so basically: "you, the customer, have to buy a new version of our software every x years because we're going to change our software to make it necessary". i wonder what would happen if one company had a monopoly on cars and tank stations? would they regularly change tank station nozzles so as to force people to replace perfectly good cars?
don't use rtf. there are hundreds of different rtf extensions and no one knows which ones will be supported by microsoft in the future. if you want to store information for the foreseeable future you can use a standard ascii-text or utf8-text, tex, html or odt and that's about it.
the problem is, people bought a word processor from microsoft 10 years ago with the understanding that it will always be a word processor. if microsoft decides not to support the documents created by the word processor in newer versions, it should supply the paying customer with an update free-of-charge.
and yet a small private company consisting of tens of individuals (opera) can make a standards compliant browser while microsoft (60000 employees and 20 billion profit every year) cannot.
so i must conclude that either microsoft is incompetent or microsoft is deliberately not implementing the standards.
if the nyse wanted to do it like that, i'm sure they could hire ten linux kernel developers for a day to fix whatever bugs they find and it would still cost less than a support contract with hp/sun/ibm/microsoft.
no, no, no. microsoft came along and there was one more voice speaking its own language for anything other than ascii. people began to be able to talk when the internet took off.
theory and law mean pretty much the same thing to the scientist. some people say theory of gravitation, others say law of gravitation. you tend to say "law" if you quote a mathematical form of gravity and "theory" if you describe gravity using words. there just happens not to be a law of evolution because it's much easier to grasp as text than as a mathematical form ( genome_{n+1}=genome_{n}+%epsilon )
there has been a lot of research and mathematical modelling to estimate how many micro-evolutionary steps are necessary to make an eye, for example. if someone has done the same with the liver i don't know.
what you don't understand about punctuated equilibrium is that it is, of course, predicted in evolutionary theory. its presence is one more confirmation of speciation being caused by successive microevolutionary steps.
put basically, an equilibrium is found in a large population and/or in a population where there is no distinct evolutionary pressure. this prediction is made by evolutionary theory if you consider that a smaller population is more likely to be uniformly exposed to a pressure to change in a particular direction. if this pressure is not pretty uniform, in-breeding within the population will tend to balance out or swallow up the change. as an example, consider a species of carnivore that finds most of its prey on land. imagine some individuals are born which can swim better than others in the population but at a cost of reduced hunting ability on land. although these individuals would have an advantage fishing for food (assuming there isn't already a really good predator filling this niche), the intermixing of dna within the population will hinder any comulative changes in this direction. if, however, a small population of animals becomes separated from the main group and finds itself on the coast without access to the main prey on land, the genes which confer an advantage in fishing will be able to spread throughout the population.
with one 20$ bill, that may be right. however, the value of the total currency in circulation should equal the value of the economy. if someone removed 1 billion dollars from the economy by burning bank notes, the treasury would just print a billion dollars and pump it back in.
i was using the word "america" in the way any united statesian (as you would presumably have me call an american) uses the word "america". i.e. i was referring to the country "america" not the continent "north america". your comment was specious. my meaning was clear.
we are not talking about money and capitalism here, but about the american's claim that america has saved the Free World from the tyranny of communism. my reply was that there maybe wouldn't have been a threat if america hadn't been so aggressive about saving the world (or protecting its financial interests).
europe is a good example here. because of the second world war, europe has as a whole learnt that war is not an option and that diplomacy is the only humane solution.
you do not understand this. having the right to read and modify the source code allows new, more powerful methods of finding bugs. as we have seen in many cases, this has allowed bugs to be found and corrected.
this is weird. i've got a motorola a780 running an old linux kernel (2.4.20) with some half-proprietary software stack on top of it. some of the software sucks really bad (real player, need i say more? oh okay, there is no way of changing some of the default sounds. the alarm clock is particularly grating) and the UI design won't win any prizes either. as well as this, the hardware is badly designed (the wires to the inbuilt gps receiver keep breaking) and the gprs control software is also broken (if you lose and then regain reception, you can't turn gprs on or off. instead you have to reboot the phone). as well as this, it sometimes switches itself off or freezes for no apparent reason, and i really don't know if this is a hardware or a software problem.
the good news: you can install a shell on it and you can telnet in from outside over bluetooth or usb. it has never dropped a call. the (poor quality) camera allows video recording as large as the space you have on your sd-card. and that's about it.
so all in all, i'm really looking forward to android.
the ones i use are never switched off, they run the whole time (the superconductors are cooled by liquid helium (i think). the smaller gradient fields are just switched on and off when needed.
the purpose of a school is not to teach pupils the small subset of skills found in the intersection of skill sets needed for every job, but to teach pupils to think and understand how the world works. what you're thinking about is a community college.
it would make a lot more sense to teach pupils at schools how network packets are built, how a register or stack machine works, how an executable file is loaded and turned into a process, how paging algorithms work etc. etc. this is the knowledge which will grant the pupil an innate understanding in computing and information technology.
apple is not a monopoly. apple does not have the power to force people to use apple products in order to be compatible with governments or public services, for example. don't get me wrong, if they had the market share, they would do, but they don't.
as far as i understood it, the main problem with the gpl2 is that its language is sometimes ambiguous in some countries. seeing as the fsf operates globally, this made the gpl2 into a real problem. the ambiguity had to be tidied up, hence the gpl3
it is unfortunately necessary in the current legal situation for the fsf to own the software you write. for example, the fsf has enough resources to offer some level of protection against legal problems due to patents. do you?
i got a pdf recently which was displayed incorrectly in every product i tried which wasn't from adobe. i tried opening it up and looking at the code but unfortunately i lack the knowledge to see what was wrong.
Slashdot Mirror
so basically: "you, the customer, have to buy a new version of our software every x years because we're going to change our software to make it necessary". i wonder what would happen if one company had a monopoly on cars and tank stations? would they regularly change tank station nozzles so as to force people to replace perfectly good cars?
don't use rtf. there are hundreds of different rtf extensions and no one knows which ones will be supported by microsoft in the future. if you want to store information for the foreseeable future you can use a standard ascii-text or utf8-text, tex, html or odt and that's about it.
the problem is, people bought a word processor from microsoft 10 years ago with the understanding that it will always be a word processor. if microsoft decides not to support the documents created by the word processor in newer versions, it should supply the paying customer with an update free-of-charge.
is taxation higher now in america than it was 100 years ago? how about 50 years ago?
and yet the citizens of other countries (i'm assuming you're an american) manage to supply free health care and education to all.
that is sooo cool!
yeah, pae is a hack, but every development intel has made to the processor after the 8086 release has been a hack.
and yet a small private company consisting of tens of individuals (opera) can make a standards compliant browser while microsoft (60000 employees and 20 billion profit every year) cannot.
so i must conclude that either microsoft is incompetent or microsoft is deliberately not implementing the standards.
if the nyse wanted to do it like that, i'm sure they could hire ten linux kernel developers for a day to fix whatever bugs they find and it would still cost less than a support contract with hp/sun/ibm/microsoft.
no, no, no. microsoft came along and there was one more voice speaking its own language for anything other than ascii. people began to be able to talk when the internet took off.
theory and law mean pretty much the same thing to the scientist. some people say theory of gravitation, others say law of gravitation. you tend to say "law" if you quote a mathematical form of gravity and "theory" if you describe gravity using words. there just happens not to be a law of evolution because it's much easier to grasp as text than as a mathematical form ( genome_{n+1}=genome_{n}+%epsilon )
there has been a lot of research and mathematical modelling to estimate how many micro-evolutionary steps are necessary to make an eye, for example. if someone has done the same with the liver i don't know.
what you don't understand about punctuated equilibrium is that it is, of course, predicted in evolutionary theory. its presence is one more confirmation of speciation being caused by successive microevolutionary steps.
put basically, an equilibrium is found in a large population and/or in a population where there is no distinct evolutionary pressure. this prediction is made by evolutionary theory if you consider that a smaller population is more likely to be uniformly exposed to a pressure to change in a particular direction. if this pressure is not pretty uniform, in-breeding within the population will tend to balance out or swallow up the change. as an example, consider a species of carnivore that finds most of its prey on land. imagine some individuals are born which can swim better than others in the population but at a cost of reduced hunting ability on land. although these individuals would have an advantage fishing for food (assuming there isn't already a really good predator filling this niche), the intermixing of dna within the population will hinder any comulative changes in this direction. if, however, a small population of animals becomes separated from the main group and finds itself on the coast without access to the main prey on land, the genes which confer an advantage in fishing will be able to spread throughout the population.
with one 20$ bill, that may be right. however, the value of the total currency in circulation should equal the value of the economy. if someone removed 1 billion dollars from the economy by burning bank notes, the treasury would just print a billion dollars and pump it back in.
i wonder if mother russia says the same thing to the poles.
i was using the word "america" in the way any united statesian (as you would presumably have me call an american) uses the word "america". i.e. i was referring to the country "america" not the continent "north america". your comment was specious. my meaning was clear.
we are not talking about money and capitalism here, but about the american's claim that america has saved the Free World from the tyranny of communism. my reply was that there maybe wouldn't have been a threat if america hadn't been so aggressive about saving the world (or protecting its financial interests).
europe is a good example here. because of the second world war, europe has as a whole learnt that war is not an option and that diplomacy is the only humane solution.
bla-bla-bla america is great bla-bla-bla without us, you'd all be communist bla-bla-bla
it is maybe exactly this sort of macho posturing that has made the threats america so valiantly has tried to defend the Free World(tm) against.
you do not understand this. having the right to read and modify the source code allows new, more powerful methods of finding bugs. as we have seen in many cases, this has allowed bugs to be found and corrected.
do you deny that the peer-review happened and the bugs were found?
...unless you have a habit of manually auditing every line of code that goes into your favorite Linux distro.
well, it looks like someone does, otherwise this would never have been found.
i wonder how many people independently audit closed-source windows code.
this is weird. i've got a motorola a780 running an old linux kernel (2.4.20) with some half-proprietary software stack on top of it. some of the software sucks really bad (real player, need i say more? oh okay, there is no way of changing some of the default sounds. the alarm clock is particularly grating) and the UI design won't win any prizes either. as well as this, the hardware is badly designed (the wires to the inbuilt gps receiver keep breaking) and the gprs control software is also broken (if you lose and then regain reception, you can't turn gprs on or off. instead you have to reboot the phone). as well as this, it sometimes switches itself off or freezes for no apparent reason, and i really don't know if this is a hardware or a software problem.
the good news: you can install a shell on it and you can telnet in from outside over bluetooth or usb. it has never dropped a call. the (poor quality) camera allows video recording as large as the space you have on your sd-card. and that's about it.
so all in all, i'm really looking forward to android.
the ones i use are never switched off, they run the whole time (the superconductors are cooled by liquid helium (i think). the smaller gradient fields are just switched on and off when needed.
no, no, no. terribly and fundamentally flawed.
the purpose of a school is not to teach pupils the small subset of skills found in the intersection of skill sets needed for every job, but to teach pupils to think and understand how the world works. what you're thinking about is a community college.
it would make a lot more sense to teach pupils at schools how network packets are built, how a register or stack machine works, how an executable file is loaded and turned into a process, how paging algorithms work etc. etc. this is the knowledge which will grant the pupil an innate understanding in computing and information technology.
apple is not a monopoly. apple does not have the power to force people to use apple products in order to be compatible with governments or public services, for example. don't get me wrong, if they had the market share, they would do, but they don't.
as far as i understood it, the main problem with the gpl2 is that its language is sometimes ambiguous in some countries. seeing as the fsf operates globally, this made the gpl2 into a real problem. the ambiguity had to be tidied up, hence the gpl3
it is unfortunately necessary in the current legal situation for the fsf to own the software you write. for example, the fsf has enough resources to offer some level of protection against legal problems due to patents. do you?
i got a pdf recently which was displayed incorrectly in every product i tried which wasn't from adobe. i tried opening it up and looking at the code but unfortunately i lack the knowledge to see what was wrong.