In many places some kind of test is mandatory. You can refuse the breathalyzer, but instead you have to take a blood test. Probable cause is not involved- it is written into the state laws that if you have a license and drive you consent to either of these tests if asked by the police.
Right... and AFAIK Florida is currently NOT one of those MANY places.
My primary objection to this situation is that instead of following the established legislative/judicial process like other states, the state of Florida is subverting the process by using an onsite judge to rubber stamp a blood test for anyone refusing the non-compulsory breathalyzer (presumably using the refusal itself as probable cause).
I believe the fourth amendment was very carefully crafted by the founding fathers and frown on any shenanigans undermining it!
Excellent... using the refusal of a non-compulsory breathalyzer as probable cause for a compulsory blood test. That's some flawless logic right there!
If our society demands stricter enforcement of DUI, then there's already a well defined process for crafting new laws and allowing them to go through proper judicial reviews.
. ..subverting this process by using onsite judges to piss all over the fourth ammendment is NOT the solution!
ATI's main competitor is Nvidia. In recent history they have : - Named several different cards the same thing (e.g. 8800 GTS) - Named the same card several different things (e.g. 8800 GT)
We need a social networking system that can be integrated into any gaming system. So that you would have the same social networking capabilities in any game that implemented/integrated the API. . . ..
The typically exposure for a bacscatter x-ray scan is 0.005 mrem The typical exposure for a 6 hour flight is 2mrem The typical annual exposure for a human is 360mrem (mostly from natural sources) The occupational safety limit (as set by the NRC and EPA) is 5000 mrem/year, or 2000 mrem/year if averaged over a 5 year period
The backscatter x-ray machine exposes you to 400x less radiation than the flight itself, and constitutes 1/70,000th of your NATURAL annual exposure. Even if you went through the machine EVERY SINGLE DAY of the year, you would still be under the annual occupational hazard limit by a factor of 3,000... phrased another way, you could go through the machine every 30 seconds, 24/7, for a full year without hitting the annual exposure limit!
There are many good reasons to refuse the backscatter x-ray. However refusing it on "medical grounds" is being purposefully ignorant of the facts, and immediately deflates your credibility with anyone that has access to the internet and passed second grade math. If you are THAT concerned about radiation exposure, you would be far better served to wear a paper hat whenever you are outside in the sun!
That being said, the backscatter x-ray machines, and "pat-downs" are bullshit symbollic measures. Neither can detect materials stuffed into orifices, and you better believe that someone motivated enough to bring down a plane will not hesitate to outdo goatse (not that they would even have to, a few grams of plastic explosive attached to the bathroom wall is all you need). Furthermore, as any police officer will tell you, a pat down of everything EXCEPT the "private regions" is absolutely worthless. It's all just part of the theater, citizen!
In many way this is what will allow Verizon to get the iPhone. When the iPhone 5 comes out it is bound to support 4G, so even if Verizon is not an official partner, people will be able to use the phone there.
Don't be so sure. IIRC, verizon is using the sim-less variant of LTE. So if the MEID isn't in the database the phone isn't getting on the network without committing a felony! The mere existence of a CDMA iphone doesn't mean that it will be easy to get on Verizon.
I have never been convinced that Apple would want to add CDMA capability, just for Verizon, because of the extra licensing costs and the fact Verizon had already announced that it was putting in place a 4G GSM network. I may still be wrong about Qualcomm-CDMA support being added (CDMA is part of GSM in the form of wave encoding, not protocol), though we will see.
Again, don't be so sure. A CDMA-less verizon phone is pretty much a paperweight for the forseeable decade. LTE rollout will be *very* limited initially (mostly large markets). Also, to correct you, GSM is TDMA. Modern 3G GSM data (e.g. HSDPA) is CDMA.
I was replying to the paulej72, who was concerned that the container-size would betray the fact that there was a hidden container.
Regarding your concern... nothing gets corrupted provided that you have mounted the inner (good) container as well. (correct me if i'm wrong here, since I haven't actually tried it myself)
If someone is dicking around with your outer container without mounting the hidden container IMHO it is actually desirable to corrupt the hidden container.
IIRC, the outside container is first initialized with random data. The inner encrypted portion (recall that perfectly encrypted data appears random) is then indistinguishable from the outer container itself.
Why not? I really fail to see what the issue is here, as long as #1) it's a free/competitive market #2) you know exactly what you are paying for
Let's say there are two (competitive) brands of hdd manufacturers A, and B, and two sizes, 1TB, and 2TB.
The hypothetical prices are as follows
Company A $49 1TB $99 2TB
Company B: $50 1TB non-upgradeable $60 1TB upgradeable to 2TB $50 software upgrade 1TB->2TB $100 2TB non upgradeable
Where's the problem? *sure* you can say that the hardware in the 1TB upgradeable model is IDENTICAL to the 2TB model, and that the *evil* HDD manufacturer is pocketing the extra $40 they make on 2TB drives, and gimping *your* hardware to lock down that last 1TB... but you CHOSE to pay a competitive rate to get that drive!
Now call Company A (AMD), and Company B (Intel), and replace TB with GHz... etc. etc. Who cares whether silicon for cache is physically missing, traces are laser-cut to set the multiplier, or there is some voodoo microcode keeping the full hyperthreading features of the hardware from you. The end-result is the same --> The chip was still sold on the free market at a particular price, with a particular set of features, and you chose to buy it. You knew exactly what you were getting when you handed the cash over!
Note #1) personally, i think this new scheme is a great idea compared to the current alternative. As you get further into a lithography process, the yields go up. This means that you no longer bin based on chip capability, but based on market demands. Therefore in the current system both intel and AMD are gimping perfectly functional chips by locking multipliers, cutting traces for extra cores/cache, etc. If the gimping were done in software you could buy that same cheap CPU today, and have the option to painlessly unlock it later with a few mouseclicks. Less frustration, and less computers in landfills.
Note #2) I'd personally like to see a multiplier unlock program. Pay extra for a hardware-unlock to your multiplier which also openly extends your factory warranty for the overclock range that was unlocked.
Note #3) Those predicting that this will be easily cracked/pirated may be premature. If it's implemented in BIOS via a microcode update, then it'll be trivially easy (esp. if one of the mainboard manufacturers chooses not to play ball). However, e-fuse technology now exists, and cpu's have unique serial numbers. Therefore it's entirely possible to bury a shared-secret key in the silicon, and use a cryptographic hash function to generate an unlock-key based on that secret AND the serial number of the individual CPU. The correct sequence is checked at the microcode level and blows the e-fuse, marking the CPU as upgraded. The secret will be difficult (if not impossible) to extract from the silicon without months->years with an electron microscope and thousands of sample chips.
EXACTLY! I'm new at this stuff too, and I think you are on to something. You just have to boolean the bit that controls the memory hash function pointer. Then you can probably just decrypt the parity bit endian stack!
#1) Iran has demonstrated (via press release) the equivalent of a model airplane with a camera. They don't have the military data network capability to reliably deliver these anywhere outside their borders. Furthermore, Turkey has one of the largest and most powerful air forces outside of the major superpowers with approximately a thousand aircraft, and over 200 F-16's (mostly modern CCIP variety, and the ability to produce them locally). I wouldn't take Iranian air aggression too seriously.
more importantly it's who your friends are:
#2) Turkey is a NATO member country. That means that if Iran (an external force by NATO definition) attacks Turkey, the most powerful military powers on the planet are obligated to rip Iran a new one...
Anyway the strange thing (to me) about these charges isn't that they surfaced, it's that they were issued in Sweden, one of the biggest liberals of the European liberal democracies and perhaps the least likely to gin up bogus charges...
... Swedish authorities ginning up charges at the behest of US interests??? ask the pirate bay...
Agree on everything said above. For outdoor use you definitely want something more rugged than a (former) cell phone.
Most phone-based GPS systems rely on A-GPS to get an initial fix quickly. Without a cellular data network, the initial acquisition takes much longer (in my experience substantially longer than a dedicated GPS unit from a cold start)
Cars don't need wireless sensors. In fact they don't need most of the electronics that gets built in at all. This may seem old-fashioned but for nearly a century a complicated non-electronic system called 'THE DRIVER" would monitor the state of the car and act appropriately when a deflating tyre is detected. I believe this system is moderately effective and not subject to radio spoofing.
The problem is that many of these new cars come with RunFlat (RFT) tires. It is difficult to determine when a runflat has lost pressure. Since there is only a finite distance you can go before the tire loses integrity entirely (~200 miles or so), TPMS is essential for preventing blowouts in those cars.
I have this BS TPMS/RFT system on my 2008 BMW, and personally believe runflats are a TERRIBLE idea... but we are stuck with RFTs for the time being and TPMS is an essential safety component in the mix.
Ask me to design my ideal car and it'll have a lightweight but strong aluminium body, a simple, efficient diesel engine, comfortable seats and a decent stereo. Everything else is chaff, I don't even need ABS.
Don't fool yourself. *YOU* may be an experienced track driver (i'm guessing based on your bravado dismissal of ABS), and don't need ABS, but everyone around you certainly does. ABS goes a LONG way in keeping a panicked novice driver in control of their car during an emergency. Furthermore, Brake Force Distribution systems and ABS do make a substantial difference in stopping distance in the real world (even for experienced drivers). An electronic system can keep *each* tire precisely at the threshold of static and kinetic friction far better than you can keep the *average* of all four tires at that threshold via modulation of the brake pedal. Go look up the stopping distances on a modern luxury car with the fancy electronics and compare it to any cheaper car without these systems! As an example, the *presumably experienced* test driver at Edmunds was able to stop a 2004 kia spectra from 60mph in 140ft. A mercedes S550 will do it in 108ft!
Mostly because I use about a dozen different languages and software packages in my daily work. I can use *any* language with activex client bindings to control office in a uniform way. This means that I can algorithmically set up a model, perform complex control of engineering software, and export the results directly into word or powerpoint for distribution without the mundane (error-prone) tasks in between (e.g. save, name, reformat, resize, place, label, align etc.). Any lower-level software, or drivers I write for hardware can then (relatively easily) re-expose similar activex server bindings on top of the normal API. I can then re-use a lot of code to go directly from real-world instruments and data into a uniform set of documentation and reports.
In essence, I can script everything in my workflow from engineering model to real data to detailed distributable documents without hours of tedious clicking. Furthermore, I can use any language (or combo of languages) for the task. The end result is that I press a button, go get some coffee, and out pops a powerpoint or word document which can get quickly passed up the chain.
I also use plain-old vbscript often to make mundane/repetitive adjustments to a document which fall outside of the scope of simple styles/masters. As a very trivial example, let's say you want to somehow transform all of the figures in a several-hundred page report uniformly. You can pop into vbscript and do that a thousand times faster than you could by pointing-and-clicking. Hell, with activex bindings, I could even pop those figures out into an image-processing program, adjust them uniformly (e.g. grayscale, watermark, etc.), and plop them right back in. I can also create a script which will take a hand-edited / revised document, and automatically update all of the results, figures, equations, tables, summaries etc. with the latest results. etc. etc. etc. Once you have the high level of abstraction the office activex model exposes, the possibilities are limitless.
Despite your version compatibility claims, the activex server specs for Microsoft Office have remained pretty consistent between releases, and (IMHO) are fairly intuitively laid out. Most (est. 99.5%) of my codebase works without modification from Office 2003 - 2010. The remaining 0.5% of changes are one-liner type things.
I can understand that most people probably never have the need to employ this level of scripting power in their office suite, but vbscript and activex compatibility are not the only reasons I gave for Mac Office being such an utterly complete load of crap. If you work in a heterogeneous computing environment on moderately complex documents, it is inevitable that you will run into (serious) compatibility problems.
Why so angry? Vbscript and activex are actually extraordinarily powerful automation tools, undoubtedly well beyond your comprehension level as a raging Apple fanboy (seriously, have you seen your previous posts?) and "enterprise administrator". Clever people actually use them on a daily basis to get rid of some of the more mundane things you undoubtedly do in Office (I particularly enjoy using the activex server bindings in powerpoint).
As for the kid comment, you are probably right. Chances are that I am MUCH younger than you are. You also may not be aware of this, but there are *some* government agencies which are particularly adept with computers and technology.
Dunno what mythical version of office mac you are using, but in my experience Mac Office 2008 proudly continues the tradition of shittiness that has become the hallmark of microsoft products on the Mac...
It is slow as mollasses (even on the highest-end hardware your tax dollars can buy), has numerous dialog problems, no support for macros, continues the tradition of the LZW compressor bug, doesn't play well with popular plugins such as mathtype or endnote (and tends to irreversibly barf all over documents with those embedded), has numerous (minor but annoying) formatting issues when documents are composed cross-platform, never preserves movies cross-platform, etc. etc.
Based on your rosey comment I KNOW you have never tried to actually DO anything more complicated than a (short) shopping list or a simple slideshow.
Furthermore, the intra-platform deficincies are one thing, but the cross-platform stuff will quickly kill your sanity. Since most colleges/business still treat PC office as the gold standard, you are going to end up a sad panda very quickly. (you know... when your professors/advisors computer kills the keep-with-next flag randomly, or renders the table 5 pixels on top of another figure... or revisions kill the table of contents links, or the figures in your presentation show up as an LZW-error etc. etc.) In my experience, you have to MANUALLY check any moderately complex document each time it is saved on a different platform (and even between different versions of Mac Office).
//I use Mac Office Word regularly, but grudgingly on my gov. issued MBP... but ALWAYS use keynote instead of mac powerpoint.
//definitely a power Office user... I use vbscript and activex control extensively with PC office for automation, even when putting together simple documents / presentations
//one of my colleagues recently started his PhD thesis in Office Mac 2008... gave up after only 2 days of its bullshit. Now *much* happier with Office 2007 in virtualbox (esp. since his advisor uses PC office 2007).
Which is going to suck extra hard for them given what a complete disaster Microsoft Office for the Mac is!
(iWork is marginally better for some things, but in my experience both MacOffice and iWork suffer from various glaring compatibility problems with Windows Office!)
Why would you assume that? The engineer from Intel was limited to using a single socket system. I could argue that there is something seriously wrong with your Linux compiled binary since you have 4x as many sockets and ran less than twice as fast.
and I could argue that you are flat out wrong - Intel has 6 cores on the latest architecture running at 5Ghz - I had 8 cores that are now 1 generation old, running at 3.2GHz, with slower memory (and cores are a little slower clock-for-clock than the i7)
but most importantly : - most posts from similar hardware show that the people using a linux binary are *several times* faster on identical hardware
It's pretty clear that the author SERIOUSLY messed up the compilation on windows (also betrayed by the fact that it took him several hours of futzing with visual studio in order to get it to work)
Slashdot Mirror
In many places some kind of test is mandatory. You can refuse the breathalyzer, but instead you have to take a blood test. Probable cause is not involved- it is written into the state laws that if you have a license and drive you consent to either of these tests if asked by the police.
Right... and AFAIK Florida is currently NOT one of those MANY places.
My primary objection to this situation is that instead of following the established legislative/judicial process like other states, the state of Florida is subverting the process by using an onsite judge to rubber stamp a blood test for anyone refusing the non-compulsory breathalyzer (presumably using the refusal itself as probable cause).
I believe the fourth amendment was very carefully crafted by the founding fathers and frown on any shenanigans undermining it!
Excellent... using the refusal of a non-compulsory breathalyzer as probable cause for a compulsory blood test. That's some flawless logic right there!
If our society demands stricter enforcement of DUI, then there's already a well defined process for crafting new laws and allowing them to go through proper judicial reviews.
. . .subverting this process by using onsite judges to piss all over the fourth ammendment is NOT the solution!
...can be made over something so obvious. OpenBSD's code has been screened again and again. If something was amiss somebody would have noticed it . . .
Yeah just look for the parts commented //super secret FBI backdoor, shhh!
You obviously have not seen things like this http://underhanded.xcott.com/
ATI's main competitor is Nvidia. In recent history they have :
- Named several different cards the same thing (e.g. 8800 GTS)
- Named the same card several different things (e.g. 8800 GT)
We need a social networking system that can be integrated into any gaming system. So that you would have the same social networking capabilities in any game that implemented/integrated the API. . . . .
You mean like Steam? Games for Windows Live?
From wikipedia :
The typically exposure for a bacscatter x-ray scan is 0.005 mrem
The typical exposure for a 6 hour flight is 2mrem
The typical annual exposure for a human is 360mrem (mostly from natural sources)
The occupational safety limit (as set by the NRC and EPA) is 5000 mrem/year, or 2000 mrem/year if averaged over a 5 year period
The backscatter x-ray machine exposes you to 400x less radiation than the flight itself, and constitutes 1/70,000th of your NATURAL annual exposure. Even if you went through the machine EVERY SINGLE DAY of the year, you would still be under the annual occupational hazard limit by a factor of 3,000... phrased another way, you could go through the machine every 30 seconds, 24/7, for a full year without hitting the annual exposure limit!
There are many good reasons to refuse the backscatter x-ray. However refusing it on "medical grounds" is being purposefully ignorant of the facts, and immediately deflates your credibility with anyone that has access to the internet and passed second grade math. If you are THAT concerned about radiation exposure, you would be far better served to wear a paper hat whenever you are outside in the sun!
That being said, the backscatter x-ray machines, and "pat-downs" are bullshit symbollic measures. Neither can detect materials stuffed into orifices, and you better believe that someone motivated enough to bring down a plane will not hesitate to outdo goatse (not that they would even have to, a few grams of plastic explosive attached to the bathroom wall is all you need). Furthermore, as any police officer will tell you, a pat down of everything EXCEPT the "private regions" is absolutely worthless. It's all just part of the theater, citizen!
In many way this is what will allow Verizon to get the iPhone. When the iPhone 5 comes out it is bound to support 4G, so even if Verizon is not an official partner, people will be able to use the phone there.
Don't be so sure. IIRC, verizon is using the sim-less variant of LTE. So if the MEID isn't in the database the phone isn't getting on the network without committing a felony! The mere existence of a CDMA iphone doesn't mean that it will be easy to get on Verizon.
I have never been convinced that Apple would want to add CDMA capability, just for Verizon, because of the extra licensing costs and the fact Verizon had already announced that it was putting in place a 4G GSM network. I may still be wrong about Qualcomm-CDMA support being added (CDMA is part of GSM in the form of wave encoding, not protocol), though we will see.
Again, don't be so sure. A CDMA-less verizon phone is pretty much a paperweight for the forseeable decade. LTE rollout will be *very* limited initially (mostly large markets). Also, to correct you, GSM is TDMA. Modern 3G GSM data (e.g. HSDPA) is CDMA.
I was replying to the paulej72, who was concerned that the container-size would betray the fact that there was a hidden container.
Regarding your concern... nothing gets corrupted provided that you have mounted the inner (good) container as well. (correct me if i'm wrong here, since I haven't actually tried it myself)
If someone is dicking around with your outer container without mounting the hidden container IMHO it is actually desirable to corrupt the hidden container.
The encryption container size never changes.
IIRC, the outside container is first initialized with random data. The inner encrypted portion (recall that perfectly encrypted data appears random) is then indistinguishable from the outer container itself.
Still not as good as shadyurl :
http://5z8.info/bomb-plans_p7p8n_stalin
No it does not violate any fundamental laws of physics... OP was referring to a heat pump. Someone needs to re-take thermo
(hint : your 10,000 BTU air conditioner does NOT pull 10,000 BTU from the grid)
Why not?
I really fail to see what the issue is here, as long as
#1) it's a free/competitive market
#2) you know exactly what you are paying for
Let's say there are two (competitive) brands of hdd manufacturers A, and B, and two sizes, 1TB, and 2TB.
The hypothetical prices are as follows
Company A
$49 1TB
$99 2TB
Company B:
$50 1TB non-upgradeable
$60 1TB upgradeable to 2TB
$50 software upgrade 1TB->2TB
$100 2TB non upgradeable
Where's the problem? *sure* you can say that the hardware in the 1TB upgradeable model is IDENTICAL to the 2TB model, and that the *evil* HDD manufacturer is pocketing the extra $40 they make on 2TB drives, and gimping *your* hardware to lock down that last 1TB... but you CHOSE to pay a competitive rate to get that drive!
Now call Company A (AMD), and Company B (Intel), and replace TB with GHz... etc. etc. Who cares whether silicon for cache is physically missing, traces are laser-cut to set the multiplier, or there is some voodoo microcode keeping the full hyperthreading features of the hardware from you. The end-result is the same --> The chip was still sold on the free market at a particular price, with a particular set of features, and you chose to buy it. You knew exactly what you were getting when you handed the cash over!
Note #1) personally, i think this new scheme is a great idea compared to the current alternative. As you get further into a lithography process, the yields go up. This means that you no longer bin based on chip capability, but based on market demands. Therefore in the current system both intel and AMD are gimping perfectly functional chips by locking multipliers, cutting traces for extra cores/cache, etc. If the gimping were done in software you could buy that same cheap CPU today, and have the option to painlessly unlock it later with a few mouseclicks. Less frustration, and less computers in landfills.
Note #2) I'd personally like to see a multiplier unlock program. Pay extra for a hardware-unlock to your multiplier which also openly extends your factory warranty for the overclock range that was unlocked.
Note #3) Those predicting that this will be easily cracked/pirated may be premature. If it's implemented in BIOS via a microcode update, then it'll be trivially easy (esp. if one of the mainboard manufacturers chooses not to play ball). However, e-fuse technology now exists, and cpu's have unique serial numbers. Therefore it's entirely possible to bury a shared-secret key in the silicon, and use a cryptographic hash function to generate an unlock-key based on that secret AND the serial number of the individual CPU. The correct sequence is checked at the microcode level and blows the e-fuse, marking the CPU as upgraded. The secret will be difficult (if not impossible) to extract from the silicon without months->years with an electron microscope and thousands of sample chips.
EXACTLY! I'm new at this stuff too, and I think you are on to something. You just have to boolean the bit that controls the memory hash function pointer. Then you can probably just decrypt the parity bit endian stack!
Oh, and another solution: Mark updates with an expiration date such that the unit will refuse to run if its firmware is too stale.
The xbox360 already does this with e-fuses (e.g. certain updates blow an e-fuse which prevents older firmware from running)
The idea that we are suddenly running out of space is laughable at best.
Your problem seems to be that you don't understand exponential growth. . .
Why are you worried about Turkey?
#1) Iran has demonstrated (via press release) the equivalent of a model airplane with a camera. They don't have the military data network capability to reliably deliver these anywhere outside their borders. Furthermore, Turkey has one of the largest and most powerful air forces outside of the major superpowers with approximately a thousand aircraft, and over 200 F-16's (mostly modern CCIP variety, and the ability to produce them locally). I wouldn't take Iranian air aggression too seriously.
more importantly it's who your friends are:
#2) Turkey is a NATO member country. That means that if Iran (an external force by NATO definition) attacks Turkey, the most powerful military powers on the planet are obligated to rip Iran a new one...
Anyway the strange thing (to me) about these charges isn't that they surfaced, it's that they were issued in Sweden, one of the biggest liberals of the European liberal democracies and perhaps the least likely to gin up bogus charges...
... Swedish authorities ginning up charges at the behest of US interests??? ask the pirate bay...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Pirate_Bay_raid
Agree on everything said above. For outdoor use you definitely want something more rugged than a (former) cell phone.
Most phone-based GPS systems rely on A-GPS to get an initial fix quickly. Without a cellular data network, the initial acquisition takes much longer (in my experience substantially longer than a dedicated GPS unit from a cold start)
Cars don't need wireless sensors. In fact they don't need most of the electronics that gets built in at all. This may seem old-fashioned but for nearly a century a complicated non-electronic system called 'THE DRIVER" would monitor the state of the car and act appropriately when a deflating tyre is detected. I believe this system is moderately effective and not subject to radio spoofing.
The problem is that many of these new cars come with RunFlat (RFT) tires. It is difficult to determine when a runflat has lost pressure. Since there is only a finite distance you can go before the tire loses integrity entirely (~200 miles or so), TPMS is essential for preventing blowouts in those cars.
I have this BS TPMS/RFT system on my 2008 BMW, and personally believe runflats are a TERRIBLE idea... but we are stuck with RFTs for the time being and TPMS is an essential safety component in the mix.
Ask me to design my ideal car and it'll have a lightweight but strong aluminium body, a simple, efficient diesel engine, comfortable seats and a decent stereo. Everything else is chaff, I don't even need ABS.
Don't fool yourself. *YOU* may be an experienced track driver (i'm guessing based on your bravado dismissal of ABS), and don't need ABS, but everyone around you certainly does. ABS goes a LONG way in keeping a panicked novice driver in control of their car during an emergency. Furthermore, Brake Force Distribution systems and ABS do make a substantial difference in stopping distance in the real world (even for experienced drivers). An electronic system can keep *each* tire precisely at the threshold of static and kinetic friction far better than you can keep the *average* of all four tires at that threshold via modulation of the brake pedal. Go look up the stopping distances on a modern luxury car with the fancy electronics and compare it to any cheaper car without these systems! As an example, the *presumably experienced* test driver at Edmunds was able to stop a 2004 kia spectra from 60mph in 140ft. A mercedes S550 will do it in 108ft!
Mostly because I use about a dozen different languages and software packages in my daily work. I can use *any* language with activex client bindings to control office in a uniform way. This means that I can algorithmically set up a model, perform complex control of engineering software, and export the results directly into word or powerpoint for distribution without the mundane (error-prone) tasks in between (e.g. save, name, reformat, resize, place, label, align etc.). Any lower-level software, or drivers I write for hardware can then (relatively easily) re-expose similar activex server bindings on top of the normal API. I can then re-use a lot of code to go directly from real-world instruments and data into a uniform set of documentation and reports.
In essence, I can script everything in my workflow from engineering model to real data to detailed distributable documents without hours of tedious clicking. Furthermore, I can use any language (or combo of languages) for the task. The end result is that I press a button, go get some coffee, and out pops a powerpoint or word document which can get quickly passed up the chain.
I also use plain-old vbscript often to make mundane/repetitive adjustments to a document which fall outside of the scope of simple styles/masters. As a very trivial example, let's say you want to somehow transform all of the figures in a several-hundred page report uniformly. You can pop into vbscript and do that a thousand times faster than you could by pointing-and-clicking. Hell, with activex bindings, I could even pop those figures out into an image-processing program, adjust them uniformly (e.g. grayscale, watermark, etc.), and plop them right back in. I can also create a script which will take a hand-edited / revised document, and automatically update all of the results, figures, equations, tables, summaries etc. with the latest results. etc. etc. etc. Once you have the high level of abstraction the office activex model exposes, the possibilities are limitless.
Despite your version compatibility claims, the activex server specs for Microsoft Office have remained pretty consistent between releases, and (IMHO) are fairly intuitively laid out. Most (est. 99.5%) of my codebase works without modification from Office 2003 - 2010. The remaining 0.5% of changes are one-liner type things.
I can understand that most people probably never have the need to employ this level of scripting power in their office suite, but vbscript and activex compatibility are not the only reasons I gave for Mac Office being such an utterly complete load of crap. If you work in a heterogeneous computing environment on moderately complex documents, it is inevitable that you will run into (serious) compatibility problems.
Stuart,
Why so angry? Vbscript and activex are actually extraordinarily powerful automation tools, undoubtedly well beyond your comprehension level as a raging Apple fanboy (seriously, have you seen your previous posts?) and "enterprise administrator". Clever people actually use them on a daily basis to get rid of some of the more mundane things you undoubtedly do in Office (I particularly enjoy using the activex server bindings in powerpoint).
As for the kid comment, you are probably right. Chances are that I am MUCH younger than you are. You also may not be aware of this, but there are *some* government agencies which are particularly adept with computers and technology.
Dunno what mythical version of office mac you are using, but in my experience Mac Office 2008 proudly continues the tradition of shittiness that has become the hallmark of microsoft products on the Mac...
//I use Mac Office Word regularly, but grudgingly on my gov. issued MBP... but ALWAYS use keynote instead of mac powerpoint.
//definitely a power Office user... I use vbscript and activex control extensively with PC office for automation, even when putting together simple documents / presentations
//one of my colleagues recently started his PhD thesis in Office Mac 2008... gave up after only 2 days of its bullshit. Now *much* happier with Office 2007 in virtualbox (esp. since his advisor uses PC office 2007).
It is slow as mollasses (even on the highest-end hardware your tax dollars can buy), has numerous dialog problems, no support for macros, continues the tradition of the LZW compressor bug, doesn't play well with popular plugins such as mathtype or endnote (and tends to irreversibly barf all over documents with those embedded), has numerous (minor but annoying) formatting issues when documents are composed cross-platform, never preserves movies cross-platform, etc. etc.
Based on your rosey comment I KNOW you have never tried to actually DO anything more complicated than a (short) shopping list or a simple slideshow.
Furthermore, the intra-platform deficincies are one thing, but the cross-platform stuff will quickly kill your sanity. Since most colleges/business still treat PC office as the gold standard, you are going to end up a sad panda very quickly. (you know... when your professors/advisors computer kills the keep-with-next flag randomly, or renders the table 5 pixels on top of another figure... or revisions kill the table of contents links, or the figures in your presentation show up as an LZW-error etc. etc.) In my experience, you have to MANUALLY check any moderately complex document each time it is saved on a different platform (and even between different versions of Mac Office).
Which is going to suck extra hard for them given what a complete disaster Microsoft Office for the Mac is!
(iWork is marginally better for some things, but in my experience both MacOffice and iWork suffer from various glaring compatibility problems with Windows Office!)
Why would you assume that? The engineer from Intel was limited to using a single socket system. I could argue that there is something seriously wrong with your Linux compiled binary since you have 4x as many sockets and ran less than twice as fast.
and I could argue that you are flat out wrong
- Intel has 6 cores on the latest architecture running at 5Ghz
- I had 8 cores that are now 1 generation old, running at 3.2GHz, with slower memory (and cores are a little slower clock-for-clock than the i7)
but most importantly :
- most posts from similar hardware show that the people using a linux binary are *several times* faster on identical hardware
It's pretty clear that the author SERIOUSLY messed up the compilation on windows (also betrayed by the fact that it took him several hours of futzing with visual studio in order to get it to work)
There is something seriously wrong with the optimizations in his windows binary...
Ran in 36 seconds on a 4 x 8224 SE AMD opteron IBM x-server running linux (8 total cores at 3.2GHz)