Actually, flash storage has been growing faster than HD for the past few years. About 6-7 years ago, a big HD would 80 GB, while a big flash card would be 32 MB, i.e. a ratio of about 2500. Now, a big HD is 500 GB and a big flash card is 16 GB, which means the ratio is more around 30. Basically, flash has been growing nearly 100 times faster. If it keeps doing that (I've no idea whether it will), flash storage will be bigger then HD in about 5 years.
While it *might* be possible to recover a Gaussian blurred image, it wouldn't be possible to do anything if the image was blurred with a sinc function. Even adding a tiny bit of noise after the Gaussian blur would most likely prevent reconstruction (because any attempt at deconvolution would amplify the noise).
That would change the law to award patents to the first who apply for a patent, rather than the first to invent.
I understand how this may sound bad, but assuming you think patents are a good idea (I don't when it comes to software), first to file is the only thing that makes sense. Otherwise, you automatically end up in court trying to prove you invented the thing first. Can you even imagine how hard (and lawyer-intensive) it must to actually prove when you invented something? So in (crystal ball) theory, "first to invent" makes sense, but in practice, it's "first to file" that makes sense.
Don't laugh. I had a salesman trying to tell me that I needed a high-end cable to carry an spdif audio signal. Otherwise, the cheap cable wouldn't sound as "rich" (I think he was confusing rich sound with rich store owner).
I'm biased because I'm one of the authors, but you may want to have a look at FlowDesigner and RobotFlow. It's a visual development for plugging blocks together and we've used it to control mobile robots and interface with sensors and actuators.
You forget there's two clocks. There's the machine's clock, which you can easily manipulate, but there's also the soundcard clock -- which you can't manipulate without your stuff sounding strange, and then there's the NTP clock, which you can't manipulate at all. And significant difference between all these clocks and a VM is detected. So basically, slowing down everything equally or skewing the local clock isn't an option.
As we know, There are known knowns. There are things we know we know. We also know There are known unknowns. That is to say We know there are some things We do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns, The ones we don't know We don't know. -- Rumsfeld
Currency "fluctuation", a.k.a. inflation, may raise this by $5 tops. Currency is not to blame for the constant increase of the price... and let's not kid ourselves, they've been raising the price since the start of the project.
Currency fluctuation != inflation. Did you know the US dollar lost about 35% of its value when compared to the Canadian dollar in the past 5 years? Same happened compared to other currencies. That's what makes the US price go up -- even though it's irrelevant because the laptops are sold in other countries.
Some say this could even lead to the abandonment of either string theory or inflation
So if the facts don't match the theory, just abandon the facts. Sounds like a neat idea. It should at least make it *much* easier to come up with a "theory of everything".
I can explain the date situation to you if you want. It is a bit complicated and most people have no idea of why this is decision is important.
I personally do not care enough on that one, just thinking that it's bit stupid that ISO would be saying "here's how you handle dates" and later say "but in a text document, you actually do it differently".
As for SVG, I do understand the frustration around it, but for the longest time those "in the known" were pretty unhappy with the direction that SVG took.
SVG may have its flaws, but at least it was agreed on by different people/orgs. Again, I don't see the point in redefining a new standard (on which nobody except MS has any input) within a new text document standard.
I should add that Math people dislike MathML anyways, and they would much rather use TeX.
I have no opinion on MathML anyway (and do use LaTeX for 99% of what I write, OO.o for the rest), but again if ISO bothers creating a standard for something, it should at least make use of it.
I agree that we have a last resort with ODF "Look it up in OpenOffice", but if "look it up" is good enough, does that not defeat the purpose of documenting ODF in the first place? The idea of a standard was so others could interop without having to sort through 8 to 9 million lines of code. And your average guy that was to generate some ODF or OOXML will not really have the skills to read through all that C++. My guess is that most people would write a file in either OOo or MSO save the file and open it up in an editor to see what the thing looks like and generate with a bunch of print statements what they want. To this crowd "get the source" is probably not very useful.
I agree that even ODF should define everything in the document instead of having it in the code. That being said, the information still exists in a form that is publicly accessible. Any person with enough time and skills can implement those app-specific features. That is not the case with OOXML. MS can (and does) hide the format and the only hope to know how it works is reverse-engineering. This is much harder (and prone to legal trouble depending on how you do it) than looking at the OO.o source code. And *even* if you manage to reverse engineer the format to a point where it works flawlessly with 100% of the files you've seen (unlikely), you're still left with two problems:
1) You'll never know for sure your converter works on strange files you may not have seen (thus opening up to FUD of the kind "do you really *trust* this app with your legal documents") 2) For backward compatibility reasons, it is common to first include features only in the "decoder" for a format and then only support them later on the "encoder" side. That means that there are certain features that could be already in there, but that you will never actually see in a file (i.e. can't reverse engineer) until a new version of MS Office decides to actually generate files that use it.
Overall, it's really the "read the MS Office source code and you'll get it right" that makes OOXML completely unacceptable for me. And it would still be unacceptable no matter how beautiful the other parts are. A standard that nobody except one company has any chance of supporting perfectly is just not a standard. It's a proprietary format that pretends to be open.
You have chosen to introduce a new topic: should it become a standard? And should it be a rubber-stamp standard? Well, I do not know the answers to that. In fact, am of the opinion that most standards in the "big boys" space are tools to club your opponent ("ISO standard: check!").
It's unfortunately becoming a bit of that but it doesn't have to be. I believe most of the IETF and W3C standards are fine with that respect. Same for ISO actually. And personally, I won't mind if the "big boys" club their opponents by using open standards. I do mind if they introduce pseudo-standards that leave enough unknown to make sure they're the only ones being able to actually implement the thing.
In particular the criticism from Groklaw is partisan, a guy on Brian Jones' blog tried to correct various statements made on the Groklaw document and he claims that his account was removed.
Partisan or now, most of what I saw there was looked like real problems.
Am not sure that it "contradicts" it just does not support every other possible standard. It has its own thing for Math instead of MathML, big deal.
Well (from the document again), they use incorrect dates (the 1900 stuff) just to be compatible with "legacy software" and completely ignore SVG, MathML and other stuff. I mean, what's the point of having standards for that if every new thing ignores it.
So does ODF (if you are referring to the capability of embedding OLE objects for example, or Windows Metafiles, they are supported in both products, and neither one has full specifications for them).
I'm not sure about what ODF does, but in the worst case, if something's application-specific in ODF, you look it up in the OO.o source code and you can at least have a chance to understand how it's done. For things that are application-specific in OOXML, you're pretty much have to wait until Microsoft open's up the Office source code (I'm sure that'll happen any day now).
I will agree with you that having two is suboptimal, but we have to support them both *anyways*, so its not like its a big deal.
Can you remind me what is the point of standards bodies again? Rubber-stamping any de facto standard because "we have to support it anyways"? I don't think so.
I'm sorry, but you can't dismiss all criticism of OOXML as pedants/FUD/misinformed and your post above attacks the messenger a lot more than the message. How about you comment on well formulated objections such as this one on grokdoc? Some are very specific (narrow) technical aspects , while others are much more fundamental, like:
- Contradicts numerous international standards - Relies on undisclosed information (e.g. application-defined behaviors)
Not to mention the obvious "why do we need a second standard in the first place?", since ODF is already an ISO standard (too many standards is like no standard at all).
That's definitely free speech, pretty much in every vaguely democratic country.
I think white/black/arab/jewish/whatever people are inferior to my people, and unfit to live. -- free (hate) speech, expect to have a close eye on you
That is not free speech in many countries even though it probably is in the US. Personally, this is close to where I would draw the line so whether I'd consider it free speech would mostly depend on the context where it is said.
I have a bomb, I'm going to kill you all. -- free speech, also probable cause for search and seizure
This is not free speech anywhere in the world I believe. Even in the US, it would be considered a death threat and it is criminal even if you don't have anything.
The holocaust never happened -- free (stupid) speech
I would consider that as "free (stupid) speech", but in many European countries (e.g. France and Germany I believe), it is actually illegal to say that.
Actually, the issue I like best is the Armenian genocide. I think it's now illegal in France to deny it, but in Turkey it's illegal to say it happens. That can become quite interesting...
Only when you do the proverbial "fire in crowded theater" one that puts people at physical risk, or inciting a riot, etc. is it outlawed.
See, "inciting a riot" is just one step further on the line that goes from "I don't like what XYZ do" to "We should kill all XYZ". And it's not only what is said, how the context (e.g. when there's a genocide about to happen). I tend to disagree with both Europe (too restrictive) and the US (not enough) as to where to draw the line. IMO, things like holocaust denial, while utterly stupid, should not be be considered criminal (as it is in many European countries). OTOH, inciting racial (or otherwise) violence shouldn't be permitted (as it is in the US).
Shouldn't this article be under the censorship icon? That's what we're talking about, isn't it?
No. Free speech doesn't mean you're free to say whatever you like with no consequence. There are many things that do not (and should not) fall under free speech: * "Hey, I've got a bomb in my luggage" (said in an airport) * Defamation (for a reasonable definition of the term) * Hate speech ("We should kill all ") *...
Of course, it's not trivial to have a good balance between what is and isn't allowed (e.g. I think "I don't like what XYZ do" is OK, while "We should kill all XYZ" isn't but in the middle, it gets quite vague).
Slashdot Mirror
My data is approximate (from memory), but it definitely shows a trend. I'm hoping that trend will continue.
Actually, flash storage has been growing faster than HD for the past few years. About 6-7 years ago, a big HD would 80 GB, while a big flash card would be 32 MB, i.e. a ratio of about 2500. Now, a big HD is 500 GB and a big flash card is 16 GB, which means the ratio is more around 30. Basically, flash has been growing nearly 100 times faster. If it keeps doing that (I've no idea whether it will), flash storage will be bigger then HD in about 5 years.
I had no idea kword could open PDF files. That's really cool. Thanks for pointing that out.
While it *might* be possible to recover a Gaussian blurred image, it wouldn't be possible to do anything if the image was blurred with a sinc function. Even adding a tiny bit of noise after the Gaussian blur would most likely prevent reconstruction (because any attempt at deconvolution would amplify the noise).
When MS drops to less than 20% market share, I will also stop asking to unbundle their OS.
How about the RIAA lawyer gets killed no matter what the outcome is? Now *that* would help cut down on stupid lawsuits.
That would change the law to award patents to the first who apply for a patent, rather than the first to invent.
I understand how this may sound bad, but assuming you think patents are a good idea (I don't when it comes to software), first to file is the only thing that makes sense. Otherwise, you automatically end up in court trying to prove you invented the thing first. Can you even imagine how hard (and lawyer-intensive) it must to actually prove when you invented something? So in (crystal ball) theory, "first to invent" makes sense, but in practice, it's "first to file" that makes sense.
Don't laugh. I had a salesman trying to tell me that I needed a high-end cable to carry an spdif audio signal. Otherwise, the cheap cable wouldn't sound as "rich" (I think he was confusing rich sound with rich store owner).
I'm biased because I'm one of the authors, but you may want to have a look at FlowDesigner and RobotFlow. It's a visual development for plugging blocks together and we've used it to control mobile robots and interface with sensors and actuators.
So much for using dummies in the front seat.
Of course. Now, you'll have heated dummies.
You forget there's two clocks. There's the machine's clock, which you can easily manipulate, but there's also the soundcard clock -- which you can't manipulate without your stuff sounding strange, and then there's the NTP clock, which you can't manipulate at all. And significant difference between all these clocks and a VM is detected. So basically, slowing down everything equally or skewing the local clock isn't an option.
I suppose you've got two antennas in your backyard that constantly move to track satellites, right?
As we know,
There are known knowns.
There are things we know we know.
We also know
There are known unknowns.
That is to say
We know there are some things
We do not know.
But there are also unknown unknowns,
The ones we don't know
We don't know.
-- Rumsfeld
It turns out that water is pretty slippery stuff
:-)
Agreed. Especially when frozen
Currency "fluctuation", a.k.a. inflation, may raise this by $5 tops. Currency is not to blame for the constant increase of the price ... and let's not kid ourselves, they've been raising the price since the start of the project.
Currency fluctuation != inflation. Did you know the US dollar lost about 35% of its value when compared to the Canadian dollar in the past 5 years? Same happened compared to other currencies. That's what makes the US price go up -- even though it's irrelevant because the laptops are sold in other countries.
It will be some mixture of H2O, H+ and O-- ions.
I really doubt you'll see O-- ions in water. H2O actually splits into H+ and OH- and the H+ often ends up (IIRC) forming an H3O+ ion.
In the weak sense I guess. Feel free to substitute "observation". In any case, it sounds bad to me (hopefully it's just bad reporting).
Some say this could even lead to the abandonment of either string theory or inflation
So if the facts don't match the theory, just abandon the facts. Sounds like a neat idea. It should at least make it *much* easier to come up with a "theory of everything".
Next time I guess you'll be taking your business elsewhere, I bet? So, they are the ones who goofed up.
So I sell you a laptop. You pay me. I don't send you the laptop. You take your business elsewhere. Sounds like a good deal?
I can explain the date situation to you if you want. It is a bit complicated and most people have no idea of why this is decision is important.
I personally do not care enough on that one, just thinking that it's bit stupid that ISO would be saying "here's how you handle dates" and later say "but in a text document, you actually do it differently".
As for SVG, I do understand the frustration around it, but for the longest time those "in the known" were pretty unhappy with the direction that SVG took.
SVG may have its flaws, but at least it was agreed on by different people/orgs. Again, I don't see the point in redefining a new standard (on which nobody except MS has any input) within a new text document standard.
I should add that Math people dislike MathML anyways, and they would much rather use TeX.
I have no opinion on MathML anyway (and do use LaTeX for 99% of what I write, OO.o for the rest), but again if ISO bothers creating a standard for something, it should at least make use of it.
I agree that we have a last resort with ODF "Look it up in OpenOffice", but if "look it up" is good enough, does that not defeat the purpose of documenting ODF in the first place? The idea of a standard was so others could interop without having to sort through 8 to 9 million lines of code. And your average guy that was to generate some ODF or OOXML will not really have the skills to read through all that C++. My guess is that most people would write a file in either OOo or MSO save the file and open it up in an editor to see what the thing looks like and generate with a bunch of print statements what they want. To this crowd "get the source" is probably not very useful.
I agree that even ODF should define everything in the document instead of having it in the code. That being said, the information still exists in a form that is publicly accessible. Any person with enough time and skills can implement those app-specific features. That is not the case with OOXML. MS can (and does) hide the format and the only hope to know how it works is reverse-engineering. This is much harder (and prone to legal trouble depending on how you do it) than looking at the OO.o source code. And *even* if you manage to reverse engineer the format to a point where it works flawlessly with 100% of the files you've seen (unlikely), you're still left with two problems:
1) You'll never know for sure your converter works on strange files you may not have seen (thus opening up to FUD of the kind "do you really *trust* this app with your legal documents")
2) For backward compatibility reasons, it is common to first include features only in the "decoder" for a format and then only support them later on the "encoder" side. That means that there are certain features that could be already in there, but that you will never actually see in a file (i.e. can't reverse engineer) until a new version of MS Office decides to actually generate files that use it.
Overall, it's really the "read the MS Office source code and you'll get it right" that makes OOXML completely unacceptable for me. And it would still be unacceptable no matter how beautiful the other parts are. A standard that nobody except one company has any chance of supporting perfectly is just not a standard. It's a proprietary format that pretends to be open.
You have chosen to introduce a new topic: should it become a standard? And should it be a rubber-stamp standard? Well, I do not know the answers to that. In fact, am of the opinion that most standards in the "big boys" space are tools to club your opponent ("ISO standard: check!").
It's unfortunately becoming a bit of that but it doesn't have to be. I believe most of the IETF and W3C standards are fine with that respect. Same for ISO actually. And personally, I won't mind if the "big boys" club their opponents by using open standards. I do mind if they introduce pseudo-standards that leave enough unknown to make sure they're the only ones being able to actually implement the thing.
In particular the criticism from Groklaw is partisan, a guy on Brian Jones' blog tried to correct various statements made on the Groklaw document and he claims that his account was removed.
Partisan or now, most of what I saw there was looked like real problems.
Am not sure that it "contradicts" it just does not support every other possible standard. It has its own thing for Math instead of MathML, big deal.
Well (from the document again), they use incorrect dates (the 1900 stuff) just to be compatible with "legacy software" and completely ignore SVG, MathML and other stuff. I mean, what's the point of having standards for that if every new thing ignores it.
So does ODF (if you are referring to the capability of embedding OLE objects for example, or Windows Metafiles, they are supported in both products, and neither one has full specifications for them).
I'm not sure about what ODF does, but in the worst case, if something's application-specific in ODF, you look it up in the OO.o source code and you can at least have a chance to understand how it's done. For things that are application-specific in OOXML, you're pretty much have to wait until Microsoft open's up the Office source code (I'm sure that'll happen any day now).
I will agree with you that having two is suboptimal, but we have to support them both *anyways*, so its not like its a big deal.
Can you remind me what is the point of standards bodies again? Rubber-stamping any de facto standard because "we have to support it anyways"? I don't think so.
Miguel,
I'm sorry, but you can't dismiss all criticism of OOXML as pedants/FUD/misinformed and your post above attacks the messenger a lot more than the message. How about you comment on well formulated objections such as this one on grokdoc? Some are very specific (narrow) technical aspects , while others are much more fundamental, like:
- Contradicts numerous international standards
- Relies on undisclosed information (e.g. application-defined behaviors)
Not to mention the obvious "why do we need a second standard in the first place?", since ODF is already an ISO standard (too many standards is like no standard at all).
I think you are stupid. -- free speech (true?)
That's definitely free speech, pretty much in every vaguely democratic country.
I think white/black/arab/jewish/whatever people are inferior to my people, and unfit to live. -- free (hate) speech, expect to have a close eye on you
That is not free speech in many countries even though it probably is in the US. Personally, this is close to where I would draw the line so whether I'd consider it free speech would mostly depend on the context where it is said.
I have a bomb, I'm going to kill you all. -- free speech, also probable cause for search and seizure
This is not free speech anywhere in the world I believe. Even in the US, it would be considered a death threat and it is criminal even if you don't have anything.
The holocaust never happened -- free (stupid) speech
I would consider that as "free (stupid) speech", but in many European countries (e.g. France and Germany I believe), it is actually illegal to say that.
Actually, the issue I like best is the Armenian genocide. I think it's now illegal in France to deny it, but in Turkey it's illegal to say it happens. That can become quite interesting...
Only when you do the proverbial "fire in crowded theater" one that puts people at physical risk, or inciting a riot, etc. is it outlawed.
See, "inciting a riot" is just one step further on the line that goes from "I don't like what XYZ do" to "We should kill all XYZ". And it's not only what is said, how the context (e.g. when there's a genocide about to happen). I tend to disagree with both Europe (too restrictive) and the US (not enough) as to where to draw the line. IMO, things like holocaust denial, while utterly stupid, should not be be considered criminal (as it is in many European countries). OTOH, inciting racial (or otherwise) violence shouldn't be permitted (as it is in the US).
Shouldn't this article be under the censorship icon? That's what we're talking about, isn't it?
...
No. Free speech doesn't mean you're free to say whatever you like with no consequence. There are many things that do not (and should not) fall under free speech:
* "Hey, I've got a bomb in my luggage" (said in an airport)
* Defamation (for a reasonable definition of the term)
* Hate speech ("We should kill all ")
*
Of course, it's not trivial to have a good balance between what is and isn't allowed (e.g. I think "I don't like what XYZ do" is OK, while "We should kill all XYZ" isn't but in the middle, it gets quite vague).