If the media "love this", how come there are about 500 Google News on "OOXML" while there are over 5000 on "Paris Hilton", 13,000 for "Nepal", 17,000 for "Vista" and so on.
It doesn't look as if the media had picked up the story at all. Many of the 500 articles don't mention the irregularities at all, from what I've seen.
My wife, who runs her own business, has now stated that as soon as professional Adobe products are ever available on *nix platforms They are. The Unix(tm) in question is OS X 10.5
Microsoft may be down quite a bit, but Apple is not even on that list at all. It was about brand recognition in the corporate sector, and Apple is mostly a consumer company. They have a couple enterprise products, but all their main products are consumer or professional products.
And here I was, thinking that amongst all the gaming consoles, the xbox certainly has the least "cool". From everything I hear around me, Halo was the only thing "cool" about the xbox. I'm not trying to say it's a bad console, but it's not the shining example that childhood memories are made of.
Actually, when you think about it, it's a win-win situation - for microsoft.
Either, they get OOXML force-fed to us all, damaging ODF.
Or, their methods will corrupt and destroy faith in the standards process itself. Now ask yourself what one important backbone of Free Software is. That's right - standards. Interoperability is why Free Software can work with each other and we can build global systems out of it.
So, in either case, MS has successfully damaged an important asset of those they consider their enemies. They can't lose.
If I had 1% of every dollar that changed hands from microsoft to some member of some national standards comittee over the past weeks, I'm pretty certain I could stop working - for life.
It is obvious that the whole process has been abused. If ISO were still capable of reasonable action, they would halt the entire process and conduct a thorough investigation before continuing.
Alas, as ISO is a comittee-driven organization, and too many of the comittee members have been bought, excuse me "convinced", to be a little more microsoft-friendly, that won't happen.
but limiting the abilities of a phone you've paid out the ass for is not one of them. True, but shortsighted.
I've got half a dozen computers scattered between work and home to muck around with. But my phone's most important feature isn't whether or not I can hack it to do X or twiddle it to do Y, the most important feature is that it has to work when I pick it up. Right then and there, this second. Not a minute later after I've closed that runaway process here or shut down that CPU sucker over there. Here and now, this instance.
If it can't guarantee that, then it's broken.
Also, when I paid "out of my ass" (actually, out of my wallet, they insisted on money for some reason) for it, I was well aware of the limitations, that there was no 3rd party software, etc.
It's great that there's an SDK now, but I - and other iPhone buyers- were quite willing to part with our money when there wasn't. So stop misrepresenting what the buying decisions were, will you?
Compared to what? In my experience, the iPod Touch makes a poor PDA even compared to an old Palm, both in terms of functionality and in terms of usability. What experience is that?
I've owned a Palm, an iPaq (a HP product, despite the name) and now an iPhone. The iPhone is most definitely the best PDA of those, and by far.
My understanding of Hawkins et al is limited, however I wonder:
If the event horizon of the MBH is considerably smaller than the mass it attempts to swallow, wouldn't it, in simple terms, have the problem of fitting a 10-inch burger into its mouth?
We're not on the atom level here, but below, since it's trivial to split up an atom if you put enough pull on it, right? What if the electron, proton or neutron that comes out first is much larger than the entire MBH? What happens when a black hole (of any size) swallows something that's bigger than itself? I could imagine that this event breaks the black hole apart, as the average density of the entire system rapidly decreases, gravity works in both directions, and the whole thing just goes poof and transforms back into ordinary matter.
It'd never work on the large scale, because a large black hole tears the matter it sucks in apart and swallows it in parts, and time acts weird near the event horizon. But those rules don't apply on the tiny scale.
Or maybe I'm totally ignorant of that area of physics.:-)
So far, looking at the history of the human race, science has almost never been the motivation of any large-scale destruction, neither intentionally nor accidental.
It has often been the tool. But the motivation has usually been either religion, or other kinds of faiths and strongly held world-views (fachism, communism, anti-communism) or personal ambitions by the powerful.
So extrapolating from history, assuming that the human race doesn't change that much, I'm much more afraid of politicians and religious leaders than I am of scientists. Especially since the later ones have the highest track record of admitting when they were wrong and their ideas stupid.
Trial judges and lawyers shouldn't be allowed to dabble in scientific questions. Leave the deciding of risks to real scientists. Totally wrong approach.
Regular people - like judges and lawyers - shouldn't be allowed to have so little scientific understanding that they can't make those decisions, or not understand what a scientist is talking about.
But "science" isn't taught in schools. Physics and chemistry and math is, but not "science". Those of us who absorbed the scientific method did so either through higher education in a scientific field, or through a natural tendency to think that way.
At the current developments, I'd offer another theory: What if the necessary predecessor to science was religion, and faced with its own extenction, religion had a built-in safety switch that makes it turn fanatical and cause it to destroy its offspring (science)?
Then, the problem wouldn't be life in the universe, there could be plenty of it. But none of it for long above a middle ages technology.
I see how it probably violates the Terms of Use (unless Blizzard was dumb enough to not outlaw bots in there). But copyright???
Seriously, there ought to be a law that any case that abuses some law to attack something unrelated (say, copyright law to attack something that's not making a copy) is thrown out right away. The law must apply to itself. Then again, I don't think lawyers understand recursion.
No, I don't blame the game programmers. Well, not alone. But the bugs and crashes and problems are one of the reasons PC gaming isn't as strong as it could be. A lot of people are just tired of it, they play to relax, not frustrate themselves.
And they don't care if it's an OS or a driver or a game bug. It crashes, that's what matters. The console doesn't crash (or at least very, very rarely).
In all things microsoft, you should always ask one question: How much?
In this case, how much did he get paid? (and in what currency, it's not always cash.)
I mean, seriously, with every other company that would be paranoia, but MS has been caught with both hands in the cookie jar actually buying ISO votes. It is very, very likely that they are buying good press and "expert opinion" as well. With enough money, you can buy friendship. Not the real one, but good enough that few will notice the difference.
Stop right there! Its not the games themselves that are the source of the problem. It's thousands of different combinations of crappy hardware (yes I'm looking at you, Intel integrated graphics), crappy drivers, and random crap people have installed on their computer (virus scanners, etc). Yeah, right. I hear that all the time from the windos apologists.
Sorry, *bzzzt*, wrong. It's the OSs job to abstract and encapsulate the hardware, and properly run the software. Under no circumstances whatsoever should an application be able to crash the operating system. Any instance whatsoever of that happening points to a bug in the operating system.
And on the other side, if one application crashes because some other application runs, or is installed, or because the hardware configuration is unexpected, then that's a bug in the application. It should check for and catch that error, full stop.
I'm not without understanding. I write software myself and it's full of bugs. Probably not as bad as some of the crap I've seen being sold for serious money, but nevertheless. And nevertheless, a bug is a bug. And an abnormal termination is always a bug, with but two exceptions: When the user fired off a "kill -9". And when power went down.
If that's Microsoft's position, than clearly this organization is just another profiteer. It is. Its purpose is to wash the Gates name clean. Robber barons have been using philantropy to that end for many decades, if not centuries.
There's also some criticism about its methods, especially regarding the choice of pharmaceuticals. Could be nothing or could be Gates shoving tax-free money towards friends. I don't know enough details to call it either way.
IBM did actually ship hardware more valuable then what was paid for. Hardware that they could otherwise have sold to someone else.
In software, having additional, but disabled, components installed costs you nothing and doesn't deprive you of any potential revenue with other customers. The only one who pays for it a little (in the form of wasted hard-disk space) is the customer you're fleecing.
The person who rents everything is utterly dependent on a high, steady stream of income can't survive even a short interruption or reduction in that stream. It's a very insecure and anxiety-provoking way to live. Which is exactly why politicians of all parties are in league with that change to society. See the excellent BBC documentary "The Politics of Fear".
The summary assumes that it's the graphics cards that cause the disappointment with current PC games.
I couldn't disagree more. What's causing this gamer to be fed up isn't graphics quality, it's game quality. From the plethora of patches, bugs, crashes and incompatabilities that plague PC games, to the sheer fact that most games are just badly done reshashes of successful predecessors.
I'd gladly take NWN2 with less fancy graphics if in return it wouldn't be a constantly crashing piece of apeshit, for example. I put down most MMORPGs after an hour or so not because the graphics weren't good enough, but because the gameplay is highly repetitive and I've seen it all before. On the other hand, GTA didn't have the best graphics of its days, but it was addictive because it had great gameplay with good-enough graphics.
PC gaming could be great, especially where consoles lack. Morrowind, for example, was a better game than Oblivion for one simple reason: The compromises that Bethesda had to make on Oblivion so that it would work on a console.
And for the final nail in the coffin of the summaries argument, consider the Wii. Is it the winner of the 3rd generation console wars because it has the best graphics, or because it's more innovative and provides more fun than the two other "look, ma', bigger and more expensive than before" competitors? Heck, the PS3 is losing to the PS2 in sales figures, and I'm sure we don't have to discuss which of them has the better graphics card.
"When Windows 7 launches sometime after the start of 2010, the desktop OS will be [...] ...vastly different from anything that's announced today (or the rest of the year). If Vista is a benchmark, they will be removing about half of the functionality that's in the current prototypes long before it ships.
Also, you can't really know what's in Win2010, because MS itself doesn't yet know - not until Steve Jobs unveils his plans for OS X 10.9 or whatever the current version in late 2009 is going to be. ("widgets, gadgets - totally different things").
Slashdot Mirror
If the media "love this", how come there are about 500 Google News on "OOXML" while there are over 5000 on "Paris Hilton", 13,000 for "Nepal", 17,000 for "Vista" and so on.
It doesn't look as if the media had picked up the story at all. Many of the 500 articles don't mention the irregularities at all, from what I've seen.
They had a credibility that can be questioned. I never thought they did. Does TFA elaborate on that part?
ISO = I Sold Out
Definitely a keeper.
Time to put your money where your mouth is.
And here I was, thinking that amongst all the gaming consoles, the xbox certainly has the least "cool". From everything I hear around me, Halo was the only thing "cool" about the xbox. I'm not trying to say it's a bad console, but it's not the shining example that childhood memories are made of.
Actually, when you think about it, it's a win-win situation - for microsoft.
Either, they get OOXML force-fed to us all, damaging ODF.
Or, their methods will corrupt and destroy faith in the standards process itself. Now ask yourself what one important backbone of Free Software is. That's right - standards. Interoperability is why Free Software can work with each other and we can build global systems out of it.
So, in either case, MS has successfully damaged an important asset of those they consider their enemies. They can't lose.
If I had 1% of every dollar that changed hands from microsoft to some member of some national standards comittee over the past weeks, I'm pretty certain I could stop working - for life.
It is obvious that the whole process has been abused. If ISO were still capable of reasonable action, they would halt the entire process and conduct a thorough investigation before continuing.
Alas, as ISO is a comittee-driven organization, and too many of the comittee members have been bought, excuse me "convinced", to be a little more microsoft-friendly, that won't happen.
I've got half a dozen computers scattered between work and home to muck around with. But my phone's most important feature isn't whether or not I can hack it to do X or twiddle it to do Y, the most important feature is that it has to work when I pick it up. Right then and there, this second. Not a minute later after I've closed that runaway process here or shut down that CPU sucker over there. Here and now, this instance.
If it can't guarantee that, then it's broken.
Also, when I paid "out of my ass" (actually, out of my wallet, they insisted on money for some reason) for it, I was well aware of the limitations, that there was no 3rd party software, etc.
It's great that there's an SDK now, but I - and other iPhone buyers- were quite willing to part with our money when there wasn't. So stop misrepresenting what the buying decisions were, will you?
I've owned a Palm, an iPaq (a HP product, despite the name) and now an iPhone. The iPhone is most definitely the best PDA of those, and by far.
My understanding of Hawkins et al is limited, however I wonder:
:-)
If the event horizon of the MBH is considerably smaller than the mass it attempts to swallow, wouldn't it, in simple terms, have the problem of fitting a 10-inch burger into its mouth?
We're not on the atom level here, but below, since it's trivial to split up an atom if you put enough pull on it, right? What if the electron, proton or neutron that comes out first is much larger than the entire MBH? What happens when a black hole (of any size) swallows something that's bigger than itself? I could imagine that this event breaks the black hole apart, as the average density of the entire system rapidly decreases, gravity works in both directions, and the whole thing just goes poof and transforms back into ordinary matter.
It'd never work on the large scale, because a large black hole tears the matter it sucks in apart and swallows it in parts, and time acts weird near the event horizon. But those rules don't apply on the tiny scale.
Or maybe I'm totally ignorant of that area of physics.
So far, looking at the history of the human race, science has almost never been the motivation of any large-scale destruction, neither intentionally nor accidental.
It has often been the tool. But the motivation has usually been either religion, or other kinds of faiths and strongly held world-views (fachism, communism, anti-communism) or personal ambitions by the powerful.
So extrapolating from history, assuming that the human race doesn't change that much, I'm much more afraid of politicians and religious leaders than I am of scientists. Especially since the later ones have the highest track record of admitting when they were wrong and their ideas stupid.
Regular people - like judges and lawyers - shouldn't be allowed to have so little scientific understanding that they can't make those decisions, or not understand what a scientist is talking about.
But "science" isn't taught in schools. Physics and chemistry and math is, but not "science". Those of us who absorbed the scientific method did so either through higher education in a scientific field, or through a natural tendency to think that way.
Nice theory of fear.
At the current developments, I'd offer another theory: What if the necessary predecessor to science was religion, and faced with its own extenction, religion had a built-in safety switch that makes it turn fanatical and cause it to destroy its offspring (science)?
Then, the problem wouldn't be life in the universe, there could be plenty of it. But none of it for long above a middle ages technology.
I see how it probably violates the Terms of Use (unless Blizzard was dumb enough to not outlaw bots in there). But copyright???
Seriously, there ought to be a law that any case that abuses some law to attack something unrelated (say, copyright law to attack something that's not making a copy) is thrown out right away. The law must apply to itself. Then again, I don't think lawyers understand recursion.
One more reason not to fly so often anymore.
Then we agree.
No, I don't blame the game programmers. Well, not alone. But the bugs and crashes and problems are one of the reasons PC gaming isn't as strong as it could be. A lot of people are just tired of it, they play to relax, not frustrate themselves.
And they don't care if it's an OS or a driver or a game bug. It crashes, that's what matters. The console doesn't crash (or at least very, very rarely).
In all things microsoft, you should always ask one question: How much?
In this case, how much did he get paid? (and in what currency, it's not always cash.)
I mean, seriously, with every other company that would be paranoia, but MS has been caught with both hands in the cookie jar actually buying ISO votes. It is very, very likely that they are buying good press and "expert opinion" as well. With enough money, you can buy friendship. Not the real one, but good enough that few will notice the difference.
Sorry, *bzzzt*, wrong. It's the OSs job to abstract and encapsulate the hardware, and properly run the software. Under no circumstances whatsoever should an application be able to crash the operating system. Any instance whatsoever of that happening points to a bug in the operating system.
And on the other side, if one application crashes because some other application runs, or is installed, or because the hardware configuration is unexpected, then that's a bug in the application. It should check for and catch that error, full stop.
I'm not without understanding. I write software myself and it's full of bugs. Probably not as bad as some of the crap I've seen being sold for serious money, but nevertheless. And nevertheless, a bug is a bug. And an abnormal termination is always a bug, with but two exceptions: When the user fired off a "kill -9". And when power went down.
There's also some criticism about its methods, especially regarding the choice of pharmaceuticals. Could be nothing or could be Gates shoving tax-free money towards friends. I don't know enough details to call it either way.
And the fact that he was a little less than 100% honest about how BASIC came to be.
I don't think the comparison is fair.
IBM did actually ship hardware more valuable then what was paid for. Hardware that they could otherwise have sold to someone else.
In software, having additional, but disabled, components installed costs you nothing and doesn't deprive you of any potential revenue with other customers. The only one who pays for it a little (in the form of wasted hard-disk space) is the customer you're fleecing.
The summary assumes that it's the graphics cards that cause the disappointment with current PC games.
I couldn't disagree more. What's causing this gamer to be fed up isn't graphics quality, it's game quality. From the plethora of patches, bugs, crashes and incompatabilities that plague PC games, to the sheer fact that most games are just badly done reshashes of successful predecessors.
I'd gladly take NWN2 with less fancy graphics if in return it wouldn't be a constantly crashing piece of apeshit, for example. I put down most MMORPGs after an hour or so not because the graphics weren't good enough, but because the gameplay is highly repetitive and I've seen it all before.
On the other hand, GTA didn't have the best graphics of its days, but it was addictive because it had great gameplay with good-enough graphics.
PC gaming could be great, especially where consoles lack. Morrowind, for example, was a better game than Oblivion for one simple reason: The compromises that Bethesda had to make on Oblivion so that it would work on a console.
And for the final nail in the coffin of the summaries argument, consider the Wii. Is it the winner of the 3rd generation console wars because it has the best graphics, or because it's more innovative and provides more fun than the two other "look, ma', bigger and more expensive than before" competitors? Heck, the PS3 is losing to the PS2 in sales figures, and I'm sure we don't have to discuss which of them has the better graphics card.
Also, you can't really know what's in Win2010, because MS itself doesn't yet know - not until Steve Jobs unveils his plans for OS X 10.9 or whatever the current version in late 2009 is going to be. ("widgets, gadgets - totally different things").