I wasn't asking who would pay; I was asking how much it would cost. My original point was that the governments who are buying these appear to be footing most or all of the costs except for direct manufacturing, hiding the obvious fact that the true cost of the OLPC is far higher than $100. I realize that some costs can be driven down on a per-unit basis with high volume, but even that can't eliminate shipping, customer support and other things that happen on a per-customer basis. Even if you personally only need shipping, the average customer needs a certain amount of marketing and after-market support, which is still part of the average cost.
Taking a SWAG at it, I'd say the true cost of the OLPC (delivered to the customer) is closer to $200 than it is to $100. That would mean a price of $300 to $400 to "rich" customers in order to subsidize the rest of the world (previous posts in this thread). At anywhere near that point, I'd just buy a Dell.
Even if there were plans to sell these commercially, the non-manufacturing costs (see my post, above) would probably require a much greater markup. Right now, they are "selling" them to single buyers in quantities of a million or more. Think about how much higher the per-unit costs will be for marketing and distribution if they sell them one at a time. Even ebay doesn't have zero selling costs, and ebay doesn't usually include free shipping.
Also, no one seems to want to talk about the non-manufacturing costs of OLPC, either. Assuming you find a non-corrupt government as a participant, it seems to me that the entire distribution cost is being foisted on that government. I don't think that's trivial. What about training? I haven't been a big fan of the TCO school of thought, but that's because in the (US) corporate world, I've seen it used mainly as a justification of bigger IT budgets. But in this case, I think we do need to factor in lots of things that will make the cost much higher than $100.
I noticed a few SPF comments (can't reply directly to them due to the new/. "system" that seems to prevent threading).
I have not noticed that it helped at all in my case. I have a postmaster account set up with my host that catches all the replies to spams that are sent spoofing my domain. The number seemed to drop in the first week or so after I set up SPF, but it's now back up to an average of 500-1000 per day, and that's just the automated replies I'm seeing.
I assume the number of spams being sent is much higher, by orders of magnitude.
From the other comments, it seems possible that I'm misinterpreting the responses. Are they merely an indication of "success"? In other words, are they all just automated responses from the mail servers that correctly figured out (via SPF) that someone was spoofing my domain? This seems illogical, since I'm not sure why a mail server that figured this out would bother with an automated response. Such a policy would double the traffic associated with each "success", which is why it seems illogical to me.
In addition, of course, I see "out of office" and similar replies from individual mailboxes. Are these merely the indication of mail servers that have not implemented SPF on their (receiving) end? While that doesn't seem illogical, it seems just too easy. In other words, this issue has made me a little paranoid, and I just want to make sure I'm not relying overly much on SPF.
Are there other tools I could/should be using?
BTW, I've never, ever received a spam that spoofed a real domain of a large organization. I've seen lame phishes like paypal5.com, but never anything exactly like paypal.com, for example. It's hard to believe that the big guys are 100% successful with just SPF. Am I just being paranoid again?
The previous answers did better than I could at explaining the *real* issues related to moving your business model to open source.
I wish to address some implicit issues based on my inference that your boss went to school for his MBMA (management by magazine article).
Business Model The recognized expert for businesses run with philosophies similar to your boss's is a brilliant business writer named Scott Adams. He has compiled thousands of case studies from the highly successful engagements of Dogbert Consulting. I think that these case studies would be highly instructive for your boss. If you're worried that perhaps your boss would be uncomfortable using case studies from a book of cartoons, you could simply cut and paste the cartoons from one of Mr. Adams's books and place a cover from Harvard Business Review on them. Trust me; it will sell.
Marketing Although some conservative businesses would actually prefer the painstaking approach of building true relationships with their customers (as well as prospects) and... oh, I don't know... maybe talking to them about issues in order to form a marketing plan; I suspect your boss would be more comfortable with the Clippings model. The Clippings model is very similar to the approach I suggest for your business model, but a bit broader. Rather than limiting yourself to the writings of Mr. Adams, simply Google terms such as "customer focus", "digital marketing", and the like; then paste as many paragraphs (random order should be fine) into whatever strategy document you need to support your boss. If you really want to tighten it up, do a boolean search and make sure "open source" is included with every search term. The key to the successful Clippings approach, as every experienced corporate staff member knows, is not completeness or even accuracy of the search. Heck, it's not even all that important to spell check it. No, the real secret of a successful Clippings project is formatting. Choose the right fonts. Add some color graphics. Pay attention to these important details, and your boss will find you indispensible.
Cut and Run No, no; nothing to do with politics or current events. No; this important third issue is for you personally. You should have ample time to see the train wreck coming, and this is simply my personal advice to you, before the trains actually collide.
Weren't there a couple of strippers and a porn star or two in the Million Gubernatorial Candidate March in Kahleefohneeyah a few years back? Anyway, it wouldn't have surprised me if one or more of them said "fuck" while showing nipples... maybe not on the campaign trail, but certainly at some point...
I wasn't knowledgeable enough to ask about the specifics of connection time. It would make the algebra even uglier, though, right?
if there are no other IP-blacklists used at the mail server level, the IP-traffic used by mail may rise by one order of magintude
Isn't that sort of what my calculation showed (increase factor of 2.08, not looking back at my OP)? If you changed all the variables in my algebra to focus only on receiving calls at the relay level and made all the same assumptions about the effectiveness of Spamhaus filtering, it seems like you'd have the same equation for the first-order traffic effect. But then you'd have to account for the relay effects (typical message goes from A to B to C to D... and at what point does Spamhaus cut it off?). I'm obviously out of my depth, just musing but curious. AFAIK, a single message typical doesn't take multiple paths, so at least there's no exponential effect to worry about, but it still seems like it's important to know how many nodes/relays are involved and how early in the hopping the filter takes effect.
I'm sure I'm still being too simplistic, but these additional considerations reinforce one or both of the two reasons I posted:
The math is uglier than the ten-fold or four-fold arguments implied
The increase is significantly less than either of those arguments implied
I never meant to imply that an increase even of say, 50%, was not significant. A 50% increase in IP traffic sounds to me like it could be a doomsday scenario at least in the short run.
Ahhh... if only I had an employer. Alas, the implicit math for me was very similar, however (and maybe implicit in my post time):
N = The peaceful night
Z = Time spent sleeping
S = Time spent on/.
Replacing the inoperative variables in your equation yields:
N - S = Z
In this particular case, Z didn't seem to be happening, so in fact it was forcing the S, not the other way around. Maybe Z will be more of a constraint tonight.
More than 90% of of all email is now spam
Others estimate Spamhaus's blocking efficacy as closer to 75%; by this metric spam would increase four-fold, not ten-fold, if Spamhaus went unavailable
I think the math is a lot more complicated than this implies. Here's how I'd work it:
P = % Spam (% of all sent mail)
S(T) = Total Mail Sent
S(S) = Spam Sent
S(N) = Non-Spam Sent
E(T) = Overall Filter Efficiency (% spam detected, Spamhaus + All Other Filters)
E(O) = Other Filter Efficiency (% spam detected, All Other Filters w/o Spamhaus)
F(T) = Overall Type II Error Rate (% false positive, Spamhaus + All Other Filters)
F(S) = Spamhaus Type II Error Rate (% false positive, Spamhaus Only)
F(O) = Other Type II Error Rate (% false positive, All Other Filters w/o Spamhaus)
R(T) = Total Mail Received
R(S) = Spam Received
R(N) = Non-Spam Received
We're interested in R(T) and what happens to it with and without Spamhaus. (Assuming we're still interested at all, since math sometimes does that...).
With Spamhaus:
R(T) = R(S) + R(N)
R(T) = S(S) x [1-E(T)] + S(N) x [ 1-F(T)]
R(T) = P x S(T) x [1-E(T)] + (1-P) x S(T) x [1-F(T)]
Without Spamhaus:
R(T) = R(S) + R(N)
R(T) = S(S) x [1-E(O)] + S(N) x [ 1-F(O)]
R(T) = P x S(O) x [1-E(O)] + (1-P) x S(O) x [1-F(O)]
The difference, expressed as a ratio of (Without Spamhaus - With Spamhaus)/(With Spamhaus), is
[ P x S(O) x [1-E(O)] + (1-P) x S(O) x [1-F(O)] ] - [ P x S(T) x [1-E(T)] + (1-P) x S(T) x [1-F(T)] ]
Divided By
[ P x S(T) x [1-E(T)] + (1-P) x S(T) x [1-F(T)] ]
The assumptions yielding either the ten-fold or the four-fold increase seem to be that E(O)=0, and of course that false positives don't matter. Even with these assumptions, the math in the OP is a bit fuzzy to me:
[ P x S(T) + [ (1-P) x S(T) ] - [ P x S(T) x (1-E(T)) + [ (1-P) x S(T) ] ]
Divided By
[ P x S(T) x (1-E(T)) + [ (1-P) x S(T) ] ]
Which Reduces To:
P x E(T) / [ 1 - [ P x E(T) ] ]
The ten-fold increase seems to be predicated upon both P=.9 and E(S)=E(T)=1. However, even if that were true, the increase would actually be nine-fold (.9/.1).
The four-fold increase seems to be predicated upon P=.9 and E(S)=E(T)=.75. However, this would yield about a two-fold increase of
Factoring in false positives might actually make the Without Spamhaus scenario more dire, but clearly it would be less dire if we assume that E(O) is not zero. A better approximation would use the marginal efficiency of Spamhaus. Even with a generous assumption that Spamhaus catches an additional third of all spams sent (vs. all others without Spamhaus, and ignoring false positives), the overall increase in R(T) looks less than 50% to me (.3/.7, or approximately 43%).
if the airwaves belong to the public, then the public should be able to determine their use
That seems reasonable, except that you don't delve far enough into how the public should make that determination. Simple majority vote on every (moral) issue? I think you'd probably agree that it's a little more complicated than that. We need to avoid tyranny by majority. Having said that, there are minorities we probably should not (yep, making a moral judgment here) accommodate, such as child pornographers. That's a tough balance in cases like simple nudity and a not-so-tough balance in cases like child pornography, IMHO.
One key to the balancing act for me is the distinction between speech and action. I tend to favor allowing things that are "pure speech", regardless of how offensive they might be. So, for example, I would tend to allow things like hate speech (juden-raus, etc.), even though I find it abhorrent. But I would ban things like child pornography because of the action, not because of the speech. The issue of computer simulation makes that a little tougher, but I'm certainly not saying that's ok. I'm not a purist on that issue, because I tend to think that movies and tv dramas depicting violence are fine, for the most part, for adults.
I also think that cable and satellite should remain out of the reach of the FCC, since they are not "public".
Cable and satellite are just as "public" as broadcast, and the rationale for regulating them is identical. Both use scarce public resources. The argument that private enterprise invested in the cable or satellite broadcast infrastructure is no different from the argument that a tv or radio network invested in their infrastructure. In fact, government involvement in cable and satellite infrastructure was much more fundamental than government involvement in early broadcast. The federal vs. local argument implicit in your post doesn't hold water for me, since cable and satellite both involve interstate commerce as well as transmission over "public" airwaves at some point in most broadcasts.
Bottom Line: I agree with most of your sentiments but lean more toward having the regulation focus on time, place and manner to allow as much freedom as possible. I'd also like to see more nudity in public parks and on daytime television.
Any Evidence IT People Work More Hours?
on
IT and Divorce?
·
· Score: 1
Has anyone seen credible research that shows IT people work longer hours than non-IT people? I would readily believe that people who work for systems integrators, etc., work longer hours, but I think that's true of all consulting, whether it's IT or something else. I've worked in consulting for business strategy, for financial services and for IT services, and the hours seemed pretty similar to me. I've also worked in corporate IT as well as other corporate departments, and the corporate hours (IT or otherwise) also seemed pretty similar to me -- and a lot lower than the hours in consulting. In-house lawyers don't bill the same kinds of hours as attorneys at corporate law firms, as another example.
Admittedly, this is without much real evidence (which doesn't seem to have bothered the hundreds of prior posters), but maybe the organizational environment is a much bigger factor than IT.
Of course, the better known theory that an asteroid caused the dinosaur extinction 65 million years ago might also be related to changes in earth's orbit, no?
That's probably true, but if and when Joe Public notices this on his radar screen, he's probably smart to watch from the sidelines for awhile to see if things improve. It's called not being an early adopter, and it's generally not a bad idea for the non-expert.
IANATechie, but couldn't you load the whole doc (in XML) to the client and then only transmit changes (via XML messaging) between the client and the server? I realize that's probably not "AJAX" anymore, but who gives a rip about that?
Hmm. I'm not sure who's right about ease of use, etc.
But word processing wasn't even a significant consideration for my dissertation. IIRC, the thinking part was the hardest, and neither package helps much with that.
I learned LaTeX for that purpose
Were you spending so much time on word processing before LaTeX that you needed to solve that problem before you could solve the mysteries of molecules?
my collegues struggling with word processors
I'm still having a hard time picturing a bunch of graduate biologists worrying about something this mundane. For example, I can't imagine my next Scientific American issue coming with an article entitled "Solving the Word Processing Obstacle to Build the Next Nanotube". Yeah, the analogy breaks down, but that's because I can't see it.
Sprint's billing system kept my account active for about six months, despite repeated cancellations by me. The software wasn't really the culprit, of course; they deliberately make it difficult to cancel an account. This wasn't a contractual obligation; I just wanted to cancel after several years of service.
I have Virgin Mobile now. Their software warns me when it's time to "top up", and I haven't had any problems.
Slashdot Mirror
Accepting your argument that XML requires bigger hard drives and more bandwidth:
You wouldn't have to save much time for developers or users to justify adding a whole lot of that, would you?
Based on the discussion that followed, how is this flamebait??
Mod parent back up to at least normal and hopefully higher. And metamod the modder down!
I will gladly pay for shipping
I wasn't asking who would pay; I was asking how much it would cost. My original point was that the governments who are buying these appear to be footing most or all of the costs except for direct manufacturing, hiding the obvious fact that the true cost of the OLPC is far higher than $100. I realize that some costs can be driven down on a per-unit basis with high volume, but even that can't eliminate shipping, customer support and other things that happen on a per-customer basis. Even if you personally only need shipping, the average customer needs a certain amount of marketing and after-market support, which is still part of the average cost.
Taking a SWAG at it, I'd say the true cost of the OLPC (delivered to the customer) is closer to $200 than it is to $100. That would mean a price of $300 to $400 to "rich" customers in order to subsidize the rest of the world (previous posts in this thread). At anywhere near that point, I'd just buy a Dell.
I agree; where's the love, man?
Even if there were plans to sell these commercially, the non-manufacturing costs (see my post, above) would probably require a much greater markup. Right now, they are "selling" them to single buyers in quantities of a million or more. Think about how much higher the per-unit costs will be for marketing and distribution if they sell them one at a time. Even ebay doesn't have zero selling costs, and ebay doesn't usually include free shipping.
Mod parent up.
Also, no one seems to want to talk about the non-manufacturing costs of OLPC, either. Assuming you find a non-corrupt government as a participant, it seems to me that the entire distribution cost is being foisted on that government. I don't think that's trivial. What about training? I haven't been a big fan of the TCO school of thought, but that's because in the (US) corporate world, I've seen it used mainly as a justification of bigger IT budgets. But in this case, I think we do need to factor in lots of things that will make the cost much higher than $100.
I noticed a few SPF comments (can't reply directly to them due to the new /. "system" that seems to prevent threading).
I have not noticed that it helped at all in my case. I have a postmaster account set up with my host that catches all the replies to spams that are sent spoofing my domain. The number seemed to drop in the first week or so after I set up SPF, but it's now back up to an average of 500-1000 per day, and that's just the automated replies I'm seeing.
I assume the number of spams being sent is much higher, by orders of magnitude.
From the other comments, it seems possible that I'm misinterpreting the responses. Are they merely an indication of "success"? In other words, are they all just automated responses from the mail servers that correctly figured out (via SPF) that someone was spoofing my domain? This seems illogical, since I'm not sure why a mail server that figured this out would bother with an automated response. Such a policy would double the traffic associated with each "success", which is why it seems illogical to me.
In addition, of course, I see "out of office" and similar replies from individual mailboxes. Are these merely the indication of mail servers that have not implemented SPF on their (receiving) end? While that doesn't seem illogical, it seems just too easy. In other words, this issue has made me a little paranoid, and I just want to make sure I'm not relying overly much on SPF.
Are there other tools I could/should be using?
BTW, I've never, ever received a spam that spoofed a real domain of a large organization. I've seen lame phishes like paypal5.com, but never anything exactly like paypal.com, for example. It's hard to believe that the big guys are 100% successful with just SPF. Am I just being paranoid again?
Thanks in advance!
I wish to address some implicit issues based on my inference that your boss went to school for his MBMA (management by magazine article).
The recognized expert for businesses run with philosophies similar to your boss's is a brilliant business writer named Scott Adams. He has compiled thousands of case studies from the highly successful engagements of Dogbert Consulting. I think that these case studies would be highly instructive for your boss. If you're worried that perhaps your boss would be uncomfortable using case studies from a book of cartoons, you could simply cut and paste the cartoons from one of Mr. Adams's books and place a cover from Harvard Business Review on them. Trust me; it will sell.
Although some conservative businesses would actually prefer the painstaking approach of building true relationships with their customers (as well as prospects) and
No, no; nothing to do with politics or current events. No; this important third issue is for you personally. You should have ample time to see the train wreck coming, and this is simply my personal advice to you, before the trains actually collide.
Weren't there a couple of strippers and a porn star or two in the Million Gubernatorial Candidate March in Kahleefohneeyah a few years back? Anyway, it wouldn't have surprised me if one or more of them said "fuck" while showing nipples ... maybe not on the campaign trail, but certainly at some point ...
Touche!
But, if I were an engineer, wouldn't I still be working on the next digit of the long division? (OK, only if I were an old school engineer?)
if there are no other IP-blacklists used at the mail server level, the IP-traffic used by mail may rise by one order of magintude
Isn't that sort of what my calculation showed (increase factor of 2.08, not looking back at my OP)? If you changed all the variables in my algebra to focus only on receiving calls at the relay level and made all the same assumptions about the effectiveness of Spamhaus filtering, it seems like you'd have the same equation for the first-order traffic effect. But then you'd have to account for the relay effects (typical message goes from A to B to C to D
I'm sure I'm still being too simplistic, but these additional considerations reinforce one or both of the two reasons I posted:
- The math is uglier than the ten-fold or four-fold arguments implied
- The increase is significantly less than either of those arguments implied
I never meant to imply that an increase even of say, 50%, was not significant. A 50% increase in IP traffic sounds to me like it could be a doomsday scenario at least in the short run.- N = The peaceful night
- Z = Time spent sleeping
- S = Time spent on
/.
Replacing the inoperative variables in your equation yields:N - S = Z
In this particular case, Z didn't seem to be happening, so in fact it was forcing the S, not the other way around. Maybe Z will be more of a constraint tonight.
Others estimate Spamhaus's blocking efficacy as closer to 75%; by this metric spam would increase four-fold, not ten-fold, if Spamhaus went unavailable
I think the math is a lot more complicated than this implies. Here's how I'd work it:
- P = % Spam (% of all sent mail)
- S(T) = Total Mail Sent
- S(S) = Spam Sent
- S(N) = Non-Spam Sent
- E(T) = Overall Filter Efficiency (% spam detected, Spamhaus + All Other Filters)
- E(S) = Spamhaus Filter Efficiency (% spam detected, Spamhaus Only)
- E(O) = Other Filter Efficiency (% spam detected, All Other Filters w/o Spamhaus)
- F(T) = Overall Type II Error Rate (% false positive, Spamhaus + All Other Filters)
- F(S) = Spamhaus Type II Error Rate (% false positive, Spamhaus Only)
- F(O) = Other Type II Error Rate (% false positive, All Other Filters w/o Spamhaus)
- R(T) = Total Mail Received
- R(S) = Spam Received
- R(N) = Non-Spam Received
We're interested in R(T) and what happens to it with and without Spamhaus. (Assuming we're still interested at all, since math sometimes does thatWith Spamhaus:
- R(T) = R(S) + R(N)
- R(T) = S(S) x [1-E(T)] + S(N) x [ 1-F(T)]
- R(T) = P x S(T) x [1-E(T)] + (1-P) x S(T) x [1-F(T)]
Without Spamhaus:- R(T) = R(S) + R(N)
- R(T) = S(S) x [1-E(O)] + S(N) x [ 1-F(O)]
- R(T) = P x S(O) x [1-E(O)] + (1-P) x S(O) x [1-F(O)]
The difference, expressed as a ratio of (Without Spamhaus - With Spamhaus)/(With Spamhaus), is[ P x S(O) x [1-E(O)] + (1-P) x S(O) x [1-F(O)] ] - [ P x S(T) x [1-E(T)] + (1-P) x S(T) x [1-F(T)] ]
Divided By
[ P x S(T) x [1-E(T)] + (1-P) x S(T) x [1-F(T)] ]
The assumptions yielding either the ten-fold or the four-fold increase seem to be that E(O)=0, and of course that false positives don't matter. Even with these assumptions, the math in the OP is a bit fuzzy to me:
- E(O) = 0
- E(T) = E(S)
- F(O) = 0
- F(T) = 0 [i.e., F(S) = 0 as well]
- [ P x S(T) + [ (1-P) x S(T) ] - [ P x S(T) x (1-E(T)) + [ (1-P) x S(T) ] ]
- Which Reduces To:
The ten-fold increase seems to be predicated upon both P=.9 and E(S)=E(T)=1. However, even if that were true, the increase would actually be nine-fold (.9/.1).yields (reducing above ratio):
Divided By
[ P x S(T) x (1-E(T)) + [ (1-P) x S(T) ] ]
P x E(T) / [ 1 - [ P x E(T) ] ]
The four-fold increase seems to be predicated upon P=.9 and E(S)=E(T)=.75. However, this would yield about a two-fold increase of
[.9 x
Factoring in false positives might actually make the Without Spamhaus scenario more dire, but clearly it would be less dire if we assume that E(O) is not zero. A better approximation would use the marginal efficiency of Spamhaus. Even with a generous assumption that Spamhaus catches an additional third of all spams sent (vs. all others without Spamhaus, and ignoring false positives), the overall increase in R(T) looks less than 50% to me (.3/.7, or approximately 43%).
if the airwaves belong to the public, then the public should be able to determine their use
That seems reasonable, except that you don't delve far enough into how the public should make that determination. Simple majority vote on every (moral) issue? I think you'd probably agree that it's a little more complicated than that. We need to avoid tyranny by majority. Having said that, there are minorities we probably should not (yep, making a moral judgment here) accommodate, such as child pornographers. That's a tough balance in cases like simple nudity and a not-so-tough balance in cases like child pornography, IMHO.
One key to the balancing act for me is the distinction between speech and action. I tend to favor allowing things that are "pure speech", regardless of how offensive they might be. So, for example, I would tend to allow things like hate speech (juden-raus, etc.), even though I find it abhorrent. But I would ban things like child pornography because of the action, not because of the speech. The issue of computer simulation makes that a little tougher, but I'm certainly not saying that's ok. I'm not a purist on that issue, because I tend to think that movies and tv dramas depicting violence are fine, for the most part, for adults.
I also think that cable and satellite should remain out of the reach of the FCC, since they are not "public".
Cable and satellite are just as "public" as broadcast, and the rationale for regulating them is identical. Both use scarce public resources. The argument that private enterprise invested in the cable or satellite broadcast infrastructure is no different from the argument that a tv or radio network invested in their infrastructure. In fact, government involvement in cable and satellite infrastructure was much more fundamental than government involvement in early broadcast. The federal vs. local argument implicit in your post doesn't hold water for me, since cable and satellite both involve interstate commerce as well as transmission over "public" airwaves at some point in most broadcasts.
Bottom Line: I agree with most of your sentiments but lean more toward having the regulation focus on time, place and manner to allow as much freedom as possible. I'd also like to see more nudity in public parks and on daytime television.
Has anyone seen credible research that shows IT people work longer hours than non-IT people? I would readily believe that people who work for systems integrators, etc., work longer hours, but I think that's true of all consulting, whether it's IT or something else. I've worked in consulting for business strategy, for financial services and for IT services, and the hours seemed pretty similar to me. I've also worked in corporate IT as well as other corporate departments, and the corporate hours (IT or otherwise) also seemed pretty similar to me -- and a lot lower than the hours in consulting. In-house lawyers don't bill the same kinds of hours as attorneys at corporate law firms, as another example.
Admittedly, this is without much real evidence (which doesn't seem to have bothered the hundreds of prior posters), but maybe the organizational environment is a much bigger factor than IT.
Oh. And a lot of that other, non-work stuff.
It's not the rotation, it's the tilt
The earth did it]
Of course, the better known theory that an asteroid caused the dinosaur extinction 65 million years ago might also be related to changes in earth's orbit, no?
i doubt that will make anyone feel better
...
but it will feel so good when they stop
So they're testing it with both students and psych[i]atric patients.
How do they tell the difference?
That's probably true, but if and when Joe Public notices this on his radar screen, he's probably smart to watch from the sidelines for awhile to see if things improve. It's called not being an early adopter, and it's generally not a bad idea for the non-expert.
IANATechie, but couldn't you load the whole doc (in XML) to the client and then only transmit changes (via XML messaging) between the client and the server? I realize that's probably not "AJAX" anymore, but who gives a rip about that?
Hmm. I'm not sure who's right about ease of use, etc.
But word processing wasn't even a significant consideration for my dissertation. IIRC, the thinking part was the hardest, and neither package helps much with that.
I learned LaTeX for that purpose
Were you spending so much time on word processing before LaTeX that you needed to solve that problem before you could solve the mysteries of molecules?
my collegues struggling with word processors
I'm still having a hard time picturing a bunch of graduate biologists worrying about something this mundane. For example, I can't imagine my next Scientific American issue coming with an article entitled "Solving the Word Processing Obstacle to Build the Next Nanotube". Yeah, the analogy breaks down, but that's because I can't see it.
Orange-ist! This is just propaganda spread by the vast blue-fuel-tank conspiracy and accepted uncritically by the blue-biased media.
Sprint's billing system kept my account active for about six months, despite repeated cancellations by me. The software wasn't really the culprit, of course; they deliberately make it difficult to cancel an account. This wasn't a contractual obligation; I just wanted to cancel after several years of service.
I have Virgin Mobile now. Their software warns me when it's time to "top up", and I haven't had any problems.
Do we have a mod up for integrity?
...
Definitely not anonymous; definitely not cowardly.
That's real-life karma.
And, good point about the new mod system. I haven't fat-fingered one yet, but I suppose it's only a matter of time