Companies refuse to volunteer information for a large variety of reasons starting with the absence of any clear and immediate profit in doing so, and not wanting to be held responsible for any code that they release.
...to have crash recovery that actually works, and readable HTML output which almost fits through the Validator as-is (as opposed to a big steaming pile of poorly formatted and violently incompatible XMLish). It feels right to have style sheets that don't accidentally reformat past documents. It feels right to not need a separate tool to write (and shortly, read) PDFs. It feels right to be able to throw your document at a script and have it do in a fraction of a second things that would take you hours or days by hand. It feels right to be able to pick up and edit broken MS-Office documents without trashing my app. And so on, ad infinitum.
The only areas where MS-Office wins for me are in startup time and spreadsheet capability. I've played with the pre-2.0 betas, and both issues are already being addressed (to say nothing of OOo getting further ahead in areas were it already wins).
Instead, they'd link to fifteen gazillion different support libraries in at least four wildly different languages so that it takes one of the major distributions' packaging genius to get the thing to compile.
Anyone who thinks I'm joking needs to sit down build GnuCash from scratch or to a lesser extent build a full-featured version of WINE or The GIMP.
However, thanks in part to those same "unsung hero" packagers, a lot of systems including GnuCash are becoming more modular, so it's ever easier to compile just the bits you need - thus sidestepping some dependency issues.
And... lest we forget: it is actually possible to build on wild disparity with FOSS. Seriously trying the same thing with such a shambles of disparate closed software would leave Sisyphus silent in awe.
...as "The Road Ahead" was. Go read PJ's rant on "I want to be an analyst" - it applies even more directly to Trey, here.
I personally would rather own a separate camera that does a good job, plus a separate 'phone which is damn near indestructible, plus a separate highly capable PDA than the latest flashy but fragile phone with sucky camera and really cramped PDA features jammed into it. IPOF, I do own a capable camera and indestructible 'phone, and if I had a PDA it would be something like a Zaurus.
And who wants to cram their delicate home stereo system into their car?
If this man had any more foresight, he'd need a white cane.
Well, technically it's the option of greatest evil remaining to them. (-:
Their traditional business model has depended on a "secret sauce", or some form of crippling or diminishment of the interface for third parties. The original MS-Office "XML" formats were horribly limited and still managed to be non-standard. If these are as crippled as the last lot, you'd be better off using HTML for interchange.
There will be a gotcha planted in there somewhere, what remains to be seen is whether it can be worked around or not. I'm betting it can.
(See Thomas Paine in "Common Sense" for the details)
Thanks for pointing this out. If not even Americans will read this, what hope has the rest of the world to know Trey's background?
Of course, if the robber barons were more than a little embarrassed at their history, they'd see to it that the next generation never even got to see it. And just how many modern schoolchildren know that Paine's book even exists?
Look into the origin and purpose of schools as we know them, and viola, the reason becomes obvious.
It turns out that his boat is just the right size (550 feet long) to ride out tsunami-sized waves. Any longer, she'd break; any shorter, she'd tip. Evidently somebody knew a lot about nautical engineering. It seems that the bilges were even self-pumped by the wave motion. Leonardo couldn't have done better.
...lots of it is genuine wood, and whether or not it was contaminated at the surface is irrelevant. The showstopper is that it is wood, which just does not preserve as wood for anything like millions of years.
That puts a ceiling on the phenomenon of maybe tens of thousands of years, possibly at a stretch hundreds of thousands. Unfortunately, orthodox geography will not admit to a landscape changing that fast.
...I've been well aware of it from the start, but on the other hand bombardment also massively increases the bulk of the waste (turns the substrate and container into waste also) and to a certain extent "randomises" the quantity and nature of the byproducts. Admittedly, it's hard to imagine something more poisonous than Pu.
...make paper expenses which as well as the obvious and prima function of effectively defrauding their own staff drags money out of areas which would open it up for candidacy as a dividend.
IOW, regardless of any putative dividend law, the fraud has made their dividends artificially late.
Thinking about it, dividends are a fairly esoteric concept anyway (although not as bad as futures and options), so maybe that's appropriate in its own odd way.
The studies I've seen say that an alphabetical layout slows the users down. It takes too long to work out where the letters are systematically, which people will do if you give them a systematic layout. So the layout shouldn't be truly random, it should be deliberately unsystematic, a slightly different set which excludes alphabetic or anything like it.
If they did, there would be no advertising firms - and MS-Windows wouldn't exist. Unix or if not then OS/2 would have eaten the entire market. Beta vs VHS and so on.
Brasil was all fired up to send mucho generic AIDS vaccine to Africa, and one of Bill's pharma companies sued in international courts to stop them, and won. How's that for a punch in the throat?
And guess how Bill's spending the 750M? I don't think very much of it will be on actual African or Asian medical staff to do the distribution and injecting, I think the majority of it will go to one of Bill's pharma companies to manufacture the stuff, so the countries and aid organisations involved still have to foot the bill for distributing and applying the stuff. Bill gets a tax-writeoff and another profit and leverages other people's charity efforts. But that could just be the cynic (and historian) in me.
And... don't get me started on vaccines as a magic bullet.
...is to provide something which encourages them to Open their specs by terrifying them even more with the consequences if they don't. A card which is fully programmable might do just that.
Not necessarily in its first incarnation, but maybe in round 2 or 3, if it gets 1% of the available market either by providing programmability features which the others can't - that get used - or by leaving expensive but seldom-critical parts off to make a cheaper chipset which gets picked up big time by ASUS or some other motherboard maker.
Remember that saving $5 on a motherboard might represent 10-20% of the manufacturing cost. If the chipset has 95% of the performance for $2-$3 less and needs no heatsink or fan where a competitor's chips do, that might just do it. Or using 30% less watts to do pretty much the same job as a chipset from the big boys might make it attractive to thin-client and laptop makers.
One programmability feature I would like to see is the ability to stack the hardware gadgets arbitrarily - e.g., if you're not going to be stretching the horsepower of the thing, plug in a second DAC and video output to run two screens (or 3, or 4) from the one card; another e.g., if you are going to stretch the hardware, perhaps you can stack 3D engines so one is precalculating the next row (or band of rows) while the other's displaying the current row (or band).
Yes, they exist - and your favourite hobbies might appear as totally bizarre to them (amongst others) as to you. Some petrified wood is opalescent and quite beautiful when polished up. I'm not specifically a fan of it, but dear old Dad is a rock-hound and has some breath-taking pieces in his collection.
Due to their differing masses, C12 and C14 behave slightly differently in chemical reactions. This can be enough to cause natural fractionation of various kinds.
However, you don't need to change the half-life of C14 to radically alter the numbers you get out of C-ratio dating. AMS dating did it all in one hit by simply counting the atoms correctly, 4eg, and any one of a dozen known natural processes (to say nothing of the preparation samples go through before analysis) can also alter the ratios on the fly.
He and Rb/Sr and other isotopic-ratio dating methods suffer from similar weaknesses. Unfortunately nobody was there at the time with instruments, and it's a bit late to start any calibration experiments now.
The second paragraph also runs into a few technical issues, beginning with the observation that bombarding anything is likely to cause even more radioactive waste, like the Cat in the Hat trying to clean up the excess Pink, or the Help Stamp Out Mercury movement.
On top of that, you have odd cases like pieces of non-petrified wood sticking up out of the ground in France or embedded in Hawkesbury sandstone in Australia. These have all been carbon-dated and returned answers in the thousand-of-years range, which seems to indicate either that some of the assumptions about initial conditions are badly wrong, or ideas about how rapidly landforms find themselves reshaped are badly wrong.
Slashdot Mirror
...or at least not directly by IBM.
Companies refuse to volunteer information for a large variety of reasons starting with the absence of any clear and immediate profit in doing so, and not wanting to be held responsible for any code that they release.
...to have crash recovery that actually works, and readable HTML output which almost fits through the Validator as-is (as opposed to a big steaming pile of poorly formatted and violently incompatible XMLish). It feels right to have style sheets that don't accidentally reformat past documents. It feels right to not need a separate tool to write (and shortly, read) PDFs. It feels right to be able to throw your document at a script and have it do in a fraction of a second things that would take you hours or days by hand. It feels right to be able to pick up and edit broken MS-Office documents without trashing my app. And so on, ad infinitum.
The only areas where MS-Office wins for me are in startup time and spreadsheet capability. I've played with the pre-2.0 betas, and both issues are already being addressed (to say nothing of OOo getting further ahead in areas were it already wins).
urpmi gnucash
y
All done in about 30 seconds including the downloads.
I personally think Mandrake rocks, but Debian and SuSE (and derivatives) users will know the feeling too.
It's an accounting program. Leave the masochism to the packaging team.
Are you wearing an "Eat me!" tee-shirt? (-:
Instead, they'd link to fifteen gazillion different support libraries in at least four wildly different languages so that it takes one of the major distributions' packaging genius to get the thing to compile.
Anyone who thinks I'm joking needs to sit down build GnuCash from scratch or to a lesser extent build a full-featured version of WINE or The GIMP.
However, thanks in part to those same "unsung hero" packagers, a lot of systems including GnuCash are becoming more modular, so it's ever easier to compile just the bits you need - thus sidestepping some dependency issues.
And... lest we forget: it is actually possible to build on wild disparity with FOSS. Seriously trying the same thing with such a shambles of disparate closed software would leave Sisyphus silent in awe.
...as "The Road Ahead" was. Go read PJ's rant on "I want to be an analyst" - it applies even more directly to Trey, here.
I personally would rather own a separate camera that does a good job, plus a separate 'phone which is damn near indestructible, plus a separate highly capable PDA than the latest flashy but fragile phone with sucky camera and really cramped PDA features jammed into it. IPOF, I do own a capable camera and indestructible 'phone, and if I had a PDA it would be something like a Zaurus.
And who wants to cram their delicate home stereo system into their car?
If this man had any more foresight, he'd need a white cane.
Their traditional business model has depended on a "secret sauce", or some form of crippling or diminishment of the interface for third parties. The original MS-Office "XML" formats were horribly limited and still managed to be non-standard. If these are as crippled as the last lot, you'd be better off using HTML for interchange.
There will be a gotcha planted in there somewhere, what remains to be seen is whether it can be worked around or not. I'm betting it can.
Thanks for pointing this out. If not even Americans will read this, what hope has the rest of the world to know Trey's background?
Of course, if the robber barons were more than a little embarrassed at their history, they'd see to it that the next generation never even got to see it. And just how many modern schoolchildren know that Paine's book even exists?
Look into the origin and purpose of schools as we know them, and viola, the reason becomes obvious.
Ignorant smartass.
The local MS rep gave me some of these to play with more than a year ago. OASIS rules, and this crap sucks rocks.
...orthodox geology.
It turns out that his boat is just the right size (550 feet long) to ride out tsunami-sized waves. Any longer, she'd break; any shorter, she'd tip. Evidently somebody knew a lot about nautical engineering. It seems that the bilges were even self-pumped by the wave motion. Leonardo couldn't have done better.
E.g. who directly measured the atmospheric C ratios even 200 years ago, let alone thousands?
...lots of it is genuine wood, and whether or not it was contaminated at the surface is irrelevant. The showstopper is that it is wood, which just does not preserve as wood for anything like millions of years.
That puts a ceiling on the phenomenon of maybe tens of thousands of years, possibly at a stretch hundreds of thousands. Unfortunately, orthodox geography will not admit to a landscape changing that fast.
...I've been well aware of it from the start, but on the other hand bombardment also massively increases the bulk of the waste (turns the substrate and container into waste also) and to a certain extent "randomises" the quantity and nature of the byproducts. Admittedly, it's hard to imagine something more poisonous than Pu.
...make paper expenses which as well as the obvious and prima function of effectively defrauding their own staff drags money out of areas which would open it up for candidacy as a dividend.
IOW, regardless of any putative dividend law, the fraud has made their dividends artificially late.
Thinking about it, dividends are a fairly esoteric concept anyway (although not as bad as futures and options), so maybe that's appropriate in its own odd way.
The studies I've seen say that an alphabetical layout slows the users down. It takes too long to work out where the letters are systematically, which people will do if you give them a systematic layout. So the layout shouldn't be truly random, it should be deliberately unsystematic, a slightly different set which excludes alphabetic or anything like it.
Hmmm.
Well, we can always hope.
- Give $750M to your own vaccine company
- UK Gummint gives another $750M to your vaccine company
- Mark up products by 300% on the way out the door, keep $1250M
- Have someone else pay for distribution and application
- Profit (by $500M or 66%)
Nice quick turnaround, too.Brasil was all fired up to send mucho generic AIDS vaccine to Africa, and one of Bill's pharma companies sued in international courts to stop them, and won. How's that for a punch in the throat?
And guess how Bill's spending the 750M? I don't think very much of it will be on actual African or Asian medical staff to do the distribution and injecting, I think the majority of it will go to one of Bill's pharma companies to manufacture the stuff, so the countries and aid organisations involved still have to foot the bill for distributing and applying the stuff. Bill gets a tax-writeoff and another profit and leverages other people's charity efforts. But that could just be the cynic (and historian) in me.
And... don't get me started on vaccines as a magic bullet.
Read here. Or to put it another way... my goodness, you really looked hard, didn't you?
...is to provide something which encourages them to Open their specs by terrifying them even more with the consequences if they don't. A card which is fully programmable might do just that.
Not necessarily in its first incarnation, but maybe in round 2 or 3, if it gets 1% of the available market either by providing programmability features which the others can't - that get used - or by leaving expensive but seldom-critical parts off to make a cheaper chipset which gets picked up big time by ASUS or some other motherboard maker.
Remember that saving $5 on a motherboard might represent 10-20% of the manufacturing cost. If the chipset has 95% of the performance for $2-$3 less and needs no heatsink or fan where a competitor's chips do, that might just do it. Or using 30% less watts to do pretty much the same job as a chipset from the big boys might make it attractive to thin-client and laptop makers.
One programmability feature I would like to see is the ability to stack the hardware gadgets arbitrarily - e.g., if you're not going to be stretching the horsepower of the thing, plug in a second DAC and video output to run two screens (or 3, or 4) from the one card; another e.g., if you are going to stretch the hardware, perhaps you can stack 3D engines so one is precalculating the next row (or band of rows) while the other's displaying the current row (or band).
Yes, they exist - and your favourite hobbies might appear as totally bizarre to them (amongst others) as to you. Some petrified wood is opalescent and quite beautiful when polished up. I'm not specifically a fan of it, but dear old Dad is a rock-hound and has some breath-taking pieces in his collection.
Due to their differing masses, C12 and C14 behave slightly differently in chemical reactions. This can be enough to cause natural fractionation of various kinds.
However, you don't need to change the half-life of C14 to radically alter the numbers you get out of C-ratio dating. AMS dating did it all in one hit by simply counting the atoms correctly, 4eg, and any one of a dozen known natural processes (to say nothing of the preparation samples go through before analysis) can also alter the ratios on the fly.
He and Rb/Sr and other isotopic-ratio dating methods suffer from similar weaknesses. Unfortunately nobody was there at the time with instruments, and it's a bit late to start any calibration experiments now.
The second paragraph also runs into a few technical issues, beginning with the observation that bombarding anything is likely to cause even more radioactive waste, like the Cat in the Hat trying to clean up the excess Pink, or the Help Stamp Out Mercury movement.
Or did you not just advocate condemning someone for improving the world's knowledge of petrified wood?
On top of that, you have odd cases like pieces of non-petrified wood sticking up out of the ground in France or embedded in Hawkesbury sandstone in Australia. These have all been carbon-dated and returned answers in the thousand-of-years range, which seems to indicate either that some of the assumptions about initial conditions are badly wrong, or ideas about how rapidly landforms find themselves reshaped are badly wrong.
...but she might be naked and petrifying, as in, Medusa. Stony glares and all.
"The relationship was rocky. She was a hard woman, but loved to be pored."
It does lend new meaning to the (search) phrase "stoned chick".