Well they said this
The conversion to XML [document formats] must be nondisruptive" meaning it fits into existing business processes which are increasingly dominated by Microsoft middleware. This implies a requirement for high-fidelity, loss-less round-trip conversions. Which seems eminently sensible to me. It also means that any open document format should support all the hairy legacy compatibility stuff that OOXML does of course, in which case why note use OOXML?
2) Why in the name of all that is holy is Word even capable of rendering Flash?
It is no fricking wonder that the MS Windows+Office platform is such a successful malware attractant when all their apps are capable of doing completely inapproriate things with inappropiate data.
It beggars belief. Actually Word isn't capable of rendering flash. But flash is an ActiveX control and Word can host it. As to the reason why someone would do this, the free flash viewer doesn't open standalone swf files, just ones embedded in a web page or in this case a doc file. RTF files can do it too.
Whenever I've tried to open complex word documents (e.g. with columns, word art, footnotes, frames, equations etc) in OO the result has been a mess. OO is probably OK for most of the features in the format but it gets enough wrong to completely destroy things like user manuals which tend to have been written by someone who uses lots of the obscure stuff.
You can save any MS Office document in OOXML and then save it later as a.doc and not lose your formatting?
I.e. because OOXML supports all the legacy features in the office formats you can roundtrip to it and back to something that people can still edit in Office 97. Which is installed on about 90% of the computers in the world.
The CDF specfication bears an inscription in OLE, foul language of Microsoft that I shall not utter here. In the common speach it can be translated as "On fileformat to rule them all, one fileformat to find them, one fileformat to bring them all and in the darkness bind them. In the land of Redmond where the shadows lie".
I don't know... my money's still on the pen. It was heartening to see such encouraging words after watching that horrific video which made me want to cry just thinking about how profanely humans have abused this ancient, loving Earth we have inherited.
I also believe "The pen is mightier than the sword" and that, indeed, one day righteousnes, wisdom, and courage will prevail over ignorance, fear, and greed. Oh for God's sake. If you want to survive as a civilisation you need both happy civilised artists and big motherfucking bombs. And you need people who are willing to use those bombs too if there is no alternative like the US and UK did in WWII. Otherwise predatory neighbouring civilisations which have bombs but no artists will take over, enslave all the artists and that will be the end of things.
It happened to Athens, and it happened to most of the European democracies in WWII. There are probably lots of examples of civilisation that were culturally quite good that got completely eradicated my their militaristic but philistine neighbours.
Even if your neighbours seem peaceful there's always a risk that their economies may collapse and some Hitler like politician may decide to revive them by deficit spending on a huge military machine. If they do that they pretty much have to use it for armed 'hostile takeovers' of their more peaceful neighbours before the deficit spending causes their economy to collapse.
And it's hard to imagine many decent books being produced in the sort of empire someone like that would build.
but Ubuntu [...] may be dramatically shortening the life of your laptop's hard drive due to an aggressive power-saving feature I always thought that Gibbon was just a bit too gutsy! You should have waited for Apathetic Ape. I hear that doesn't bother at all with power management.
If I had the catalog handy, I'd be quoting you prices right now. I wouldn't buy a shrink wrap machine off someone who already owned one. They could sell me a box of bricks shrinkwrapped into the original shrink wrap machine box and then spend the money on heroin. Vermin bastards. If I ever start a religion the penalty for shrink wrap crime would be to be shrink wrapped to death on a cross.
Not that you could trust the people doing the execution come to think of it. God damnit.
People used to say that about black people or women. Maybe in the future Corporate Americans will be allowed to be full citizens, vote and run for office.
But she seems to have been dragged down by the Bush adminstration's slow sinking. Which is unfair really, I don't think if it were up to her to decide policy rather than just advise on implementation that the US would have botched Iraq so badly. And Condie running as a moderate would have attracted lots of support from groups that usually only vote for Democrats.
Well I'm sure the bureaucrats at the Federal Election Commission have an excellent sense of humour about violations of campaign finance law. Just like the TSA do when people answer the question "Did you pack this bag?" with "No my good friend Mr bin Laden did!". Or the FBI do when you joke about wanting to kill the POTUS on the internet.
I'm sure all these people will assume that if they miscategorize a real problem as a joke their superiors won't fire them and it's therefore more important to seem hip and aware of irony and satire to the Web 2.0 crowd than to cover their asses by tagging something that is almost certainly a joke for investigation. And most importantly of all, it's vital that some smart alec who's gone out of his way to piss them off not be inconvenienced by spending a few hours being investigated.
I'm in Kaffiristan so I don't know how things work in the USA. But is possible that he might be sent to Guantanamo Bay for this?
In my country someone made a joke about running against our President and he was sent the toxic waste mines. We love our President and do not want his good name to be besmirched by hoodlums. From what I can tell Mr Colbert has made many jokes about your President yet he has evaded the Secret Police.
Do such things happen in America now too? I don't know much about your country. I do know from watching American TV that crime is very bad there and people hire vigilantes like Robert McCall to scare off drug dealers who are menacing them. Here in our country we have no crime, since undesirables are worked to death in the mines. Why doesn't your President hire more policemen using aid money from the decadent imperialist west?
The Old Testament and the Quran are both pretty nasty. In fact the Quran is a hacked version of Jewish holy texts which are also the basis for the Old Testament. All these are utterly appalling from a modern point of view because they were written by the semi literate leaders of Taliban like nomads. If you wanted to stay leader you needed to provide your followers with a steady stream of slaves and booty and religion was just a way to justify the wars that you sent them off to fight to get it. In a very real sense, the purpose of these texts is to convince people that raping and murdering people is actually the right thing to do despite the fact that most people know intuitively that it isn't.
The difference is that Christians have the relatively benign New Testament as well. I also think that Christianity got eroded in the Enlightenment to the point where it is no longer incompatible with a modern society. Before that it certainly was, look at Galileo. So bringing up the Old Testament to show that Christianity is as bad as Islam is pretty disingenuous.
In his book "The Real Frank Zappa" released in 1989 Zappa explains his plan for the future of music distribution. He says that consumers arn't that interested in CDs or vinyl and explains how you could use the cable tv or telephone system to digitally transmit music (and cover art, etc) into peoples homes on a subscription basis. This was back in 1989, long before your interweb thing took off. But 1989 is not before Modems. And he could probably figure out that the time to send a song would drop dramatically in the future to the point where it was possible to send songs.
I mean it's not rocket science to work out the Shannon limit for a phone line with the filters in the exchange tweaked would give DSL like speeds, or to notice that a frequency domain compression algorithm should be feasable for music and should compress raw PCM data from a CD by around 10:1. So would clearly be possible to send a digital copy of a song over a phoneline in about real time.
Which is a terrible idea of course, because then the guy that paid have something which they can send to all their friends.
Actually I think Valve are adapting to the fact that the market for $50 games is less than than for cheaper ones.
Hence Episodic content. Rather than selling Half Life 3 for $50 they will sell three episodes for Epsiode one was $20, Episode two was $30 and so on. It's like they get to reuse the same engine, which is expensive to develop for more hours of gameplay. I guess level design is cheaper.
Of course most people will still buy the 'gamelets' in bundles like the Orange Box which was $50.
A lot of this is due to the weak dollar of course. $50 is only £25 which probably seems cheap to UK gamers. And the value of those $50 to Valve has probably dropped compared to when the dollar and pound where closer to parity.
Mind you, when I bought Bioshock from Direct2Drive it noticed my UK credit card and forced me to buy from the UK site for £30 rather than £25. I'm not actually in the UK anymore, so that kind of sucks. So if you're complaining about the US price, bear in mind that some of us have it worse.
My understanding of how computers are powered is limited, but if the drive requires less power will the power supply draw less power from the outlet? I would have thought that PSUs draw a constant amount. That can't be true because it violates the principle of conservation of energy.
Nothing at the moment. But with a bit of work they could make a hard drive that kills your wares collection between the time that copyright police start to break down your door to the point where they actually beat your ass down and seize the PC.
Okay, less power. But what have you given up in the trade-off? You buy Deathstar (now Hitachi Global Storage Satan Dataeater DeathStar). It works really well for about a year, to trick you into storing vital data on it and then goes from making funny noises to total failure in a matter of hours.
Actually when Deathstars decide to destroy your data they actually do a much more thorough job than DOD 5220.22-M:
Note that the drive has scraped all the magnetic oxide off the glass platter and deposited it the bottom of the drive.
I can imagine situations where this would be useful, like when Iranian students stormed the US embassy in 1979. Imagine if the embassy PCs had had a self destruct button which would trigger this "scrape all the oxide off the platter" behaviour.
Of course the current Deathstar behaviour of destroying your data to the point where not even the NSA could get it back after a long but unpredictable period of working very well is somewhat less useful.
You can't do that anymore. Vista and a new mouse supporting DirectInput10's mandatory Milgram Trainer mode will give you a small shock the first time you try, gradually rising to a fatal jolt after about a dozen tries.
Slashdot Mirror
OO can't do that. ActiveX controls are Windows executables. The only way OO could host arbitrary ones would be if it implemented all of the Win32 API.
It is no fricking wonder that the MS Windows+Office platform is such a successful malware attractant when all their apps are capable of doing completely inapproriate things with inappropiate data.
It beggars belief. Actually Word isn't capable of rendering flash. But flash is an ActiveX control and Word can host it. As to the reason why someone would do this, the free flash viewer doesn't open standalone swf files, just ones embedded in a web page or in this case a doc file. RTF files can do it too.
Whenever I've tried to open complex word documents (e.g. with columns, word art, footnotes, frames, equations etc) in OO the result has been a mess. OO is probably OK for most of the features in the format but it gets enough wrong to completely destroy things like user manuals which tend to have been written by someone who uses lots of the obscure stuff.
You can save any MS Office document in OOXML and then save it later as a .doc and not lose your formatting?
I.e. because OOXML supports all the legacy features in the office formats you can roundtrip to it and back to something that people can still edit in Office 97. Which is installed on about 90% of the computers in the world.
The CDF specfication bears an inscription in OLE, foul language of Microsoft that I shall not utter here. In the common speach it can be translated as "On fileformat to rule them all, one fileformat to find them, one fileformat to bring them all and in the darkness bind them. In the land of Redmond where the shadows lie".
I also believe "The pen is mightier than the sword" and that, indeed, one day righteousnes, wisdom, and courage will prevail over ignorance, fear, and greed. Oh for God's sake. If you want to survive as a civilisation you need both happy civilised artists and big motherfucking bombs. And you need people who are willing to use those bombs too if there is no alternative like the US and UK did in WWII. Otherwise predatory neighbouring civilisations which have bombs but no artists will take over, enslave all the artists and that will be the end of things.
It happened to Athens, and it happened to most of the European democracies in WWII. There are probably lots of examples of civilisation that were culturally quite good that got completely eradicated my their militaristic but philistine neighbours.
Even if your neighbours seem peaceful there's always a risk that their economies may collapse and some Hitler like politician may decide to revive them by deficit spending on a huge military machine. If they do that they pretty much have to use it for armed 'hostile takeovers' of their more peaceful neighbours before the deficit spending causes their economy to collapse.
And it's hard to imagine many decent books being produced in the sort of empire someone like that would build.
Getting bathroom tiles in the box rather than a hard drive "happens?" I'll stick to what I can get from Newegg and Wal-mart from now on, thanks.
Shopping is a bit like hunting. Sometimes you get the bear, sometimes the bear gets you.Not that you could trust the people doing the execution come to think of it. God damnit.
That's bogus though. You can tell someone's beliefs very well by what they laugh at.
People used to say that about black people or women. Maybe in the future Corporate Americans will be allowed to be full citizens, vote and run for office.
My favourite candidate would have been black, female and quite possibly gay.
http://blogcritics.org/archives/2005/03/14/123729.php
But she seems to have been dragged down by the Bush adminstration's slow sinking. Which is unfair really, I don't think if it were up to her to decide policy rather than just advise on implementation that the US would have botched Iraq so badly. And Condie running as a moderate would have attracted lots of support from groups that usually only vote for Democrats.
Well I'm sure the bureaucrats at the Federal Election Commission have an excellent sense of humour about violations of campaign finance law. Just like the TSA do when people answer the question "Did you pack this bag?" with "No my good friend Mr bin Laden did!". Or the FBI do when you joke about wanting to kill the POTUS on the internet.
I'm sure all these people will assume that if they miscategorize a real problem as a joke their superiors won't fire them and it's therefore more important to seem hip and aware of irony and satire to the Web 2.0 crowd than to cover their asses by tagging something that is almost certainly a joke for investigation. And most importantly of all, it's vital that some smart alec who's gone out of his way to piss them off not be inconvenienced by spending a few hours being investigated.
I'm in Kaffiristan so I don't know how things work in the USA. But is possible that he might be sent to Guantanamo Bay for this?
In my country someone made a joke about running against our President and he was sent the toxic waste mines. We love our President and do not want his good name to be besmirched by hoodlums. From what I can tell Mr Colbert has made many jokes about your President yet he has evaded the Secret Police.
Do such things happen in America now too? I don't know much about your country. I do know from watching American TV that crime is very bad there and people hire vigilantes like Robert McCall to scare off drug dealers who are menacing them. Here in our country we have no crime, since undesirables are worked to death in the mines. Why doesn't your President hire more policemen using aid money from the decadent imperialist west?
The Old Testament and the Quran are both pretty nasty. In fact the Quran is a hacked version of Jewish holy texts which are also the basis for the Old Testament. All these are utterly appalling from a modern point of view because they were written by the semi literate leaders of Taliban like nomads. If you wanted to stay leader you needed to provide your followers with a steady stream of slaves and booty and religion was just a way to justify the wars that you sent them off to fight to get it. In a very real sense, the purpose of these texts is to convince people that raping and murdering people is actually the right thing to do despite the fact that most people know intuitively that it isn't.
The difference is that Christians have the relatively benign New Testament as well. I also think that Christianity got eroded in the Enlightenment to the point where it is no longer incompatible with a modern society. Before that it certainly was, look at Galileo. So bringing up the Old Testament to show that Christianity is as bad as Islam is pretty disingenuous.
In Glasgow if you've got a degree, you're a geek. Worse probably, more like prey.
I mean it's not rocket science to work out the Shannon limit for a phone line with the filters in the exchange tweaked would give DSL like speeds, or to notice that a frequency domain compression algorithm should be feasable for music and should compress raw PCM data from a CD by around 10:1. So would clearly be possible to send a digital copy of a song over a phoneline in about real time.
Which is a terrible idea of course, because then the guy that paid have something which they can send to all their friends.
Mensa,
If you were really smart you'd know that you can't prove it by getting into Mensa.
gamer,
Gamers aren't necessarily smart.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TEWIw-a0GJw
pornstar
And pornstars are definitely not.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louis_Theroux's_Weird_Weekends#Porn
Actually I think Valve are adapting to the fact that the market for $50 games is less than than for cheaper ones.
Hence Episodic content. Rather than selling Half Life 3 for $50 they will sell three episodes for Epsiode one was $20, Episode two was $30 and so on. It's like they get to reuse the same engine, which is expensive to develop for more hours of gameplay. I guess level design is cheaper.
Of course most people will still buy the 'gamelets' in bundles like the Orange Box which was $50.
A lot of this is due to the weak dollar of course. $50 is only £25 which probably seems cheap to UK gamers. And the value of those $50 to Valve has probably dropped compared to when the dollar and pound where closer to parity.
Mind you, when I bought Bioshock from Direct2Drive it noticed my UK credit card and forced me to buy from the UK site for £30 rather than £25. I'm not actually in the UK anymore, so that kind of sucks. So if you're complaining about the US price, bear in mind that some of us have it worse.
Actually the brain centers for religious experiences are known too, so we could 'fix' them with a gamma knife.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/science/horizon/2003/godonbrain.shtml
Muahahaha
Nothing at the moment. But with a bit of work they could make a hard drive that kills your wares collection between the time that copyright police start to break down your door to the point where they actually beat your ass down and seize the PC.
http://hardware.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=335643&cid=21075965
Actually when Deathstars decide to destroy your data they actually do a much more thorough job than DOD 5220.22-M:
http://www.astro.ufl.edu/~ken/crash/index.html
Note that the drive has scraped all the magnetic oxide off the glass platter and deposited it the bottom of the drive.
I can imagine situations where this would be useful, like when Iranian students stormed the US embassy in 1979. Imagine if the embassy PCs had had a self destruct button which would trigger this "scrape all the oxide off the platter" behaviour.
Of course the current Deathstar behaviour of destroying your data to the point where not even the NSA could get it back after a long but unpredictable period of working very well is somewhat less useful.
You can't do that anymore. Vista and a new mouse supporting DirectInput10's mandatory Milgram Trainer mode will give you a small shock the first time you try, gradually rising to a fatal jolt after about a dozen tries.