Quite sad actually. Despite all the negative reports about Vista, the new machines will ship with Vista as OEM, usually without compatibility issues or driver issues because the vendors take care of it, the juggernaut will roll inexorably and gain market share.
There will be no change in the situation as long as the business customers take it in their chin and continue to buy MSFT no matter how much abuse they suffer. If the constant acceleration of upgrade treadmill gets interrupted, at least MSFT will retreat from all its loss leading misadventures and allow creativity and innovation to flourish in other areas of computing. Hopefully. The way it goes, PCs are a lost cause for the next five to ten years.
A funder of the OpenDoc Society invited Microsoft to join that organization, saying: "This plan is not about Microsoft, it's about ensuring the perpetual availability of data without any obstacles."
MSFT countered saying that it has nothing against its users ensuring perpetual availability of their data residing in their machines and it would gladly join the organization if Microsoft's right to perpetual profits could be guaranteed.
In many countries, like Japan, there is a law that says whenever a picture is taken using a digital camera a loud and distinct click must be sounded. This was because people were snapping surreptitious pictures of other people of a particular gender from very peculiar angles and there was a public outcry. So should this camera on the lanyard sound click every 30 seconds?
The problem is, if you take a picture every 30 sec all day in public places, then you could be a witness to crime or crimes. Thus you might have evidence of a crime in those pictures. If you have something that might or might not be evidence of a crime, you can destroy that in good faith. There is nothing wrong in shredding paper documents or throwing away audio tapes etc. Only if you destroy it knowingly to conceal a crime, it is felony obstruction of justice.
But, there was a new twist, with the Sorbanes-Oxley (spelling?) Act that mandates preservation of all electronic records, whether or not they are evidence, whether or not you knew it is evidence. So these pictures should be preserved for whatever period the act says they must be preserved.
Of course any one who posts drivel like this could not be a lawyer and I am not one.
From the article:
The hidden cost of vulnerability
What management may not realize, however, is that they are already paying a hefty hidden cost by having outdated systems in place, "because you are paying for an administrator's time to deal with these issues," Johnson said. The trick is to show management this in a way that translates into dollars saved.
"It's a hard sell, because security is not a line item on their income or expense sheets. There also is not a line item that says they lost, say, $100,000 on their security problem last year. Or lost staff productivity because people had viruses on their machines," he said.
Of course, MSFT can claim Vista is better than XP. It should not be seen as dissing XP. In fact every company makes such a claim. On the other hand, MSFT taking time to educate the IT honchos about the hidden costs of vulnerability and security implications etc might benefit Linux as a side benefit. If they get the message that security is important, they might see that monoculture is a vulnerability too.
Govenment needs the money. Tax-and-spend Democrats and Borrow-and-spend Republicans and united with a President who does not include cost of a damned war in the regular budget. Why would they do anything that benefits the citizens in the long run? Sell whatever they can to the highest bidder and then they will make election promises, "If you elect me I will rein in the out-of-control Washington and make those damned corporations pay dearly..."
Why would MS protect boot.ini? If someone accidentally deletes it and gets hopelessly mired, are they going to switch to Linux? No? Then it is going to result in a new purchase of another copy of windows right? Then why bother to protect boot.ini when you could easily protect the profits and sales? When there is no competition, such things happen. Especially in the PC based gaming arena.
At the w3schools, the top browser is Firefox at 36%. OK, OK it is a techie site not a general site. And yes, if you add IE5, IE6 and
IE7 it comes to 57% beating Firefox. But still, for the first time, in Sep 2007, the column for Firefox becomes the king of the hill. Since IE6 is going down, till IE7 overtakes Firefox, it will keep the number 1 spot for sometime to come.
The real funny part is what Feynman did to Clark for that invention. Smith gave Feynaman some routine paperwork to sign the patents over to the government for 1$. He signed it over and demanded that one buck. Since no one actually wanted that dollar, Smith had no idea of how to start the paperwork to pay Feynman his 3 dollars. So he gave it from his pocket. Feynman went to a bakery and bought dozens of donuts and bagels and distributed it saying it is from that dollar for his invention. Many of the people in the Manhatten project had dozens of patents signed over to the government for one dollar. They all came dunning for their dollar. Feynman throughly enjoyed the spectacle.
I was hoping finally the corporations would wake up to the onerous requirements MSFT is placing on them, making them jump through so many hoops like a trained monkey and finally decide to become less independent on MSFT. Now the computer will continue to work, but with a few more nagging messages. Given the amount of nagging dialogs that most users don't understand who routinely press OK to continue and get on with their work. It will merely accustom the users to higher levels of pain and raise the tolerance levels. Is there any wonder people hate computers?
Some 30 years ago, I had to resolve an issue with my "Student Concession Season Ticket" with the Southern Railways in Chennai (Madras those days), India and walked into the Great Hall where such matters of momentous importance are dealt with. An incredible sight. It was a hall some 100 feet wide and 400 feet deep. Rows upon rows of desks, touching end to end across the hall! Between every row of desks there was some two feet gaps to put chairs in, where the clerks were processing files. There was a central aisle. The ceiling was some 20 or 30 feet high, with rickety ceiling fans hanging on thin rods slowly spinning and pushing the rising hot air down on to the gnomes. And at the head of the Hall, facing all the clerks was the officer in charge of that department. I could close my eyes and imagine him hitting a gavel on the desk and call out cadence, "Battle Speed! dum, dum, dum, dadadum" like in Ben Hur slave galley scene.
Cubeless office? Some bureaucrat working for the British Raj invented them 100 years ago.
I dare you to post your real email address. If you think "harvesting email" addresses and sending them email should be legitimate, you should be trumpeting your email address. Why are you hiding your
profile buddy?
I am sure many people have great things to sell to you and they will find it a great marketing tool to send you emails selling really useful things to you. When you are at it, why don't you post your real mailing address? I will subscribe to a thousand catalog companies on your behalf. I am sure you would not mind your credit card bills, mortgage notices, tax bills being mixed up with all the catalogs you are getting in your regular mail.
Very interesting amendment, from USA no less!!
on
OOXML's 662 Resolutions
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
Would have sworn it is a comment on a slashdot thread! Way to go Alan Bell!! 3 cheers. - - - - - - US - 270
Naming DIS 29500: The current name of DIS 29500, Office Open XML is seriously misleading in several respects. First, it is not a document format based on XML but rather an XML representation of a legacy document format with particular processing semantics. Second, reference should not be made to commercial products and clearly "Office" in the title of this proposal is meant as a reference to Microsoft Office. Lastly, the proposal is no more or less open than any other ISO proposal and so "Open" is meaningless in this context.
It is suggested that a new name be chosen for the proposal that reflects its goal of representing and continuing a legacy document format as represented in XML. Such a name should not carry an implied reference to a Microsoft product nor should it use the term "open." One possible name would be: Legacy Document Formats Represented in XML. The principles developed from this effort might well prove effective for other legacy document formats that should be represented in XML.
You are right in saying Indians are willing to learn English. But English giving India a leg up in competitiveness is a recent phenomena. India is fragmented by language. Just about 40% of Indians have Hindi as their mother tounge. Probably 70% of Indians have some working knowledge of Hindi. But almost all the higher education, courts, government etc run purely on English. Partly the legacy of being a former British Colony. Indians have always used English for internal communication. Indian English a very well recognized dialect of English.
Do you know that India has a bigger English language Newspaper circulation than USA?
Wiki says Indian English language Newspaer circulation is 8 million of Times of India, 4 million for The Hindu and 3.8 million for Hindustan Times. Compare it to 2.8 million for USA today, 2.5 million for the Wall St Journal and 2 million for the NYT.
Yeah, Mexico will benefit by learning English, heck, any country will. But for Mexico to reach India in English literacy, it has to go a long long way.
They should realize they are some small city government in New Jersey. They seem to think they are China. Only to China, Google and Yahoo will dutifully genuflect and bend over. Not to New Jersey.
It took Darwin himself to derail this ancient tradition -- and he proceeded in the gentle way so characteristic of his radical intellectual approach to nearly everything. The ichneumons also troubled Darwin greatly and he wrote of them to Asa Gray in 1860:
I own that I cannot see as plainly as others do, and as I should wish to do, evidence of design and beneficence on all sides of us. There seems to me too much misery in the world. I cannot persuade myself that a beneficent and omnipotent God would have designedly created the Ichneumonidae with the express intention of their feeding within the living bodies of Caterpillars, or that a cat should play with mice.
Present day Christians might square it by saying the moral code is not binding on lower animals, but in Darwin's day, the reigning principle was something like Paley's watchmaker God to square the findings of science with theology. The thought of wasps feeling on live caterpillars were shocking to Darwin.
You have the liberty and the right to lead your life according to your beliefs. Of course you recognize my right and liberty to pursue happiness according to my belief, right? You would fight this hard to defend my right to worship a tree, a snake, a cow or an idol, or none, correct?
As a side note, I personally don't find the explanation of evolution to be satisfying - I eat, sleep, work, and die, and maybe even reproduce. Whoopie. What do I have to look forward to?
It is ok, if you don't find the explanation satisfying. It usually takes a couple of college level courses in biology, and some smattering of Probability and Statistics at at least AP level to grasp it. That does not mean you are a dumbass or anything. Many people don't readily grasp orbital mechanics or the Ham Sandwich theorem in Computational Geometry[*]. Given sincere study they (and you can grasp) any subject.
Fine if you want to find meaning in life by expecting to meet your Creator after you die. The difference between that expectation and hoping to meet 72 smiling virgins is one of degree, not essence. As long as you don't pretend what you believe is science and try to sneak it into schools, it is peace! live and let live.
[*] The Ham Sandwich theorem: If you have two pieces of bread (A and B) and a hunk of ham (H) in the middle, you can slice ALL of them into two exactly equal halves in just one stroke with a planar knife. Each piece A,B and H will be exactly split into two halves. No matter how lumpy and how irregular the bread and ham are. All you need is just one stroke. And no complicated speciality knife either, simple plane knife. Some people find it incredible that there is a branch of mathematics that can handle this problem and pose a theorem, leave alone the proof.
It definitely did not happen in one generation. You could not have a mother wasp that killed and the daughter who carefully drove the roach.
Let us start with wasps that stung a roach, killed it and laid eggs on the corpse. Some small variation in the gene that made the poison slightly stronger or slightly weaker. If it is so weak the roach took longer to die, the wasp larvae had better food so they were at an advantage. So they dominate and crowd out the wasps making stronger venom. It was probably not even the weakness of the venom, it could be amount of venom, or a tendency to seek larger roaches... anything that changes how long it takes for the roach to die. But if it reaches a stage where the roach was not even paralyzed then those genes lost the race. Thus over a long period, a species of wasp that paralyzed but not killed the roach developed.
From this species each individual made a slightly different potion of chemicals and the one that reduced the flight instinct of the roach had better survival rate. All it takes is simple differential survival rates and such incredible developments could occur.
Of course you don't have to believe all this explanation. You could go with a designer God who created a creature so diabolical it trained its young to eat roaches alive. The earlier speculation was that the roaches lost their fight-of-flight instinct. But now it looks like their muscles are paralyzed, but instinct is present in the brain. So the roach is being aware of being eaten alive and probably not even numbed to pain, just it is not able to run away. It makes it even more horrifying. If you want to believe in a God who could be so diabolical and evil, go ahead and believe.
Direct result of such a micro-managing designer God is that, He designed me to believe in evolution. God is the one who is making me fight the fundies trying to inject religion into the class room. God is responsible for my strenuous opposition to Discovery Institute. You also have to excuse every murderer, rapist, child molester because, it is God who is ultimately responsible for the actions of the human machines He designed.
After tying yourself into knots trying to find a way out using "Free Will" dogma, you will eventually long for the simplicity of the explanation of "evolution is responsible for this. We can't extrapolate any morality from this roach and wasp".
A simpler form of this behavior was observed by Charles Darwin. Wasps laying eggs on live caterpillars which were eaten alive by wasp larvae! That convinced Darwin that no moral, just, fair God would design such a system. It was one of his motivations in seeking natural explanations for behavior of animals. Darwin wanted to plug the hole, "I am bad because God designed me to be bad and sinful" defense for the sinners. Because if Paley's watchmaker God was true, then every immoral behavior is a designed behavior, specifically created by God. It is ironic that present day fundies paint Darwin in the darkest hue.
The evolution is easily explained. Wasps sting and kill cockroaches and lay an egg on the dead roach to provide ready food for their larvae. Some wasps had less potent venom, strong enough to paralyze but taking longer to kill. These roaches would stay alive longer and provide better, less rotten bodies for the larvae. Now you can see the selection mechanism, give it a few million years and a billion generations, you can see behavior that is incredible.
Slashdot Mirror
There will be no change in the situation as long as the business customers take it in their chin and continue to buy MSFT no matter how much abuse they suffer. If the constant acceleration of upgrade treadmill gets interrupted, at least MSFT will retreat from all its loss leading misadventures and allow creativity and innovation to flourish in other areas of computing. Hopefully. The way it goes, PCs are a lost cause for the next five to ten years.
He already sent out a couple of million 409 emails, in all caps.
I know, It is Pittsburgh, Beechwood Blvd, Right? or Left?
I have not tried it myself, but OpenOffice offers saving to LaTeX2e or some such export capability. And you know it can read doc files.
MSFT countered saying that it has nothing against its users ensuring perpetual availability of their data residing in their machines and it would gladly join the organization if Microsoft's right to perpetual profits could be guaranteed.
In many countries, like Japan, there is a law that says whenever a picture is taken using a digital camera a loud and distinct click must be sounded. This was because people were snapping surreptitious pictures of other people of a particular gender from very peculiar angles and there was a public outcry. So should this camera on the lanyard sound click every 30 seconds?
But, there was a new twist, with the Sorbanes-Oxley (spelling?) Act that mandates preservation of all electronic records, whether or not they are evidence, whether or not you knew it is evidence. So these pictures should be preserved for whatever period the act says they must be preserved.
Of course any one who posts drivel like this could not be a lawyer and I am not one.
What management may not realize, however, is that they are already paying a hefty hidden cost by having outdated systems in place, "because you are paying for an administrator's time to deal with these issues," Johnson said. The trick is to show management this in a way that translates into dollars saved.
"It's a hard sell, because security is not a line item on their income or expense sheets. There also is not a line item that says they lost, say, $100,000 on their security problem last year. Or lost staff productivity because people had viruses on their machines," he said.
Of course, MSFT can claim Vista is better than XP. It should not be seen as dissing XP. In fact every company makes such a claim. On the other hand, MSFT taking time to educate the IT honchos about the hidden costs of vulnerability and security implications etc might benefit Linux as a side benefit. If they get the message that security is important, they might see that monoculture is a vulnerability too.
Govenment needs the money. Tax-and-spend Democrats and Borrow-and-spend Republicans and united with a President who does not include cost of a damned war in the regular budget. Why would they do anything that benefits the citizens in the long run? Sell whatever they can to the highest bidder and then they will make election promises, "If you elect me I will rein in the out-of-control Washington and make those damned corporations pay dearly..."
Why would MS protect boot.ini? If someone accidentally deletes it and gets hopelessly mired, are they going to switch to Linux? No? Then it is going to result in a new purchase of another copy of windows right? Then why bother to protect boot.ini when you could easily protect the profits and sales? When there is no competition, such things happen. Especially in the PC based gaming arena.
At the w3schools, the top browser is Firefox at 36%. OK, OK it is a techie site not a general site. And yes, if you add IE5, IE6 and IE7 it comes to 57% beating Firefox. But still, for the first time, in Sep 2007, the column for Firefox becomes the king of the hill. Since IE6 is going down, till IE7 overtakes Firefox, it will keep the number 1 spot for sometime to come.
The real funny part is what Feynman did to Clark for that invention. Smith gave Feynaman some routine paperwork to sign the patents over to the government for 1$. He signed it over and demanded that one buck. Since no one actually wanted that dollar, Smith had no idea of how to start the paperwork to pay Feynman his 3 dollars. So he gave it from his pocket. Feynman went to a bakery and bought dozens of donuts and bagels and distributed it saying it is from that dollar for his invention. Many of the people in the Manhatten project had dozens of patents signed over to the government for one dollar. They all came dunning for their dollar. Feynman throughly enjoyed the spectacle.
Did you move the file within the same hard disk? Have you tried to copy a large file from one hard disk to another?
I was hoping finally the corporations would wake up to the onerous requirements MSFT is placing on them, making them jump through so many hoops like a trained monkey and finally decide to become less independent on MSFT. Now the computer will continue to work, but with a few more nagging messages. Given the amount of nagging dialogs that most users don't understand who routinely press OK to continue and get on with their work. It will merely accustom the users to higher levels of pain and raise the tolerance levels. Is there any wonder people hate computers?
Cubeless office? Some bureaucrat working for the British Raj invented them 100 years ago.
I am sure many people have great things to sell to you and they will find it a great marketing tool to send you emails selling really useful things to you. When you are at it, why don't you post your real mailing address? I will subscribe to a thousand catalog companies on your behalf. I am sure you would not mind your credit card bills, mortgage notices, tax bills being mixed up with all the catalogs you are getting in your regular mail.
Would have sworn it is a comment on a slashdot thread! Way to go Alan Bell!! 3 cheers.
- - - - - -
US - 270
Naming DIS 29500: The current name of DIS 29500, Office Open XML is seriously misleading in several respects. First, it is not a document format based on XML but rather an XML representation of a legacy document format with particular processing semantics. Second, reference should not be made to commercial products and clearly "Office" in the title of this proposal is meant as a reference to Microsoft Office. Lastly, the proposal is no more or less open than any other ISO proposal and so "Open" is meaningless in this context.
It is suggested that a new name be chosen for the proposal that reflects its goal of representing and continuing a legacy document format as represented in XML. Such a name should not carry an implied reference to a Microsoft product nor should it use the term "open." One possible name would be: Legacy Document Formats Represented in XML. The principles developed from this effort might well prove effective for other legacy document formats that should be represented in XML.
DIS 29500
Do you know that India has a bigger English language Newspaper circulation than USA? Wiki says Indian English language Newspaer circulation is 8 million of Times of India, 4 million for The Hindu and 3.8 million for Hindustan Times. Compare it to 2.8 million for USA today, 2.5 million for the Wall St Journal and 2 million for the NYT.
Yeah, Mexico will benefit by learning English, heck, any country will. But for Mexico to reach India in English literacy, it has to go a long long way.
They should realize they are some small city government in New Jersey. They seem to think they are China. Only to China, Google and Yahoo will dutifully genuflect and bend over. Not to New Jersey.
It took Darwin himself to derail this ancient tradition -- and he proceeded in the gentle way so characteristic of his radical intellectual approach to nearly everything. The ichneumons also troubled Darwin greatly and he wrote of them to Asa Gray in 1860: I own that I cannot see as plainly as others do, and as I should wish to do, evidence of design and beneficence on all sides of us. There seems to me too much misery in the world. I cannot persuade myself that a beneficent and omnipotent God would have designedly created the Ichneumonidae with the express intention of their feeding within the living bodies of Caterpillars, or that a cat should play with mice.
Present day Christians might square it by saying the moral code is not binding on lower animals, but in Darwin's day, the reigning principle was something like Paley's watchmaker God to square the findings of science with theology. The thought of wasps feeling on live caterpillars were shocking to Darwin.
Agreed. Peace on Earth. May your tribe increase and May God bless a tolerant soul like you to reach higher levels of hierarchy in your Church.
You have the liberty and the right to lead your life according to your beliefs. Of course you recognize my right and liberty to pursue happiness according to my belief, right? You would fight this hard to defend my right to worship a tree, a snake, a cow or an idol, or none, correct?
It is ok, if you don't find the explanation satisfying. It usually takes a couple of college level courses in biology, and some smattering of Probability and Statistics at at least AP level to grasp it. That does not mean you are a dumbass or anything. Many people don't readily grasp orbital mechanics or the Ham Sandwich theorem in Computational Geometry[*]. Given sincere study they (and you can grasp) any subject.
Fine if you want to find meaning in life by expecting to meet your Creator after you die. The difference between that expectation and hoping to meet 72 smiling virgins is one of degree, not essence. As long as you don't pretend what you believe is science and try to sneak it into schools, it is peace! live and let live.
[*] The Ham Sandwich theorem: If you have two pieces of bread (A and B) and a hunk of ham (H) in the middle, you can slice ALL of them into two exactly equal halves in just one stroke with a planar knife. Each piece A,B and H will be exactly split into two halves. No matter how lumpy and how irregular the bread and ham are. All you need is just one stroke. And no complicated speciality knife either, simple plane knife. Some people find it incredible that there is a branch of mathematics that can handle this problem and pose a theorem, leave alone the proof.
Let us start with wasps that stung a roach, killed it and laid eggs on the corpse. Some small variation in the gene that made the poison slightly stronger or slightly weaker. If it is so weak the roach took longer to die, the wasp larvae had better food so they were at an advantage. So they dominate and crowd out the wasps making stronger venom. It was probably not even the weakness of the venom, it could be amount of venom, or a tendency to seek larger roaches... anything that changes how long it takes for the roach to die. But if it reaches a stage where the roach was not even paralyzed then those genes lost the race. Thus over a long period, a species of wasp that paralyzed but not killed the roach developed.
From this species each individual made a slightly different potion of chemicals and the one that reduced the flight instinct of the roach had better survival rate. All it takes is simple differential survival rates and such incredible developments could occur.
Of course you don't have to believe all this explanation. You could go with a designer God who created a creature so diabolical it trained its young to eat roaches alive. The earlier speculation was that the roaches lost their fight-of-flight instinct. But now it looks like their muscles are paralyzed, but instinct is present in the brain. So the roach is being aware of being eaten alive and probably not even numbed to pain, just it is not able to run away. It makes it even more horrifying. If you want to believe in a God who could be so diabolical and evil, go ahead and believe.
Direct result of such a micro-managing designer God is that, He designed me to believe in evolution. God is the one who is making me fight the fundies trying to inject religion into the class room. God is responsible for my strenuous opposition to Discovery Institute. You also have to excuse every murderer, rapist, child molester because, it is God who is ultimately responsible for the actions of the human machines He designed.
After tying yourself into knots trying to find a way out using "Free Will" dogma, you will eventually long for the simplicity of the explanation of "evolution is responsible for this. We can't extrapolate any morality from this roach and wasp".
The evolution is easily explained. Wasps sting and kill cockroaches and lay an egg on the dead roach to provide ready food for their larvae. Some wasps had less potent venom, strong enough to paralyze but taking longer to kill. These roaches would stay alive longer and provide better, less rotten bodies for the larvae. Now you can see the selection mechanism, give it a few million years and a billion generations, you can see behavior that is incredible.