I find that hard to believe. For that matter I find it hard to believe that you believe it, at least if you think about it. That's like saying that you need a special formatting directive just because WordPerfect 1.1 had a checkbox that said "Set all text to 12 point Times" -- you could simply set the font type to "Times" and the size to "12" without losing any text or changing any formatting. From the document I linked to, which you really should read, it looks like this strange compress top spacing is almost like a bug in WP5.x and you can't get the same effect in other ways. And your proposed equivalent solution isn't really the same thing. The point about this attribute is it compresses the space above every line of text in some special way, regardless of how the text is formatted and without otherwise changing the formatting. That's not equivalent to reformatting everything to Times 12pt. Most people would kill you if you did that to a document they had spent time working on.
Do you have much experience in writing office packages by any chance? Given that you didn't sit in on the design meetings for this feature, it seems a bit presumptive of you to claim that there's a better, simpler solution. If you're making millions out of selling the world's best selling office product, there are probably constraints on how you implement things. You know, like compatibility with all the software you've shipped.
I'd like to support the formatting implied by that checkbox, so I can render documents consistently with other implementations. Well you can now, because it's documented. And it's an official ISO standard, so it seems like they managed to convince a few people that it was OK. OpenOffice is already implementing it too.
Now the PS3 is ahead in sales at the momentbut for ages the XBox360 outsold it, which is more than the XBox managed with the PS2. Of course the WII, DS and a bunch of other cheaper devices outsell 360 and PS3. But I think it's easier for Microsoft to try to migrate games from the sorts of companies it works with on Windows to the 360 than start an entirely new business based around something like a Wii. Buying an XBox n*360 every 4 years is much cheaper than feeding upgrades into a gaming PC. Of course a new Wii or the successor would be cheaper still, but it's not the sort of platform that PC games companies really know how to write for.
How can you object to this? Suppose the stories are true and they paid people off to agree with them. How is that morally worse than using sockpuppets to support yourself in online arguments?
Wouldn't it be technologically superior to require MS Word to emulate "truncateFontHeightsLikeWP6" using standard formatting directives, rather than forcing every other implementer to code for compatibility with some file format that isn't even part of the spec? It's suppressTopSpacingWP. Look at the part of the spec quoted here -
This is what happens when the user selects "Suppress extra line spacing like WordPerfect 5.x" in Tools->Options->Compatibility. If suppressTopSpacingWP didn't exist, that UI element could not work. If you don't want to implement it in your competing office suite, no one is forcing you. If you do want to support documents saved when it was checked, the effect it has on basline to baseline distance is documented thanks to the ISO process where people complained until it was documented. That was the quid pro quo for them voting for it as a standard rather than against.
I think there comes a time when the political establishment prefers a democratic system though. The Economist argued that as countries become rich, at some point it's mostly in their interest for this to happen.
It's probably about property rights, or a safe retirement, or knowing that your children won't be persecuted if you lose power. Politicians in a democracy tend to have very well paid retirements whereas in a non democracy they end up under house arrest or worse with their assets confiscated.
Certainly coups and revolutions which could usher in a stable but highly illiberal political system seem less frequent as societies get richer. I'm not 100% sure whether this is universal though. You can imagine a worst case political system where a tiny minority have all the power and money and everyone else is basically scared of them but is stable. E.g. Rome or North Korea. Living standards probably declined in both since they started, though few of their citizens could know this.
The Soviet Union wasn't vicious as either but autocracy could have survived there if the country wasn't competing with freer societies, since it collapsed because ordinary people complained about living standards. If there was no competition, they wouldn't have known anything was wrong since they wouldn't have been any better societies for them to compare with. Which is what Orwell was warning people about in '1984', a world where there are no free societies and living standards in the non free ones are falling.
Now at this point, it's hard to see what will happen to China. My guess is that it will liberalise in a couple of decades, since there isn't really any ideological reason for it not to now that it has stopped pretending to be a socialist island in a sea of capitalism. Though nationalism would be a good way for Chinese autocrats to dissuade Chinese people from unfavourable comparisons with other countries.
The establishment media in the US is all biased towards the right. Don't most opinion polls show that most US journalists vote Democrat?
http://www.mediaresearch.org/biasbasics/biasbasics3.asp
KEY FINDINGS: * More than half of the journalists surveyed (52%) said they voted for Democrat John Kerry in the 2004 presidential election, while fewer than one-fifth (19%) said they voted for Republican George W. Bush. The public chose Bush, 51 to 48 percent.
* When asked "generally speaking, do you consider yourself a Democrat, Republican, an Independent, or something else?" more than three times as many journalists (33%) said they were Democrats than said they were Republicans (10%).
Dos games program the system DMA controller directly. It's located at ports 0x00-0x0f, 0xc0-0xdf and 0x80-0x8f. When DMA is active the ISA DMAREQ line is pulsed by the card and the system answers with DMAACK. The actual memory access is done by the ISA system DMA controller.
Now PCI cards are assigned memory/IO space by the Bios and the chipset does the address decoding. Originally the bios would work out how much IO and memory space is needed at boot and program the PCI bridge to forward that region to PCI, and then program all the PCI cards to use resources in that region. E.g. if you have two IO cards requesting 16 port locations, the Bios would set the PCI bridge up to forward ports from 0x4000 to 0x4020 and then assign 0x4000-400f to the first device and 0x4010-0x401f to the second. It won't forward 0x00-0xff, since they are implemented in the chipset. PCI cards have their own DMA controller - they just request the bus and then drive the address bits to whatever memory they want to access themselves - this is called busmastering.
Now consider a PCI Soundblaster card and a Dos game. The game will set up a buffer with samples and program the address into the system DMA controller. The PCI card can't see the IO port accesses since the PCI bridge won't forward them. It can't see DMAREQ and DMAACK since they aren't on the PCI bus.
Now the first solution to this was a to have another connector on the motherboard with the DMAREQ and DMAACK lines for the soundcard. This was called a sideband connector, which is the PCI jargon for a connector that provides access to to signals not on the PCI bus.
This is bad though, because the fast PCI bus needs to be locked during each slow ISA DMA transfer. The next solution, Distributed DMA essentially splits the system DMA controller into a bunch of single channel slices and allows PCI cards to implement one or more of them using bus mastering. It's quite complicated though and requires support in the PCI bridge, the soundcard and probably in the system Bios too. You can read about it here -
Now all this really mattered to Creative. They sold Soundblaster cards because lots of Dos games used the SoundBlaster standard - essentially a way to set up IO ports including the ISA system DMA controller. But initial PCI motherboards stopped PCI soundcards from implementing this standard because those cards couldn't support software that used ISA DMA. Then a bit later people started to make motherboards with sideband connectors and finally Distributed DMA. Realistically DDMA support on the motherboard is the only way that the Creative API can be implemented efficiently by a PCI soundcard. So they should have lobbied the PCI SIG to implement it.
Meanwhile of course, Microsoft was promoting DirectX where applications use a Win32 API to access the soundcard and the register interface was hidden in the driver. Which ended up winning - eventually Dos games died out and all soundcards ended up implementing whatever register interface was convenient for them to implement. The Soundblaster register standard effectively died out.
Actually, almost all user interface actions in Windows can be controlled with keys. Back in the Win95 days you could see this easily - hotkeys were underlined in UI items. Now the quest for style of substance has caused them to be hidden by default. But hold down the Alt key and most Windows applications will be full of keyboard accelerators. E.g. in Opera Alt F opens the file menu. Alt+F, S will save for example. Most applications have Ctrl key combinations like Ctrl+S to do the same thing. Accelerators are part of the OS, but developers need to add & characters to their.rc files to say what shortcuts they want. E.g in the.rc file the File menu title is &File. This and the hidden by default status of accelerators does mean that inexperienced developers can forget to do this of course. Which is a shame - there are people who can't use a mouse and thus won't be able to use these applications.
So, we have all the major operating systems/window managers fully in the Fisher-Price camp. Use FreeDOS. I use it on my 8GB USB flash disk, and I still have 7.999GB free.
Doom and Wolfenstein were clever back in the day, but it wouldn't be the first time that a famous expert was blindsided by a paradigm shift in their field.
As an totally independent consultant working on one of the standards boards I'd just like to say that people here don't what we are trying to achieve here with OOXML... they.... don't understand.... OOXML... or... <ALIEN VOICE>THE GLORY OF ITS PURPOSE. GLORY TO MICROSOFT!</ALIEN VOICE>
All of our C++ apps, without exception, require a nanny process to kill em when they hemorage too much memory. You have to make sure that you match up calls to new with calls to delete, free to malloc and so on. C++ only leaks when it is written by sloppy, disorganized people with a poor eye for detail.
It's hemorrhage (US spelling) or haemorrhage (UK spelling) BTW.
Keep in mind that Computer Science is *not* coding. It's a subfield of mathematics that deals with the theory of computation. The lecturer might have been a theorist. Hmm, so some people don't code any more but spend their time thinking about higher level problems? Outside academia we call those people managers or PHBs.
Don't you think that women sending ambiguous signals is a barrier to stop stupid men breeding? Now I'm sure people are going to pipe up at this point and say they are good at programming and math and so on. But as the bumper stickers says "If you're so smart why ain't you rich?". And in any case numeric skills are one kind of intelligence. Social skills are another. If you can't pass the social intelligence test, no kids for you, unless you have the numeric skills to make an load of money. I'm skeptical that men have that option these days though, since most women make enough money to support themselves independently.
The US government has defended the UK against the Nazis and Communists and defended Taiwan against the crypto fascist Chinese 'Communists'. Plus the've helped the world resist Islamofascism. I'm not going to say that they always did the optimal thing, but I do think that they acted mostly in good faith and mostly backed the right side. In fact I'm seriously considering moving to the US at some point. I think it's frankly bizarre that some US citizens don't see this, given that US foreign policy is decided democratically and therefore partly by them. Maybe those US citizens would be happier somewhere else;-)
Creative's first attempt at a PCI soundcard turned out so murky that 1997 era mobos have something called a "SoundBlaster link" to make them happy. Finally giving up Creative bought another company that had made a PCI soundcard and slapped the SoundBlaster brand on it. (SoundBlaster 16 PCI.. or SoundBlaster 512, they had many names for it). Actually it has to be like that. The original SoundBlaster standard for Dos used ISA system DMA. Dos games would program the DMA countroller themselves.
PCI doesn't support that since it's oriented towards busmaster DMA where the controller is on the card so you need a sideband connector so the old Dos games can run unmodified. At some point distributed DMA started to be supported PCI bridges, so the Dos application could write to the DMA controller but a PCI soundcard could catch the write and emulate it with busmaster DMA. But in the first release of PCI you needed a sideband connector so that old Dos games could use ISA DMA. Then again, I suppose if Creative had got it right then DDMA would have been a mandatory part of PCI from the start.
It sounds like they were more interested in having prior art to invalidate someone else's future patents in future rather than the patents themselves. A bunch of documents stored at the patent office would be great for this since they obviously couldn't take the usual prior art route of publishing. Getting a patent would be bad too, since that would be published.
I have Vista, an 8600M GT and the 'Bioshock' drivers, 163.44 and they're rock solid. Zero crashes, zero glitches.
Not surprising really, since Bioshock is the only thing that was unstable with the drivers that came with the laptop and these were released specifically to stabilise it.
What about if the music industry was collectivised? If you look at the original idea collectivisation was actually quite good. Everyone would be paid the same and would consume as much as they could. Obviously the implementation of this was flawed in since most "communist" countries were really state capitalist dictatorships.
But a true anarchist collectivisation system might work quite well. I think the proposed system is bad though, since there is no link between the people that consume the music and the people that produce it. E.g. an unpopular musician would get just as much as a popular one. State capitalist collectivisation had the same issues. Lazy farmers were paid as much as hard working ones, so the supply of food dropped dramatically, leading to terrible famine in some cases.
My collectivisation would work like this. Copyright would be abolished and musicians would be free to release what they wanted, but since there were no controls on copying they would not be able to stop buying a copy and then putting it on the internet. However some sort of taxation would tax all internet users and pay a fee to collective, and that would pay a salary to musicians, provided they met production quotas. So far this is the same as the proposed scheme. But I think the missing element is feedback, so I propose that in return for taxation the public would vote on directly on quotas, how much the collective would pay musicians per song of particular genres.
That may not work on a Mac, given that they use EFI and only fake the BIOS for Windows in Boot Camp. Well the legacy Bios support code could easily put something into the Bios information Windows collects before it switches to protected mode and applications could read it out later WMI. Or if you were really desperate an application could use a device driver to check a signature on the Rom, or check for some Apple only device using the Setup enumeration API.
On the other hand, the fact that the computer has EFI and not a true BIOS is a pretty good indication it's a Mac, atleast for now. Actually a Mac isn't an EFI machine from the point of view of Windows, it looks like one with a very limited Bios. Someone worked out you could boot Windows with just int 13 disk access and a calls like e820 that get hold of the memory map. But since Intel was heavily involved in the project they probably support things like ACPI too, since you need those for power management. And ACPI has lots of information about the machine which is accessible to Win32 applications.
Slashdot Mirror
Do you have much experience in writing office packages by any chance? Given that you didn't sit in on the design meetings for this feature, it seems a bit presumptive of you to claim that there's a better, simpler solution. If you're making millions out of selling the world's best selling office product, there are probably constraints on how you implement things. You know, like compatibility with all the software you've shipped. I'd like to support the formatting implied by that checkbox, so I can render documents consistently with other implementations. Well you can now, because it's documented. And it's an official ISO standard, so it seems like they managed to convince a few people that it was OK. OpenOffice is already implementing it too.
http://www.hardcoreware.net/reviews/review-348-1.htm
Now the PS3 is ahead in sales at the momentbut for ages the XBox360 outsold it, which is more than the XBox managed with the PS2. Of course the WII, DS and a bunch of other cheaper devices outsell 360 and PS3. But I think it's easier for Microsoft to try to migrate games from the sorts of companies it works with on Windows to the 360 than start an entirely new business based around something like a Wii. Buying an XBox n*360 every 4 years is much cheaper than feeding upgrades into a gaming PC. Of course a new Wii or the successor would be cheaper still, but it's not the sort of platform that PC games companies really know how to write for.
How can you object to this? Suppose the stories are true and they paid people off to agree with them. How is that morally worse than using sockpuppets to support yourself in online arguments?
http://blogs.msdn.com/brian_jones/archive/2008/01/18/suppresstopspacingwp-compat-settings-1.aspx
This is what happens when the user selects "Suppress extra line spacing like WordPerfect 5.x" in Tools->Options->Compatibility. If suppressTopSpacingWP didn't exist, that UI element could not work. If you don't want to implement it in your competing office suite, no one is forcing you. If you do want to support documents saved when it was checked, the effect it has on basline to baseline distance is documented thanks to the ISO process where people complained until it was documented. That was the quid pro quo for them voting for it as a standard rather than against.
I think there comes a time when the political establishment prefers a democratic system though. The Economist argued that as countries become rich, at some point it's mostly in their interest for this to happen.
It's probably about property rights, or a safe retirement, or knowing that your children won't be persecuted if you lose power. Politicians in a democracy tend to have very well paid retirements whereas in a non democracy they end up under house arrest or worse with their assets confiscated.
Certainly coups and revolutions which could usher in a stable but highly illiberal political system seem less frequent as societies get richer. I'm not 100% sure whether this is universal though. You can imagine a worst case political system where a tiny minority have all the power and money and everyone else is basically scared of them but is stable. E.g. Rome or North Korea. Living standards probably declined in both since they started, though few of their citizens could know this.
The Soviet Union wasn't vicious as either but autocracy could have survived there if the country wasn't competing with freer societies, since it collapsed because ordinary people complained about living standards. If there was no competition, they wouldn't have known anything was wrong since they wouldn't have been any better societies for them to compare with. Which is what Orwell was warning people about in '1984', a world where there are no free societies and living standards in the non free ones are falling.
Now at this point, it's hard to see what will happen to China. My guess is that it will liberalise in a couple of decades, since there isn't really any ideological reason for it not to now that it has stopped pretending to be a socialist island in a sea of capitalism. Though nationalism would be a good way for Chinese autocrats to dissuade Chinese people from unfavourable comparisons with other countries.
http://www.mediaresearch.org/biasbasics/biasbasics3.asp KEY FINDINGS:
* More than half of the journalists surveyed (52%) said they voted for Democrat John Kerry in the 2004 presidential election, while fewer than one-fifth (19%) said they voted for Republican George W. Bush. The public chose Bush, 51 to 48 percent.
* When asked "generally speaking, do you consider yourself a Democrat, Republican, an Independent, or something else?" more than three times as many journalists (33%) said they were Democrats than said they were Republicans (10%).
Dos games program the system DMA controller directly. It's located at ports 0x00-0x0f, 0xc0-0xdf and 0x80-0x8f. When DMA is active the ISA DMAREQ line is pulsed by the card and the system answers with DMAACK. The actual memory access is done by the ISA system DMA controller.
Now PCI cards are assigned memory/IO space by the Bios and the chipset does the address decoding. Originally the bios would work out how much IO and memory space is needed at boot and program the PCI bridge to forward that region to PCI, and then program all the PCI cards to use resources in that region. E.g. if you have two IO cards requesting 16 port locations, the Bios would set the PCI bridge up to forward ports from 0x4000 to 0x4020 and then assign 0x4000-400f to the first device and 0x4010-0x401f to the second. It won't forward 0x00-0xff, since they are implemented in the chipset. PCI cards have their own DMA controller - they just request the bus and then drive the address bits to whatever memory they want to access themselves - this is called busmastering.
Now consider a PCI Soundblaster card and a Dos game. The game will set up a buffer with samples and program the address into the system DMA controller. The PCI card can't see the IO port accesses since the PCI bridge won't forward them. It can't see DMAREQ and DMAACK since they aren't on the PCI bus.
Now the first solution to this was a to have another connector on the motherboard with the DMAREQ and DMAACK lines for the soundcard. This was called a sideband connector, which is the PCI jargon for a connector that provides access to to signals not on the PCI bus.
http://www.edn.com/archives/1995/112395/graph/24df4fg1.htm
This is bad though, because the fast PCI bus needs to be locked during each slow ISA DMA transfer. The next solution, Distributed DMA essentially splits the system DMA controller into a bunch of single channel slices and allows PCI cards to implement one or more of them using bus mastering. It's quite complicated though and requires support in the PCI bridge, the soundcard and probably in the system Bios too. You can read about it here -
http://www.edn.com/archives/1995/112395/24df4.htm
Now all this really mattered to Creative. They sold Soundblaster cards because lots of Dos games used the SoundBlaster standard - essentially a way to set up IO ports including the ISA system DMA controller. But initial PCI motherboards stopped PCI soundcards from implementing this standard because those cards couldn't support software that used ISA DMA. Then a bit later people started to make motherboards with sideband connectors and finally Distributed DMA. Realistically DDMA support on the motherboard is the only way that the Creative API can be implemented efficiently by a PCI soundcard. So they should have lobbied the PCI SIG to implement it.
Meanwhile of course, Microsoft was promoting DirectX where applications use a Win32 API to access the soundcard and the register interface was hidden in the driver. Which ended up winning - eventually Dos games died out and all soundcards ended up implementing whatever register interface was convenient for them to implement. The Soundblaster register standard effectively died out.
... but you'll notice I said Gigabytes, not Gibibytes.
You have out geeked me, because I don't understand why that is funny.
Actually, almost all user interface actions in Windows can be controlled with keys. Back in the Win95 days you could see this easily - hotkeys were underlined in UI items. Now the quest for style of substance has caused them to be hidden by default. But hold down the Alt key and most Windows applications will be full of keyboard accelerators. E.g. in Opera Alt F opens the file menu. Alt+F, S will save for example. Most applications have Ctrl key combinations like Ctrl+S to do the same thing. Accelerators are part of the OS, but developers need to add & characters to their .rc files to say what shortcuts they want. E.g in the .rc file the File menu title is &File. This and the hidden by default status of accelerators does mean that inexperienced developers can forget to do this of course. Which is a shame - there are people who can't use a mouse and thus won't be able to use these applications.
Those whales are terrorists.
Maybe Carmack is wrong?
Doom and Wolfenstein were clever back in the day, but it wouldn't be the first time that a famous expert was blindsided by a paradigm shift in their field.
I think in Harkonnen terms Vista is The Beast Rabban and XP Second Edition is Feyd Rautha.
As an totally independent consultant working on one of the standards boards I'd just like to say that people here don't what we are trying to achieve here with OOXML ... they .... don't understand .... OOXML... or ... <ALIEN VOICE>THE GLORY OF ITS PURPOSE. GLORY TO MICROSOFT!</ALIEN VOICE>
It's hemorrhage (US spelling) or haemorrhage (UK spelling) BTW.
Don't you think that women sending ambiguous signals is a barrier to stop stupid men breeding? Now I'm sure people are going to pipe up at this point and say they are good at programming and math and so on. But as the bumper stickers says "If you're so smart why ain't you rich?". And in any case numeric skills are one kind of intelligence. Social skills are another. If you can't pass the social intelligence test, no kids for you, unless you have the numeric skills to make an load of money. I'm skeptical that men have that option these days though, since most women make enough money to support themselves independently.
The US government has defended the UK against the Nazis and Communists and defended Taiwan against the crypto fascist Chinese 'Communists'. Plus the've helped the world resist Islamofascism. I'm not going to say that they always did the optimal thing, but I do think that they acted mostly in good faith and mostly backed the right side. In fact I'm seriously considering moving to the US at some point. I think it's frankly bizarre that some US citizens don't see this, given that US foreign policy is decided democratically and therefore partly by them. Maybe those US citizens would be happier somewhere else ;-)
PCI doesn't support that since it's oriented towards busmaster DMA where the controller is on the card so you need a sideband connector so the old Dos games can run unmodified. At some point distributed DMA started to be supported PCI bridges, so the Dos application could write to the DMA controller but a PCI soundcard could catch the write and emulate it with busmaster DMA. But in the first release of PCI you needed a sideband connector so that old Dos games could use ISA DMA. Then again, I suppose if Creative had got it right then DDMA would have been a mandatory part of PCI from the start.
It sounds like they were more interested in having prior art to invalidate someone else's future patents in future rather than the patents themselves. A bunch of documents stored at the patent office would be great for this since they obviously couldn't take the usual prior art route of publishing. Getting a patent would be bad too, since that would be published.
I have Vista, an 8600M GT and the 'Bioshock' drivers, 163.44 and they're rock solid. Zero crashes, zero glitches.
Not surprising really, since Bioshock is the only thing that was unstable with the drivers that came with the laptop and these were released specifically to stabilise it.
Or someone in a small cage.
What about if the music industry was collectivised? If you look at the original idea collectivisation was actually quite good. Everyone would be paid the same and would consume as much as they could. Obviously the implementation of this was flawed in since most "communist" countries were really state capitalist dictatorships.
But a true anarchist collectivisation system might work quite well. I think the proposed system is bad though, since there is no link between the people that consume the music and the people that produce it. E.g. an unpopular musician would get just as much as a popular one. State capitalist collectivisation had the same issues. Lazy farmers were paid as much as hard working ones, so the supply of food dropped dramatically, leading to terrible famine in some cases.
My collectivisation would work like this. Copyright would be abolished and musicians would be free to release what they wanted, but since there were no controls on copying they would not be able to stop buying a copy and then putting it on the internet. However some sort of taxation would tax all internet users and pay a fee to collective, and that would pay a salary to musicians, provided they met production quotas. So far this is the same as the proposed scheme. But I think the missing element is feedback, so I propose that in return for taxation the public would vote on directly on quotas, how much the collective would pay musicians per song of particular genres.