Anyway, what I was going to say was that they simply need to "imitate" the feature, which OpenOffice/WordPerfect already do with their legacy Word doc support, making the point of this article moot. Now, don't get me wrong, this standard sucks, it's a bunch of floof, but so is the basis for this article.
No, they can't "imitate" the feature. They have to do EXACTLY what Office does, otherwise they're not compliant. Did you even read that guidance block you quoted? "If applications wish to match this behavior, they must utilize and duplicate the output of those applications." It entirely defeats the point of even having a standard. They should've just saved 5999 pages, and simply wrote "Mimic Microsoft Office".
Sure, they say it should be avoided, but that's not going to stop them from continually pointing out that nobody else is compliant. And do I need to point out how silly it is that a brand new draft standard already has deprecated features?
[Guidance: To faithfully replicate this behavior, applications must imitate the behavior of that application, which involves many possible behaviors and cannot be faithfully placed into narrative for this Office Open XML Standard. If applications wish to match this behavior, they must utilize and duplicate the output of those applications. It is recommended that applications not intentionally replicate this behavior as it was deprecated due to issues with its output, and is maintained only for compatibility with existing documents from that application. end guidance]
That guidance block perfectly sums up why this standard is a waste of fucking time.
I'm not seeing how this makes them any less evil. If they sell the bulbs for less profit, then I'd say maybe a little less evil.
Selling things for a profit isn't evil.
If you want to complain about Walmart, complain about their shitty service, or how their employees are morons, or the over all low quality of the products they sell, or how they treat their employees like dirt. There's no shortage of reasons why Walmart could be considered "evil", but selling things for a profit isn't one of them.
Everytime you get a paycheck that isn't negative, you've sold your labor for a profit. Get over it.
You have something better? MD5 is the easiest computationally and produces the smallest result to store, using other techniques will increase the size of your database and computational expense.
There's no way they could use MD5. MD5 hashes are designed to return the same value given the same input, and a totally different value for even a slight modification of the input. Or in other words, md5("ABCD") is nothing at all like md5("ABCE"). Given the nature of audio and video, it would be trivial to bypass an MD5 copyright check. Change a single pixel in a single frame from RGB(255,255,255) to RGB(255,255,254) and nobody would notice, and it'd get through the check.
Exactly. There's already Fortran and COBOL, everything else is superfluous.
Seriously though, why don't we need another programming language? It's not like we only get a finite number of them. We're not going to run out of space or anything.
Actually, that story sounds (ironically) like my attempt to switch to Ubuntu.
Download install CD. Burn it. Boot from it. Install. "Using GRUB as your bootloader is HIGHLY RECOMMENDED". Okay, use GRUB.
No offense, but you either skipped, or left out, the most important step of the entire procedure, which would be "Read the installation instructions.", and should go right before "Download install CD".
It's hardly fair to blame the software when you didn't read the directions.
A good number of historians would disagree you on that. Most say WWII ended the Great Depression.
Obviously, a good number of historians never went very far with economics.
There's a fair amount of evidence pointing towards a recovery from the depression even without WWII. The government was starting to buy a lot of highways, bridges, and other public goods in order to put people to work. Of course WWII sped up the process a great deal, because suddenly the government needed a shitload of planes, soldiers, boats, guns, bombs and everything else. At the time, they didn't have very many of those things (relative to what it needed), so they started buying a whole bunch of them.
So yes, WWII greatly sped up the process, but from an economic standpoint, it wasn't necessary to end the depression.
Most people, even smart people, don't know what a remote login or VPN even is. So a webOS provides a friendly familiar version of what they are used to.
Ignorance is no excuse to use such a bastardization. If a person badly enough needs to login or otherwise access a machine remotely, they should setup some kind of regular remote access or VPN. If they're not technically adept enough, they can have somebody else set it up for them. Creating a very poor psuedo-remote access system built over HTTP with HTML isn't the solution.
No offense to the developers, it's decent for what it is. I just think they're solving a problem that doesn't exist, with technology that isn't up to the challenge, and then giving it a name that doesn't make any sense.
First off, these aren't "operating systems." An operating system is the system of software that interacts with the hardware of the computer and provides an interface for regular application software to use and share that hardware. Most operating systems do quite bit more than that, but at it's heart, that's what an OS is for. These "Web operating systems" don't do anything like that, by any stretch of the imagination. At best these would some kind of user interface.
Second of all, they're SLOW. Way to go, guys, your "WebOS" makes my 2+ Ghz Athlon 64 and gig of memory run like a slow 386.
If that's not bad enough, there's really no use for these things. At best they're remote desktop for people who are too stupid to setup a regular remote login or VPN. I mean, shit, I can tunnel X over ssh and log in to one of my home machines from work, and get full access to a regular X session and all of Linux. It's not as fast as being logged in locally, but it's still much faster than these "Web OSes"
And finally, it's an abomination of the underlying technology. Somebody really needs to have a little talk with these people about using the right tool for the job. This isn't even like using a hammer to pound in a screw, it's more like using a jack hammer to to fix a watch.
Unfortunately, this is another problem with GNU/Linux that will prevent it from agglomerating any success in the desktop market. For Fedorda Core, the installation is pretty well guided and is, as you said, a click of button. Try saying that about Debian Sarge, or about Gentoo, or even about Fedora Core without the proper drivers (which would fit a lot of ATI people...)
Debian, Gentoo, Slackware, Arch and a number of other distros aren't meant to be hand-holding newbie distros. They're specifically geared towards people who don't care if they have to edit configuration files to set something up. They make it very clear from the beginning that they're for experienced Linux users.
A one click install is fine for distros targeted at can't-be-bothered-to-learn "Joe Dell Customer". But it would severely piss off the existing userbase of the more "hardcore" distros.
Murder and self-defense are exactly the same if you describe them both only as "using a firearm to cause a person to die". The context is important; and to some of us, suppressing free speech is not equivalent to punishing someone for breaking into a former employer's network in order to damage it.
If you're going to do business in a country, you're obligated to follow their laws, whether you like them or not. If Google or Yahoo wants to make a statement about a country's policies, breaking the law isn't the most effective way to do it.
The difference is that yes, in this case, a malicious "hax0r" does get put away... but in Yahoo!'s case, they did the same to a journalist who desires freedom in an oppressive communist state. They're two different things.
What's the difference? In both cases somebody was breaking a law in their country. And in both cases the search engines gave relevant information to the governments of those countries. They seem almost exactly the same to me.
Because you obviously don't know anything about Acid2 test. Acid2 is very good test for rising bar but it doesn't test the whole area of standards world.
Perhaps. But if I remember correctly, about a year ago every Firefox fanboy was trumpeting Acid2 as the ultimate browser test, and going on about how Firefox was going to pass it before IE. And they might, because the IE devs just don't care. But the fanboys all shutup when every other browser passed. Funny how that works.
Because Firefox2 uses "old" Gecko 1.8. I surf with "Gecko/2006121504 Minefield/3.0a1" and it renders Acid2 test perfectly.
Good for you. The one guy who's Firefox passes Acid2. Unfortunately, that doesn't mean shit if it's not an official release. If it didn't have so many already, I'd add more memory leaks and random crashes to my version of Firefox. Then I could bash it on Slashdot. And by your logic, that'd be OK, I'd have valid complaints. But fortunately, random crashes and gigantic memory leaks are already a "feature" of Firefox, so I just get to bash Firefox.
x86-64's main use is its address space. 32 bits places a 4 million word limitation on your addressing.
That's not entirely true. The new 64 bit extensions also added 8 new registers. That doesn't necessarily speed up most apps, but they do allow for more function parameters to be passed in registers. Theoretically it could reduce the number of memory accesses required, too.
otoh, a lot of science people want double floats and 64 bit words, but look at the big boys, nvidia. it may bite them in the @#$@# someday, but for now they're sticking to a strong party line: 32bit floating point is sufficient. this works alright for video cards & games, since 4 channels of 32bit fp is an 128bit fp buffer. thats large, but still not entirely that accurate. i'd like to see a time when even game worlds are so massive they straight up require 64bit fp.
Graphics cards usually stay with 32-bit floats because they're "good enough." For 32-bit RGBA color, four 32-bit floats get shoved into 32-bits for display, so a whole 32-bits per component is already overkill. Position data is a little different, but adding more bits still wouldn't make much of a difference.
Scientific programs already use 64-bit and higher floating point. GCC, for example, offers the "-m128bit-long-double" compiler switch to use 128-bits for the "long double" type. For x86_64 GCC uses 128-bit long doubles by default.
I built an Athlon64 machine a while back and put Debian Etch on it, and it's awesome.
You have to use the testing or unstable branches to get AMD64 support until the 4.0 release, but testing (Etch) has been working perfectly for me. With very little work, I've even been able to get the few 32-bit apps I need to work. Without a chroot I have Opera (with Flash), the 32-bit proprietary video codecs, and a few others working perfectly.
The only "gotcha" I can think of is that the nVidia kernel module isn't in the apt-get package repositories. So after every kernel update I have to apt-get the newer linux sources and reinstall the drivers. But that's not a 64-bit vs 32-bit issue.
Because there's a cost associated with offering different peripherals, both in terms of increased complexity on the production line and also future support. The number of people buying, say, Ubuntu installed on HP desktops is too small to justify the additional support and manufacturing commitment; whereas, say, enough people choose between the NVidia ATI cards.
What are you basing your hypothesis on? HP doesn't manufacture any machines with Ubuntu preinstalled, so of course nobody buys them.
Additionally, go to an OEM like Dell and look at their choices. You will notice that, for each performance and product level, there is usually only one choice. You don't see an ATI X1900 being offered alongside the GeForce 7900 - there is no reason to complicate your operations by offering two competing products that are arguably in the exact same performance category.
Yes, but since we're talking about HP, try looking at their website. Each machine has an Intel and an AMD version, usually within $50 of each other. And in many cases you'll see choices for both ATI and nVidia video cards.
A lot of the time, that's more expensive. E.g. WinModems were cheaper than hardware modems because the signal processing was done by Windows. But the specs were closed so it was hard to support them on Linux.
I disagree. With the exception of a few very low end printers (not HP), very little hardware is tied exclusively to Windows like WinModems were. Manufactures often only release drivers for Windows, but there usually isn't core functionality missing from the hardware anymore.
But if you're a PC manufacturer, it's not worth jeopardising your sales to people who want Windows by using a hardware modem rather than a software one, since that adds to the build cost. Microsoft being Microsoft, they will always try to create this sort of situation, where the PC manufacturers can save a few bucks at the cost of being able to run alternative OSs. And given that the vast majority of PCs run Windows, it will continue to work.
Except it didn't really work in the first place. MS conned the modem manufacturers and a few low cost printer manufacturers, but other than that the trend never really caught on.
I'm pretty sure Microsoft offers licensing discounts as long as they're exclusive. Start selling machines with Linux and the discount is lost, and the $800 HP becomes $1000.
No, I disagree. Every desktop oriented Linux distro in the world would be scrambling for a chance to be OEM installed on consumer PCs. And given the choice between an HP with Windows for $1000 and an identical HP with Linux for $600, I think most consumers would pick Linux every time. Assuming the in store Linux HP machines weren't purposely rigged to look bad, I think most non-gaming consumers would realize that OpenOffice, Firefox, Gaim, and Thunderbird meet all their requirements.
Because it costs them more money to support multiple OSes or indeed no OS at all? Think of all those fun tech help calls for people who chose the no OS option and then can't get drivers for some piece of hardware.
No it doesn't. OEMs like HP and Dell just tell you to call Microsoft for OS issues anyway. Supporting a second OS is as hard as giving out a second 800 number.
And hardware support is a non-issue if you're manufacturing the PC. Pick hardware that works with both Linux and Windows. Problem solved.
Even if you make the assumption that the OS is a required part of the computer, there's still no reason they should only bundle Windows. They offer a variety of case designs to choose from. nVidia or ATI graphics cards to choose from. AMD or Intel processors to choose from. So why no choice on operating system?
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No, they can't "imitate" the feature. They have to do EXACTLY what Office does, otherwise they're not compliant. Did you even read that guidance block you quoted? "If applications wish to match this behavior, they must utilize and duplicate the output of those applications." It entirely defeats the point of even having a standard. They should've just saved 5999 pages, and simply wrote "Mimic Microsoft Office".
Sure, they say it should be avoided, but that's not going to stop them from continually pointing out that nobody else is compliant. And do I need to point out how silly it is that a brand new draft standard already has deprecated features?
That guidance block perfectly sums up why this standard is a waste of fucking time.
Exactly. So stop wasting your time whining that they made money and start complaining about the "evil" shit they did.
Selling things for a profit isn't evil.
If you want to complain about Walmart, complain about their shitty service, or how their employees are morons, or the over all low quality of the products they sell, or how they treat their employees like dirt. There's no shortage of reasons why Walmart could be considered "evil", but selling things for a profit isn't one of them.
Everytime you get a paycheck that isn't negative, you've sold your labor for a profit. Get over it.
There's no way they could use MD5. MD5 hashes are designed to return the same value given the same input, and a totally different value for even a slight modification of the input. Or in other words, md5("ABCD") is nothing at all like md5("ABCE"). Given the nature of audio and video, it would be trivial to bypass an MD5 copyright check. Change a single pixel in a single frame from RGB(255,255,255) to RGB(255,255,254) and nobody would notice, and it'd get through the check.
In that case, I apologize. Your post seemed to be fairly detailed, and it didn't mention reading the instructions.
I don't use Ubuntu, but in their defense, GRUB is usually the best approach, except when it doesn't work ;-)
Exactly. There's already Fortran and COBOL, everything else is superfluous.
Seriously though, why don't we need another programming language? It's not like we only get a finite number of them. We're not going to run out of space or anything.
If it doesn't interest you, don't use it.
No offense, but you either skipped, or left out, the most important step of the entire procedure, which would be "Read the installation instructions.", and should go right before "Download install CD".
It's hardly fair to blame the software when you didn't read the directions.
This guy really should've been on the list.
Use Opera. Somebody had to say it...
Obviously, a good number of historians never went very far with economics.
There's a fair amount of evidence pointing towards a recovery from the depression even without WWII. The government was starting to buy a lot of highways, bridges, and other public goods in order to put people to work. Of course WWII sped up the process a great deal, because suddenly the government needed a shitload of planes, soldiers, boats, guns, bombs and everything else. At the time, they didn't have very many of those things (relative to what it needed), so they started buying a whole bunch of them.
So yes, WWII greatly sped up the process, but from an economic standpoint, it wasn't necessary to end the depression.
Ignorance is no excuse to use such a bastardization. If a person badly enough needs to login or otherwise access a machine remotely, they should setup some kind of regular remote access or VPN. If they're not technically adept enough, they can have somebody else set it up for them. Creating a very poor psuedo-remote access system built over HTTP with HTML isn't the solution.
No offense to the developers, it's decent for what it is. I just think they're solving a problem that doesn't exist, with technology that isn't up to the challenge, and then giving it a name that doesn't make any sense.
I don't even know where to start.
First off, these aren't "operating systems." An operating system is the system of software that interacts with the hardware of the computer and provides an interface for regular application software to use and share that hardware. Most operating systems do quite bit more than that, but at it's heart, that's what an OS is for. These "Web operating systems" don't do anything like that, by any stretch of the imagination. At best these would some kind of user interface.
Second of all, they're SLOW. Way to go, guys, your "WebOS" makes my 2+ Ghz Athlon 64 and gig of memory run like a slow 386.
If that's not bad enough, there's really no use for these things. At best they're remote desktop for people who are too stupid to setup a regular remote login or VPN. I mean, shit, I can tunnel X over ssh and log in to one of my home machines from work, and get full access to a regular X session and all of Linux. It's not as fast as being logged in locally, but it's still much faster than these "Web OSes"
And finally, it's an abomination of the underlying technology. Somebody really needs to have a little talk with these people about using the right tool for the job. This isn't even like using a hammer to pound in a screw, it's more like using a jack hammer to to fix a watch.
Debian, Gentoo, Slackware, Arch and a number of other distros aren't meant to be hand-holding newbie distros. They're specifically geared towards people who don't care if they have to edit configuration files to set something up. They make it very clear from the beginning that they're for experienced Linux users.
A one click install is fine for distros targeted at can't-be-bothered-to-learn "Joe Dell Customer". But it would severely piss off the existing userbase of the more "hardcore" distros.
If you're going to do business in a country, you're obligated to follow their laws, whether you like them or not. If Google or Yahoo wants to make a statement about a country's policies, breaking the law isn't the most effective way to do it.
What's the difference? In both cases somebody was breaking a law in their country. And in both cases the search engines gave relevant information to the governments of those countries. They seem almost exactly the same to me.
MD5? Or SHA if you're really paranoid, maybe?
Perhaps. But if I remember correctly, about a year ago every Firefox fanboy was trumpeting Acid2 as the ultimate browser test, and going on about how Firefox was going to pass it before IE. And they might, because the IE devs just don't care. But the fanboys all shutup when every other browser passed. Funny how that works.
Good for you. The one guy who's Firefox passes Acid2. Unfortunately, that doesn't mean shit if it's not an official release. If it didn't have so many already, I'd add more memory leaks and random crashes to my version of Firefox. Then I could bash it on Slashdot. And by your logic, that'd be OK, I'd have valid complaints. But fortunately, random crashes and gigantic memory leaks are already a "feature" of Firefox, so I just get to bash Firefox.
I set it up quite a while back, so I don't remember exactly. It was something like this. Hope that helps.
That's not entirely true. The new 64 bit extensions also added 8 new registers. That doesn't necessarily speed up most apps, but they do allow for more function parameters to be passed in registers. Theoretically it could reduce the number of memory accesses required, too.
otoh, a lot of science people want double floats and 64 bit words, but look at the big boys, nvidia. it may bite them in the @#$@# someday, but for now they're sticking to a strong party line: 32bit floating point is sufficient. this works alright for video cards & games, since 4 channels of 32bit fp is an 128bit fp buffer. thats large, but still not entirely that accurate. i'd like to see a time when even game worlds are so massive they straight up require 64bit fp.
Graphics cards usually stay with 32-bit floats because they're "good enough." For 32-bit RGBA color, four 32-bit floats get shoved into 32-bits for display, so a whole 32-bits per component is already overkill. Position data is a little different, but adding more bits still wouldn't make much of a difference.
Scientific programs already use 64-bit and higher floating point. GCC, for example, offers the "-m128bit-long-double" compiler switch to use 128-bits for the "long double" type. For x86_64 GCC uses 128-bit long doubles by default.
I built an Athlon64 machine a while back and put Debian Etch on it, and it's awesome.
You have to use the testing or unstable branches to get AMD64 support until the 4.0 release, but testing (Etch) has been working perfectly for me. With very little work, I've even been able to get the few 32-bit apps I need to work. Without a chroot I have Opera (with Flash), the 32-bit proprietary video codecs, and a few others working perfectly.
The only "gotcha" I can think of is that the nVidia kernel module isn't in the apt-get package repositories. So after every kernel update I have to apt-get the newer linux sources and reinstall the drivers. But that's not a 64-bit vs 32-bit issue.
What are you basing your hypothesis on? HP doesn't manufacture any machines with Ubuntu preinstalled, so of course nobody buys them.
Yes, but since we're talking about HP, try looking at their website. Each machine has an Intel and an AMD version, usually within $50 of each other. And in many cases you'll see choices for both ATI and nVidia video cards.
I disagree. With the exception of a few very low end printers (not HP), very little hardware is tied exclusively to Windows like WinModems were. Manufactures often only release drivers for Windows, but there usually isn't core functionality missing from the hardware anymore.
Except it didn't really work in the first place. MS conned the modem manufacturers and a few low cost printer manufacturers, but other than that the trend never really caught on.
No, I disagree. Every desktop oriented Linux distro in the world would be scrambling for a chance to be OEM installed on consumer PCs. And given the choice between an HP with Windows for $1000 and an identical HP with Linux for $600, I think most consumers would pick Linux every time. Assuming the in store Linux HP machines weren't purposely rigged to look bad, I think most non-gaming consumers would realize that OpenOffice, Firefox, Gaim, and Thunderbird meet all their requirements.
No it doesn't. OEMs like HP and Dell just tell you to call Microsoft for OS issues anyway. Supporting a second OS is as hard as giving out a second 800 number.
And hardware support is a non-issue if you're manufacturing the PC. Pick hardware that works with both Linux and Windows. Problem solved.
So? His statement is still false.
Even if you make the assumption that the OS is a required part of the computer, there's still no reason they should only bundle Windows. They offer a variety of case designs to choose from. nVidia or ATI graphics cards to choose from. AMD or Intel processors to choose from. So why no choice on operating system?