Scary to think this is the world I am buying several grand a year to enter

PBS Cringely on IT Outsourcing

] The proposed patents apparently seek to protect methods
] other applications could use to interpret the XML
] dialect, or schema, Office uses to describe and organize
] information in documents. Microsoft recently agreed to
] publish those schemas and is looking at opening other
] chunks of Office code.

They go from not telling people about the format of their files to patenting how to _read_ the file format. How much market share is enough? They are killing innovation.

I mean look at IE. Its crap. Its more than crap, its easily the worst of the mainstream browsers. That is what we would be stuck with if it weren't for Mozilla, Opera, and Netscape. No tabs, no gestures, no ad/pop-up blocking. Just a steamy pile of shit that lets viruses propogate better than it renders HTML.

What do we get with OpenOffice? We get export to PDF/Flash, we get awesome and logical file formats (They are zlibed tar balls of XML documents). We get good excryption, PGP signing, the works. And these fuckers want to kill that. What do they offer in return? Another closed format, shit encryption (oh wait, thats right, once hacked its no longer a security feature but Microsoft no calls it a protective feature against accidental editting) and DRM. Other than that Office has not really changed much in the last several years.

My Dad taught me something long ago. He said in any industry the #2 highest seller has the best product, and #1 hs the best marketing. When a competitor releases something new, a normally company will try and improve there product and release theres. Microsoft kills the competition, normally through lies or downright illegal means (Borland compilers, Stacker, Netscape, Java), but doesn't improve their products. This pisses me off to no end because the state of software doesn't improve. Instead we get a company growing bigger and fatter off the corpses of very smart and cool ideas, and still they producing shit.

Microsoft seeks patents for Office XML file formats - RANT

I saw this on World News Tonight a week or 2 back. That cannon is maked to attack tanks and other armor. There is nothing left of where the men were except burning brush

Helichopper kill

Decius wrote:
] Doyle Rodgers, the white-haired, full-bearded furniture
] salesman better known to Atlanta television audiences as
] the "Wolfman," died Wednesday. He was 67.

I have fond memories of watching him on TV summer afternoons between Knight Rider and MacGyver.

... well ... looks like I'll have to ask for Donna .... (I am so going to hell)

RE: Atlanta's Wolfman passes

Elonka wrote:
] - My most intense "He said *what*???" moment: I was horrified
] when Bush talked about marriage and used the term "activist
] judges." ACTIVIST judges? Like someone just came out of a
] 60s street protest, put down their megaphone and placard, and
] took a seat on the bench by accident? I was mightily offended
] by that comment -- he was implying that the judicial branch of
] government has too much power and needs to be reined in. If
] he wants to propose a constitutional amendment, fine. But to
] take a slam at the judicial branch like that, as though they
] were making whimsical decisions, was out of line.

There is a prof at Georgia Tech who has this page a day calendar of Bush quotes. One was in response to the question a reporter posed about the Patriot Act. Bush said "Its the job of the Judical Branch to make the laws and the Executive Branch to interpret them"

Yes, this is the man we have running our country.

RE: State of the Union Address

About damn time. Hopefully more people will send SCO letters like this when they SCO tries to extort them through the mail

Small business response to SCO

] lets be honest, that's not what they meant. the award was
] designed to recognise a black student in honor of MLK's
] efforts for civil rights. it has nothing to do with africa,
] and this kid, or his family, should've recognized that. This
] boys campain may have been innocent, but it wasn't very smart.

I would argue that there very fact you have a Black Student of the year instead of a Student of the year is in and of itself a mistake. What does that say, "None of these students could win 'Student of the Year' so we have a running just for them?" Bullshit. And if its an African American Club in the school giving the award for raising issues or something, isn't a white just as able to educate the public about mispresentation/mistreatment of Blacks. If the answer is no then a lot of my fellow democrats have wasted there time. I think a white kid from South Africa could just as easily talk about issues/problem/slavery in African as a Black kid whose last 3 generations are from Arkansas or something.

The "We should be treated equal, but at the same time have our own special club just for us" thing does not work.

Just my $0.02

RE: You are not African-American, You are White

] Republican staff members of the US Senate Judiciary
] Commitee infiltrated opposition computer files for a
] year, monitoring secret strategy memos and periodically
] passing on copies to the media, Senate officials told The
] Globe.
]
] From the spring of 2002 until at least April 2003,
] members of the GOP committee staff exploited a computer
] glitch that allowed them to access restricted Democratic
] communications without a password. Trolling through
] hundreds of memos, they were able to read talking points
] and accounts of private meetings discussing which
] judicial nominees Democrats would fight -- and with what
] tactics.

Boston.com / News / Nation / Infiltration of files seen as extensive

] Google certainly isn't the only search engine whose
] results can be gamed by users acting in concert.
] President Bush's biography is also the No. 1 search
] result for "miserable failure" on Yahoo, which draws on
] Google's technology

Mentions how a small group of users can do lots of linking and manipulate the results returned by Google. However the point is that people are linking to these things and are discussing about them, and isn't that the point of the Internet anyway? Furthermore, ITs not "corrupting" the results persay, since "miserable failure" is so generic a search term anyway

Google Bombing for Fun and Political Profit

] A small group of Westside High School students plastered
] the school Monday with posters advocating that a white
] student from South Africa receive the "Distinguished
] African American Student Award" next year.

] The students' actions on Martin Luther King Jr. Day upset
] several students and have led administrators to
] discipline four students.
...
] The posters were removed by administrators because they
] were "inappropriate and insensitive," Westside
] spokeswoman Peggy Rupprecht said Tuesday.

WTF is this? It seems that Blacks professing they are "African American" is prefectly ok, but for a white guy to profess his nationality, it is "inappropriate and insensitive." What kind of bullshit double standard is that? If anything he is more African-American they any of these people: He was born in African, he lives in America. How many of these other students running for African-American Student of the year can say that?

You are not African-American, You are White