My question, though, is whether it is possible for other vendors and OpenOffice to create a better , more pleasing formatting and presentation of the content in the XML than Office 2003 does?
Why bother with the part where you walk into CompUSA? The last time I went in there I had to wait in line quite a long while to talk to someone knowledgeable, but was accosted without prompting by a lurking sales droid to buy an extended warranty on products I was holding while I was waiting in yet another line for a cashier:)
No, really.
With hard drive space so cheap, why not pre-load all kinds of software, each with a unique encryption key (varies for software, computer) and let the user call in with a credit card number to get the key for the software?
Until broadband for the last mile is a reality, I think this is a lot less hassle than visiting CompUSA.
It's good to think ahead to the consequences of breakthroughs that may enable human lifespans to be extended far beyond their current limits. Will the quality of life be good enough, how much will it cost, how should society be restructured, etc.?
However, I'm thinking there's already evidence of what to expect. The number of senior citizens is increasing dramatically and throwing a wrench into pension schemes drawn up decades ago when life spans weren't so great as they are now.
Furthermore, as more and more health care treatments and diagnostics have become available and actually utilized, the overall cost of health care has been increasing in real terms. You can already see the signs of the system straining with hospitals requiring insurance cards, the fraction of uninsured people increasing, the cost of health insurance rising, people waiting in line at ERs, etc.
It's a gradual process and it's already started happening.
As much as I hate MS business tactics I would hesitate accepting a gift that artificially tied into unrelated decisions that should be made on their own merits.
I would concur that MS is bad, MS has an unfair monopoly. I would agree that henceforth I would no longer require students or departments to purchase MS software. I would agree that students be made aware of, educated and trained in the use of alternatives.
But after all is said and done, I would not prohibit any student or department from deciding to buy MS software. Let individuals do what they think best fits their needs.
If it does more than one thing (like be an OS AND a browser
Because software can be constructed almost any way the authors desire (technical need for simplicity, speed, low memory footprint, source code elegance; business need for obscurity, leveraging of other specific software, serving customer desire, breaking compatibility with older file formats), you can see how difficult it is for lawyers to argue about how the division of functionality for any piece of software "ought to be", "should have been", etc.
Any argument that a certain tying in the design of software preserves or propagates a monopoly can be equally and plausibly countered in a room full of legal analysts as a reasonable design decision. A decision that brings convenience to some strange subset of users or developers under a full moon.
Really, the only way to circumvent MS from deploying tactics similar to "boot_OS_and_load_IE()" in the future is to legally separate the business functions into different companies.
In the early days at Microsoft there was supposedly a "Chinese Wall" between OS development and application development, but I don't think it worked very well (from the standpoint of competitors in either the OS or application arena). "DOS isn't done till Lotus won't run."
So, yeah, you're right. It's downright impossible to enforce in practice.
The interim next best thing is to require complete API exposure and publication 6 months prior to any product release. If they change the API, then the product release is delayed. If any product of theirs won't run on an independently created complete working API, then product release is delayed. Etc.
So I wonder if raw WINE use is less robust than, say, something like Lindows?
[Don't quote me, but IIRC from a few years ago, "remote control by variable different people" of any MS software seems like it is addressed in their licenses in a prohibitive fashion...unless they all have a license:)]
you score points with me for not just whacking the user, no questions asked, like the major ISPs seem to be doing.
Amen. Kudoes to you for it.
Seems to me that the volume of specious email like the fabricated one you received is such that you can not practically afford to give an increasing fraction of your valuable time to sifting the claims submitted by email.
Has anyone come up with an auto-responder that ISP's can use that pretty much automate the task of
Dear Spammer:
Thank you for your email.
Unfortunately, no individual here will read it and nor is authorized to formulate the proper response that it deserves.
If you have a specific legal issue to raise, then please send a registered letter to the following address detailing the specific user and specific violation and dates of violations.
<insert address of home office>
I would imagine that would help cut down the volume to genuine concerns.
[Of course, getting a larger raise than the other times was nice for a fleeting moment.]
Honestly, though, the best experience I had at work was coming in on a weekend about 10 years ago to finish working on a special (programming) project with a coworker that also thought it was special, worth coming in on the weekend to do.
Did I mention that the idea and definition of the project germinated with us, at the worker bee level? This was no project handed down from on high - they merely reviewed and approved it to go ahead and get funded.
On that particular Saturday, I was debugging and, finally, around early afternoon, found The One Last Bug that let the application do what we thought it could do.
It was just in time for a conference presentation the next week.
I felt more happiness about my work at that point than at any point since then.
So the lesson here is that happiness resulted from:
risk
success in the face of a deadline
intelligent and enthusiastic coworkers
having say in definining your work
My experience is that most people in most jobs get sufficient risk, some or only a little success in the face of a deadline, few co-workers that are both intelligent and enthusiastic, and get management that does not trust them to have a large say in defining their own work.
highschool level history book...WWII. Britain, Russia, USA and France.
I've noticed that.
Another really fun place to experience some cognitive dissonance on a large scale is to compare Chinese and Japanese high school history books' account of the same era.
Sometimes I think we'd do better if the news feeds to news audiences were dynamically multiplexed so that, on occasion, people would get a clue that their friends on the other side of the world are getting fed a line and that maybe, just maybe, we were gettting fed a line, too.
Diesel may qualify as cleaner compared to gasoline based on certains emissions like CO and NOx, but if you've ever been unfortunate enough to tail a diesel vehicle closely on the road you'll note that particulate emissions from diesel are a lot more noticeable.
I'm constantly amazed at how large populations can have such diverse viewpoints. I think the issue du jour regarding Iraq is a good case in point [but I'd rather not go into the details of that specific issue here.]
What's happening is that Political Rights Management is already here in the form of Media Access Controls.
The colored and filtered "news" that one hears in Omaha, Paris, Beijing, Tel Aviv, or in Islamabad each has its spin on it.
I know this is nothing new to many readers. But I'm still struck by how such disparate viewpoints can coexist. For the most part, these "news" sources ignore each other and the logical contradictions between themselves and others, or even the logical contradictions within a single news source.
The Fourth Estate has been disappointing me a lot lately.
Well, I think the result is a net positive, but of course I have to be anxious that the authorities in control of the Echelon technology do not use it for means that bring about general unhappiness. [ie., imagine any authoritariam regime given that power...]
In the long run, though, I'm saddened that the image of the U.S. (which is increasing battered on the international stage, sometimes correctly, sometimes not), is further tarnished because we are becoming known for invading the privacy of citizens of the world, while ostensibly respecting the 4th Amendment for our own citizens (though with the Patriot Act and the proposed DSEA, that will soon become history).
The United States bolsters the case of those who hate it. The minute "democracy" and a "Bill of Rights" is introduced into a postwar Iraq, the people will spit on their newly found rights, listen to local demogogues, mullahs or others, and vote into a power a new strongman.
There's no question that the AT&T breakup meant the downsizing of an advanced research laboratory, but it's a pity to see it disappear all the same (Stroustrop leaving, etc.).
Such rapid downsizing can be bad, as decisions of where to cut as often hit meat and bone as they hit fat. The decimation process often induces the good productive staff and managers to start looking for a kinder work environment.
And I've seen some good interview candidates swing through here with Lucent experience.
I bought some Lucent after it dropped an order of magnitude in price - but it's halved its value yet again.
In the public sector in 1999 we were wringing our hands at how counterparts in.com startups were making 2.5 times what we were getting paid. Now that telecoms are augering in to the bottom of the toilet tank, I'm kind of glad I didn't jump ship.
Don't forget that in the public sector, there is a profound dislike of actually firing people (whether they deserve it or not).
In an era of budget cutting, expenditures on non-people items are the first to go; then the raises, and only then, the employees themselves.
That being the case, it is quite possible to chop IT spending down to Linux levels and to steathily reabsorb the retraining costs because you have the employee sitting around anyway. Once the retraining costs have been absorbed, you will have accomplished the upgrade and be unshackled from MS expensive licenses in the future.
[This is kind of like how charging for computer time has a lower threshhold defined by the cost of electric power.]
You're dead on right. The new device will be cheaper and slightly but significantly less-featured than a TiVo.
Most consumers have a state of mind where commercials represent distracting blather that they try to tune out of their heads, use to go get food, take a pee break, etc.
They don't realize just how reversed the situation is at the networks: the shows are distracting blather that must be used to convince viewers to watch the advertisements.
I love my TiVo. And everyone I know that has one loves it, too. But most consumers aren't even aware of what a TiVo is or what it can do. So, despite the enormous potential if its price were brought down and its advertising budget brought up, a large number of consumers will be co-opted by a less than TiVo-like experience for their first PVR.
they look like they genuinely take care of their employees.
Mmmm. Do they? Now?
In times past they were known for using temporary staffing companies to hire most of their non-programmer, non-executive employees. The temp employees most certainly did not enjoy the same priveleges.
Oh, except where I read that particularly good-looking secretarial staff did receive invitations to the volleyball games with highly paid, overworked programmers.
There was a lawsuit about this issue, although I'm not sure what the terms of the settlement ended up producing.
A career with a MS is properly described by words like "genuine, care, fulfulling". Maybe in the early to mid 1980s there were some elements of that.
These days, it's a chance to work with some very bright people desperately waiting to become fully vested while MSFT is starting to asymptote because of market saturation by the Borg.
Talk to any public school student and find out pretty quick how badly most teachers are neglecting their jobs.
You're correct.
Some of teachers do neglect to perform their duties with dedication we, the taxpaying public, expect of them.
<sarcasm>Given just how exorbitant the salaries are for teachers these days, I'm surprised that we have as many problems attracting competent teachers as we do.</saracasm>
It's not the rest of societies problem. Parents are doing far too much insisting on protection 'for the children' which ends up restricting what adults can do.
I agree with your second sentence, but I have reservations about feeling so absolutely correct about the first.
Yes, it is quite correct that the majority of parents are underqualified and have unrealistic expectations that society will assume some responsibility for raising their children. Talk to any public school teacher and you can find out pretty quick just how bady most parents are neglecting their jobs.
And so I believe that heavy-handed Internet porn filters at libraries are bad policy. That parents should be monitoring their children's activity and not complain so much. Automating the monitoring to save money doesn't wash as valid excuse to me, no more than using a VCR and TV as a convenient babysitter does.
But, unless you can afford to home school your own children, there is a necessity for you to go a job and to send your kids to some public school somewhere where you are physically unable to monitor what your children are doing.
In that case, I think parents have a reasonable expectation that society will fulfull some responsibility for monitoring their children and preventing them from exposure to things that they would rather their kids not see at a young age.
Zoning restrictions that prohibit the establishment of adult movie theatres near schools are another example of where society has collectively decided it is their problem and made some policy decision.
It reminds me a lot of this earlier tactic for getting people hooked onto playing games on cell phones. As I recall, the variant was to have a few hot chicks playing cell phone games in bars so that onlooking guys in the bar would assume that acquisition of said merchandise was the new magic bullet to Success with Women.
But please. My mental environment is already overly polluted with high-pitched sales "information" that crowds out reflection, creative thinking, following a logical train of thought, etc.
When I read about OLEDs a couple of years ago they seemed to offer brilliant displays compared to competing technologies, such as LCDs. I don't know how the cd/cm^2 compare quantitatively, though.
But, IIRC, there was some mention of problems having to do with the lifetimes of the displays, blue colors, over a year.
Have all of the problems with OLEDs been overcome? Will the viewfinder look as nice 5 years from now?
Slashdot Mirror
This is hardly surprising news.
My question, though, is whether it is possible for other vendors and OpenOffice to create a better , more pleasing formatting and presentation of the content in the XML than Office 2003 does?
Why bother with the part where you walk into CompUSA? The last time I went in there I had to wait in line quite a long while to talk to someone knowledgeable, but was accosted without prompting by a lurking sales droid to buy an extended warranty on products I was holding while I was waiting in yet another line for a cashier:)
No, really.
With hard drive space so cheap, why not pre-load all kinds of software, each with a unique encryption key (varies for software, computer) and let the user call in with a credit card number to get the key for the software?
Until broadband for the last mile is a reality, I think this is a lot less hassle than visiting CompUSA.
It's good to think ahead to the consequences of breakthroughs that may enable human lifespans to be extended far beyond their current limits. Will the quality of life be good enough, how much will it cost, how should society be restructured, etc.?
However, I'm thinking there's already evidence of what to expect. The number of senior citizens is increasing dramatically and throwing a wrench into pension schemes drawn up decades ago when life spans weren't so great as they are now.
Furthermore, as more and more health care treatments and diagnostics have become available and actually utilized, the overall cost of health care has been increasing in real terms. You can already see the signs of the system straining with hospitals requiring insurance cards, the fraction of uninsured people increasing, the cost of health insurance rising, people waiting in line at ERs, etc.
It's a gradual process and it's already started happening.
As much as I hate MS business tactics I would hesitate accepting a gift that artificially tied into unrelated decisions that should be made on their own merits.
I would concur that MS is bad, MS has an unfair monopoly. I would agree that henceforth I would no longer require students or departments to purchase MS software. I would agree that students be made aware of, educated and trained in the use of alternatives.
But after all is said and done, I would not prohibit any student or department from deciding to buy MS software. Let individuals do what they think best fits their needs.
If it does more than one thing (like be an OS AND a browser
Because software can be constructed almost any way the authors desire (technical need for simplicity, speed, low memory footprint, source code elegance; business need for obscurity, leveraging of other specific software, serving customer desire, breaking compatibility with older file formats), you can see how difficult it is for lawyers to argue about how the division of functionality for any piece of software "ought to be", "should have been", etc.
Any argument that a certain tying in the design of software preserves or propagates a monopoly can be equally and plausibly countered in a room full of legal analysts as a reasonable design decision. A decision that brings convenience to some strange subset of users or developers under a full moon.
Really, the only way to circumvent MS from deploying tactics similar to "boot_OS_and_load_IE()" in the future is to legally separate the business functions into different companies.
In the early days at Microsoft there was supposedly a "Chinese Wall" between OS development and application development, but I don't think it worked very well (from the standpoint of competitors in either the OS or application arena). "DOS isn't done till Lotus won't run."
So, yeah, you're right. It's downright impossible to enforce in practice.
The interim next best thing is to require complete API exposure and publication 6 months prior to any product release. If they change the API, then the product release is delayed. If any product of theirs won't run on an independently created complete working API, then product release is delayed. Etc.
So I wonder if raw WINE use is less robust than, say, something like Lindows?
[Don't quote me, but IIRC from a few years ago, "remote control by variable different people" of any MS software seems like it is addressed in their licenses in a prohibitive fashion...unless they all have a license:)]
you score points with me for not just whacking the user, no questions asked, like the major ISPs seem to be doing.
Amen. Kudoes to you for it.
Seems to me that the volume of specious email like the fabricated one you received is such that you can not practically afford to give an increasing fraction of your valuable time to sifting the claims submitted by email.
Has anyone come up with an auto-responder that ISP's can use that pretty much automate the task of
I would imagine that would help cut down the volume to genuine concerns.[Of course, getting a larger raise than the other times was nice for a fleeting moment.]
Honestly, though, the best experience I had at work was coming in on a weekend about 10 years ago to finish working on a special (programming) project with a coworker that also thought it was special, worth coming in on the weekend to do.
Did I mention that the idea and definition of the project germinated with us, at the worker bee level? This was no project handed down from on high - they merely reviewed and approved it to go ahead and get funded.
On that particular Saturday, I was debugging and, finally, around early afternoon, found The One Last Bug that let the application do what we thought it could do.
It was just in time for a conference presentation the next week.
I felt more happiness about my work at that point than at any point since then.
So the lesson here is that happiness resulted from:
My experience is that most people in most jobs get sufficient risk, some or only a little success in the face of a deadline, few co-workers that are both intelligent and enthusiastic, and get management that does not trust them to have a large say in defining their own work.
highschool level history book...WWII. Britain, Russia, USA and France.
I've noticed that.
Another really fun place to experience some cognitive dissonance on a large scale is to compare Chinese and Japanese high school history books' account of the same era.
Sometimes I think we'd do better if the news feeds to news audiences were dynamically multiplexed so that, on occasion, people would get a clue that their friends on the other side of the world are getting fed a line and that maybe, just maybe, we were gettting fed a line, too.
Just join a club to form a
- whitelist - stuff that's definitely OK to see
- blacklist - stuff that's definitely not OK to see
- graylist - stuff that's outside the known universe
to define your own internet experience. Sounds like a great idea to me.Think of the possibilities, too. The anti-matter folks and the matter folks can help each other with their respective lists.
Some of the pr0n viewing crowd can join the Moral Majority Virtual web but just set (white=black and black=white) and everyone wins.
Superior mpg, and clean emissions.
Yes to the first.
On the second point, I have some doubts.
Diesel may qualify as cleaner compared to gasoline based on certains emissions like CO and NOx, but if you've ever been unfortunate enough to tail a diesel vehicle closely on the road you'll note that particulate emissions from diesel are a lot more noticeable.
The portable page claims the portable version of OpenSSH will run on Cygwin.
I'm constantly amazed at how large populations can have such diverse viewpoints. I think the issue du jour regarding Iraq is a good case in point [but I'd rather not go into the details of that specific issue here.]
What's happening is that Political Rights Management is already here in the form of Media Access Controls.
The colored and filtered "news" that one hears in Omaha, Paris, Beijing, Tel Aviv, or in Islamabad each has its spin on it.
I know this is nothing new to many readers. But I'm still struck by how such disparate viewpoints can coexist. For the most part, these "news" sources ignore each other and the logical contradictions between themselves and others, or even the logical contradictions within a single news source.
The Fourth Estate has been disappointing me a lot lately.
Well, I think the result is a net positive, but of course I have to be anxious that the authorities in control of the Echelon technology do not use it for means that bring about general unhappiness. [ie., imagine any authoritariam regime given that power...]
In the long run, though, I'm saddened that the image of the U.S. (which is increasing battered on the international stage, sometimes correctly, sometimes not), is further tarnished because we are becoming known for invading the privacy of citizens of the world, while ostensibly respecting the 4th Amendment for our own citizens (though with the Patriot Act and the proposed DSEA, that will soon become history).
The United States bolsters the case of those who hate it. The minute "democracy" and a "Bill of Rights" is introduced into a postwar Iraq, the people will spit on their newly found rights, listen to local demogogues, mullahs or others, and vote into a power a new strongman.
Meet the new boss. Same as the old boss.
the fact that my employer invented UNIX
Sounds somewhat like AT&T Bell Labs.
There's no question that the AT&T breakup meant the downsizing of an advanced research laboratory, but it's a pity to see it disappear all the same (Stroustrop leaving, etc.).
Such rapid downsizing can be bad, as decisions of where to cut as often hit meat and bone as they hit fat. The decimation process often induces the good productive staff and managers to start looking for a kinder work environment.
And I've seen some good interview candidates swing through here with Lucent experience.
I bought some Lucent after it dropped an order of magnitude in price - but it's halved its value yet again.
In the public sector in 1999 we were wringing our hands at how counterparts in .com startups were making 2.5 times what we were getting paid. Now that telecoms are augering in to the bottom of the toilet tank, I'm kind of glad I didn't jump ship.
Linux is only free if your time has no value
Don't forget that in the public sector, there is a profound dislike of actually firing people (whether they deserve it or not).
In an era of budget cutting, expenditures on non-people items are the first to go; then the raises, and only then, the employees themselves.
That being the case, it is quite possible to chop IT spending down to Linux levels and to steathily reabsorb the retraining costs because you have the employee sitting around anyway. Once the retraining costs have been absorbed, you will have accomplished the upgrade and be unshackled from MS expensive licenses in the future.
[This is kind of like how charging for computer time has a lower threshhold defined by the cost of electric power.]
If it's easy to use and user friendly...
You're dead on right. The new device will be cheaper and slightly but significantly less-featured than a TiVo.
Most consumers have a state of mind where commercials represent distracting blather that they try to tune out of their heads, use to go get food, take a pee break, etc.
They don't realize just how reversed the situation is at the networks: the shows are distracting blather that must be used to convince viewers to watch the advertisements.
I love my TiVo. And everyone I know that has one loves it, too. But most consumers aren't even aware of what a TiVo is or what it can do. So, despite the enormous potential if its price were brought down and its advertising budget brought up, a large number of consumers will be co-opted by a less than TiVo-like experience for their first PVR.
people who spell her name wrong or people who mistake her gender.
Reminds me of "It may be spelled N-e-t-s-c-a-p-e, but it's pronouned "mozilla""
Her name may be spelled M-i-t-c-h-e-l-l, but it's pronounced "Chief Lizard Wrangler"
Anyone with a title like that is likely to be on the receiving end of sexual advances more adventurous than most of us.
they look like they genuinely take care of their employees.
Mmmm. Do they? Now?
In times past they were known for using temporary staffing companies to hire most of their non-programmer, non-executive employees. The temp employees most certainly did not enjoy the same priveleges.
Oh, except where I read that particularly good-looking secretarial staff did receive invitations to the volleyball games with highly paid, overworked programmers.
There was a lawsuit about this issue, although I'm not sure what the terms of the settlement ended up producing.
A career with a MS is properly described by words like "genuine, care, fulfulling". Maybe in the early to mid 1980s there were some elements of that.
These days, it's a chance to work with some very bright people desperately waiting to become fully vested while MSFT is starting to asymptote because of market saturation by the Borg.
It is not possible...
That doesn't seem like the firmest ground on which to base a lawsuit, as I'm sure other posters have noted earlier.
It's tantamount to saying
Well, it's always possible. There are anecdotal examples where success has been built upon a foundation of misdeeds.But in this case, that's a far-fetched possibility and I think any investigation in the facts supporting the allegations will soon bear that out.
Talk to any public school student and find out pretty quick how badly most teachers are neglecting their jobs.
You're correct.
Some of teachers do neglect to perform their duties with dedication we, the taxpaying public, expect of them.
<sarcasm>Given just how exorbitant the salaries are for teachers these days, I'm surprised that we have as many problems attracting competent teachers as we do.</saracasm>
It's not the rest of societies problem. Parents are doing far too much insisting on protection 'for the children' which ends up restricting what adults can do.
I agree with your second sentence, but I have reservations about feeling so absolutely correct about the first.
Yes, it is quite correct that the majority of parents are underqualified and have unrealistic expectations that society will assume some responsibility for raising their children. Talk to any public school teacher and you can find out pretty quick just how bady most parents are neglecting their jobs.
And so I believe that heavy-handed Internet porn filters at libraries are bad policy. That parents should be monitoring their children's activity and not complain so much. Automating the monitoring to save money doesn't wash as valid excuse to me, no more than using a VCR and TV as a convenient babysitter does.
But, unless you can afford to home school your own children, there is a necessity for you to go a job and to send your kids to some public school somewhere where you are physically unable to monitor what your children are doing.
In that case, I think parents have a reasonable expectation that society will fulfull some responsibility for monitoring their children and preventing them from exposure to things that they would rather their kids not see at a young age.
Zoning restrictions that prohibit the establishment of adult movie theatres near schools are another example of where society has collectively decided it is their problem and made some policy decision.
I think it's unconscionable that Connecticut is having a lottery offering crack for children to raise cash.
I'm going to call up my radio station immediately and express my opinion about this obscenity.
It reminds me a lot of this earlier tactic for getting people hooked onto playing games on cell phones. As I recall, the variant was to have a few hot chicks playing cell phone games in bars so that onlooking guys in the bar would assume that acquisition of said merchandise was the new magic bullet to Success with Women.
But please. My mental environment is already overly polluted with high-pitched sales "information" that crowds out reflection, creative thinking, following a logical train of thought, etc.
When I read about OLEDs a couple of years ago they seemed to offer brilliant displays compared to competing technologies, such as LCDs. I don't know how the cd/cm^2 compare quantitatively, though.
But, IIRC, there was some mention of problems having to do with the lifetimes of the displays, blue colors, over a year.
Have all of the problems with OLEDs been overcome? Will the viewfinder look as nice 5 years from now?