I have to disagree with you. I have had MS Word documents go completely fubar, with no way of figuring out how to fix them. (OK, recently I've been able to fix some of them by opening them in OOo.org) With reveal codes, at least I was able to figure out what was going wrong with WP documents. I've used Wordperfect 5.2, 6.1, 8, and 11, and various Words along the way. All of them were better than the contemporary MS Words. Many things just work better in Wordperfect including kerning, lists, outline numbering, help, . . .
By the way, for one of the posts farther up, windowsa 3.1 wasn't really backwards compatible with DOS as much as it ran on top of DOS.
They were talking about the test of Teaching, Suggestion, Motivation to determine if combining existing things would be obvious or patentable. The Supreme Court just might change or eliminate that test, but don't hold your breath. Sometimes judges will have the toughest questioning for the side that they eventually rule in favor of.
"First and foremost, copyrights and patents are not property, . . . "
Copyrights and patents are issued by the government and are property.
The ideas/words behind them are not.
". . . that you may be able to predict the market (not prfectly, but at least profitably) by effectively predicting what the program traders en-masse are doing."
>"And this fact is EXACTLY what stabilizes the market!"
Actually, that sort of predicting what effect the predictions will have, which changes the outcome once the original predictions about predictions get popular, which changed outcome requires one to change the predictions on how the predictions affect the outcomes of predicting, etc. would seem to me to be destabilizing.
Any particular predicting software that doesn't in large measure on rely on fundamentals can only work in the long run if there are few doing it and few others aware of how they're doing it. Otherwise I can see only 2 possible outcomes: self-fullfilling predictions locking the market into an unnatural steady state, or chaotic swings as different predictors are switched to in an ever-escalating war of anaylsis.
Biologically speaking, all people are part of the human race, there is only one.
People do categorize people into races by skin color, hair, and other differences. These are real differences, but do not really rise to the level of different races as that word is used about other animals.
Socially constructively speaking, you can categorize things any way you want. The fact that you can create categories that can be correlated with genes says little more than that there are different peoples with different ancestral roots. There still is virtually as much genetic variation within those categories as between them. It's more informative to explain the differences as adaptations to different environments, such as dark skin color, which is shared by the Africans, Indians, aboriginal Australians, and just about any peoples that have been located long enough where there is an abundance of heat and sun.
Bonobos and Humans share 98% of the same genes; this says nothing about the variations of each gene. Apparently humans vary about 10% in the content of those genes, and now, according to the article, more than 10% in the numbers of copies of multiple-copy genes.
The Novel codebase for VBA compatibility is not the same one used in (at least some of the) other distros. Still, Novel didn't just drop this in suddenly because of the MS agreement, the've been working on it for a while. They claim it is more fully featured than the other guys', and are trying to promote for inclusion in the official OOo case. If there are VBA patents that are at issue (assuming they're valid - a big assumption), it's doubtful that the other implentations would avoid problems any more than Novel's
It is the physical copy you are buying, not the "content". Doctrine of first sale says you can do anything you want with that CD - play frisbee, use it as a coaster, share it, start a library. Copyright says you can't copy it without permission. Certain practical exceptions have been figured out because of modern mediums, like the "copy" your computer makes in it's memory in order to play the CD, but in principle, the copyright holder has the government granted monopoly on making any physical copies. Trying to regulate the content instead could have some pretty Orwellian consequences - think about it.
I've felt the same about the computer books in a typical book store. Most of them used to be about computers, now they're almost all about how to use specific proprietary programs like MS Office, or, at the best case, about specific proprietary programming languages, like MS Visual Basic or C#.
Uh, many of your suggestions are included under discrete mathematics. Per Wikipedia: "Discrete mathematics has become popular in recent decades because of its applications to computer science"
"The reason why Windows still hasn't been unseated is that too many people have software that is Windows-only."
Not completely true. The main reason is that MS Windows comes preloaded when you buy a computer. It's a hassle just trying to avoid it.
A smaller reason is that as long as people get familiar with something at work, they want (and sometimes need to) to have the same system at home. Now it is true that business has often locked themselves in to Windows-only programs, like AutoCAD, so you're not completely wrong.
"Does your company design, manufacture and market hacky sacks?"
If you could take a break from locking everything down, relax, and learn to kick, you'd say "footbags", and not be so uncouth as to say "hacky sacks".
(hey, not that I've learned to kick any good, but my kids sure let me know how wrong I was to say hackysack.)
The new high school around here (Antioch, IL) uses methane from a nearby landfill for energy. I'm not sure how much they get from it, or what it cost, but in the long run it's a better idea than spending more and more to drill for every last bit of natural gas left in the earth.
I know! What we really oughta do is tie together the heat exxchanger under the road and the line of solar panels along the side with batteries and thermal storage so when it snows, we can pump the stored energy into the road to melt the snow. Seriously, I've worked on several homes with gas-fired boilers where the biggest load on the boilers was for snow melt of the driveway and sidewalks. Seems to me like an awful waste compared to hiring someone to plow or shovel.
They said they use the MS Windows machines to test compatibility issues, doesn't sound like they could get rid of them completely, as long as there's a need to connect iPods to macines with MS OSs.
CFC production has only been recently ended. CFC use is still widespread in systems made before the ban on new CFC systems went into effect. Every one of those installations has the potential to release CFCs. HCFC production has not yet been phased out, and though those chemicals are not considered to be as destructive to the ozone, they still contribute to ozone depletion. CFCs and HCFCs are very stable, and it will be decades before the amount already in the stratosphere, let alone ongoing releases, declines enough to have only a negligible effect on the ozone.
Re:Holy Honey I Shrunk The Kids, Batman!
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Gadgets, Then & Now
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As far as I know, the undos do not work across sessions. But once when I was playing with adding graphics to a small.doc, I noticed that the file size got humongous (970k for 2 or 3 pages), and stayed that way even though I had deleted all the jpgs from the document. I'm guessing it saved the graphics in the undo/redo queue. But after saving and opening again the next day, the file stayed huge even though the undo button was greyed out. YMMV, though, every version of MSWord probably handles it a little differently.
You might think it's not tracking changes, but internally it still may be. I had a two page document that I played around with; adding and deleting jpgs, moving them around, trying to figure out how to get the required layout. At the end I deleted all the pics and saved. The doc was 900KB! Even after reopening, modifying quite a bit and saving it, it stayed huge. I'm guessing that it was saving the jpgs in the undo queue, even when they were no longer available to undo from the undo button.
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I have to disagree with you.
I have had MS Word documents go completely fubar, with no way of figuring out how to fix them. (OK, recently I've been able to fix some of them by opening them in OOo.org) With reveal codes, at least I was able to figure out what was going wrong with WP documents.
I've used Wordperfect 5.2, 6.1, 8, and 11, and various Words along the way. All of them were better than the contemporary MS Words. Many things just work better in Wordperfect including kerning, lists, outline numbering, help, . . .
By the way, for one of the posts farther up, windowsa 3.1 wasn't really backwards compatible with DOS as much as it ran on top of DOS.
What is being described as a soccerball with opposite ends connected is essentially a dodeca-donut.
They were talking about the test of Teaching, Suggestion, Motivation to determine if combining existing things would be obvious or patentable. The Supreme Court just might change or eliminate that test, but don't hold your breath. Sometimes judges will have the toughest questioning for the side that they eventually rule in favor of.
Windows and Office make obscene profits.
Xbox loses money.
I doubt that the very fact of a removeable note is patented. The forumaltion of the weak glue would be.
"First and foremost, copyrights and patents are not property, . . . " Copyrights and patents are issued by the government and are property. The ideas/words behind them are not.
". . . that you may be able to predict the market (not prfectly, but at least profitably) by effectively predicting what the program traders en-masse are doing." >"And this fact is EXACTLY what stabilizes the market!" Actually, that sort of predicting what effect the predictions will have, which changes the outcome once the original predictions about predictions get popular, which changed outcome requires one to change the predictions on how the predictions affect the outcomes of predicting, etc. would seem to me to be destabilizing. Any particular predicting software that doesn't in large measure on rely on fundamentals can only work in the long run if there are few doing it and few others aware of how they're doing it. Otherwise I can see only 2 possible outcomes: self-fullfilling predictions locking the market into an unnatural steady state, or chaotic swings as different predictors are switched to in an ever-escalating war of anaylsis.
Biologically speaking, all people are part of the human race, there is only one. People do categorize people into races by skin color, hair, and other differences. These are real differences, but do not really rise to the level of different races as that word is used about other animals. Socially constructively speaking, you can categorize things any way you want. The fact that you can create categories that can be correlated with genes says little more than that there are different peoples with different ancestral roots. There still is virtually as much genetic variation within those categories as between them. It's more informative to explain the differences as adaptations to different environments, such as dark skin color, which is shared by the Africans, Indians, aboriginal Australians, and just about any peoples that have been located long enough where there is an abundance of heat and sun.
Bonobos and Humans share 98% of the same genes; this says nothing about the variations of each gene.
Apparently humans vary about 10% in the content of those genes, and now, according to the article, more than 10% in the numbers of copies of multiple-copy genes.
It's stereoscopic, not really 3D. Shouldn't be too hard for a new game, if assume the viewing equipment. But how do they convert existing TV?
The Novel codebase for VBA compatibility is not the same one used in (at least some of the) other distros. Still, Novel didn't just drop this in suddenly because of the MS agreement, the've been working on it for a while. They claim it is more fully featured than the other guys', and are trying to promote for inclusion in the official OOo case. If there are VBA patents that are at issue (assuming they're valid - a big assumption), it's doubtful that the other implentations would avoid problems any more than Novel's
It is the physical copy you are buying, not the "content". Doctrine of first sale says you can do anything you want with that CD - play frisbee, use it as a coaster, share it, start a library. Copyright says you can't copy it without permission. Certain practical exceptions have been figured out because of modern mediums, like the "copy" your computer makes in it's memory in order to play the CD, but in principle, the copyright holder has the government granted monopoly on making any physical copies.
Trying to regulate the content instead could have some pretty Orwellian consequences - think about it.
I've felt the same about the computer books in a typical book store. Most of them used to be about computers, now they're almost all about how to use specific proprietary programs like MS Office, or, at the best case, about specific proprietary programming languages, like MS Visual Basic or C#.
Uh, many of your suggestions are included under discrete mathematics.
Per Wikipedia: "Discrete mathematics has become popular in recent decades because of its applications to computer science"
"The reason why Windows still hasn't been unseated is that too many people have software that is Windows-only."
Not completely true. The main reason is that MS Windows comes preloaded when you buy a computer. It's a hassle just trying to avoid it.
A smaller reason is that as long as people get familiar with something at work, they want (and sometimes need to) to have the same system at home. Now it is true that business has often locked themselves in to Windows-only programs, like AutoCAD, so you're not completely wrong.
"Does your company design, manufacture and market hacky sacks?" If you could take a break from locking everything down, relax, and learn to kick, you'd say "footbags", and not be so uncouth as to say "hacky sacks". (hey, not that I've learned to kick any good, but my kids sure let me know how wrong I was to say hackysack.)
The new high school around here (Antioch, IL) uses methane from a nearby landfill for energy. I'm not sure how much they get from it, or what it cost, but in the long run it's a better idea than spending more and more to drill for every last bit of natural gas left in the earth.
"CNN has a good roundup of Vista's long development history" links to CNET, and doesn't have a history of what became Vista.
By the time it costs $300 to catch a can of tuna, it'll be too late.
I know! What we really oughta do is tie together the heat exxchanger under the road and the line of solar panels along the side with batteries and thermal storage so when it snows, we can pump the stored energy into the road to melt the snow.
Seriously, I've worked on several homes with gas-fired boilers where the biggest load on the boilers was for snow melt of the driveway and sidewalks. Seems to me like an awful waste compared to hiring someone to plow or shovel.
They said they use the MS Windows machines to test compatibility issues, doesn't sound like they could get rid of them completely, as long as there's a need to connect iPods to macines with MS OSs.
CFC production has only been recently ended. CFC use is still widespread in systems made before the ban on new CFC systems went into effect. Every one of those installations has the potential to release CFCs.
HCFC production has not yet been phased out, and though those chemicals are not considered to be as destructive to the ozone, they still contribute to ozone depletion.
CFCs and HCFCs are very stable, and it will be decades before the amount already in the stratosphere, let alone ongoing releases, declines enough to have only a negligible effect on the ozone.
Perhaps he meant NASA's predecessor NACA: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Advisory_Com mittee_for_Aeronautics
As far as I know, the undos do not work across sessions. But once when I was playing with adding graphics to a small .doc, I noticed that the file size got humongous (970k for 2 or 3 pages), and stayed that way even though I had deleted all the jpgs from the document. I'm guessing it saved the graphics in the undo/redo queue. But after saving and opening again the next day, the file stayed huge even though the undo button was greyed out. YMMV, though, every version of MSWord probably handles it a little differently.
You might think it's not tracking changes, but internally it still may be. I had a two page document that I played around with; adding and deleting jpgs, moving them around, trying to figure out how to get the required layout. At the end I deleted all the pics and saved. The doc was 900KB! Even after reopening, modifying quite a bit and saving it, it stayed huge. I'm guessing that it was saving the jpgs in the undo queue, even when they were no longer available to undo from the undo button.