Washington Times, not the Post.
A board of directors at a newspaper generally has very little to do with editorial content.
This is not the opinion of the newspaper, but an op-ed piece, representing the opinions of the article's authors.
Conspiracy theories aside, the Washington Times is a pretty substandard paper -- they print more 'news' stories than any legit paper I've ever seen that are based on single, anonymous sources -- stories which are transparent plants that fall apart days (or less) after publication. This is the paper that 'broke' the story that all of Iraq's secret weapons were smuggled out of the country by the Russians after the US invasion. Its sole source for that one (IIRC) was an 'anonymous White House official' -- perhaps the one who was just indicted.
Besides that, the Wash Times is an organ of the Moonies. [Note: the information on the preceeding link is mostly correct, except they describe the Times as a 'highly respected newspaper'. It isn't.]
But the problem is not technical - the board would be illegal.
Assuming this bit of nonsense were to get anywhere (which it won't), I think you could still sell kits without any problem. It's a bit like with homebrew -- it's illegal for a shop to sell alcohol to a minor but there's nothing wrong with a shop selling to a minor barley malt, hops, yeast, corn sugar, fermenting bins, airlocks, bottles, caps, capper, and a whole range of books on the fine art of zymology.
Similarly, it would be illegal to sell a device that captures an analog video signal to a digital format, but it would not be illegal to sell breadboards, DSPs, coaxial/component jacks, solder, etc.
Nevertheless, this is just a proposal from an industry lobbyist -- the kind of thing that happens all the time in Washington. It isn't a bill, and if by some miracle it becomes a bill, it will never make it out of committee. Remember, electronics manufacturers also have some pretty powerful lobbyists, and there's no way that they will let Hollywood dictate design and engineering decisions.
For what it's worth, my local library (Arlington, VA) has complete collections of the old Avengers, Secret Agent, and I Spy (the one with Bill Cosby) on DVD, plus a lot of other BBC stuff -- Poirot Mysteries, Monty Python, various mini-series, etc -- some HBO series, and quite a few old (and not so old) films.
My point is that it's worth checking out libraries in your area before looking into cosmetic dentistry.
On a related note, I've seen three Compaqs fail in the last two or three months, and none were older than a year and a half. On my notebook (Compaq Evo N800c), the HDD failed I suspect from overheating because of the video card. On one Presario desktop, the HDD failed without any notice from a corrupt boot sector, and on another Presario desktop, the CPU fan and heatsink assembly just broke (cheap plastic clamps).
I also found plenty of things inside the Presarios that just made me angry -- like the fact that there was an AGP circuit on the mobo but HP didn't put in a slot, and the fact that the case has a fan mount, but there's no 3-pin case fan connector on the mobo. That and the cheap CPU cooler assembly -- it's not an expensive part, but when it fails it can damage some very expensive parts.
Shoddy design, corner-cutting, and hardware that really should last longer. You'll have to count me in the "never HP, never again" camp.
The issue isn't MS tightening the source code so viruses etc are less of a problem, it is MS bundling tacked-on security products into the OS distribution, effectively blocking other businesses that offer these protections already.
To put it another way, it is MS using a monopoly position in one market (OS) to leverage a monopoly in another market (security). They have already been tried and convicted twice because of this behaviour.
If they were making Vista secure by design, this wouldn't be an issue. As it is, Vista will have the same fundamental security flaws that MS Windows systems have always had, but they will ship with supplemental security software that removes other players from that market. This is most certainly a legitimate beef.
If you take away the problem -- insecure design -- then Symantec et al have no reason to complain. If you leave the problem but give away a product that other companies now sell, that is a violation of anti-monopoly and rules.
I didn't complain that Toyota put a car stereo in the car that I didn't want. if they had to make a version of the car without the car stereo that'd cost more money and that'd be passed along to me, and buying a Scion wouldn't be a cheap deal.
Sure, but you should have insisted that the dealer remove the radio before picking up the car, and remove the charge for the radio from your purchase invoice. A stereo adds several hundred dollars to the price of the car, even when the retail value of the radio is much less. Of course, this also has the added advantage that when they remove the radio, they leave behind the speakers and wiring since it's just too much of a pain to strip them.
Around 1.5 million people in Manhattan. So that would be saying every single man, woman, and child in the Manhattan send 4.75 text messages a day.
Ummm. No. Manhattan has a population of 1.5 million. That means 1.5 million live there. The number of people who work in Manhattan every day is quite a bit higher -- 4.5 or 5 million I'd reckon, maybe more.
I'm still highly skeptical of this but know that it is possible. I was in Slovakia in 2002 when they won the ice-hockey world championships. It's a small country, and the mobile networks came to a grinding halt as everyone tried to call and text their friends after the game (and, yes, everyone in the country was watching it). Calls would not go through at all, but SMSs did, with some delay. Is it possible? absolutely. Is this the best way to knock out a cell network? Absolutely not.
There is a pint of beer sitting on my desk waiting for the first person who can name a reasonably successful product or technology - past or present - which Microsoft pioneered.
Well, if there's a pint of beer riding on it I'll bite.
1. Flight Simulator. I remember playing this back in the '80s ion MS-DOS. It wasn't (isn't) a commercial-grade FS, but it was reasonably priced, worked well, and was lots of fun.
2. ActiveX. Just because it's a security nightmare and an all-around bad idea doesn't mean it's not innovative. I'm not sure if this meets your 'reasonably successful' criterion, but considering the number of exploits due to the widespread use of ActiveX, it is succesful (at least for some people).
3. Legal attrition. While this is not so much a product as a strategy, and MS is not the first to employ it, they have taken the strategy to new depths. There is no one who can afford to outlast them in legal proceedings, and so the courtroom is as important to the MS business as their OEM deals. Just keep the suit going until one side runs out of money. Note: this strategy only works if your pile of cash is bigger than everyone else's -- just ask Darl.
4. Admin/user confusion. As far as I know, MS was the first to give it's users complete administrative access while restricting administrative control. Just try using XP Home to manually configure two separate network interfaces -- IE needs to be root, but not even root can tell IE which network/IP address to use. Again, a bad idea but unsuccessful?
5. Active Directory. I can't say much about this -- I don't use and don't like it, but I know MS admins who swear by it.
For the record, I run FC3, FC4 and Debian most of the time. I do keep an XP Pro partition for doing video editing, at least untill OSS tools catch up. And make mine a lager, and please put it in the fridge till I get there.
My current MythTV uptime is about 2 weeks, and then it was only down while I put in another 128 MB of memory (total 512). It's a combined backend, frontend built on a P3-700, and I've put altogether around $500 in parts into it.
You have to understand that it is a very powerful and complex system. You are going to have to make adjustments to get it working how you want. This is a feature -- you have absolute control. Of course, it is also Linux and MySQL, which means it may take some work to get MythTV how you want it. But once it's there, it's rock solid.
A Tivo will cost you at least $218 for the unit and the year contract, and at least $168 per year as long as you have it. Don't think this cost isn't there just because you're not paying up front. A lifetime subcription applies to the life of the box, not the subcriber. If you upgrade your box, you need a new subscription.
If you stop paying the subscription, you're left with a useless box. If you decide MythTV isn't for you, the hardware is still all yours, as well as everything you've recorded.
I love Google, because they rarely promise something and don't deliver. Actually, they rarely promise something. It just shows up one day and it's elegant, clean, and fast.
Hear, hear. MS holds flashy press conferences to announce products that won't ship for a year (if at all), includes laundy-lists of features that will be radically pared down before release, and ultimately ships products that are, at best, incremental improvements over previous versions, although they are touted as 'revolutionary', eg Win 2k vs Win XP.
Google doesn't talk about products in preparation. They quietly release full-function betas before announcing them, and the betas offer features that really are revolutionary. No Gmail wasn't the first web mailer, but it redefined what a web mail program was capable of. No Google didn't make the first map, but maps.google blows everyone else away.
Yes, there is a big difference between between building something like Google Desktop Search and building a whole new filesystem and all the other changes that requires. But the point is what is promised and what is delivered.
Google promises nothing, and delivers products that become essential. Microsoft promises the sky and moon (I thought Windows was supposed to be voice-controlled by now, and my fridge was supposed to automatically order milk when I need it), and delivers products whose importance to daily life is based primarily on the difficulty in avoiding them.
When Google does drop the next bomb (Google TV?, GoogleFS?, Googlix OS for running a smart terminal?), you won't hear about it in a press release. You'll be an invited Beta tester.
Re:the C. P. Snow Divide of Sciences and Humanitie
on
Flash, Meet Sparkle
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· Score: 1
"They hate the viruses, the downtime, the forced upgrades, the patch hell, the crappy products - everything"
Let me go over this, word by word:
viruses: fault of a sys/net-admin. It's no big deal installing a good antivirus, even network-wide.
A virus could be the fault of a sloppy sysadmin, but then again, it is the fault of Microsoft that they have left so many holes in the OS for viruses to attack through. Folks who know what's going on also dislike their habit of ignoring secuirity problems, and the insistence of people like you to rely on third party apps to keep the OS secure.
To me, it is absolutely unforgivable that a vendor that pays so much lip service to security does such a poor job implementing it, and that the best response they can come up with is to buy more software.
Yes, the XP SP2 firewall is an improvement over the "firewall" that was in previous versions. But it still leaves a number of ports open (without the possibility of closing them), will not allow you to prevent certain apps from calling out (why, pray tell, does my printer need an internet connection?), and tends to screw things up when run concurrently with another software firewall (though Clippy will warn you regularly about it).
But this still doesn't address the problem that MS software was not built with security in mind (like by separating root and user space), and that security (like networking in MS) is something tacked on, not a foundation. It's rather like putting a shiny new padlock on a screen door.
What really bugs me is that MS has been singing the security song for years now, but when I buy a new MS PC, I also need a hardware firewall, a sofware firewall, and an AV package, all at additional expense, and that if I make a mistake and get my box rooted then it's my fault. This attitude is, frankly, intolerable.
forced upgrades: does somebody from Microsoft stands behind you with a baseballbat, threatening to smack you silly if you don't upgrade?
Effectively, yes. See, if you have a large deployment of Win 2k or NT 4 boxes (there are still plenty of the latter) MS will no longer provide technical support or security updates, nor will they provide the means for people to do the patches themsevles. If you get hit, you're SOL, which for a business is as effective as a baseball bat upside the head.
Anyways, we have upgrades all the time. The only persons who complain (if you can call it that) are the sysadmins, but that's just a select few compared to the normal users who should not notice these upgrades.
Normal users notice this every time a balloon pops up telling them they need to download critical updates (which seems to happen with alarming frequency), telling them that the updates are downloaded and need to be installed, and that the updates are intalled and the PC needs to be restarted. This interrupts the flow of work, and is one of the most common peeves among people I work with.
This also ignores all the TSR update apps that every single piece of sofware on MS wants to install these days. My printer works. It doesn't need an update, and I don't need a background process to make sure it doesn't need an update.
the patch hell: what patch hell? Please explain. I've just patched a terminal server using windowsupdate. One reboot later and the server is back in production. Hell? Not more than applying a patch for any other OS.
Patch hell? See above. I've never had to reboot Linux because of a patch, meaning not having to take a server off-line. Plus the patches are much more infrequent, and it's up to me when and how they get applied. This is because *NIX systems have security (and networking) built into the core of the OS, not as an afterthought. That, my friend, is quite a bit more.
Don't get me wrong, i would love to see the day that our systems run 100% MS-free. But the reality is, that (most) MS products are well su
The Dept of Homeland Security is working on radio blimps for this purpose -- basically putting a bunch of cell/data transcievers on a blimp and flying it over a disaster area.
This would (presumably) solve some of the problems from Sept 2001 in New York, when all the radio gear on top of the WTC went down and the rest couldn't keep up with traffic. It would have been very helpful indeed if they could have got one of these flying over New Orleans, particularly since the lack of communication was the biggest problem everyone noticed about the immediate relief effort.
I'm expecting it to split over time into an international english, which will be largely today's american english, and whatever the english speaking countries drift into speaking.
It may surprise Americans to learn, but it's British English that is the lingua-franca overseas. All you need to do is read local English-language publications in non-English-speaking countries (British spelling, conventions), listen to people speak on the radio (British usage), or look at what qualifications are needed for University credit in English language (Cambridge First Certificate, not TOEFL).
It may also surprise Americans to learn that far, far more people in the world understand the rules of cricket than the rules of baseball. This, however, is an unfortunate thing.
But there are some things a grammar checker could readily do; see if a verb should be able to accept a direct object, see if a sentence ends in a preposition, etc.
Sure, but there are plenty of verbs in English that can take an object or not, and plenty of words where the meaning changes (sometimes subtley, sometimes not) depending on whether the verb has an object or not. For example: "I see the house", "I see" (subtle difference); "I'm moving the TV", "I'm moving" (bigger difference); "I'll hang the laundry", "I'll hang" (completely different meanings, though arguably different verbs -- just try teaching your computer that).
The other point is a bit pointless, as ending a sentence with a preposition is no longer considered bad grammar ("This is the type of pedantry up with which I will not put" -- Winston Churchill)
Nor is it considered bad grammar anymore to sloppily split infinitives.
For a machine grammar checker to work, it has to know rules. This can (theoretically) work in languages with rigid, well-defined and widely-folowed rules, but will not work so easily in English where there are so many exceptions.
Conversion of the Northlands to Christianity didn't even *begin* until the 800s, and wasn't completed until the 1100s. The coming of Christianity to the Vikings marks the end of the Dark Ages, not the beginning.
Yes, but as a consequence of other things, not a cause.
As a previous poster noted, the term 'dark ages' refers more to our gap in knowledge than how people lived -- a woman was not more or less likely to die in childbirth, for example, in 1100 than in 600.
What the Church brought to the picture was standardized (relatively) records and a huge administrative apparatus. Thanks to the organization of the Curch, it was possible to keep track of births, deaths, and marriages much more easily.
What really changed the way people lived between the Fall of Rome and the High Middle Ages (about 1100 to 1300) were inventions that seem pretty mundane to us now -- a new type of plow, a new kind of loom, innovations in sail design that let ships tack into the wind, doubling or tripling the number of journeys possible in a year.
The plow, made with a curved piece of metal instead of wood (though I can't remember all the details), would cut through and turn even very rocky northern-European soils, while the older wood plow would just bounce over rocks. This greatly increased the amount of arable land, and meant that for the first time there were food surpluses (and so opportunities for trade).
The mechanical loom increased exponentially the amount of cloth that could be produced, which further drove trade, and which also meant that pretty much any journey between the Italian ports and the Arabian peninsula were profitable, leading to vast improvements in ship design.
The trade, of course, made cloth producers and sellers very rich, though maybe not as much as the traders and shippers in Venice and Florence. The need for currency drove the development of mines and mints in central Europe.
All this wonderful commerce gave your average villager something brand-new: free time and a bit of cash. Of course the new administrations of the church and state had to be paid for, and this was much easier to do with currency than with tributes of corn and sheep (although this practice continued into the 20th centrury in parts of Austria-Hungary, Russia, etc).
My point is that the church was a part of something larger that was happening at the time. It was a significant part, particularly the Church's role in public administration, record-keeping, banking, education, etc. But the church wasn't the primary cause of development in Europe between, say 500 and 1100. They were, though, one of the primary beneficiaries.
From what I can tell (I have read the specification but didn't understand that much of it) OpenDoc is a fairly restrictive format in terms of what you can do with it. AFAICT it won't do video or audio. It will do charts and images, and I think there was some kind of scripting language in there.
There seems to be quite a bit of confusion on this point (thanks in no small part to MS), so let's clear things up.
OO.org can put just about anything you want in a document -- text, audio, video, spreadsheed, OLE object, etc. Functionally, it is in no way different than what MS Office can do.
The difference, explained disingenuously by MS is that the extra content in not embedded in the document in OO.org as it is in MS Office -- i.e., put a picture into Office and the picture is a part of the.doc file in the.doc format.
The fact that OO.org doesn't do it this way is a feature. Instead, inserting an object into OO.org means using xml to create a placeholder in the text that points to an external file (media, spreadsheet, whatever), and the external file is saved along with the document text inside a zip container. This is really a far more elegant solution.
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Indianapolis charges. I was only in the airport around half an hour though, so I don't know how hard it would be to crack.
Micorsoft is a monopoly -- they have been found so in both the EU and US. They still have a stranglehold on corporate and home desktops, and produce the only office productivity software that you can use in a lot of business environments.
There is nothing wrong or illegal about being a monopoly. If you make the best baskets and control 90 percent of the market, then good on you. What is illegal is using your dominant position in one market to abuse another. If, for example, you colluded with vendors to make sure your baskets were the only ones buyers saw, or forced vendors to pay you even for every basket sold that wasn't yours, or that (for some inexplicable reason) your baskets could only hold fruit from your orchards -- that would be illegal.
So the question more properly is: Is Microsoft sill abusing its monopoly position?
The answer would appear to be that they're trying awfully hard to. Rather than giving existing security vendors more transparent help, they're building (buying) their own AV and security units. We'll see what it looks like in Longvista I guess, but it sure sound to me like using their OS monopoly to leverage a position in the security market.
Sounds kinda like what they did with WMP -- not because they care about the player but because they want to own the format. More leveraging the OS to squeeze into another market. Feel free to use whatever media player you want, but you'll need their proprietary codec from WMP (free download!) to play all the Super Media Content (TM) (which will, of course, require DRM licenses and other license fees from producers who use the format; you'll have paid for them in your Genuine Windows(TM) License). They don't want the player, they want the pipe -- and the OS can help them lock it up.
MS says they will move Office documents to xml to allow for interoperability, but not to the specification that they helped write. They will open the format to a degree slightly less than their customers want and the law requires, and deal will legal consequences as standard operating costs. Same song different decade. Bill don't care as long as those $400/seat licenses keep rolling in,
MS certainly has more competition these days, in every area the tentacles have expanded. However, it still has its original monopoly in PC desktop operating systems (and office productivity software), and is still actively leveraging that position to help itself in other markets.
But, there were rumours that like radio airplay, the promoters had figured out a way to rig the charts as well. Something like spend a large sums of money on buying back your albums and then sell them back. That way the albums climb the chart even though no-one is buying the CDs.
Yup. It also helps them fiddle the books -- if they ship eg 300,000 copies of a title (that they know is crappy and won't sell) before Christmas, those go in the books as a plus, money that will be coming in. It's not until the 250,000 unsold copies are returned by the retailers that the studio has to account for the loss, which is in the next fiscal year.
This was the standard operation for disco kings Casablanca Records back in the late 70s. It also lead directly to the music industry crash of the late 70s, early 80s as other labels emulated the strategy. The companies all started shipping far more copies than they could possibly hope to sell, which backfired on them once they weren't able to ship enough to offset unsold returns.
Dirty, dirty, dirty business. Read this book to find out just how slimy the business is, and how it's been slimy (and infested with mobsters) from the very beginning.
Musicians no longer come out of art school wanting to do something novel for their own niche audience; greed has overcome artistic integrity.
Close, but not quite. There's a big BIG difference between a pop star and a musician. The break really happened between the mid to late 80s and mid 90s as video meant a star had to be pretty, and predecessors of devices like this meant singing ability was a much lesser concern. Paula Abdul for example, according to a guy who played for her, is tone deaf, and depended on pitch correction devices for recording. She didn't do much actual singing in concerts -- woulda got in the way of the dancing.
All the sudden it became much easier to sign young, cheap talent for short run with a catchy tune. All the pop stars had to do look cute and a little rebellious, learn a few dance moves, sing into the magic box, and try not to get caught doing something that would harm record sales. I would bet there are few pop stars now who don't use pitch correction.
Putting together pop bands had been done before, of course. The Monkees, the Sex Pistols, all the bubblegum bands in the 60s, most of Mowtown, were hired and directed perfomers. But still the music of those times was dominated by singers -- and fantastic ones at that.
Lots of pop singers these days start using microphones much earlier, and don't learn to project their voices the way singers used to -- by singing loud in churches and such. With some exceptions, there's just not a lot of power behind the voices these days -- they can shout and screech, but they don't project.
Before MTV and pitch correction, pop stars may have been a lot of things, but they were very, very, very good singers. Even (and especially) the cheesey ones -- put on Lionel Ritchie's 'All Night Long' sometime and really listen to the composition and his voice.
But as I said, singing ability is much less important when everything's going to be pitch-corrected and compressed to hell anyway. What matters is a tight ass. People like Aretha Franklin and Etta James would never have a chance today.
As far as musicians go, they still come out of music school. The real musicians in the business are the ones who play in the pop stars' tour bands and studio bands, the ones who make mad hourly rates to tweak your amp settings. Some try their hand with pop outfits, others are content to make a good living as studio guys. On most record deals the studio musicians are much better off than the act -- payment up front + hourly rate + points on the record (maybe). The act is loaned the money to make the record and then has to pay it back through sales before they get anything.
Last spring I was working on contract in a former defense contractor office (the office is former, not the company). It had a SCIF , and those things are hard-core.
The whole building, 8 stories IIRC, had the SCIF structure built into it from the foundation up, and each floor's room was reinforced. Just by eyeball and memory, the floor was around 10cm higher than the surrounding floor, and the ceiling around 10 cm lower.
I never looked above the normal ceiling panels and have no idea how much space was between floors. The wall with the door, the only one you can see, was 35 - 40 cm thick of heavy, reinforced metal, The door was at least 30 cm thick and had bank-vault bolts on three (maybe four) sides, each 5-7cm thick. I never saw it in the locked position, but the holes looked to go back at least 10 cm.
Inside the room was allegedly soundproof, but with the server there I never got to find out. It was definitely radio-free. There was even a switch on the room control that would make CRT displays all fuzzy (not the original intent, but nifty). It didn't seem to affect LCDs, but I wouldn't want to make my laptop the guinea pig. I don't know what was doing it, but I am certainly not cleared to find out.
When the door was locked the room had its own air circulation system. Also, the room is on its own power grid (with backup generator, though I don't know where) and a different telephone network that features a direct line to the Pentagon (now inactive).
I remember we had to run some cat5 so we could put the server in there, and it took the buildings guys around 3 hours to drill the holes we needed. I also remember that we were using it as a conference room but one night the cleaning people closed it by accident and the auto-lock feature kicked in.
That's also when I noticed the lock -- a mechanical six-button job. It took a four-number combination, but I have no idea how it worked -- I know it could repeat numbers, and the combination could be more or fewer digits, at least I was told.
It was quite a room though, and most definitely secure when it needed to be. Somebody would notice 3 hours of drilling, and the lock can't be picked. I suppose it could be brute-forced, but that's not exactly practical. Those power and hotline cables have to come out somewhere, but logically it's at the bottom of the foundation.
When I build a house I think I'll put one in just for kicks.
Let me make sure I understand this properly. You purchase something at a price that you know was mistaken. You justify your action by claiming that it's the stores fault, and sort of a retribution for the way they treat their employees?
It's not that he knew the price was mistaken per se, it's that the price was far lower than the going rate. He confirmed on the spot that the listed price was correct (It was, the salesguy's barcode reader confirmed it as did the checkout).
If CompUSA made a mistake somewhere in their distribution chain (God forbid), then it's CompUSA's problem. CompUSA may have made a mistake but they were given two chances to catch it. They did not.
What the GP did was neither dishonest, nor unethical, nor immoral in any way -- he completed an agreed upon transaction after repeatedly clarifying the terms. There was no attempt to decieve, nor any premeditation. They said it cost $x, and he paid $x.
The fact that the average CompUSA employee is dumber than dirt is maybe an explanation for how the mishap occured, but no justification is necessary.
You've well proved how dumb they think me.
The problem with rebates is that the vendor/retailer is trying to make you think you're a smart customer by saving (belatedly) on some purchase -- let's say a $150 printer with a $60 rebate.
So you can get a printer worth $150 for $90 -- good deal, right? Pretty smart, right?
Except the fact that there's a rebate tells me that the vendor knows damn well that the printer is only worth $90. Why else would they be selling it for $90 after rebate?
Further, accepting that the vendor and I both know damn well the printer is only worth $90, they are asking me to pay an extra $60 (plus tax) up front that I may or may not get back at some time in the future. Why can't the shop grant the rebate on the spot and send whatever info to the vendor?
You're not saving $60 from the rebate, you're 'loaning' $60 to the vendor with basically no guarantee that you'll ever see it again. That doesn't sound very smart at all.
Whenever I'm offered a rebate I tell the salesdrone that they must think I'm stupid. I'm not, and so I avoid rebates whenever possible, making sure to tell the shop why I won't buy anything with a rebate other than instant.
It hasn't yet made any difference.
I am rather hard on the Times at times, mainly because their editorial opinion seems to drastically shape (distort) their news reporting, particularly on international and political matters. I simply cannot read their opinion pages without becoming angry, for example. (Then again, I find some of the shrill liberal comentators in the Post, like Ariana Huffington, just as insufferable as some of the Times' resident knuckleheads, like Pat Buchanan).
But you are right that their local reporting is often good, and at times a damn sight better than the Post's. The coverage of DC's baseball saga is a perfect example this -- the Post never seems to question why Mayor Williams gave MLB the biggest sweetheart deal in the history of the game, and last year treated Linda Cropp as an obstructionist who wanted to kill baseball in DC.
The Times consistently, and quite rightly, pointed out that no city had ever offered anywhere near what DC was offering for an MLB team, and that the deal required DC to raise all the money, assume all the financial risk, and hand the profits over to the Nationals' new owners.
The Times also quite effectively belittled William's assertion that the city could throw $500+ million at the team and new stadium without affecting other city programs or raising taxes.
So you're right, there is no question that there are good journalists who work for the Times, and on the whole they do a good job with local coverage.
But I still don't think that changes my original point that their political coverage is weak and biased, and as a result the Times is not a particularly respected paper, at least not outside of certain ideological camps, and certainly not outside of the DC area. I am also extremely suspicious when they run front-page stories that rely on a single, often unnamed source -- this a no-no that they teach you the first day of journalism school, but something the Times does with alarming frequency.
All the same, I'm happy that we do have more than one local paper. I don't subscribe to either, but read both in fairly equal measure -- mostly picking up discarded copies on the Metro.
Excuse me Mr. Dumbass, this op-ed piece is in the Washington Times, not the Post.
A board of directors at a newspaper generally has very little to do with editorial content.
This is not the opinion of the newspaper, but an op-ed piece, representing the opinions of the article's authors.
Conspiracy theories aside, the Washington Times is a pretty substandard paper -- they print more 'news' stories than any legit paper I've ever seen that are based on single, anonymous sources -- stories which are transparent plants that fall apart days (or less) after publication. This is the paper that 'broke' the story that all of Iraq's secret weapons were smuggled out of the country by the Russians after the US invasion. Its sole source for that one (IIRC) was an 'anonymous White House official' -- perhaps the one who was just indicted.
Besides that, the Wash Times is an organ of the Moonies. [Note: the information on the preceeding link is mostly correct, except they describe the Times as a 'highly respected newspaper'. It isn't.]
But the problem is not technical - the board would be illegal.
Assuming this bit of nonsense were to get anywhere (which it won't), I think you could still sell kits without any problem. It's a bit like with homebrew -- it's illegal for a shop to sell alcohol to a minor but there's nothing wrong with a shop selling to a minor barley malt, hops, yeast, corn sugar, fermenting bins, airlocks, bottles, caps, capper, and a whole range of books on the fine art of zymology.
Similarly, it would be illegal to sell a device that captures an analog video signal to a digital format, but it would not be illegal to sell breadboards, DSPs, coaxial/component jacks, solder, etc.
Nevertheless, this is just a proposal from an industry lobbyist -- the kind of thing that happens all the time in Washington. It isn't a bill, and if by some miracle it becomes a bill, it will never make it out of committee. Remember, electronics manufacturers also have some pretty powerful lobbyists, and there's no way that they will let Hollywood dictate design and engineering decisions.
For what it's worth, my local library (Arlington, VA) has complete collections of the old Avengers, Secret Agent, and I Spy (the one with Bill Cosby) on DVD, plus a lot of other BBC stuff -- Poirot Mysteries, Monty Python, various mini-series, etc -- some HBO series, and quite a few old (and not so old) films. My point is that it's worth checking out libraries in your area before looking into cosmetic dentistry.
On a related note, I've seen three Compaqs fail in the last two or three months, and none were older than a year and a half. On my notebook (Compaq Evo N800c), the HDD failed I suspect from overheating because of the video card. On one Presario desktop, the HDD failed without any notice from a corrupt boot sector, and on another Presario desktop, the CPU fan and heatsink assembly just broke (cheap plastic clamps).
I also found plenty of things inside the Presarios that just made me angry -- like the fact that there was an AGP circuit on the mobo but HP didn't put in a slot, and the fact that the case has a fan mount, but there's no 3-pin case fan connector on the mobo. That and the cheap CPU cooler assembly -- it's not an expensive part, but when it fails it can damage some very expensive parts.
Shoddy design, corner-cutting, and hardware that really should last longer. You'll have to count me in the "never HP, never again" camp.
The issue isn't MS tightening the source code so viruses etc are less of a problem, it is MS bundling tacked-on security products into the OS distribution, effectively blocking other businesses that offer these protections already.
To put it another way, it is MS using a monopoly position in one market (OS) to leverage a monopoly in another market (security). They have already been tried and convicted twice because of this behaviour.
If they were making Vista secure by design, this wouldn't be an issue. As it is, Vista will have the same fundamental security flaws that MS Windows systems have always had, but they will ship with supplemental security software that removes other players from that market. This is most certainly a legitimate beef.
If you take away the problem -- insecure design -- then Symantec et al have no reason to complain. If you leave the problem but give away a product that other companies now sell, that is a violation of anti-monopoly and rules.
I didn't complain that Toyota put a car stereo in the car that I didn't want. if they had to make a version of the car without the car stereo that'd cost more money and that'd be passed along to me, and buying a Scion wouldn't be a cheap deal.
Sure, but you should have insisted that the dealer remove the radio before picking up the car, and remove the charge for the radio from your purchase invoice. A stereo adds several hundred dollars to the price of the car, even when the retail value of the radio is much less. Of course, this also has the added advantage that when they remove the radio, they leave behind the speakers and wiring since it's just too much of a pain to strip them.
Around 1.5 million people in Manhattan. So that would be saying every single man, woman, and child in the Manhattan send 4.75 text messages a day.
Ummm. No. Manhattan has a population of 1.5 million. That means 1.5 million live there. The number of people who work in Manhattan every day is quite a bit higher -- 4.5 or 5 million I'd reckon, maybe more.
I'm still highly skeptical of this but know that it is possible. I was in Slovakia in 2002 when they won the ice-hockey world championships. It's a small country, and the mobile networks came to a grinding halt as everyone tried to call and text their friends after the game (and, yes, everyone in the country was watching it). Calls would not go through at all, but SMSs did, with some delay. Is it possible? absolutely. Is this the best way to knock out a cell network? Absolutely not.
There is a pint of beer sitting on my desk waiting for the first person who can name a reasonably successful product or technology - past or present - which Microsoft pioneered.
Well, if there's a pint of beer riding on it I'll bite.
1. Flight Simulator. I remember playing this back in the '80s ion MS-DOS. It wasn't (isn't) a commercial-grade FS, but it was reasonably priced, worked well, and was lots of fun.
2. ActiveX. Just because it's a security nightmare and an all-around bad idea doesn't mean it's not innovative. I'm not sure if this meets your 'reasonably successful' criterion, but considering the number of exploits due to the widespread use of ActiveX, it is succesful (at least for some people).
3. Legal attrition. While this is not so much a product as a strategy, and MS is not the first to employ it, they have taken the strategy to new depths. There is no one who can afford to outlast them in legal proceedings, and so the courtroom is as important to the MS business as their OEM deals. Just keep the suit going until one side runs out of money. Note: this strategy only works if your pile of cash is bigger than everyone else's -- just ask Darl.
4. Admin/user confusion. As far as I know, MS was the first to give it's users complete administrative access while restricting administrative control. Just try using XP Home to manually configure two separate network interfaces -- IE needs to be root, but not even root can tell IE which network/IP address to use. Again, a bad idea but unsuccessful?
5. Active Directory. I can't say much about this -- I don't use and don't like it, but I know MS admins who swear by it.
For the record, I run FC3, FC4 and Debian most of the time. I do keep an XP Pro partition for doing video editing, at least untill OSS tools catch up. And make mine a lager, and please put it in the fridge till I get there.
My current MythTV uptime is about 2 weeks, and then it was only down while I put in another 128 MB of memory (total 512). It's a combined backend, frontend built on a P3-700, and I've put altogether around $500 in parts into it.
You have to understand that it is a very powerful and complex system. You are going to have to make adjustments to get it working how you want. This is a feature -- you have absolute control. Of course, it is also Linux and MySQL, which means it may take some work to get MythTV how you want it. But once it's there, it's rock solid.
A Tivo will cost you at least $218 for the unit and the year contract, and at least $168 per year as long as you have it. Don't think this cost isn't there just because you're not paying up front. A lifetime subcription applies to the life of the box, not the subcriber. If you upgrade your box, you need a new subscription.
If you stop paying the subscription, you're left with a useless box. If you decide MythTV isn't for you, the hardware is still all yours, as well as everything you've recorded.
And I got it running by following directions.
I love Google, because they rarely promise something and don't deliver. Actually, they rarely promise something. It just shows up one day and it's elegant, clean, and fast.
Hear, hear. MS holds flashy press conferences to announce products that won't ship for a year (if at all), includes laundy-lists of features that will be radically pared down before release, and ultimately ships products that are, at best, incremental improvements over previous versions, although they are touted as 'revolutionary', eg Win 2k vs Win XP.
Google doesn't talk about products in preparation. They quietly release full-function betas before announcing them, and the betas offer features that really are revolutionary. No Gmail wasn't the first web mailer, but it redefined what a web mail program was capable of. No Google didn't make the first map, but maps.google blows everyone else away.
Yes, there is a big difference between between building something like Google Desktop Search and building a whole new filesystem and all the other changes that requires. But the point is what is promised and what is delivered.
Google promises nothing, and delivers products that become essential. Microsoft promises the sky and moon (I thought Windows was supposed to be voice-controlled by now, and my fridge was supposed to automatically order milk when I need it), and delivers products whose importance to daily life is based primarily on the difficulty in avoiding them.
When Google does drop the next bomb (Google TV?, GoogleFS?, Googlix OS for running a smart terminal?), you won't hear about it in a press release. You'll be an invited Beta tester.
Let me go over this, word by word:
viruses: fault of a sys/net-admin. It's no big deal installing a good antivirus, even network-wide.
A virus could be the fault of a sloppy sysadmin, but then again, it is the fault of Microsoft that they have left so many holes in the OS for viruses to attack through. Folks who know what's going on also dislike their habit of ignoring secuirity problems, and the insistence of people like you to rely on third party apps to keep the OS secure.
To me, it is absolutely unforgivable that a vendor that pays so much lip service to security does such a poor job implementing it, and that the best response they can come up with is to buy more software.
Yes, the XP SP2 firewall is an improvement over the "firewall" that was in previous versions. But it still leaves a number of ports open (without the possibility of closing them), will not allow you to prevent certain apps from calling out (why, pray tell, does my printer need an internet connection?), and tends to screw things up when run concurrently with another software firewall (though Clippy will warn you regularly about it).
But this still doesn't address the problem that MS software was not built with security in mind (like by separating root and user space), and that security (like networking in MS) is something tacked on, not a foundation. It's rather like putting a shiny new padlock on a screen door.
What really bugs me is that MS has been singing the security song for years now, but when I buy a new MS PC, I also need a hardware firewall, a sofware firewall, and an AV package, all at additional expense, and that if I make a mistake and get my box rooted then it's my fault. This attitude is, frankly, intolerable.
forced upgrades: does somebody from Microsoft stands behind you with a baseballbat, threatening to smack you silly if you don't upgrade?
Effectively, yes. See, if you have a large deployment of Win 2k or NT 4 boxes (there are still plenty of the latter) MS will no longer provide technical support or security updates, nor will they provide the means for people to do the patches themsevles. If you get hit, you're SOL, which for a business is as effective as a baseball bat upside the head.
Anyways, we have upgrades all the time. The only persons who complain (if you can call it that) are the sysadmins, but that's just a select few compared to the normal users who should not notice these upgrades.
Normal users notice this every time a balloon pops up telling them they need to download critical updates (which seems to happen with alarming frequency), telling them that the updates are downloaded and need to be installed, and that the updates are intalled and the PC needs to be restarted. This interrupts the flow of work, and is one of the most common peeves among people I work with.
This also ignores all the TSR update apps that every single piece of sofware on MS wants to install these days. My printer works. It doesn't need an update, and I don't need a background process to make sure it doesn't need an update.
the patch hell: what patch hell? Please explain. I've just patched a terminal server using windowsupdate. One reboot later and the server is back in production. Hell? Not more than applying a patch for any other OS.
Patch hell? See above. I've never had to reboot Linux because of a patch, meaning not having to take a server off-line. Plus the patches are much more infrequent, and it's up to me when and how they get applied. This is because *NIX systems have security (and networking) built into the core of the OS, not as an afterthought. That, my friend, is quite a bit more.
Don't get me wrong, i would love to see the day that our systems run 100% MS-free. But the reality is, that (most) MS products are well su
The Dept of Homeland Security is working on radio blimps for this purpose -- basically putting a bunch of cell/data transcievers on a blimp and flying it over a disaster area.
This would (presumably) solve some of the problems from Sept 2001 in New York, when all the radio gear on top of the WTC went down and the rest couldn't keep up with traffic. It would have been very helpful indeed if they could have got one of these flying over New Orleans, particularly since the lack of communication was the biggest problem everyone noticed about the immediate relief effort.
I'm expecting it to split over time into an international english, which will be largely today's american english, and whatever the english speaking countries drift into speaking.
It may surprise Americans to learn, but it's British English that is the lingua-franca overseas. All you need to do is read local English-language publications in non-English-speaking countries (British spelling, conventions), listen to people speak on the radio (British usage), or look at what qualifications are needed for University credit in English language (Cambridge First Certificate, not TOEFL).
It may also surprise Americans to learn that far, far more people in the world understand the rules of cricket than the rules of baseball. This, however, is an unfortunate thing.
But there are some things a grammar checker could readily do; see if a verb should be able to accept a direct object, see if a sentence ends in a preposition, etc.
Sure, but there are plenty of verbs in English that can take an object or not, and plenty of words where the meaning changes (sometimes subtley, sometimes not) depending on whether the verb has an object or not. For example: "I see the house", "I see" (subtle difference); "I'm moving the TV", "I'm moving" (bigger difference); "I'll hang the laundry", "I'll hang" (completely different meanings, though arguably different verbs -- just try teaching your computer that).
The other point is a bit pointless, as ending a sentence with a preposition is no longer considered bad grammar ("This is the type of pedantry up with which I will not put" -- Winston Churchill)
Nor is it considered bad grammar anymore to sloppily split infinitives.
For a machine grammar checker to work, it has to know rules. This can (theoretically) work in languages with rigid, well-defined and widely-folowed rules, but will not work so easily in English where there are so many exceptions.
Conversion of the Northlands to Christianity didn't even *begin* until the 800s, and wasn't completed until the 1100s. The coming of Christianity to the Vikings marks the end of the Dark Ages, not the beginning.
Yes, but as a consequence of other things, not a cause.
As a previous poster noted, the term 'dark ages' refers more to our gap in knowledge than how people lived -- a woman was not more or less likely to die in childbirth, for example, in 1100 than in 600.
What the Church brought to the picture was standardized (relatively) records and a huge administrative apparatus. Thanks to the organization of the Curch, it was possible to keep track of births, deaths, and marriages much more easily.
What really changed the way people lived between the Fall of Rome and the High Middle Ages (about 1100 to 1300) were inventions that seem pretty mundane to us now -- a new type of plow, a new kind of loom, innovations in sail design that let ships tack into the wind, doubling or tripling the number of journeys possible in a year.
The plow, made with a curved piece of metal instead of wood (though I can't remember all the details), would cut through and turn even very rocky northern-European soils, while the older wood plow would just bounce over rocks. This greatly increased the amount of arable land, and meant that for the first time there were food surpluses (and so opportunities for trade).
The mechanical loom increased exponentially the amount of cloth that could be produced, which further drove trade, and which also meant that pretty much any journey between the Italian ports and the Arabian peninsula were profitable, leading to vast improvements in ship design.
The trade, of course, made cloth producers and sellers very rich, though maybe not as much as the traders and shippers in Venice and Florence. The need for currency drove the development of mines and mints in central Europe.
All this wonderful commerce gave your average villager something brand-new: free time and a bit of cash. Of course the new administrations of the church and state had to be paid for, and this was much easier to do with currency than with tributes of corn and sheep (although this practice continued into the 20th centrury in parts of Austria-Hungary, Russia, etc).
My point is that the church was a part of something larger that was happening at the time. It was a significant part, particularly the Church's role in public administration, record-keeping, banking, education, etc. But the church wasn't the primary cause of development in Europe between, say 500 and 1100. They were, though, one of the primary beneficiaries.
From what I can tell (I have read the specification but didn't understand that much of it) OpenDoc is a fairly restrictive format in terms of what you can do with it. AFAICT it won't do video or audio. It will do charts and images, and I think there was some kind of scripting language in there.
There seems to be quite a bit of confusion on this point (thanks in no small part to MS), so let's clear things up.
OO.org can put just about anything you want in a document -- text, audio, video, spreadsheed, OLE object, etc. Functionally, it is in no way different than what MS Office can do.
The difference, explained disingenuously by MS is that the extra content in not embedded in the document in OO.org as it is in MS Office -- i.e., put a picture into Office and the picture is a part of the .doc file in the .doc format.
The fact that OO.org doesn't do it this way is a feature. Instead, inserting an object into OO.org means using xml to create a placeholder in the text that points to an external file (media, spreadsheet, whatever), and the external file is saved along with the document text inside a zip container. This is really a far more elegant solution.