Have you looked at DNA lately? In the ancient bacteria, fossil fishes and fungi of the world the DNA is svelte and cleanly coded.... all streamlined to do a few tasks very efficiently, then move forward a few billion years and you get rats and primates.... all bloated with junk and things like consciousness that are completely unnecessary to survival, just bells and whistles really.
Yes, it's bloated. But that doesn't mean it wasn't useful at some point. Also, consciousness is not bells and whistles - Humans have become brilliant at survival because of it. The Selfish Gene has some excellent points in this regard.
Very good points. Also, this is one place where open standards are great: Even if the file format is long obsolete, there's a good chance there are modern tools available to read them, and you can create your own scripts to extract data automatically for review.
My bet is that SCO and Acacia are cannon fodder, to wear down open source vendors and customers before the MS lawyers take the final stand. Then it's bye-bye Microsoft, and good riddance.
I'm fluent in Norwegian and English, almost fluent in German, can hold a simple conversation in French, and am beginning to learn a bit of Swiss German, and I say *good* (or *yawn*, depending on the mood). Some examples why:
Yes, you have things like articles with gender which don't have an equivalent in English. But do they help communication in any way? "Das Haus" or "huset" don't have more semantic value than "the house". They all convey the same information. The only exception I can think of is if you're trying researching whether cultural values or biases toward either gender can somehow be wrestled from them. For everybody else, it's just a lot more to learn by heart.
Words with special meanings not found in another language can easily be imported. This happens all the time - Consider "zeitgeist", "laissez-faire", or "quisling".
Has any of the former colonies' culture or wisdom died out because they started using another language? No, even taking over the country for decades doesn't do that - Just look at the colonies of France and the U.K..
After technique 1 failing (buying their way), rest assured that "Embrace, extend, extinguish" is next on the list. They will find some feature that ODF lacks and customers really want, and the next version of Office will use "ODFm" or "ODF 2010". Hell to parse, locked in, and very similar to ODF, except that it will make any document break slightly when read by OO.o and others.
Seriously, the average computer user doesn't even have a clue (nor do they care) what the "black box with white letters" (i.e., a MSDOS prompt window) is, what it is for, or why they need it.
They don't need it, which is why Windows is still popular. Buggy, annoying, and intrusive, but popular. In my experience, no amount of GUI work will help you use the native CLI.
On that note, it would be nice to see GUI and CLI apps use the same terminology, and the GUI even giving you hints on how to use the CLI - See TortoiseCVS for an excellent example.
Sounds to me like this should really be made into a GreaseMonkey script or Firefox extension, to avoid having an "official" algorithm that everybody will try to appease.
This has been my biggest beef with/any/ Linux distribution the last five years or so - S/PDIF, IEC958, optical, or whatever you want to call it is terribly supported. Ubuntu's audio device menu is a huge improvement - At least I can get stereo digital without Googling. No luck with surround there, though.
Any probabilistic computation device can be duplicated to get a better probability of a correct result. Think majority voting systems. Conventional computers already have a very high probability of getting the correct result, because of sheer number of particles being shuffled around per bit - Any quantum effects are swamped by the overall system.
Well, at least companies can say they support the standard, while anyone trying to make a mashup or parser will be tearing their hair out. Except for the "attributes should really be elements" argument, what's wrong with XML? Making web sites harder to parse (and consequently, making layouts harder to specify unambiguously) will come back to bite us in the ass.
I feel your pain. But having it on the web will not prevent people from finding information on forums, and it certainly doesn't mean random Joes will be able to edit it.
[...] both companies for which I've worked as a writer are constantly working to improve documentation content and style in hopes that you'll use it instead of Google.
Why? Seriously, the web is the best possible place for documentation. Application documentation search (man, info, Windows help) is infinitely far behind any of today's web search engines, and considering the revenue possibilities, this is not likely to change. Other benefits (semantics, no need to compile, cross-platform) are left as an exercise to the reader.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, it's bloated. But that doesn't mean it wasn't useful at some point. Also, consciousness is not bells and whistles - Humans have become brilliant at survival because of it. The Selfish Gene has some excellent points in this regard.
How about the root of the sum of two cubes? Oh, wait...
What? Going off to found 5145hd07 2.0? With booze, poker, and hookers?
Very good points. Also, this is one place where open standards are great: Even if the file format is long obsolete, there's a good chance there are modern tools available to read them, and you can create your own scripts to extract data automatically for review.
How about working for it instead of praying for it?
Sincerely, an atheist.
My bet is that SCO and Acacia are cannon fodder, to wear down open source vendors and customers before the MS lawyers take the final stand. Then it's bye-bye Microsoft, and good riddance.
Someone should make a script to run every January 1, to get it over with...
I'm fluent in Norwegian and English, almost fluent in German, can hold a simple conversation in French, and am beginning to learn a bit of Swiss German, and I say *good* (or *yawn*, depending on the mood). Some examples why:
Yes, you have things like articles with gender which don't have an equivalent in English. But do they help communication in any way? "Das Haus" or "huset" don't have more semantic value than "the house". They all convey the same information. The only exception I can think of is if you're trying researching whether cultural values or biases toward either gender can somehow be wrestled from them. For everybody else, it's just a lot more to learn by heart.
Words with special meanings not found in another language can easily be imported. This happens all the time - Consider "zeitgeist", "laissez-faire", or "quisling".
Has any of the former colonies' culture or wisdom died out because they started using another language? No, even taking over the country for decades doesn't do that - Just look at the colonies of France and the U.K..
Didn't you get the memo? Sleeping transvestites are all the rage in the office these days.
Seriously, does this still need to be repeated? The web was invented at CERN, a European nuclear physics research facility.
Good thing this guy keeps reminding me which games to buy. He's not paid by the game developers? Shucks.
That ... *Head explodes*
Time to mention Ekiga (formerly GnomeMeeting) and OpenWengo. They suck, but there you go...
After technique 1 failing (buying their way), rest assured that "Embrace, extend, extinguish" is next on the list. They will find some feature that ODF lacks and customers really want, and the next version of Office will use "ODFm" or "ODF 2010". Hell to parse, locked in, and very similar to ODF, except that it will make any document break slightly when read by OO.o and others.
They don't need it, which is why Windows is still popular. Buggy, annoying, and intrusive, but popular. In my experience, no amount of GUI work will help you use the native CLI.
On that note, it would be nice to see GUI and CLI apps use the same terminology, and the GUI even giving you hints on how to use the CLI - See TortoiseCVS for an excellent example.
Sounds to me like this should really be made into a GreaseMonkey script or Firefox extension, to avoid having an "official" algorithm that everybody will try to appease.
The next business practice will be "Wait for R2"...
This has been my biggest beef with /any/ Linux distribution the last five years or so - S/PDIF, IEC958, optical, or whatever you want to call it is terribly supported. Ubuntu's audio device menu is a huge improvement - At least I can get stereo digital without Googling. No luck with surround there, though.
Any probabilistic computation device can be duplicated to get a better probability of a correct result. Think majority voting systems. Conventional computers already have a very high probability of getting the correct result, because of sheer number of particles being shuffled around per bit - Any quantum effects are swamped by the overall system.
Lost in computation...
Mine will (yeah, I wish)
Well, at least companies can say they support the standard, while anyone trying to make a mashup or parser will be tearing their hair out. Except for the "attributes should really be elements" argument, what's wrong with XML? Making web sites harder to parse (and consequently, making layouts harder to specify unambiguously) will come back to bite us in the ass.
I feel your pain. But having it on the web will not prevent people from finding information on forums, and it certainly doesn't mean random Joes will be able to edit it.
Why? Seriously, the web is the best possible place for documentation. Application documentation search (man, info, Windows help) is infinitely far behind any of today's web search engines, and considering the revenue possibilities, this is not likely to change. Other benefits (semantics, no need to compile, cross-platform) are left as an exercise to the reader.