I know that LibreOffice chokes on a lot of docx formatting. For simple documents it does fine, but it's docx support otherwise sucks serious donkeyballs. We finally gave up on it. The price just wasn't worth the hassle.
I think if you were running a pure OpenOffice shop with not much in the way of correspondence in or out of the organization, it would probably work fine.
Re:Not good enough, dammit, not good enough!
on
Running Netflix On Linux
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· Score: 4, Insightful
It's rather peculiar considering there's a Netflix app for Android.
That's the biggest suckage for us. We went to fully encrypted laptops and desktops this spring as a requirement of a government contract we won. Used Truecrypt, which is pretty painless, but it's pretty much killed remote work on our branch office machines. Now someone has to be there to fire it back up again.
Oh what I would give for Truecrypt to build in remote password entry like I can do with dmcrypt on *nix.
Re:Innovative companies fail a lot, MSFT included
on
The Empire In Decline?
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· Score: 2
XBox's success comes from Microsoft plowing billions into it. It's like bragging about your car being worth $50,000 when you've spent $1,000,000 to get it there.
But we've seen similar effects elsewhere. The salons of Western Europe attracted all sorts of literary talent, and competition between writers, musicians and artists lead to ever greater achievements. In the world of science, the printing press allowed the relatively quick dissemination of learning of all kinds. It's not as if Greece was alone in that particular phenomenon.
Yes, the Greeks did some extraordinary things, but backing that, I think, was not some genetic innovation, but rather economic and social innovations. Greece, particularly the major city states, were incredibly wealthy and the networks of trade and empires they built created the conditions in which a learned class of scholars could be supported. The same likely applies to all the "high" civilizations; whether it be Sumeria or ancient China, the Indus civilizations, Ancient Egypt, the Mayans, and so forth.
I'm not trying to discount the achievements of the Classical Greeks. They were extraordinary, and even where they wrong, they were still light years ahead of many of their contemporaries. But I think what has been accomplished in the last couple of centuries has rivaled the achievements of the Greeks. We owe them a lot for that, but to claim we're the idiot children of the Classical thinkers is absurd.
Well, off the top, one would have to identify genetic factors, and the problem here is that criminal behavior likely has as many, or even more, cultural or economic roots as it does genetic. This is the same old conundrum that Social Darwinists keep running up against. They keep bringing up behaviors to actively breed against that often have nothing to do with genetics at all; ignoring the importance of developmental biology, early childhood development (including diet, which we now realize has a significant effect on intelligence) and the kind of culture the child is brought up in.
There may be certain groups tending towards criminal behavior that may have a genetic predisposition; but the interactions between genes and environment is incredibly complex. That's not even considering that what we may consider overly risky or violent behaviors may, in one context, be bad, but in another, be beneficial.
We know how the pyramids were constructed. We know where the blocks came from, have a pretty good idea of how they moved the blocks to the site and how they raised the blocks.
And there is no objective way to test this. Let's remember here that the output of Classical Greek learning and thought was done by a relatively small number of people compared to the number of people living in Ancient Greece. Trying to determine how smart (by whatever metric you use) the average Greek was based upon how intelligent Socrates or Eratosthenes were is about as useful as trying to determine how smart the average Renaissance Italian was by looking at Leonardo da Vinci and Galileo Galilei, or the average Enlightenment Briton by John Locke or Isaac Newton.
In what respect? Over the last five hundred years we have seen technological, philosophical and scientific revolutions that not even the Classical Greeks, for all their gifts, could match. Part of that is of course that the Classical Greeks did not have the printing press and the other revolutions in communicating ideas that have made the permanent loss of knowledge much less likely.
Frankly, I think the conclusions the paper reaches are so subjective as to be daft. The Greeks, like us, reached their great heights by standing on the shoulders of giants. Why would you pick the Classical Greeks as a high water mark? Why not the Ancient Sumerians, Chinese and Egyptians, who invented writing, urban living and civilization itself? Frankly, I think picking the Classical Greeks indicates a not insubstantial cultural bias, one that has been present in Western (and Islamic) academia for centuries.
I don't buy it. I don't think there are any substantial cognitive differences between, say, some proto-Literate Sumerian from 6,000 years ago and your average big city dweller today. There may be small differences due to selection pressures, but I simply do not believe 6,000 years is long enough for the full genetic effects of changed environments to be that huge. The chief differences are going to be the advances that the culture as a whole have achieved.
I was speaking in general terms. Obviously there are a complex series of interactions not only in what taxes are charged, but all the various levels of government that have taxation powers. But in very general terms, taxation can raise revenues, and most certainly has been used in such a way for thousands of years.
My reps are contacting me and telling me CALs are going up a minimum of 50%. I know how this revolution is being fields, by shaking down enterprise customers.
The last time that rhetoric was used the secessionist states were steamrolled into submission. No President will ever allow any group of states secede. And before you go one inch further down your idiot road, do remember that the vast majority of the big guns are in the hands of the US military, which answers directly to the President of the United States.
This might be a legitimate argument if it were not for the fact that the Standard Model has its own particular issues, and all these attempts to extend it, no matter how much you (whoever the fuck you are) may not approve are ways to try to solve those problems.
At least the Quebecois have some reasonable claim to being a nation, and to some extent were even given a separate constitutional status after the Plains of Abraham. The secessionist argument was lost in the United States a century and a half ago, at the conclusion of a rather brutal and bloody war. The Federal Government, in the most basic fashion, won the right to prevent any state from leaving the Union.
On slashdor Libertarians also get mod points. Almost every post I've ever made here that was critical of Libertarianism has been modded down. Gives you a good idea of how much liberty would be extended to critics in a Libertarian regime.
I'm under the impression that Lucasfilm will be run largely like Pixar, as a semi-autonomous business unit within Disney. Pixar has done well in the arrangement, so I are no reason Lucasfilm could not prosper.
Ford became the big star, but Hamill and Fisher both built successful careers, even if not A list acting careers. Star Wars involved about seven years of their lives thirty years ago.
I think a weathered old Luke would be a damned fine thing. I have no problem with the original cast returning, although I had thought Carrie Fisher had largely abandoned working in front of the camera.
Slashdot Mirror
That's like saying "I hate penetrative sex. We live in the age of the Petri dish. Let everyone ejaculate into a beaker!"
I know that LibreOffice chokes on a lot of docx formatting. For simple documents it does fine, but it's docx support otherwise sucks serious donkeyballs. We finally gave up on it. The price just wasn't worth the hassle.
I think if you were running a pure OpenOffice shop with not much in the way of correspondence in or out of the organization, it would probably work fine.
It's rather peculiar considering there's a Netflix app for Android.
That's the biggest suckage for us. We went to fully encrypted laptops and desktops this spring as a requirement of a government contract we won. Used Truecrypt, which is pretty painless, but it's pretty much killed remote work on our branch office machines. Now someone has to be there to fire it back up again.
Oh what I would give for Truecrypt to build in remote password entry like I can do with dmcrypt on *nix.
Chief reason is to encrypt the swap file. If the swap file is not encrypted, keys and data could be potentially retrieved.
The division as a whole has yet to pay back its investment. Microsoft has basically bought market share.
Don't blame me. I voted for Kodos.
XBox's success comes from Microsoft plowing billions into it. It's like bragging about your car being worth $50,000 when you've spent $1,000,000 to get it there.
But we've seen similar effects elsewhere. The salons of Western Europe attracted all sorts of literary talent, and competition between writers, musicians and artists lead to ever greater achievements. In the world of science, the printing press allowed the relatively quick dissemination of learning of all kinds. It's not as if Greece was alone in that particular phenomenon.
Yes, the Greeks did some extraordinary things, but backing that, I think, was not some genetic innovation, but rather economic and social innovations. Greece, particularly the major city states, were incredibly wealthy and the networks of trade and empires they built created the conditions in which a learned class of scholars could be supported. The same likely applies to all the "high" civilizations; whether it be Sumeria or ancient China, the Indus civilizations, Ancient Egypt, the Mayans, and so forth.
I'm not trying to discount the achievements of the Classical Greeks. They were extraordinary, and even where they wrong, they were still light years ahead of many of their contemporaries. But I think what has been accomplished in the last couple of centuries has rivaled the achievements of the Greeks. We owe them a lot for that, but to claim we're the idiot children of the Classical thinkers is absurd.
Well, off the top, one would have to identify genetic factors, and the problem here is that criminal behavior likely has as many, or even more, cultural or economic roots as it does genetic. This is the same old conundrum that Social Darwinists keep running up against. They keep bringing up behaviors to actively breed against that often have nothing to do with genetics at all; ignoring the importance of developmental biology, early childhood development (including diet, which we now realize has a significant effect on intelligence) and the kind of culture the child is brought up in.
There may be certain groups tending towards criminal behavior that may have a genetic predisposition; but the interactions between genes and environment is incredibly complex. That's not even considering that what we may consider overly risky or violent behaviors may, in one context, be bad, but in another, be beneficial.
We know how the pyramids were constructed. We know where the blocks came from, have a pretty good idea of how they moved the blocks to the site and how they raised the blocks.
Of course natural selection is still in effect. It's not as if we've separated ourselves from the environment. Evolution still continues.
And there is no objective way to test this. Let's remember here that the output of Classical Greek learning and thought was done by a relatively small number of people compared to the number of people living in Ancient Greece. Trying to determine how smart (by whatever metric you use) the average Greek was based upon how intelligent Socrates or Eratosthenes were is about as useful as trying to determine how smart the average Renaissance Italian was by looking at Leonardo da Vinci and Galileo Galilei, or the average Enlightenment Briton by John Locke or Isaac Newton.
In what respect? Over the last five hundred years we have seen technological, philosophical and scientific revolutions that not even the Classical Greeks, for all their gifts, could match. Part of that is of course that the Classical Greeks did not have the printing press and the other revolutions in communicating ideas that have made the permanent loss of knowledge much less likely.
Frankly, I think the conclusions the paper reaches are so subjective as to be daft. The Greeks, like us, reached their great heights by standing on the shoulders of giants. Why would you pick the Classical Greeks as a high water mark? Why not the Ancient Sumerians, Chinese and Egyptians, who invented writing, urban living and civilization itself? Frankly, I think picking the Classical Greeks indicates a not insubstantial cultural bias, one that has been present in Western (and Islamic) academia for centuries.
I don't buy it. I don't think there are any substantial cognitive differences between, say, some proto-Literate Sumerian from 6,000 years ago and your average big city dweller today. There may be small differences due to selection pressures, but I simply do not believe 6,000 years is long enough for the full genetic effects of changed environments to be that huge. The chief differences are going to be the advances that the culture as a whole have achieved.
I was speaking in general terms. Obviously there are a complex series of interactions not only in what taxes are charged, but all the various levels of government that have taxation powers. But in very general terms, taxation can raise revenues, and most certainly has been used in such a way for thousands of years.
My reps are contacting me and telling me CALs are going up a minimum of 50%. I know how this revolution is being fields, by shaking down enterprise customers.
While I personally think Win8 is going to be a Vista-level disaster, I think two weeks is a wee bit premature to be hanging any forecasts on.
The last time that rhetoric was used the secessionist states were steamrolled into submission. No President will ever allow any group of states secede. And before you go one inch further down your idiot road, do remember that the vast majority of the big guns are in the hands of the US military, which answers directly to the President of the United States.
This might be a legitimate argument if it were not for the fact that the Standard Model has its own particular issues, and all these attempts to extend it, no matter how much you (whoever the fuck you are) may not approve are ways to try to solve those problems.
You realize that your little diatribe, by and large, could have been pulled out of a Southern secessionist speech almost verbatim, right?
Lincoln won, Jefferson Davis lost. Get over it already.
At least the Quebecois have some reasonable claim to being a nation, and to some extent were even given a separate constitutional status after the Plains of Abraham. The secessionist argument was lost in the United States a century and a half ago, at the conclusion of a rather brutal and bloody war. The Federal Government, in the most basic fashion, won the right to prevent any state from leaving the Union.
On slashdor Libertarians also get mod points. Almost every post I've ever made here that was critical of Libertarianism has been modded down. Gives you a good idea of how much liberty would be extended to critics in a Libertarian regime.
I'm under the impression that Lucasfilm will be run largely like Pixar, as a semi-autonomous business unit within Disney. Pixar has done well in the arrangement, so I are no reason Lucasfilm could not prosper.
Ford became the big star, but Hamill and Fisher both built successful careers, even if not A list acting careers. Star Wars involved about seven years of their lives thirty years ago.
I think a weathered old Luke would be a damned fine thing. I have no problem with the original cast returning, although I had thought Carrie Fisher had largely abandoned working in front of the camera.