Interesting isn't it how lizard people make frequence appearances in great works of art. Maybe David Icke is right, and only a few brave script writers have managed to add warnings about the lizards into V and Battlestar Galactica before they were eaten.
I always thought the Christian God would be more like someone outside a simulation of the Universe rather than being part of it. Omniscience, omnipotence and being able to trigger the big bang aren't really possible for someone inside the Universe, but they are trivially easy if for someone running a matrix style simulation of the universe outside the universe.
That said, all the usual objections to Solipsism apply to this. It seems like you would need proof from lots of different sources that our reality is not the outermost one before you started to take that sort of idea seriously. And you have to wonder if someone running a simulation would bother to intervene as opposed to nuking the simulation and restarting with different parameters.
But if you think of science as asymptotically approaching the absolute Truth, discovering newer, more accurate theories could be considered analogous to finding new layers to reality. E.g. a grand unified theory would presumably contain relativity and quantum mechanics as approximations but would explain more than either of them. It would be the underlying mechanism in a sense that drives both of them.
The whole format is built upon the assumption that only MS and Word will be using it and it is not designed to abstract word processing documents in general, but to kowtow to the eccentricities of Word.
Well it's a Microsoft format, and the only word processor they have is Word. What do you expect?
Rather than "render like WP 5.x" you need to define how WP 5.x renders that feature, then incorporate it into your conversion script in a way that makes sense in general for documents.
Microsoft spent lots of time and money taking over the market from WP, and they have no incentive making it easy for someone to take over the market from Word.
And the logic inside Word just needs the "render like WP 5.x" hint, so support for this feature comes free if you already have Word. The fact that the OpenOffice people need to spend ages fiddling around with WP 5.x to implement this feature is a plus from Microsoft's point of view
Whereas doing it your way means that Word needs a rewrite but OpenOffice has a spec they can implement. It's not surprising thay Microsoft chose to do it their way rather than your way. And it doesn't work - see below.
No, the alternative is to do it right and build hacks like the ones you mention into the import and export routines, rather than embedding them, without any definition, into the format.
"Right" is subjective here. You define right as something which OpenOffice can implement easily. Microsoft, define it as something which Word can implement easily.
But I still think you don't understand my deeper point that roundtripping with.DOC means the new format needs to be able to handle all the quirks of.DOC. The face of the matter is that.DOC files have a "render like WP 5.x" attribute, so if you want to be able to roundtrip, that must exist in the XML format. You could add a bunch of finer grained attributes that describe how WP 5.x renders and add them to the standard but as soon as you needed to convert back to DOC you'd need to recongnize them and turn them into a.DOC style "Render as WP 5.x" attribute. But doing that is hard, especially if the user might remove some of the attributes when they edit the file. So in practice you pretty much need to have the.DOC atrribute.
Consider the "render like WP 5.x" to be a high level attribute. It's not easy to convert low level things back to high level ones. Imagine going from assembler back to C for example. More to the point imagine going from C to assembler, editing the assembler and then trying to go back to C. Doesn't seem so "right" now, does it?
Any format that allows you roundtrip from.doc to that format and back without altering formatting has to be like this, right? It has to support all the features the.doc format does.
That's the reason for all the "render like WordPerfect 5.x" options that people have complained about, because they have to allow people to convert to the XML format and then convert back without reducing the document to an unreadable mess.
I remember reading some interview with the Office program manager where he said rountripping to HTML was a big feature, long before they thought of making their XML format an open standard.
But obviously the HTML or XML that you emit that can be roundtripped back to.doc will be fairly unreadable, since you need to encode all the stuff that.doc supports somehow. Like suppressTopSpacingWP in fact.
The alternative is to not support roundtripping and then wait for slashdot headlines like "Users find that the new Office XML format mangles their documents". More to the point, Office is dead if it does that, the advantage it has is that it's a defacto standard, used for the vast majority of editable documents in big companies. Anything which dilutes that is dangerous. And I doubt somehow that Microsoft really care if anyone else recognizes their standard, they just need to be able to claim that they have documented it to make it seem open.
David Irwine (hope I spelt his name right) the author recently served a spell in jail fin Austria for denying the holocaust. Now while not many people would support his views and frankly I think the guy is a few sandwiches short of a picnic , WTF is a supposedly democratic country doing JAILING someone simply because he holds a daft view??
It's David Irving. But I couldn't agree more with the rest of your post, not only is it morally wrong to censor people, it's counterproductive too. Ideas die because they get discredited in open debate, not because you lock up last few people that believe them. And people need to understand that they don't have a right not to be offended.
And it's scary the sort of arrogant and conspiritorial thinking that would make environmentalists want to be ban people who disagree with them. Reminds me of Marxism, another totalitarian creed which claimed to be scientific but was completely lacking in experimental evidence and falsifiability ended up sending it's critics to concentration camps. Come to think of it, the Marxists were obsessed with the idea of capitalism being unsustainable too, and most former Marxists are now environmentalists. Hmm.
Plus if Steve Jobs said "I'm going to have to take away your unborn baby because of (thinks for a few milliseconds) Sarbannes Oxley", most Mac users would rationalize it - "Hey, with all the money I'll save on iToys and iEducation I can buy a one week course of the new iStemCell anti aging treatment, and the world is much too crowded anyway", whereas Microsoft would get sued again if they charged for patches.
There's a fine line between fanboyism and Stockholm syndrome.
...just to get them a luxury item they'd still have to keep putting money into, will be obsolete in five years, and that the kids themselves probably badgered her for months to get them!
Hmm, that puts it all in perspective. The radio station has clearly been infiltrated by communists, out to sabotage the economy by killing good consumers.
We have a computer based time tracking system (software time clock) that all hourly employees use. When we do "on next logon" software updates, sometimes it takes a few minutes and delays the users computer from getting to the prompt to check into the time clock. Supervisors are aware of when we push software updates so they can look out for people that are a few minutes late checking in and adjust as required. We often have users call us directly and complain that somehow they were given some random software push which delayed their check in and want us to call their supervisor. We had no updates scheduled, no reference or logs on that computer to indicate any update was pushed to their computer that day and they get pissed. "Well someone was updating something", bullshit, do not blame it on us because you were 3 minutes late. On that note, people have tried the bad mouse or KB thing as well when they are late.
Sounds like you work for a crap company to be honest.
On the other hand, pushing updates out at logon time is highly annoying, and virtually a declaration of war if you get it wrong. E.g. I worked at a large company when the blaster worm hit. The IT department pushed out the update, which was good but they repackaged it into some auto update tool they had presumably spend a fortune licensing. The repackaged version rendered PCs unbootable, whereas the orginal Microsoft packaged EXE file did not. IT departments response "Windows sucks so we have to do these updates. No we can't fix your machine, it will need to be reinstalled" Luckily, some fairly aggressive management types had this problem, and basically screamed at the IT guys for several hours until they found a way to fix it.
Basically, if you work in support and you do something that inconveniences people and then deny it's a problem, expect to get yelled at. Saying "Windows sucks" or offering a reinstall of the OS won't cut it, since a fair few people are desperately busy and work on dev machines that need a week's work to set up from a freshly Ghosted OS.
I don't think you know very much about ones and zeros. Do you honestly think it's more difficult to compliment someone's hair than to read a circuit diagram of a full adder with a latch and see what it does? Or that it's more difficult to trade Simpsons quotes than to recognize and exploit a buffer overflow? Or that it's more difficult to listen to someone bitching about their ex-wife then to understand how the discrete logarithm problem can be used for public-key cryptography?
Umm, but your only looking at the surface of the interactions, you have no idea what they mean and why people do them. The underlying reasons why people do these things are really complex, much more complex than any of the engineering things you mention.
No, but you can kill 'em, and dissolve the bodies acid in a soundproofed rented apartment while listening to Psycho Killer by Talking Heads on your new iPod, laughing and crying at the same time.
In fact, there's a special flag, LARGE_ADDRESS_AWARE that you need to set in the PE header if you know your application doesn't make this assumption. Then, if/3GB is set in boot.ini, or someone runs your application on x64 Windows, the OS will pass you addresses above 2GB, otherwise you only get 2GB of address space.
Actually Internet conventional wisdom is fairly unpredictable when it comes to copyright.
Case 1: Metallica vs the Internet
Metallica, a pasty white but decidedly non nerdy metal band complain about people stealing their music.
Slashdot: LOL, retards. Information wants to be free. Musicians should make money from live gigs + It's copyright infringement not stealing. Stealing is when you take something physical away from someone, like when a mugger took my iRiver full of Metallica songs.
Case 2: Someone uses GPL code in a non GPL product
Slashdot: OMG Stealing! Mailbomb them back to the stoneage!
Case 3: Pasty white Mac fans remix music, get sued
BoingBoing: Information wants to be free. DRM eats babies!
Case 4: A rich black man uses 4 chords from nerdy white guys
Slashdot: ZOMG! Stealing! Plagiarism!
I'd say that the background of the two parties is more important than any deep principle.
Disclaimer: Conventional Wisdom determined by reading comments until I got a headache, not a representative sample.
What happens when (not if) N. Korea weaponizes these giant rabbits? Possibly by irradiating them and turning them into an even larger and more fearsome animal (sort of like African killer bees, but with big floppy death ray shooting ears). Seriously folks. Won't someone think of the children?
This is modded... insightful? Funny, yeah, okay. But insightful?
It's because Funny +1 doesn't increase the GP's Karma.
Either that or the mod knows something we don't know about the uses of Giant Killer Bunnies...
What happens if an asteroid hits the Earth and destroys the Library of Congress along with civilisation. Or America might fight an all out nuclear war with China. How will I be able to play my Britney Spears album in 75 years time then?
But it's by no means inevitable that any society will pull itself up by it's bootstraps. Even in Europe, it was quite possible that the Dark Ages could have stayed dark indefinitely. In fact it's somewhat mysterious why Europe developed science and democracy in the 18th Century, especially as lots of other more advanced societies like China and India stayed stagnant.
When you look at most of Africa or the Middle East, there's no real sign that they will be anything other than unfree and poor for the forseeable future as far as I can see. Certainly the economic and political development that happened towards the end of the Dark Ages seems to be completely absent there.
But that's not what schools are doing. I've heard of students in England and Sweden being marked down for being 'wrong' about environmental issues. It reminds me a lot of my experiences of going to a Christian school and getting bad grades on essays because I poked holes in their nonsensical belief system. Admittedly it's hard to teach this stuff in a balanced way because the people that believe in environmental decline seem to be better at explaining their ideas than the people who don't. Still it seems to be just as bad to teach left wing pseudo religious ideas like environmentalism as right wing ones like Christianity, because people that believe those ideas tend to be extremely hostile to any kind of criticism, which is what the kids should be encouraged to do.
So, not only is murder in support of Christianity not encouraged, it itself is a sin. This wasn't always well known, though, and some people long long ago murdered people for not being Christians. That causes problems today, as people will say, "While other religions murder people now, some people a hundred million years ago murdered people in the name of Christianity, so Christianity is just the same."
And you might respond, "But that was very long ago and went against the principles of Christianity and thus is condemned."
And the person will rebut, "Yes, but I'm a moral retard who equivocates everything. As far as I'm concerned, A is the same as Z."
Yeah, he's wrong about the age of the Earth too, everyone knows it's 6010 years old.
The thing I find funny about Ussher is that he worked out the Earth was created on October 23, 4004 BC. Talk about quoting results with too much precision.
Yeah, the films have made billions, and will probably go on making making hundreds of millions over the next few decades as New Line license the rights. In which case quibbling about a $50-$100million looks downright mean, and it's not even a good business if Jackson ends up making the Hobbit with another studio as seems likely. Presumably if they'd played straight, they'd have made way more than $50-100 million out of the Hobbit if he'd directed it for them.
I bet if he'd put Tom Bombadil in it, he'd have got his money Tom^H^H^HEru Ilúvatar works in mysterious ways. He's actually lucky that Wingnut films hasn't disappeared under the sea like Númenor.
That made me laugh too. It sums up the difference between the philosophies of people that make things that are to be bought by individual consumers, and people that make things that will be bought by governments and handed out for free.
Slashdot Mirror
Interesting isn't it how lizard people make frequence appearances in great works of art. Maybe David Icke is right, and only a few brave script writers have managed to add warnings about the lizards into V and Battlestar Galactica before they were eaten.
I always thought the Christian God would be more like someone outside a simulation of the Universe rather than being part of it. Omniscience, omnipotence and being able to trigger the big bang aren't really possible for someone inside the Universe, but they are trivially easy if for someone running a matrix style simulation of the universe outside the universe.
That said, all the usual objections to Solipsism apply to this. It seems like you would need proof from lots of different sources that our reality is not the outermost one before you started to take that sort of idea seriously. And you have to wonder if someone running a simulation would bother to intervene as opposed to nuking the simulation and restarting with different parameters.
But if you think of science as asymptotically approaching the absolute Truth, discovering newer, more accurate theories could be considered analogous to finding new layers to reality. E.g. a grand unified theory would presumably contain relativity and quantum mechanics as approximations but would explain more than either of them. It would be the underlying mechanism in a sense that drives both of them.
The whole format is built upon the assumption that only MS and Word will be using it and it is not designed to abstract word processing documents in general, but to kowtow to the eccentricities of Word.
.DOC means the new format needs to be able to handle all the quirks of .DOC. The face of the matter is that .DOC files have a "render like WP 5.x" attribute, so if you want to be able to roundtrip, that must exist in the XML format. You could add a bunch of finer grained attributes that describe how WP 5.x renders and add them to the standard but as soon as you needed to convert back to DOC you'd need to recongnize them and turn them into a .DOC style "Render as WP 5.x" attribute. But doing that is hard, especially if the user might remove some of the attributes when they edit the file. So in practice you pretty much need to have the .DOC atrribute.
Well it's a Microsoft format, and the only word processor they have is Word. What do you expect?
Rather than "render like WP 5.x" you need to define how WP 5.x renders that feature, then incorporate it into your conversion script in a way that makes sense in general for documents.
Microsoft spent lots of time and money taking over the market from WP, and they have no incentive making it easy for someone to take over the market from Word.
And the logic inside Word just needs the "render like WP 5.x" hint, so support for this feature comes free if you already have Word. The fact that the OpenOffice people need to spend ages fiddling around with WP 5.x to implement this feature is a plus from Microsoft's point of view
Whereas doing it your way means that Word needs a rewrite but OpenOffice has a spec they can implement. It's not surprising thay Microsoft chose to do it their way rather than your way. And it doesn't work - see below.
No, the alternative is to do it right and build hacks like the ones you mention into the import and export routines, rather than embedding them, without any definition, into the format.
"Right" is subjective here. You define right as something which OpenOffice can implement easily. Microsoft, define it as something which Word can implement easily.
But I still think you don't understand my deeper point that roundtripping with
Consider the "render like WP 5.x" to be a high level attribute. It's not easy to convert low level things back to high level ones. Imagine going from assembler back to C for example. More to the point imagine going from C to assembler, editing the assembler and then trying to go back to C. Doesn't seem so "right" now, does it?
Any format that allows you roundtrip from .doc to that format and back without altering formatting has to be like this, right? It has to support all the features the .doc format does.
l
.doc will be fairly unreadable, since you need to encode all the stuff that .doc supports somehow. Like suppressTopSpacingWP in fact.
That's the reason for all the "render like WordPerfect 5.x" options that people have complained about, because they have to allow people to convert to the XML format and then convert back without reducing the document to an unreadable mess.
I remember reading some interview with the Office program manager where he said rountripping to HTML was a big feature, long before they thought of making their XML format an open standard.
http://xml.coverpages.org/microsoftHTML971215.htm
But obviously the HTML or XML that you emit that can be roundtripped back to
The alternative is to not support roundtripping and then wait for slashdot headlines like "Users find that the new Office XML format mangles their documents". More to the point, Office is dead if it does that, the advantage it has is that it's a defacto standard, used for the vast majority of editable documents in big companies. Anything which dilutes that is dangerous. And I doubt somehow that Microsoft really care if anyone else recognizes their standard, they just need to be able to claim that they have documented it to make it seem open.
David Irwine (hope I spelt his name right) the author recently served a spell in jail fin Austria for denying the holocaust. Now while not many people would support his views and frankly I think the guy is a few sandwiches short of a picnic , WTF is a supposedly democratic country doing JAILING someone simply because he holds a daft view??
It's David Irving. But I couldn't agree more with the rest of your post, not only is it morally wrong to censor people, it's counterproductive too. Ideas die because they get discredited in open debate, not because you lock up last few people that believe them. And people need to understand that they don't have a right not to be offended.
And it's scary the sort of arrogant and conspiritorial thinking that would make environmentalists want to be ban people who disagree with them. Reminds me of Marxism, another totalitarian creed which claimed to be scientific but was completely lacking in experimental evidence and falsifiability ended up sending it's critics to concentration camps. Come to think of it, the Marxists were obsessed with the idea of capitalism being unsustainable too, and most former Marxists are now environmentalists. Hmm.
Don't forget Alpha, PPC and Arm.
Plus if Steve Jobs said "I'm going to have to take away your unborn baby because of (thinks for a few milliseconds) Sarbannes Oxley", most Mac users would rationalize it - "Hey, with all the money I'll save on iToys and iEducation I can buy a one week course of the new iStemCell anti aging treatment, and the world is much too crowded anyway", whereas Microsoft would get sued again if they charged for patches.
There's a fine line between fanboyism and Stockholm syndrome.
If she'd done if for a PS3, would that qualify?
...just to get them a luxury item they'd still have to keep putting money into, will be obsolete in five years, and that the kids themselves probably badgered her for months to get them!
Hmm, that puts it all in perspective. The radio station has clearly been infiltrated by communists, out to sabotage the economy by killing good consumers.
Actually, the amount of water needs to drink a day is directly related to body weight. Average is 8 cups of water though
/.ers could drink much more water than this an be absolutely safe.
Exactly, most
We have a computer based time tracking system (software time clock) that all hourly employees use. When we do "on next logon" software updates, sometimes it takes a few minutes and delays the users computer from getting to the prompt to check into the time clock. Supervisors are aware of when we push software updates so they can look out for people that are a few minutes late checking in and adjust as required. We often have users call us directly and complain that somehow they were given some random software push which delayed their check in and want us to call their supervisor. We had no updates scheduled, no reference or logs on that computer to indicate any update was pushed to their computer that day and they get pissed. "Well someone was updating something", bullshit, do not blame it on us because you were 3 minutes late. On that note, people have tried the bad mouse or KB thing as well when they are late.
Sounds like you work for a crap company to be honest.
On the other hand, pushing updates out at logon time is highly annoying, and virtually a declaration of war if you get it wrong. E.g. I worked at a large company when the blaster worm hit. The IT department pushed out the update, which was good but they repackaged it into some auto update tool they had presumably spend a fortune licensing. The repackaged version rendered PCs unbootable, whereas the orginal Microsoft packaged EXE file did not. IT departments response "Windows sucks so we have to do these updates. No we can't fix your machine, it will need to be reinstalled" Luckily, some fairly aggressive management types had this problem, and basically screamed at the IT guys for several hours until they found a way to fix it.
Basically, if you work in support and you do something that inconveniences people and then deny it's a problem, expect to get yelled at. Saying "Windows sucks" or offering a reinstall of the OS won't cut it, since a fair few people are desperately busy and work on dev machines that need a week's work to set up from a freshly Ghosted OS.
I don't think you know very much about ones and zeros. Do you honestly think it's more difficult to compliment someone's hair than to read a circuit diagram of a full adder with a latch and see what it does? Or that it's more difficult to trade Simpsons quotes than to recognize and exploit a buffer overflow? Or that it's more difficult to listen to someone bitching about their ex-wife then to understand how the discrete logarithm problem can be used for public-key cryptography?
Umm, but your only looking at the surface of the interactions, you have no idea what they mean and why people do them. The underlying reasons why people do these things are really complex, much more complex than any of the engineering things you mention.
No, but you can kill 'em, and dissolve the bodies acid in a soundproofed rented apartment while listening to Psycho Killer by Talking Heads on your new iPod, laughing and crying at the same time.
On Windows, lot of applications make subtle implicit assumptions about the high bit always being clear in pointers
. aspx
/3GB is set in boot.ini, or someone runs your application on x64 Windows, the OS will pass you addresses above 2GB, otherwise you only get 2GB of address space.
/ 12/213468.aspx
http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa366521
In fact, there's a special flag, LARGE_ADDRESS_AWARE that you need to set in the PE header if you know your application doesn't make this assumption. Then, if
http://blogs.msdn.com/oldnewthing/archive/2004/08
Actually Internet conventional wisdom is fairly unpredictable when it comes to copyright.
Case 1: Metallica vs the Internet
Metallica, a pasty white but decidedly non nerdy metal band complain about people stealing their music.
Slashdot: LOL, retards. Information wants to be free. Musicians should make money from live gigs + It's copyright infringement not stealing. Stealing is when you take something physical away from someone, like when a mugger took my iRiver full of Metallica songs.
Case 2: Someone uses GPL code in a non GPL product
Slashdot: OMG Stealing! Mailbomb them back to the stoneage!
Case 3: Pasty white Mac fans remix music, get sued
BoingBoing: Information wants to be free. DRM eats babies!
Case 4: A rich black man uses 4 chords from nerdy white guys
Slashdot: ZOMG! Stealing! Plagiarism!
I'd say that the background of the two parties is more important than any deep principle.
Disclaimer: Conventional Wisdom determined by reading comments until I got a headache, not a representative sample.
It's because Funny +1 doesn't increase the GP's Karma.
Either that or the mod knows something we don't know about the uses of Giant Killer Bunnies...
What happens if an asteroid hits the Earth and destroys the Library of Congress along with civilisation. Or America might fight an all out nuclear war with China. How will I be able to play my Britney Spears album in 75 years time then?
But it's by no means inevitable that any society will pull itself up by it's bootstraps. Even in Europe, it was quite possible that the Dark Ages could have stayed dark indefinitely. In fact it's somewhat mysterious why Europe developed science and democracy in the 18th Century, especially as lots of other more advanced societies like China and India stayed stagnant.
When you look at most of Africa or the Middle East, there's no real sign that they will be anything other than unfree and poor for the forseeable future as far as I can see. Certainly the economic and political development that happened towards the end of the Dark Ages seems to be completely absent there.
But that's not what schools are doing. I've heard of students in England and Sweden being marked down for being 'wrong' about environmental issues. It reminds me a lot of my experiences of going to a Christian school and getting bad grades on essays because I poked holes in their nonsensical belief system. Admittedly it's hard to teach this stuff in a balanced way because the people that believe in environmental decline seem to be better at explaining their ideas than the people who don't. Still it seems to be just as bad to teach left wing pseudo religious ideas like environmentalism as right wing ones like Christianity, because people that believe those ideas tend to be extremely hostile to any kind of criticism, which is what the kids should be encouraged to do.
As an ex Londoner, I'd like to point out that the IRA wasn't particularly Christian.
E.g. look at their political wing
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sinn_Féin
Certainly they were much less motivated by Christianity, than the July 7th bombers were motivated by Islam.
Got to say your comments reminded me of this
http://reformedchicksblabbing.blogspot.com/2006/0
Yeah, he's wrong about the age of the Earth too, everyone knows it's 6010 years old.
The thing I find funny about Ussher is that he worked out the Earth was created on October 23, 4004 BC. Talk about quoting results with too much precision.
Yeah, the films have made billions, and will probably go on making making hundreds of millions over the next few decades as New Line license the rights. In which case quibbling about a $50-$100million looks downright mean, and it's not even a good business if Jackson ends up making the Hobbit with another studio as seems likely. Presumably if they'd played straight, they'd have made way more than $50-100 million out of the Hobbit if he'd directed it for them.
I bet if he'd put Tom Bombadil in it, he'd have got his money Tom^H^H^HEru Ilúvatar works in mysterious ways. He's actually lucky that Wingnut films hasn't disappeared under the sea like Númenor.
Don't forget Bad Taste and Brain Dead. No one can deny that they are works of cinematic genius.
That made me laugh too. It sums up the difference between the philosophies of people that make things that are to be bought by individual consumers, and people that make things that will be bought by governments and handed out for free.