Unfortunately, as the pro-MS person above pointed out there are no ODF implementations yet either. KOffice and OpenOffice can't read each others ODF reliably yet either.
However- I use Openoffice now (finally) after 3? years (v1.04) of trying to make the conversion. It is very close and I EVEN noticed word lacks some of its neat features when I have to use word at work. I'll right-click and the context menu in word is missing something that should *logically* be there. That's a very good sign!
And the free suites will only get better. Next for me- Openoffice needs to improve context awareness of redo operations.
This equates to roughly 300 square miles of electrical plants currently. I'm not sure if the gov site includes dams, windfarms, and nukes. I know windfarms get pretty big (google: 40000-Acre Wind Farm (~62 sq miles), 2000 turbines over 200000 acres (~310 sq miles), Indian Mesa wind farm situated on 34000 acres in West Texas).
We are talking about a gasoline powered car vs a hybrid car vs a nuclear powered car.
A gas car is currently cheaper but we are running out of gas. A hybrid car can reduce gasoline usage to 1/5 what it is currently. It is more expensive than a gas car. A nuclear car could run forever but produces really long term toxic waste and is *EXTREMELY* expensive.
So why not 4 hybrid cars and one nuclear car?
Peak power usage is usually during the day (and during the hottest, brightest part of the day- and less when it is overcast). Why not have peak power be solar?
---
Besides, we are approaching step 3 and nuclear replenishment will drop from 3 to 2.
Yea, a german solar power plant bought up Nanosolar's entire production for the next 24 months. Grrrr.
NS solar tech is much cheaper than current solar tech- As in 50k->30k for putting solar power in your 2000sq' house (45 year vs 25 year payoff-- but that assumes no more inflation-- with historical inflation more like 22 vs 12 year payoff).
I know the area of intense heat will be invisible-- how big would it be?
Thinking back to wind turbines for unexpected kills.
Also, would sucking the energy out of an area (and sending it elsewhere as electricity) lower its temperature and possibly change the micro-climate?
If we put 35 billion into this technology, we would not be raising the price of food and fuel and we would not be lowering our m.p.g. by 10% either. I recently went on a trip and got "countryside real gas" instead of "cityside 85% gas" and got 35 extra miles on the same tank-- that's 3mpg (14%!). It's like a hidden tax having to fill up 1/7 more than with real gasoline.
I'm not seeing how anything is wrong with the analogy.
The grandparent poster I was responding to said we should only have one standard because we already had ODF.
I was pointing out a trivial example where multiple standards work fine (and really to no particular benefit-- a 1/2" long wood screw is a 1/2" long wood screw regard less of it's head or threading).
If we never HAD flathead screwdrivers in the first place (because phillips was the one and only standard) then there would be no flat head screws.
Well for one thing, property taxes on physical properties are so high that you do not really own them. You just rent them from the government (i.e. the people) for a while.
At the least, these "copyrighted" IP materials should pay a reasonable 5% tax on their annual income.
If I spend 8 hours working for dairy queen- since i provided good service and built good will towards the dairy queen did I not help build the business? Do I not deserve to be paid at least something until the day I die? And perhaps for my heirs for 50 years afterwards?
Or... let's say you are correct.
Should not everything ever created by anyone be tracked and the original owners compensated? Track down the exact person who invented the idea of "Fairy godmother" and give their heirs a cut of anything that uses that concept. Oh wait- it's made of two subparts- "Fairy" and "Godmother"... so the fairy godmother creator is actually poaching on the creator of those two ideas. At least they deserve a percentage- but perhaps they should be able to entirely ban the use of "Fairy Godmother" altogether.
Or we can recognize that ideas become part of our common society after a while and that attempts to lock them up forever for one subgroups financial benefit is absurd.
First- I agree with you with regard to copyrighted material under 28 years old with the important caveat that creators ONLY deserve a reasonable compensation based on the cost and effort to create that work. No one- executives, creators, etc deserves to make millions of dollars a year just because they got "lucky" and won the jackpot. The current copyright periods reflected that it took 28 years to get a reasonable profit back in the 1700's. Clearly that is no longer the case.
---
Anything over 28 years old is a product of government corruption by disney and other large corporations so I do not respect those- sure it is legal but I view it as so scummy that companies have corrupted a set of laws intended for the public good into "corporate welfare for life- no one can ever use our stuff even tho our stuff is often new versions of public domain stuff (esp disney)".
Also, if I have purchased a product, I get pretty pissed off when I can't make a backup copy to take with me on vacation or use that product on my various devices or stop working because I installed a new hard drive. I disagree with the entire "LISCENSED TO USE" concept as well. I do respect the "Cable" model where you pay a tiny fee and so only reasonably expect to get temporary usage of a large amount of material.
---
The purpose of copyright law is to encourage people to create works. I think now that the world is a bigger place, people would create a lot MORE works with a lot LESS encouragement. Actors used to make 6 movies a year-- songwriters used to write a song a month-- today their productivity has dropped as their compensation has gone up (and the quality of the work has not gotten better either).
Try opening an OOOXML (-) file with an ODF (+) editor--
Gerardolm... if all we had was ONE standard as the parent poster proposes (in this case "phillips" (+) ), that there would BE NO FLAT SCREWS (-). Having both kinds of screws is redundant.
Consider metric and english for screws also and we really have 4 kinds of screws currently (+m,-m,+e,-e) too. We only need one standard (IMHO, Metric Phillips (+m) ). But the world gets along fine (tho a bit wastefully) with multiple parallel standards for the same things.
There is nothing inherently wrong in having OOOXML, ODF, and several other document standards. You might for example have a "light" standard format for particular kinds of documents that do not include some features and this gives you the freedom to implement the standard easier. A good parallel would be EDI transactions-- yes, they could have written a monster transaction that covered everything (call it the 999) but instead they have a standard "invoice" transaction, a standard "order" transaction, etc.
Then set up your own IT department which you do not call IT so the constraints you put on IT do not apply.
That's what I'm seeing.
The end result is an unproductive mess with major systems essentially designed and implemented by non-IT people who have absolutely no clue about the enterprise or long term interconnectivity issues or it works great but takes a dozen people to keep going instead of running automatically... but they are not IT people... so it's okay.
wow-- you are right. Guess I'm too tired from too little sleep last night...
Back on topic...
Wiki is a fairly accurate source of information and often has links to the basic articles. If you do a research paper and discover new primary references, please update Wiki to reflect them!
And back on topic...
my hand is a butterfly... wheeeeee I can fly.. it looks like i picked the wrong day to quit taking amphetamines!
The counter trend is that there is no justification to spend $400k on an eight year education which will only pay $85k a year.
Many of the places with high requirements do not pay sufficient compensation to cover the cost of becoming qualified for those positions.
There are code words now... "Required" means if you have it and someone who doesn't is hired, you have a legal claim. OTH "Desired", "Recommended" or any other word means it is completely optional and you can be hired without those skills.
In your interviews- a new thing is focusing on concrete events. 1) Situation (Overwhelmed by new software requirements) 2) What you did (brought in a new IDE) 3) The result of your action (We completed all our projects on schedule)
Try to turn your day to day experience into these little dialogues. And always be ready for "what is your weakness" question-- remember, it is really to see if you know the interview game-- the correct answer is always "my weakness is that I just work too many hours without any desire for even comp time or a raise while retaining my insane desire for creating the highest quality software".
---
Back on topic-- My company is already seeing how our outsourcing firm is becoming to expensive to keep-- the long term trend is that indian employees will be the same cost as western it workers. China is not a good option- I have worked with three chinese and all were brilliant and all had enormous communications issues. It's like they got to 4th grade english and then said "It hurts my ego too much to learn more-- I am now good enough at english." Any other possible source of outsourcing just doesn't have the population levels that india and china have. I give it 3-4 years and then I think IT salaries will start to rise again.
I'm seeing a lot of digs at wiki's reliablity lately and even laura ingrams tossed in an anti-wiki comment on her show. Almost like the "powers that be" want to undercut it.
Fact is, Wiki is on par with Encyclopedia Brittanica in terms of accuracy.
I appreciate your kicking in there... As you say, these are the scary ones...
However, He has some good points on the "No implementation of ODF" and "SVG not really supported". The SVG issue seems to have been around for a long time. I get the impression from skimming various web sites that many SVG documents work- but as he says the implementation is not identical so you could not develop another ODF reader and get predictable results. While digging, I noticed that 2.0 OOO and Koffice are both ODF but cannot read each other's documents with 100% reliability.
The great thing about ODF tho- is that OOO and KOffice will continue to be developed and these issues *will* be fixed. Microsoft told our corporation for some bugs in their products-- "that will not be fixed". And as a developer, I understand why a "for profit" corporation would do that. Why spend $1mil to fix a bug that produces $100k marginal income. Only Sears did that kinda thing (back in the day) because quality was part of their brand name. Microsoft doesn't really have a lot of skin in the "quality" brand name game. It's more in the "decent quality with lots of support if you pay for it" brand name game.
I know microsoft is having a rough time with the open source movement-- and their patents will only buy them at most 17 years. There will inevitably be a time that most basic kinds of software will have powerful,free, mature implementations that are O/S agnostic. Wordprocessing, spreadsheets, graphics and audio software all fit in that basic software category. Even GIMP will someday rival Adobe Photoshop. Because APS will get increasingly expensive to maintain while GIMP will just get better and better over time.
CCD could be a chaotic event with increasing stress before a complete breakdown.
Sort of like this... p= pollution level/stress
p0 p1 p2 p3 p4 sudden collapse may or may not happen from here on. (it's random so hard to prove scientifically) p5 s.c. zone p6 s.c. zone p7 bees always die at this level ( so it is repeatable- so science can easily detect it)
We have a lot of problem with random/chaotic events.... then you add in politics (tree huggers, developers, industrialists, religious wack jobs) and it gets really messy. And then science is generally probabilistic anyway. Even for Gravity it is "observed data holds true so far- but could change tomorrow".
There is a way the governments can recover this...
Instead of using a title "Open", they list the characteristics they require.
* Not encumbered by patents in anyway (all involved patents must be released into the public domain immediately) * Completely specified (nothing defined in terms of how another program works-- specify the desired behavior) * I'm sure there are a few others but these two alone would kill OOXML from being relabeled an apple.
Old out of print comics (Kamandi... Warlord...) which have no graphic novels you can buy... never found another good site and sure missed Demonoid for them.
Slashdot Mirror
He he he.
It is enough to me, that one has and got the reference!
Nasa...
There was a period where any program projected to be over 50k lines had to be in Ada.
So they did the only logical thing.. broke projects into 50k line components.
Unfortunately, as the pro-MS person above pointed out there are no ODF implementations yet either.
KOffice and OpenOffice can't read each others ODF reliably yet either.
However- I use Openoffice now (finally) after 3? years (v1.04) of trying to make the conversion. It is very close and I EVEN noticed word lacks some of its neat features when I have to use word at work. I'll right-click and the context menu in word is missing something that should *logically* be there. That's a very good sign!
And the free suites will only get better. Next for me- Openoffice needs to improve context awareness of redo operations.
Actually, based on some off the cuff calculations...
.2 sq miles.
Current solar acreage is probably small. A very large solar plant takes
http://www.metaefficient.com/news/north-americas-largest-solar-electric-plant-in-switched-on.html
http://www.metric-conversions.org/cgi-bin/util/convert.cgi
Electric Plant
It looks like electric plants maybe about 75 acres to 170 acres.
(various google "electric plant acres" results.
Say 125 acres average.
http://www.eia.doe.gov/cneaf/electricity/ipp/ipp_sum.html
350mw per plant (19,300mw/55 plants)
604,514 = 1727 electric plants currently
This equates to roughly 300 square miles of electrical plants currently. I'm not sure if the gov site includes dams, windfarms, and nukes. I know windfarms get pretty big (google: 40000-Acre Wind Farm (~62 sq miles), 2000 turbines over 200000 acres (~310 sq miles), Indian Mesa wind farm situated on 34000 acres in West Texas).
We are talking about a gasoline powered car vs a hybrid car vs a nuclear powered car.
A gas car is currently cheaper but we are running out of gas.
A hybrid car can reduce gasoline usage to 1/5 what it is currently. It is more expensive than a gas car.
A nuclear car could run forever but produces really long term toxic waste and is *EXTREMELY* expensive.
So why not 4 hybrid cars and one nuclear car?
Peak power usage is usually during the day (and during the hottest, brightest part of the day- and less when it is overcast). Why not have peak power be solar?
---
Besides, we are approaching step 3 and nuclear replenishment will drop from 3 to 2.
Yea, a german solar power plant bought up Nanosolar's entire production for the next 24 months. Grrrr.
NS solar tech is much cheaper than current solar tech- As in 50k->30k for putting solar power in your 2000sq' house (45 year vs 25 year payoff-- but that assumes no more inflation-- with historical inflation more like 22 vs 12 year payoff).
I know the area of intense heat will be invisible-- how big would it be?
Thinking back to wind turbines for unexpected kills.
Also, would sucking the energy out of an area (and sending it elsewhere as electricity) lower its temperature and possibly change the micro-climate?
If we put 35 billion into this technology, we would not be raising the price of food and fuel and we would not be lowering our m.p.g. by 10% either. I recently went on a trip and got "countryside real gas" instead of "cityside 85% gas" and got 35 extra miles on the same tank-- that's 3mpg (14%!). It's like a hidden tax having to fill up 1/7 more than with real gasoline.
I'm not seeing how anything is wrong with the analogy.
The grandparent poster I was responding to said we should only have one standard because we already had ODF.
I was pointing out a trivial example where multiple standards work fine (and really to no particular benefit-- a 1/2" long wood screw is a 1/2" long wood screw regard less of it's head or threading).
If we never HAD flathead screwdrivers in the first place (because phillips was the one and only standard) then there would be no flat head screws.
Well for one thing, property taxes on physical properties are so high that you do not really own them.
You just rent them from the government (i.e. the people) for a while.
At the least, these "copyrighted" IP materials should pay a reasonable 5% tax on their annual income.
If I spend 8 hours working for dairy queen- since i provided good service and built good will towards the dairy queen did I not help build the business? Do I not deserve to be paid at least something until the day I die? And perhaps for my heirs for 50 years afterwards?
Or... let's say you are correct.
Should not everything ever created by anyone be tracked and the original owners compensated? Track down the exact person who invented the idea of "Fairy godmother" and give their heirs a cut of anything that uses that concept. Oh wait- it's made of two subparts- "Fairy" and "Godmother"... so the fairy godmother creator is actually poaching on the creator of those two ideas. At least they deserve a percentage- but perhaps they should be able to entirely ban the use of "Fairy Godmother" altogether.
Or we can recognize that ideas become part of our common society after a while and that attempts to lock them up forever for one subgroups financial benefit is absurd.
I mainly use it when I've moderated a thread and want to say something on it.
First- I agree with you with regard to copyrighted material under 28 years old with the important caveat that creators ONLY deserve a reasonable compensation based on the cost and effort to create that work. No one- executives, creators, etc deserves to make millions of dollars a year just because they got "lucky" and won the jackpot. The current copyright periods reflected that it took 28 years to get a reasonable profit back in the 1700's. Clearly that is no longer the case.
---
Anything over 28 years old is a product of government corruption by disney and other large corporations so I do not respect those- sure it is legal but I view it as so scummy that companies have corrupted a set of laws intended for the public good into "corporate welfare for life- no one can ever use our stuff even tho our stuff is often new versions of public domain stuff (esp disney)".
Also, if I have purchased a product, I get pretty pissed off when I can't make a backup copy to take with me on vacation or use that product on my various devices or stop working because I installed a new hard drive. I disagree with the entire "LISCENSED TO USE" concept as well. I do respect the "Cable" model where you pay a tiny fee and so only reasonably expect to get temporary usage of a large amount of material.
---
The purpose of copyright law is to encourage people to create works. I think now that the world is a bigger place, people would create a lot MORE works with a lot LESS encouragement. Actors used to make 6 movies a year-- songwriters used to write a song a month-- today their productivity has dropped as their compensation has gone up (and the quality of the work has not gotten better either).
Try opening an OOOXML (-) file with an ODF (+) editor--
Gerardolm... if all we had was ONE standard as the parent poster proposes (in this case "phillips" (+) ), that there would BE NO FLAT SCREWS (-). Having both kinds of screws is redundant.
Consider metric and english for screws also and we really have 4 kinds of screws currently (+m,-m,+e,-e) too. We only need one standard (IMHO, Metric Phillips (+m) ). But the world gets along fine (tho a bit wastefully) with multiple parallel standards for the same things.
There is nothing inherently wrong in having OOOXML, ODF, and several other document standards. You might for example have a "light" standard format for particular kinds of documents that do not include some features and this gives you the freedom to implement the standard easier. A good parallel would be EDI transactions-- yes, they could have written a monster transaction that covered everything (call it the 999) but instead they have a standard "invoice" transaction, a standard "order" transaction, etc.
Oh come on... by the time OOOXML is a usable standard, all the patents will have expired.
Yes but it could not be used as a primary reference for a college paper.
Would you care to generate a primary reference paper for us?
Nah... phillips and flathead are both standard screwdrivers.
But really, you don't need flathead.
But anyone can make a phillips or flathead screw or screwdriver.
Then set up your own IT department which you do not call IT so the constraints you put on IT do not apply.
That's what I'm seeing.
The end result is an unproductive mess with major systems essentially designed and implemented by non-IT people who have absolutely no clue about the enterprise or long term interconnectivity issues or it works great but takes a dozen people to keep going instead of running automatically... but they are not IT people... so it's okay.
Withdrawing OOOXML is not the only option... In theory, OOOXML could be turned into a reasonable standard so that is the other option. In theory.
wow-- you are right. Guess I'm too tired from too little sleep last night...
Back on topic...
Wiki is a fairly accurate source of information and often has links to the basic articles. If you do a research paper and discover new primary references, please update Wiki to reflect them!
And back on topic...
my hand is a butterfly... wheeeeee I can fly..
it looks like i picked the wrong day to quit taking amphetamines!
The counter trend is that there is no justification to spend $400k on an eight year education which will only pay $85k a year.
Many of the places with high requirements do not pay sufficient compensation to cover the cost of becoming qualified for those positions.
There are code words now...
"Required" means if you have it and someone who doesn't is hired, you have a legal claim.
OTH
"Desired", "Recommended" or any other word means it is completely optional and you can be hired without those skills.
In your interviews- a new thing is focusing on concrete events.
1) Situation (Overwhelmed by new software requirements)
2) What you did (brought in a new IDE)
3) The result of your action (We completed all our projects on schedule)
Try to turn your day to day experience into these little dialogues.
And always be ready for "what is your weakness" question-- remember, it is really to see if you know the interview game-- the correct answer is always "my weakness is that I just work too many hours without any desire for even comp time or a raise while retaining my insane desire for creating the highest quality software".
---
Back on topic-- My company is already seeing how our outsourcing firm is becoming to expensive to keep-- the long term trend is that indian employees will be the same cost as western it workers. China is not a good option- I have worked with three chinese and all were brilliant and all had enormous communications issues. It's like they got to 4th grade english and then said "It hurts my ego too much to learn more-- I am now good enough at english."
Any other possible source of outsourcing just doesn't have the population levels that india and china have. I give it 3-4 years and then I think IT salaries will start to rise again.
I'm seeing a lot of digs at wiki's reliablity lately and even laura ingrams tossed in an anti-wiki comment on her show. Almost like the "powers that be" want to undercut it.
Fact is, Wiki is on par with Encyclopedia Brittanica in terms of accuracy.
I appreciate your kicking in there... As you say, these are the scary ones...
However, He has some good points on the "No implementation of ODF" and "SVG not really supported". The SVG issue seems to have been around for a long time. I get the impression from skimming various web sites that many SVG documents work- but as he says the implementation is not identical so you could not develop another ODF reader and get predictable results. While digging, I noticed that 2.0 OOO and Koffice are both ODF but cannot read each other's documents with 100% reliability.
The great thing about ODF tho- is that OOO and KOffice will continue to be developed and these issues *will* be fixed. Microsoft told our corporation for some bugs in their products-- "that will not be fixed". And as a developer, I understand why a "for profit" corporation would do that. Why spend $1mil to fix a bug that produces $100k marginal income. Only Sears did that kinda thing (back in the day) because quality was part of their brand name. Microsoft doesn't really have a lot of skin in the "quality" brand name game. It's more in the "decent quality with lots of support if you pay for it" brand name game.
I know microsoft is having a rough time with the open source movement-- and their patents will only buy them at most 17 years. There will inevitably be a time that most basic kinds of software will have powerful,free, mature implementations that are O/S agnostic. Wordprocessing, spreadsheets, graphics and audio software all fit in that basic software category. Even GIMP will someday rival Adobe Photoshop. Because APS will get increasingly expensive to maintain while GIMP will just get better and better over time.
CCD could be a chaotic event with increasing stress before a complete breakdown.
Sort of like this...
p= pollution level/stress
p0
p1
p2
p3
p4 sudden collapse may or may not happen from here on. (it's random so hard to prove scientifically)
p5 s.c. zone
p6 s.c. zone
p7 bees always die at this level ( so it is repeatable- so science can easily detect it)
We have a lot of problem with random/chaotic events.... then you add in politics (tree huggers, developers, industrialists, religious wack jobs) and it gets really messy.
And then science is generally probabilistic anyway. Even for Gravity it is "observed data holds true so far- but could change tomorrow".
There is a way the governments can recover this...
Instead of using a title "Open", they list the characteristics they require.
* Not encumbered by patents in anyway (all involved patents must be released into the public domain immediately)
* Completely specified (nothing defined in terms of how another program works-- specify the desired behavior)
* I'm sure there are a few others but these two alone would kill OOXML from being relabeled an apple.
Old out of print comics (Kamandi... Warlord...) which have no graphic novels you can buy... never found another good site and sure missed Demonoid for them.