bwahaha.. yes, because using someone else's SDK is "implementing the standard".
Maybe not, but it resolves a related point other posters were talking about: requiring at least 2 programs from different vendors that can read the data format.
If the SDK lets Windows programmers write one-line "ReadOOXMLDoc32(hMyDoc);"-style perfect implementations of the standard, great. We'll see a lot of programs that can read OOXML then.
Implementing it from scratch? I'm guessing nigh-impossible. But, you don't have to if you're just trying to get a second program to read an OOXML file.
Congress exempts itself from a lot of laws - link. Although the house.gov site puts a positive spin on this (news at 11), they're exempt from minimum wage, OSHA, the Freedom Of Information Act (FOIA), and a lot of other ones.
Funny, isn't it? Congress is exempt from nearly all provisions of the "Ethics in Government Act of 1978."
Interesting. I've managed to avoid the mandatory "Microsoft Office 101" classes because of crap like they put you through.
But, if it helps, there's the "switch rows/columns" button on the design tab. If you think of the actual in-spreadsheet chart as your "preview" it's mostly the same.
I like it, and like beating people over the head with it. I find it a lot more intuitive - the design/layout/format tabs don't appear if you don't have a chart, and do appear when you do, for example. I personally don't feel the learning curve is that steep, but if 2003 works for you, you shouldn't have to keep learning a new version "just because."
It shouldn't take 15 or 20 minutes to make a chart in Excel 2007.
Highlight your data. As I'm guessing you're aware of, all the different chart types have their own button under the "Insert" tab of the ribbon. Want a bar graph? Highlight your data and click the "Bar" button. You're done! 2 minutes => 1 mouse click.
Need more nitpicking stuff? It already brought you over to the "design" tab. Pick out colors, choose what kind of legend and axis labeling you need, add error bars... They're all hidden behind one or two mouse clicks.
I'm curious... Was there something in the chart wizard that you simply can't do now? I hated it because 9 times out of 10 I really didn't care about all the screens it made you answer to, "like minor X and Y axis labels."
That's true - and I don't quite buy the whole "dark fiber" conspiracy stuff, either.
But, I'm guessing it's easier to add another fiber line down the backbone. Easier to run a few sets of fiber between peering points or another backbone than it is to run fiber everywhere there's a telephone line.
I never knew about "PivotTables" in Excel until it was the first button under the "insert" tab. Turns out they're kinda the biggest reason to use Excel. (Granted, I don't use it much.
Ditto for automatically captioning pictures with "Figure x" in Word - I never knew it was there until it popped up in a context menu one day as I was preparing a lab report.
I also knew Word had some kind of revision control - "That's when you double-click the wrong button and all the text shows up red, right?" - but I didn't know you could do nifty things like accept/reject changes until they had their own buttons under the "review" tab.
There are a few more things that I forget. But, I don't do much word processing, and never did know much about the features Word has (had) - until they were so helpfully arranged that I might see them. I'm sure other people feel the same way - Heyyyy, didja know they added pivot tables in the new Excel?
Office 2007 (with the "ribbon") is the biggest thing to happen to the Office suite since Windows 95. Quit whining that they moved the buttons around just that tiny little bit - I found features and said "Oh, wow! I wish that was in other versions of Office, too!" only to realize that it was - I just couldn't find it until now.
When you start Powerpoint (or any part of Office 2007) for the first time, the little round Office logo in the top left will glow and a pop up will tell you "Here is where the Save As button is!"
Couldn't find the "new slide" button? When you start PowerPoint, the ribbon will be on the "home" tab. There's a giant button that says "new slide."
Same thing for center-aligning text. Even with the ribbon, it's the same icon, in the same spot, as every other version of Office since they went to a GUI.
Save as? Big round button. Center align? Hasn't moved. New slide? Big button labeled "new slide." Hardly "logic-killing" or "brain-damaging." And, you can always have PowerPoint or Office save things as PDFs or JPEGs or bitmaps or what have you, and Microsoft Word has supported RTF at least since Windows 3.11.
And, if it's what your employer expects you to use, and gives it to you freely, suck it up. The learning curve really isn't that steep.
What would be nice is a law making it illegal for municipalities to grant the infamous "last mile" monopoles to telephone and cable companies.
In my ideal little fantasy world, it would also be nice if we stopped obsessing over the "natural monopoly" aspects of line ownage. We'd have more infrastructure than we'd know what to do with if we let AT&T, Comcast, etc. each install their own lines rather than forcing them to share. (Granted, telephone poles having 6 or 7 different phone lines on them sounds redundant, but part of the capacity problem would be solved.)
Well, you see, I'm for the "censorship" of spam. Spammers are a minority of users I'd like to see disenfranchised of everything but breathing. Well, maybe that too.
Saying that a spam filter is censorship is exactly like saying arresting someone for murder is "censorship." They're both non-sequitors, IMHO, TUIA (To Use an Internet Acronym>)
If Office Professional Kittens Edition 2007 x64.NET (TM) (R) (C) costs me $400, but Office Rental 2009 is $100 a year, then I'd go with "Office Rental 2009." Especially if it included "Office Rental Supreme Edition 2011" when it came out.
If it's a "we're going to charge you $400 a year, every year, and then report you to credit agencies" then, no. Screw you, Microsoft.
Also - what's to keep them from including a year subscription with new computers? It would be just like commercial virus scanners.
Just to nitpick, the words for "kill" and "murder" in Hebrew differ only in the vowels used. Coincidentally, vowels are rarely (never?) written in Biblical Hebrew.
So, we'll never know if the commandment was "thou shalt not kill" or "thou shalt not murder." But, since later edicts in that book involve stoning people, I'm guessing it was the "murder" one.
I guess, as long as a wayward piece of junk doesn't fall on some prized property of (America|Russia). If it takes out some villager in Africa?
You think any piece of junk is going to survive re-entry?
A few pieces must; how often do you think it happens?
Suppose that by some miracle, a piece of space junk survives falling several miles through the atmosphere. Does water cover most of our planet, or does Africa cover most of our planet?
Such inflammatory language over a problem that doesn't exist. If I say I still don't think it's worth the effort, will you accuse me of bigotry?
Great idea. Let's jail people for technical failures.
Let's see... electricity demand's higher than it's ever been in history. What can we do?
Build a new plant? No, no, no. Coal pollutes a lot, oil pollutes as much and is too pricey anyway, nuclear is too dangerous, wind turbines don't produce enough power and spread a highly contagious form of "not-in-my-backyard-itis" and solar is impractical for anything other than providing a house with hot water.
Can we expand an existing plant? There's less red tape here, but most plants have been expanded as much as is practical already.
Can we get people to use less electricity? Nope. You can't raise rates, and of course you can't just cut off service.
So... we get rolling blackouts. We can't make as much electricity as what people are using.
And we jail people for this? And you want investors, the people providing the money to expand the power grid, to go to jail, too?
I hope you're powering your terminal with a crank right now. If not, you will be soon.
Interesting. And here in Wisconsin, WPS/"WE" energies/whatever they are now is providing power cheaper public utilities elsewhere.
I suppose another factor in cost would include how much capacity the plant needs to maintain - if you only serve 80,000 people, I would imagine you would need a smaller, less maintenance-intensive plant.
Now, in a competitive world, the surrounding towns would be able to buy their power from your plant.
I am a student at St. Norbert College, a Catholic liberal arts school. (Though there's almost as many Lutherans as Catholics, but that's another "problem." ^.^)
Fairly recently, their computer science program was split from the math department - you can actually major in computer science now, rather than getting a math major with a compsci concentration.
But, the coursework is impressively rigorous. The CS101 class is essentially "hello world" in C++. The 200 level classes are theory - data structures, algorithm efficiency, event and object-oriented programming, etc. - implemented in C++. 300 level courses are machine architecture - learn assembly language! - set theory, and other things. The required course in programming languages exposes people to a few things like functional languages, writing your own compiler, etc.
Even though one of my classes only had four (!) people in it, the coursework here is a lot more rigorous and thorough than a lot of schools I've seen - despite the "liberal arts" label. See if you can shadow a few classes for a day, look at the syllabuses, etc. It seems a lot of "technical schools" just aren't anymore.
There really are no alternative to public roads. Private roads, as in "500 evil big business companies neglecting 500 duplicate roads to everywhere and nowhere" is a strawman favored for those who oppose private anything.
The private alternative to public roads is private maintenance of public roads. There are dozens of construction companies listed in my local yellow pages alone. It took at least 14 years for my city to fill a large pothole (it was there since before I was born) despite it being off a main thoroughfair. I'm pretty sure ABC Building Co. or ZZ Thomlinson Inc. could've done as good a job or better.
Why not have a system where individual citizens can create issue tickets - "there's a car-sized pothole in the middle of x street!" or "we should really have another lane here!" - private companies can bid on them, and a municipal committee accepts or rejects the bids?
Private schools can easily provide access that is "as fair and public" as public school. Just give them the same tax dollars public schools are given - it's called a "voucher program."
What say Public School #123 educates at an average cost of $5687 a head. Give every student a $5687 coupon they can apply towards public or private school tuition. That simple - in fact, more people would have more access to more schools.
Now, I'd like you to cite an example where government services anywhere have outperformed any competitive, private-sector service. Amtrak would be a "great" place to start.
The idea of the laffer curve is that if you are beyond it's peak, lowering tax rates can increase government revenue. You are correct in saying that we have no way of knowing where we are on that curve, but that's true of most variables in economic models; we guess at or calculate their values from the data we have. It's just one way to explain how more taxes were collected even though the rate was cut.
The Laffer Curve has little to do with the law of diminishing returns; it does not predict that the same marginal increase in tax rates will always result in less taxes collected.
Also, the graph you linked to is "receipts as a percentage of GDP." The idea behind the tax cuts was to raise GDP; the extra receipts were a nice side effect.
Educate myself? How rude. You fail reading comprehension.
But, the long string of semicolons is separating a list of lists. He describes in comma-delimited clauses each aspect of the cable, and separates the clauses themselves with semicolons.
I love what I'm reading here. Simple math? Language comprehension? I hope they don't decide to use "captchas" for the Diebold^Welectronic vocting we'll all be doing in a few years...
How about the fact that federal receipts went up after the Bush tax cuts? It's called the Laffer curve.
Now, if you subscribe to Keynesian economics, you could argue that an increase in government spending by the same amount would have been more effective than cutting taxes because that multiplier is higher than the tax multiplier.
But, it's really time for the "tax cuts for the rich" propaganda to stop. Small businesses (LLC-types) are taxed as if they were individuals. If you want economic growth to happen from small business, you have to stop taxing the $200k income bracket to death. A lot of the "people" who fall in there are mom and pop shops.
Besides, nobody's moving the Alternative Minimum Tax. With any luck and present inflation, soon nearly everyone will be taxed under the AMT. This means that we'll have a de facto flat tax on income.
Slashdot Mirror
bwahaha.. yes, because using someone else's SDK is "implementing the standard".
Maybe not, but it resolves a related point other posters were talking about: requiring at least 2 programs from different vendors that can read the data format.
If the SDK lets Windows programmers write one-line "ReadOOXMLDoc32(hMyDoc);"-style perfect implementations of the standard, great. We'll see a lot of programs that can read OOXML then.
Implementing it from scratch? I'm guessing nigh-impossible. But, you don't have to if you're just trying to get a second program to read an OOXML file.
Congress exempts itself from a lot of laws - link. Although the house.gov site puts a positive spin on this (news at 11), they're exempt from minimum wage, OSHA, the Freedom Of Information Act (FOIA), and a lot of other ones.
Funny, isn't it? Congress is exempt from nearly all provisions of the "Ethics in Government Act of 1978."
Interesting. I've managed to avoid the mandatory "Microsoft Office 101" classes because of crap like they put you through.
But, if it helps, there's the "switch rows/columns" button on the design tab. If you think of the actual in-spreadsheet chart as your "preview" it's mostly the same.
I like it, and like beating people over the head with it. I find it a lot more intuitive - the design/layout/format tabs don't appear if you don't have a chart, and do appear when you do, for example. I personally don't feel the learning curve is that steep, but if 2003 works for you, you shouldn't have to keep learning a new version "just because."
It shouldn't take 15 or 20 minutes to make a chart in Excel 2007.
Highlight your data. As I'm guessing you're aware of, all the different chart types have their own button under the "Insert" tab of the ribbon. Want a bar graph? Highlight your data and click the "Bar" button. You're done! 2 minutes => 1 mouse click.
Need more nitpicking stuff? It already brought you over to the "design" tab. Pick out colors, choose what kind of legend and axis labeling you need, add error bars... They're all hidden behind one or two mouse clicks.
I'm curious... Was there something in the chart wizard that you simply can't do now? I hated it because 9 times out of 10 I really didn't care about all the screens it made you answer to, "like minor X and Y axis labels."
That's true - and I don't quite buy the whole "dark fiber" conspiracy stuff, either.
But, I'm guessing it's easier to add another fiber line down the backbone. Easier to run a few sets of fiber between peering points or another backbone than it is to run fiber everywhere there's a telephone line.
I never knew about "PivotTables" in Excel until it was the first button under the "insert" tab. Turns out they're kinda the biggest reason to use Excel. (Granted, I don't use it much.
Ditto for automatically captioning pictures with "Figure x" in Word - I never knew it was there until it popped up in a context menu one day as I was preparing a lab report.
I also knew Word had some kind of revision control - "That's when you double-click the wrong button and all the text shows up red, right?" - but I didn't know you could do nifty things like accept/reject changes until they had their own buttons under the "review" tab.
There are a few more things that I forget. But, I don't do much word processing, and never did know much about the features Word has (had) - until they were so helpfully arranged that I might see them. I'm sure other people feel the same way - Heyyyy, didja know they added pivot tables in the new Excel?
Office 2007 (with the "ribbon") is the biggest thing to happen to the Office suite since Windows 95. Quit whining that they moved the buttons around just that tiny little bit - I found features and said "Oh, wow! I wish that was in other versions of Office, too!" only to realize that it was - I just couldn't find it until now.
When you start Powerpoint (or any part of Office 2007) for the first time, the little round Office logo in the top left will glow and a pop up will tell you "Here is where the Save As button is!"
Couldn't find the "new slide" button? When you start PowerPoint, the ribbon will be on the "home" tab. There's a giant button that says "new slide."
Same thing for center-aligning text. Even with the ribbon, it's the same icon, in the same spot, as every other version of Office since they went to a GUI.
Save as? Big round button. Center align? Hasn't moved. New slide? Big button labeled "new slide." Hardly "logic-killing" or "brain-damaging." And, you can always have PowerPoint or Office save things as PDFs or JPEGs or bitmaps or what have you, and Microsoft Word has supported RTF at least since Windows 3.11.
And, if it's what your employer expects you to use, and gives it to you freely, suck it up. The learning curve really isn't that steep.
Great Grandparent: How can I get the old Slashdot back?
Grandparent: Disable Javascript. All the old behaviour comes back.
Parent AC: Somehow your attempt to be helpful is "blatently obvious" and irrelevant.
What would be nice is a law making it illegal for municipalities to grant the infamous "last mile" monopoles to telephone and cable companies.
In my ideal little fantasy world, it would also be nice if we stopped obsessing over the "natural monopoly" aspects of line ownage. We'd have more infrastructure than we'd know what to do with if we let AT&T, Comcast, etc. each install their own lines rather than forcing them to share. (Granted, telephone poles having 6 or 7 different phone lines on them sounds redundant, but part of the capacity problem would be solved.)
Well, you see, I'm for the "censorship" of spam. Spammers are a minority of users I'd like to see disenfranchised of everything but breathing. Well, maybe that too.
Saying that a spam filter is censorship is exactly like saying arresting someone for murder is "censorship." They're both non-sequitors, IMHO, TUIA (To Use an Internet Acronym>)
For me, it all depends on pricing.
If Office Professional Kittens Edition 2007 x64 .NET (TM) (R) (C) costs me $400, but Office Rental 2009 is $100 a year, then I'd go with "Office Rental 2009." Especially if it included "Office Rental Supreme Edition 2011" when it came out.
If it's a "we're going to charge you $400 a year, every year, and then report you to credit agencies" then, no. Screw you, Microsoft.
Also - what's to keep them from including a year subscription with new computers? It would be just like commercial virus scanners.
Just to nitpick, the words for "kill" and "murder" in Hebrew differ only in the vowels used. Coincidentally, vowels are rarely (never?) written in Biblical Hebrew.
So, we'll never know if the commandment was "thou shalt not kill" or "thou shalt not murder." But, since later edicts in that book involve stoning people, I'm guessing it was the "murder" one.
Are laws against murder "censorship" against "violent expression"?
Goatse = (attempted) eyeball murder.
I guess, as long as a wayward piece of junk doesn't fall on some prized property of (America|Russia). If it takes out some villager in Africa?
You think any piece of junk is going to survive re-entry?
A few pieces must; how often do you think it happens?
Suppose that by some miracle, a piece of space junk survives falling several miles through the atmosphere. Does water cover most of our planet, or does Africa cover most of our planet?
Such inflammatory language over a problem that doesn't exist. If I say I still don't think it's worth the effort, will you accuse me of bigotry?
Great idea. Let's jail people for technical failures.
Let's see... electricity demand's higher than it's ever been in history. What can we do?
Build a new plant? No, no, no. Coal pollutes a lot, oil pollutes as much and is too pricey anyway, nuclear is too dangerous, wind turbines don't produce enough power and spread a highly contagious form of "not-in-my-backyard-itis" and solar is impractical for anything other than providing a house with hot water.
Can we expand an existing plant? There's less red tape here, but most plants have been expanded as much as is practical already.
Can we get people to use less electricity? Nope. You can't raise rates, and of course you can't just cut off service.
So... we get rolling blackouts. We can't make as much electricity as what people are using.
And we jail people for this? And you want investors, the people providing the money to expand the power grid, to go to jail, too?
I hope you're powering your terminal with a crank right now. If not, you will be soon.
Interesting. And here in Wisconsin, WPS/"WE" energies/whatever they are now is providing power cheaper public utilities elsewhere.
I suppose another factor in cost would include how much capacity the plant needs to maintain - if you only serve 80,000 people, I would imagine you would need a smaller, less maintenance-intensive plant.
Now, in a competitive world, the surrounding towns would be able to buy their power from your plant.
I am a student at St. Norbert College, a Catholic liberal arts school. (Though there's almost as many Lutherans as Catholics, but that's another "problem." ^.^)
Fairly recently, their computer science program was split from the math department - you can actually major in computer science now, rather than getting a math major with a compsci concentration.
But, the coursework is impressively rigorous. The CS101 class is essentially "hello world" in C++. The 200 level classes are theory - data structures, algorithm efficiency, event and object-oriented programming, etc. - implemented in C++. 300 level courses are machine architecture - learn assembly language! - set theory, and other things. The required course in programming languages exposes people to a few things like functional languages, writing your own compiler, etc.
Even though one of my classes only had four (!) people in it, the coursework here is a lot more rigorous and thorough than a lot of schools I've seen - despite the "liberal arts" label. See if you can shadow a few classes for a day, look at the syllabuses, etc. It seems a lot of "technical schools" just aren't anymore.
There really are no alternative to public roads. Private roads, as in "500 evil big business companies neglecting 500 duplicate roads to everywhere and nowhere" is a strawman favored for those who oppose private anything.
The private alternative to public roads is private maintenance of public roads. There are dozens of construction companies listed in my local yellow pages alone. It took at least 14 years for my city to fill a large pothole (it was there since before I was born) despite it being off a main thoroughfair. I'm pretty sure ABC Building Co. or ZZ Thomlinson Inc. could've done as good a job or better.
Why not have a system where individual citizens can create issue tickets - "there's a car-sized pothole in the middle of x street!" or "we should really have another lane here!" - private companies can bid on them, and a municipal committee accepts or rejects the bids?
Private schools can easily provide access that is "as fair and public" as public school. Just give them the same tax dollars public schools are given - it's called a "voucher program."
What say Public School #123 educates at an average cost of $5687 a head. Give every student a $5687 coupon they can apply towards public or private school tuition. That simple - in fact, more people would have more access to more schools.
Now, I'd like you to cite an example where government services anywhere have outperformed any competitive, private-sector service. Amtrak would be a "great" place to start.
The idea of the laffer curve is that if you are beyond it's peak, lowering tax rates can increase government revenue. You are correct in saying that we have no way of knowing where we are on that curve, but that's true of most variables in economic models; we guess at or calculate their values from the data we have. It's just one way to explain how more taxes were collected even though the rate was cut.
The Laffer Curve has little to do with the law of diminishing returns; it does not predict that the same marginal increase in tax rates will always result in less taxes collected.
Also, the graph you linked to is "receipts as a percentage of GDP." The idea behind the tax cuts was to raise GDP; the extra receipts were a nice side effect.
Educate myself? How rude. You fail reading comprehension.
Ouch, mods.
But, the long string of semicolons is separating a list of lists. He describes in comma-delimited clauses each aspect of the cable, and separates the clauses themselves with semicolons.
I love what I'm reading here. Simple math? Language comprehension? I hope they don't decide to use "captchas" for the Diebold^Welectronic vocting we'll all be doing in a few years...
How about the fact that federal receipts went up after the Bush tax cuts? It's called the Laffer curve.
Now, if you subscribe to Keynesian economics, you could argue that an increase in government spending by the same amount would have been more effective than cutting taxes because that multiplier is higher than the tax multiplier.
But, it's really time for the "tax cuts for the rich" propaganda to stop. Small businesses (LLC-types) are taxed as if they were individuals. If you want economic growth to happen from small business, you have to stop taxing the $200k income bracket to death. A lot of the "people" who fall in there are mom and pop shops.
Besides, nobody's moving the Alternative Minimum Tax. With any luck and present inflation, soon nearly everyone will be taxed under the AMT. This means that we'll have a de facto flat tax on income.
And 50% of them can be made to prove anything.
Absolutely. Anything.
Very good point, so MS "forces" IE/MediaPlayer/Whathaveyou on you, Apple "forces" you to their hardware. Which is worse?
They also "force" use to use iLife, Safari, etc. So with Mac, you've got hardware and software shoved down your throat.
Of course, that's a "feature" of the Macs, evidently. MacBooks are really just rebranded first-generation video iPods.
Actually, I found a picture of the car here
It looks like a full-featured car, although there are unresolved ethical problems with such a model.