(BTW, "Several applications, while similar, just work slightly differently for various things like opening files..."? When I was using Windows, I don't think I came across any application, ever, that didn't use the OS common file dialogue. What program are you claiming doesn't?)
Think about what it would be like if the command "ls" was named something different in every linux distribution. Part of Microsoft's success is that there are GUI contracts that are very rarely broken so you almost always know how to do basic tasks with a new program. Sigh. Time to trot out the screenshot yet again. All those Microsoft applications in that screenshot all work the same right? The menu in notepad is just like the complete lack of a menu in Word and Media Player? You've missed the GP's point. A User Interface Contract is not necessarily about appearence; and the important ones aren't. For example, there's nothing in the Windows UI guidelines that says that a toolbar must be grey. And, indeed, a lot of the toolbar's aren't grey. This is not a bad thing: a different colour toolbar does not impede UI knowledge transferability, but does help identify different applications.
But a number of important things stay the same. For example, in any document-based application, Alt,F,S and Ctrl-S both give you Save. Always. Everywhere. Now, I've never used IE7 (I'm currently using Opera on Ubuntu...), and from your screenshot it doesn't seem to have a menubar. I don't know whether it just doesn't have a menubar, or whether it's hidden by default. But somehow I can be pretty certain that, whichever the answer is, pressing Alt,F,S will still give me save.
To be fair, Gnome now does this just as well as Windows. All the standard Gnome apps conform to the same guidelines. So let's look at a related area: well-defined boundaries in keyboard shortcuts. For example: in Evolution, check mail is F9; but Compiz uses F9 for its widget-gadget-dashboard thing by default. Problem: if you turn on 'extra effects' in Compiz, every time you check mail, you get your screen taken over by a moded widget overly.
Now, why does this happen? F9 is check mail in Evolution because that's what Windows uses; and F9 is Dashboard in Compiz because that's what Mac OS uses. In Windows, F? keys on their own are per-application shortcuts. On a mac, F? keys on their own are system-wide shortcuts. On Linux, there is no one dictated standard, so everyone picks whichever convention they prefer, and you get conflicts.
Having well-defined app/system keyboard chord boundaries is a lot less sexy that mandating the colour of all applications toolbars, to be sure. But, as a UI contract, it's the more important of the two.
There's a set of RELAX NG XML Schemas for the Transitional and Strict OOXML specs that are trivial enough to use with something like jing [thaiopensource.com]; what more do you want?
I've already seen examples of MOO-XML that are compliant to the schema but won't load in Office. I would link to the blog in question, but searching for "office not compliant OOXML" now chokes up so many links (mostly about how bad it is) that I had trouble finding it.
The page you're looking for is this one. Certainly, that's what the Slashdot story (and most of the pages that come up in the Google search) used as a source.
Oh, and look, he states how he got his results: "...a set of the RELAX NG schemas for the (post-BRM) revision of OOXML... use[ing] jing (or similar)...".
Now doesn't that look familiar? Yup, it's exactly what I said in my post. Know why? Because that was the source I used for my post.
indentLikeWord97... you have no idea from reading the schema OR the standard how to implement it. Your only recourse would be to get a copy of Word97, and reverse-engineer a painstaking model of how it indented things, and implement that yourself...
I assume you're thinking of AutoSpaceLikeWord95, there's no tag "indentlikeword97" (or at least if there is, googling for it gives no results).
And yeah, you could painstakingly reverse-engineer Word 95, work out how that implemented autospacing, and copy that.
Or you could, I dunno, read the spec. Or, at least, any version of the spec since about a year ago, when the ECMA released the relevent appendix with the deprecated tag documentation. But, hey, I guess it's easier to parrot other Slashdot posters who haven't read the spec and are themselves quoting yet older posts, until you get to a year ago and someone who has read the spec and was posting about their concerns which, back then, were perfectly valid.
For your edification:
2.15.3.6 autoSpaceLikeWord95 (Incorrectly Adjust Text Spacing for Specific Unicode Ranges)
This element specifies adjustments (detailed below) which should be applied to the spacing between adjoining regions of non-ideographic and ideographic text when the autoSpaceDE (Â2.3.1.2) and autoSpaceDN (Â2.3.13) elements have a value of true (or equivalent). This algorithm typically results in the following:
An increase in the inter-character spacing added between non-ideographic and/or number characters and certain full-width characters
No inter-character spacing between non-ideographic and/or number characters and certain half-width characters
Typically, applications apply additional spacing between ideographic and non-ideographic characters/numeric characters when the autoSpaceDE / autoSpaceDN properties are applied. This element, when present with a val attribute value of true (or equivalent), specifies that applications shall apply the following adjustments to this logic:
Characters in the following Unicode ranges should be treated as ideographic, even though those characters are full-width forms of non-ideographic text: U+FF10-U+FF19, U+FF21-U+FF3A, and U+FF41-U+FF5A. [Note: This results in the unnecessary addition of space. end note]
Characters in the following Unicode ranges should be treated as non-ideographic, even though those characters are ideographic: U+FF66-U+FF9F. [Note: This results in the omission of the intended additional space. end note]
[Example: Consider a WordprocessingML document with two paragraphs containing a mix of East Asian and Latin characters:
ab cd ab cd
The first paragraph contains characters with Unicode value U+FF66 (). The second paragraph contains characters with Unicode
Now, if you really want to complain about OOXML, what about the lack of a compliance test suite? There's a set of RELAX NG XML Schemas for the Transitional and Strict OOXML specs that are trivial enough to use with something like jing; what more do you want?
Really? Can you cite this? A minute's thought should convince you that the only reliable source for such a claim would be the FSF's own list of licenses. And sure enough, a quarter of the way down the page:
Microsoft Public License (Ms-PL)
This is a free software license, compatible with version 3 of the GNU GPL.
I don't believe you know what a strawman argument is. "An argument against a position that superficially resembles an opponent's actual view but is easier to refute." For instance, consider the following completely hypothetical argument:
Person A: MS's shared source license don't provide the same benefits as true open source licenses. Person B: That's misleading; some of the shared source licenses, such as the MS-RL and MS-PL, do provide the same benefits, and have been certified by the OSI and FSF as doing so. Person A: That's not true. Consider the following situation, where the MS-LRL clearly does not provide the same benefits as the GPL.
You see how person A has set up a straw man by implicitly misrepresenting person B's position ("x, y in X do provide the same benefits as w") through overgeneralisation ("All X provide the same benefits as w"), a position that is much easier to attack (by pointing out "z in X does not provide the same benefits as w")?
The GP didn't mention the shared source license, the MS licenses s/he talked about were the MS-RL and the MS-LRL; Umm, both of those licenses are ones MS refers to as "shared source" licenses along with MS-PL, MS-RSL, and MS-LPL. You seem a bit misinformed. I was using "shared source" licenses to mean the ones with "shared source" in the title, such as the "Shared Source CLI, C#, and Jscript License" and the "Windows Embedded CE 6.0 Shared Source License". You're right, though, MS does seem to refer to the whole lot of them with the tern "shared source licenses" on their website. I was going by the list of licenses on the FSF's licenses page; which doesn't use that terminology. Apologies.
If your [thanks] comment were to be applied to the former of those (& the MS-PL as well), the "people with a very superficial understanding of the benefits of OSS" would then apparently include the OSI and FSF's lawyers... I don't even understand what you're trying to say with this garbled mess. If you disagree with one of my comments, cite it and explain how you think it is wrong. To spell it out explicitly: You said "People with a very superficial understanding of the benefits of OSS would think MS's shared source license provide those same benefits". I was pointing out that both the MS-RL and the MS-PL (though not the L versions of each, for obvious reasons) had been certified by both the OSI as Open Source licenses and the FSF as Free Software licenses -- i.e. licenses which preserve the Four Freedoms. So, if only "people with a very superficial understanding of the benefits of OSS would think MS's shared source license provide those same benefits", then this would apparently include the OSI and FSF's lawyers. Clear?
People with a very superficial understanding of the benefits of OSS would think MS's shared source license provide those same benefits Nice subtle strawman. The GP didn't mention the shared source license, the MS licenses s/he talked about were the MS-RL and the MS-LRL; if you're comment were to be applied to the former of those (& the MS-PL as well), the "people with a very superficial understanding of the benefits of OSS" would then apparently include the OSI and FSF's lawyers...
To most of who know something about criminal scammers like Microsoft, one of the oldest tactics in the book is look-alike or sound-alike products. Microsoft is intentionally trying to muddy the waters this way Absolutely. It's so bad, they even managed to trick the Free Software Foundation's own lawyers into certifying the MS-PL (for example) as Free and compatible with the GLPv3. No doubt with your vastly better knowledge of the law you can work out just how Microsoft have so slyly accomplished this; so you'd better ring Richard Stallmann quick and tell him he's been hoodwinked!
Wouldn't use any Microsoft license at all. Any tie to Microsoft is a tie they can and will exploit, a liability no one can really afford. I am, of course, pitifully unintelligent compared to you, so I'm afraid you're going to have to explain to me how exactly the fact that Microsoft is the author of a license allows them any power they would not otherwise have. If I choose to release my software under the MS Public License, the text of that license, not the author of it, determines the conditions for further distribution. And the FSF has certified it as both GPLv3-compatible and a Free software license (though, of course, your knowledge of the law must be far in excess of the FSF's lawers, so I bow to your wisdom on this).
I don't think "Yeah, the actual text of the license may not mention Microsoft at all, but we should still have control over software released under it cos we wrote the license!" is going to impress a judge very much.
The fact that they apparently have not even made an effort to roll out Silverlight on their own site is remarkable in the light of this. That fact that you believe that that "have not even made an effort to roll out Silverlight on their own site" rather proves the GP's point. TFA made it quite clear that they have start to roll out silverlight -- the Microsoft Home Page and MSDN both use silverlight, for example -- but that the rollout is happening quite slowly and cautiously. However, as usual on Slashdot, the summary simplified and exaggerated the actual story to the point of being fabrication ("Microsoft still has not adopted Silverlight, and uses Flash all over it's websites"); and of course, on Slashdot, no-one reads TFA.
TFA:
the Microsoft Home Page and the Microsoft Developer Network use Silverlight Summary:
"Microsoft still has not adopted Silverlight, and uses Flash all over it's websites." Apparently, "all its websites" [note the lack of apostrophe] doesn't include the home page and MSDN...
Distros like Ubuntu are not developer friendly because... you will have a hell of a time compiling anything from source unless you get all the right development libs after install Yes, I can see how running "sudo apt-get build-essential" can be hell. I mean, at 28 characters it, umm, really puts a strain on my RSI. Or something.
Now, the trouble I have here, (and I say this as man who writes software for a living), is that while I see reference to an algorithm here, I don't see the algorithm specified. The actual algorithm is:
Characters in the following Unicode ranges should be treated as ideographic, even though those characters are full-width forms of non-ideographic text: U+FF10-U+FF19, U+FF21-U+FF3A, and U+FF41-U+FF5A. Characters in the following Unicode ranges should be treated as non-ideographic, even though those characters are ideographic: U+FF66-U+FF9F. Everything else is commentary.
Facts? Try this fact: this is not an external standard that Microsoft is supposed to bring their software into line with, this standard was presented by Microsoft as accurately describing what their software actually did. That's the whole reason it was "fast tracked", because it was supposed to be a description of a conforming implementation. Wrong. OOXML Strict is an external standard that Microsoft is supposed to bring their software into line with. The standard that's based on what Office 2007 actually does is OOXML Transitional, under which Office 2007 gave one error, repeated 84 times (the "somewhat less" in the summary is typical Slashdot summary-flamebait).
Except, as has been pointed out here in the past by people who actually went through and read it, the OOXML "documented" standard is full of references to microsoft office internals, which _aren't_ documented in it. Except, as pointed out by people in comments on this article, those items have been flagged and fixed as per the comments raised on the initial draft. Would that be TFA, of this slashdot discussion? I can't find any references to flagging or fixing in TFA, and a vague reference to an ongoing slashdot debate is hardly authoritative. A quote or a link might be helpful.
Personally, I haven't heard about any comments being addressed in the MSOOXML spec. The reason you haven't seen any of the relevent references in any Slashdot discussion is that they're invariably modded down to 0 or -1, because Slashdot modders don't like it when reality disagrees with their anti-Microsoft POV. E.g., here's a link to someone quoting from the documentation for autoSpaceLikeWord95. Since, as any Red-blodded True Slashdotter will tell you, autoSpaceLikeWord95 is undocumented, quoting from the documentation is liable to disturb Slashdotters' world-view; it's easier to just stick your fingers in your ears, moderate down, and pretend it didn't happen.
I do love Slashdot, but the apparent wish of the entire community to remain wilfully and childishly ignorant, insofar as Microsoft is concerned, is really quite disturbing.
The fact that content-free posts like "OOXML is such a foul, repugnant anti-standard" are repeatedly modded 'insightful' -- as are the myrad identical "OOXML is unimplementable because it includes undocumented tagss like autoSpaceLikeWord95" replies that inundate anyone who dares question the dogma of OOXMLBADBADBAD -- whereas any posts, such as the parent, which try to point out that autoSpaceLikeWord95 is actually documented perfectly well (albeit in the appendix rather than the main body due to its status as deprecated, as mandated by the ECMA), and give the relevent part of the spec are quickly modded down to Score: 0 and stay there...
It does make you wonder how many people are just ignorant, merely repeating what everyone else is saying because they haven't read the spec themselves (it is, after all, quite long); and how many are actually perfectly aware of the relevent facts but just don't like them.
This basically means that no-one else except Microsoft are capable of writing their OOXML files (and i don't think others can read them either). Why do you think Open Office still doesn't support the new OOXML files? .
Ummm, the upcoming version of Openoffce (3.0) does support OOXML.
And NeoOffice supports it now.
As does Corel WordPerfect Office.
And Apple's iWork '08 (and Textedit. And the iPhone).
And Thinkfree Office.
And Gnumeric.
And QuickOffice.
And Dataviz' DocumentsToGo.
And Datawatch Monarch.
And Zoho Writer.
And Xpertdoc Studio.
(Shall I go on?)
Exactly! For example, who needs a graphical way of setting up and specifying the relative position of dual screens? Just because Windows and probably Mac OS have had such capabilities since 1998, doesn't mean Linux needs it. New users should just "man xrandr" and learn the syntax like everyone else!
(Explanation of sarcasm: The 'Screens and Graphics' Xinerama front-end has rightly been deprecated in Hardy like the obselete xorg.conf-trashing piece of crap it is; and the new 'Screen Resolution' xrandr front end doesn't support this capability yet. Canoninical's Bryce Harrington is on record as saying that he "had hoped to spend time implementing this for Hardy, but bugs have taken precedence".)
What irritates me about Ubuntu's Home folder layout isn't the presence of 'Documents', 'Music' etc. folders; it's the absence of a '.appdata' folder, or any environment-variable way of telling applications what folder to use as an appdata folder; which means that the root of your home folder ends cluttered full of files & folders of application settings.
The whole of arithmetic? I'm not so sure... [Gödel's incompleteness theorem] Meh -- depends what you define as "arithmetic". Sure, by Godel I it is possible to construct statements in Peano that are neither provably true nor false, like the ParisHarrington theorem in Ramsey theory. But "elementary arithmetic" usually refers to statements like "(2*3 + 4) / 2 = 5", and all such statements are trivially provable in Peano.
You can go a lot more basic than 1+1=2. Go back to the Peano axioms and you'll find that all you have to assume is the existance of "0", a "successor" function, induction, and a few trivial things like the properties of equality and addition, and you get the whole of arithmetic -- including 1+1=2.
So you invent/assume your choice of axioms, and everything else follows from them and can be discovered at leisure.
Congratulations, you've just invented the Projectively Extended Reals! Yes, it is certainly possible to get a consistent system with 'a point at infinity'. Trouble is, it isn't very useful. Why not? A lot of things that make the Reals useful come from the fact that they're a field. The projectively extended reals aren't a field, so you lose a lot of useful theorems. And there really isn't very much you can do with them that you can't do with the normal reals or that wouldn't be better done in a Riemann sphere anyway. The complex numbers as an extension to the reals, by contrast, are enormously useful, not only in Mathematics (complex numbers are a field) but also in Physics and Engineering.
for example, we technically haven't fully *discovered* pi or e, since they're transcendental, but we have *invented* easier ways to approximate them in order to simplify our lives (~3.14 and ~2.72). Just because pi isn't expressible in finite digits under the decimal system doesn't mean it isn't "fully discovered" or "fully known". For example, I could express it exactly and succinctly as 4 * sum_n=0^infinity ((-1)^n) / (2n+1). And consider that 1/3 isn't expressible exactly in finite digits under the decimal system either.
Actually its not quite e=mc^2, thats just the first term in a taylor series for the actual answer. No. For an object measured in its rest frame, the energy is possesses is exactly mc^2 (where m = m_0 = rest mass). The only situation where you're using a Taylor series approximation is when you approximate the energy of a moving object with speed v much less than c by mc^2 + (1/2)mv^2. But if you want the exact answer for a moving object it's easy enough to use E = \gamma mc^2 anyway.
If you define "bug" to mean "unexpected undocumented behaviour", as Knuth seems to, then it's not surprising that there have been very few bugs claimed, since TeX is so very well documented.
But most people -- and certainly the majority of open source projects these days -- define "bug" as "undesirable behaviour"; and by that standards, TeX is chock full of bugs. To pick a couple of obvious examples, incorrect handling of ASCII 0x22 quotation marks, and treating "etc." as the end of a sentence. These aren't "bugs" to Knuth since the incorrect behavious is well documented, but by many people's standards they are.
Slashdot Mirror
See my reply to your previous comment on the same topic.
(BTW, "Several applications, while similar, just work slightly differently for various things like opening files..."? When I was using Windows, I don't think I came across any application, ever, that didn't use the OS common file dialogue. What program are you claiming doesn't?)
But a number of important things stay the same. For example, in any document-based application, Alt,F,S and Ctrl-S both give you Save. Always. Everywhere. Now, I've never used IE7 (I'm currently using Opera on Ubuntu...), and from your screenshot it doesn't seem to have a menubar. I don't know whether it just doesn't have a menubar, or whether it's hidden by default. But somehow I can be pretty certain that, whichever the answer is, pressing Alt,F,S will still give me save.
To be fair, Gnome now does this just as well as Windows. All the standard Gnome apps conform to the same guidelines. So let's look at a related area: well-defined boundaries in keyboard shortcuts. For example: in Evolution, check mail is F9; but Compiz uses F9 for its widget-gadget-dashboard thing by default. Problem: if you turn on 'extra effects' in Compiz, every time you check mail, you get your screen taken over by a moded widget overly
Now, why does this happen? F9 is check mail in Evolution because that's what Windows uses; and F9 is Dashboard in Compiz because that's what Mac OS uses. In Windows, F? keys on their own are per-application shortcuts. On a mac, F? keys on their own are system-wide shortcuts. On Linux, there is no one dictated standard, so everyone picks whichever convention they prefer, and you get conflicts.
Having well-defined app/system keyboard chord boundaries is a lot less sexy that mandating the colour of all applications toolbars, to be sure. But, as a UI contract, it's the more important of the two.
There's a set of RELAX NG XML Schemas for the Transitional and Strict OOXML specs that are trivial enough to use with something like jing [thaiopensource.com]; what more do you want?
I've already seen examples of MOO-XML that are compliant to the schema but won't load in Office. I would link to the blog in question, but searching for "office not compliant OOXML" now chokes up so many links (mostly about how bad it is) that I had trouble finding it.
The page you're looking for is this one. Certainly, that's what the Slashdot story (and most of the pages that come up in the Google search) used as a source.
... use[ing] jing (or similar)...".
Oh, and look, he states how he got his results: "...a set of the RELAX NG schemas for the (post-BRM) revision of OOXML
Now doesn't that look familiar? Yup, it's exactly what I said in my post. Know why? Because that was the source I used for my post.
indentLikeWord97 ... you have no idea from reading the schema OR the standard how to implement it. Your only recourse would be to get a copy of Word97, and reverse-engineer a painstaking model of how it indented things, and implement that yourself...
I assume you're thinking of AutoSpaceLikeWord95, there's no tag "indentlikeword97" (or at least if there is, googling for it gives no results).
And yeah, you could painstakingly reverse-engineer Word 95, work out how that implemented autospacing, and copy that.
Or you could, I dunno, read the spec . Or, at least, any version of the spec since about a year ago, when the ECMA released the relevent appendix with the deprecated tag documentation. But, hey, I guess it's easier to parrot other Slashdot posters who haven't read the spec and are themselves quoting yet older posts, until you get to a year ago and someone who has read the spec and was posting about their concerns which, back then, were perfectly valid.
For your edification:
2.15.3.6 autoSpaceLikeWord95 (Incorrectly Adjust Text Spacing for Specific Unicode Ranges)
This element specifies adjustments (detailed below) which should be applied to the spacing between adjoining regions of non-ideographic and ideographic text when the autoSpaceDE (Â2.3.1.2) and autoSpaceDN (Â2.3.13) elements have a value of true (or equivalent). This algorithm typically results in the following:
Typically, applications apply additional spacing between ideographic and non-ideographic characters/numeric characters when the autoSpaceDE / autoSpaceDN properties are applied. This element, when present with a val attribute value of true (or equivalent), specifies that applications shall apply the following adjustments to this logic:
Characters in the following Unicode ranges should be treated as ideographic, even though those characters are full-width forms of non-ideographic text: U+FF10-U+FF19, U+FF21-U+FF3A, and U+FF41-U+FF5A. [Note: This results in the unnecessary addition of space. end note]
Characters in the following Unicode ranges should be treated as non-ideographic, even though those characters are ideographic: U+FF66-U+FF9F. [Note: This results in the omission of the intended additional space. end note]
[Example: Consider a WordprocessingML document with two paragraphs containing a mix of East Asian and Latin characters:
ab cd ab cd
The first paragraph contains characters with Unicode value U+FF66 (). The second paragraph contains characters with Unicode
This is a free software license, compatible with version 3 of the GNU GPL.
Person A: MS's shared source license don't provide the same benefits as true open source licenses.
Person B: That's misleading; some of the shared source licenses, such as the MS-RL and MS-PL, do provide the same benefits, and have been certified by the OSI and FSF as doing so.
Person A: That's not true. Consider the following situation, where the MS-LRL clearly does not provide the same benefits as the GPL.
You see how person A has set up a straw man by implicitly misrepresenting person B's position ("x, y in X do provide the same benefits as w") through overgeneralisation ("All X provide the same benefits as w"), a position that is much easier to attack (by pointing out "z in X does not provide the same benefits as w")? The GP didn't mention the shared source license, the MS licenses s/he talked about were the MS-RL and the MS-LRL; Umm, both of those licenses are ones MS refers to as "shared source" licenses along with MS-PL, MS-RSL, and MS-LPL. You seem a bit misinformed. I was using "shared source" licenses to mean the ones with "shared source" in the title, such as the "Shared Source CLI, C#, and Jscript License" and the "Windows Embedded CE 6.0 Shared Source License". You're right, though, MS does seem to refer to the whole lot of them with the tern "shared source licenses" on their website. I was going by the list of licenses on the FSF's licenses page; which doesn't use that terminology. Apologies. If your [thanks] comment were to be applied to the former of those (& the MS-PL as well), the "people with a very superficial understanding of the benefits of OSS" would then apparently include the OSI and FSF's lawyers... I don't even understand what you're trying to say with this garbled mess. If you disagree with one of my comments, cite it and explain how you think it is wrong. To spell it out explicitly: You said "People with a very superficial understanding of the benefits of OSS would think MS's shared source license provide those same benefits". I was pointing out that both the MS-RL and the MS-PL (though not the L versions of each, for obvious reasons) had been certified by both the OSI as Open Source licenses and the FSF as Free Software licenses -- i.e. licenses which preserve the Four Freedoms. So, if only "people with a very superficial understanding of the benefits of OSS would think MS's shared source license provide those same benefits", then this would apparently include the OSI and FSF's lawyers. Clear?
I don't think "Yeah, the actual text of the license may not mention Microsoft at all, but we should still have control over software released under it cos we wrote the license!" is going to impress a judge very much.
Characters in the following Unicode ranges should be treated as non-ideographic, even though those characters are ideographic: U+FF66-U+FF9F. Everything else is commentary.
Personally, I haven't heard about any comments being addressed in the MSOOXML spec. The reason you haven't seen any of the relevent references in any Slashdot discussion is that they're invariably modded down to 0 or -1, because Slashdot modders don't like it when reality disagrees with their anti-Microsoft POV. E.g., here's a link to someone quoting from the documentation for autoSpaceLikeWord95. Since, as any Red-blodded True Slashdotter will tell you, autoSpaceLikeWord95 is undocumented, quoting from the documentation is liable to disturb Slashdotters' world-view; it's easier to just stick your fingers in your ears, moderate down, and pretend it didn't happen.
I do love Slashdot, but the apparent wish of the entire community to remain wilfully and childishly ignorant, insofar as Microsoft is concerned, is really quite disturbing.
The fact that content-free posts like " OOXML is such a foul, repugnant anti-standard " are repeatedly modded 'insightful' -- as are the myrad identical "OOXML is unimplementable because it includes undocumented tagss like autoSpaceLikeWord95" replies that inundate anyone who dares question the dogma of OOXMLBADBADBAD -- whereas any posts, such as the parent, which try to point out that autoSpaceLikeWord95 is actually documented perfectly well (albeit in the appendix rather than the main body due to its status as deprecated, as mandated by the ECMA), and give the relevent part of the spec are quickly modded down to Score: 0 and stay there...
It does make you wonder how many people are just ignorant, merely repeating what everyone else is saying because they haven't read the spec themselves (it is, after all, quite long); and how many are actually perfectly aware of the relevent facts but just don't like them.
And NeoOffice supports it now.
As does Corel WordPerfect Office.
And Apple's iWork '08 (and Textedit. And the iPhone).
And Thinkfree Office.
And Gnumeric.
And QuickOffice.
And Dataviz' DocumentsToGo.
And Datawatch Monarch.
And Zoho Writer.
And Xpertdoc Studio.
(Shall I go on?)
Are you trolling; or just very, very misinformed?
Exactly! For example, who needs a graphical way of setting up and specifying the relative position of dual screens? Just because Windows and probably Mac OS have had such capabilities since 1998, doesn't mean Linux needs it. New users should just "man xrandr" and learn the syntax like everyone else!
(Explanation of sarcasm: The 'Screens and Graphics' Xinerama front-end has rightly been deprecated in Hardy like the obselete xorg.conf-trashing piece of crap it is; and the new 'Screen Resolution' xrandr front end doesn't support this capability yet. Canoninical's Bryce Harrington is on record as saying that he "had hoped to spend time implementing this for Hardy, but bugs have taken precedence".)
What irritates me about Ubuntu's Home folder layout isn't the presence of 'Documents', 'Music' etc. folders; it's the absence of a '.appdata' folder, or any environment-variable way of telling applications what folder to use as an appdata folder; which means that the root of your home folder ends cluttered full of files & folders of application settings.
You can go a lot more basic than 1+1=2. Go back to the Peano axioms and you'll find that all you have to assume is the existance of "0", a "successor" function, induction, and a few trivial things like the properties of equality and addition, and you get the whole of arithmetic -- including 1+1=2.
So you invent/assume your choice of axioms, and everything else follows from them and can be discovered at leisure.
Congratulations, you've just invented the Projectively Extended Reals! Yes, it is certainly possible to get a consistent system with 'a point at infinity'. Trouble is, it isn't very useful. Why not? A lot of things that make the Reals useful come from the fact that they're a field. The projectively extended reals aren't a field, so you lose a lot of useful theorems. And there really isn't very much you can do with them that you can't do with the normal reals or that wouldn't be better done in a Riemann sphere anyway. The complex numbers as an extension to the reals, by contrast, are enormously useful, not only in Mathematics (complex numbers are a field) but also in Physics and Engineering.
If you define "bug" to mean "unexpected undocumented behaviour", as Knuth seems to, then it's not surprising that there have been very few bugs claimed, since TeX is so very well documented.
But most people -- and certainly the majority of open source projects these days -- define "bug" as "undesirable behaviour"; and by that standards, TeX is chock full of bugs. To pick a couple of obvious examples, incorrect handling of ASCII 0x22 quotation marks, and treating "etc." as the end of a sentence. These aren't "bugs" to Knuth since the incorrect behavious is well documented, but by many people's standards they are.