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Comment Re:Is LibreOffice vulnerable to the same exploit? (Score 5, Informative) 88

Probably the MS-fans will think that's a problem, because LibreOffice is not "compatible".

In fact the very fact that LibreOffice is an independent implementation of the file formats is a big advantage, because it is much more robust - When you reverse-engineer something you usually cover all possibilities (of a variable, etc.) - this is also the reason why you can often open corrupted .doc files with LibreOffice.

Comment Re:UK School Assessment (Score 1) 529

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F...

The share of foreign citizens in Finland is 3.4%, among the lowest in the European Union. Most of them are from Russia, Estonia and Sweden.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U...

In 2001, 92.1% of the population identified themselves as White, leaving 7.9%[298] of the UK population identifying themselves as of mixed ethnic minority. [..] In 2011, 26.5% of primary and 22.2% of secondary pupils at state schools in England were members of an ethnic minority.

Different people, different test scores, who would have thought that?

Comment Re:Well, the answer is simple... (Score 1) 89

It is better because it has not changed a lot in the last 20 years. It may be true that there were some incompatible revisions somewhen in the 90s, but for all practical purposes that is history with no practical importance today.

Also, simply because of its age, you can be sure that RTF does not infringe any patents, because *all* relevant patents have expired. So you can legally create a RTF-reader/writer, even when you use the Microsoft-RTF-specification (their specification is copyrighted of course, but you don't copy the specification, you just use it.)

With OOXML all that is not so clear.

Comment Re:Hoo boy, scientific racism again. (Score 1) 202

Have you ever read letters from American Civil War soldiers to their families back home? We're not talking a college education demographic by a long shot, but the eloquence and care of language in these letters is often breathtaking. Are we "dumber" than them as a populace for not being able to write like an average farm boy could 150 years ago?

Yes we are. After 5 generations of cheap oil the population lost the need to plan for hard winters. I'm sure you personally know quite a lot of people who are living from paycheck to paycheck and/or are living on welfare (which by the way is also only possible because of cheap oil). Those people just didn't exist back then because they could not survive the winters.

But don't worry. The oil will become very expensive again soon enough.

Comment Re:It will never go away (Score 1) 513

Well, why did Apple gain over 30% last year - on the desktop, that means EXCLUDING tablets and phones? I don't know about chromebooks, but I guess those have also nice gains.

Sure, PC-sales would have not been stellar in any case, that is true. But the sharp drop on the PC-side combined with the upswing on the everything-except-Windows side was caused by Windows 8.

Comment Re:Which shows that people don't understand (Score 1) 846

This kind of messages does not help your cause.

1) Stop insulting people. Maybe it is that the arguments where not convincing enough, or simply wrong.

You are certainly wrong about that. Insults DO help their cause.

Up until 1998 (which is still the warmest year on record), the alarmists actually supported their views with data (even though the famous "hockeystick" was manipulated and distorted it was at least indirectly connected to real data). But since about 2000, the data is ignored (For example, this outdated nonsense is still on the Wikipedia "Global Warming" page: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F... and in the main article (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_warming) right beside it is the sentence: "The Earth's average surface temperature rose by 0.74±0.18 C over the period 1906–2005" - hey, 2005 is already 9 years ago - what gives?) and the alarmists have stopped posting data and instead run almost completely on insults.

And yes, it does work. Nobody wants to be insulted.

On the other hand, of course the whole "climate science" needs alarmism as a reason for existence. They can't forecast "the climate will change slightly as it did numerous times before" - such a paper is boring, uninteresting and unlikely to get much interest for further funding. Also, successful climate scientists who pull the party-line can pump out paper after paper, literally swamping some dissident who writes a critical paper on his own time and dime.

So you have the carrot (grant money, good quasi-tenured jobs) and the stick (insults, social stigma). It is no wonder that you get >90% of approval that way, especially if you count papers (which can and are mass-produced).

But time is working against the alarmists. Every year that passes which is cooler than 1998 is yet another year they cannot explain. If we are living in an era of perpetually rising temperatures, one might think that the 1998 record should be broken by now.

Comment Re:Pretty much (Score 1) 296

Microsoft breaks things all the time, just look at Windows 8.

In fact they not only break things accidentally, they quite often do it on purpose to force upgrades. They already promised to delete all downloadable support software for Windows XP when support runs out. Why? Because the bandwidth costs so much?

At my workplace the IT department is already struggling for over 2 years with the transition from XP to 7 because there is just so much software and hardware that doesn't work with 7. The "solution" is to put the XP-machines, where no Win7-transition is possible on isolated non-internet-connected networks.

So yes, Microsoft breaks a lot on every update.

Comment Re:What's the difference? (Score 1) 296

The 1300$ model is of course for those who want a status-symbol, i.e. the high price is a feature.

Basically the classic consoles are the printer/toner sales-model: You get the hardware relatively cheap, but you pay through the nose afterwards.

For an open platform that is impossible, so for the Steambox, you have to pay a little bit more for the hardware (i.e. about 500-700$), but you save money on the software.

Surely, there is a place for the printer/toner sales-model, therefore the PS3/XBone have their place - but not everybody likes it that way. (Of course for the brainwashed the fact that different products may use different sales-models is very, very hard to grasp.) So there is place for the open sales-model as well.

But the Steambox has some other advantage: It is also a PC, and you can use it for everything a PC can do:

For example if you use a tablet for EMail/Web and have only moderate PC-use (write Christmas cards once per year, etc.) - and your PC gets old, you may buy a Steambox instead of upgrading the PC. In that case you save money - and space because you can scrap that desk where the PC is sitting on.

So there is definitely a market for the Steambox.

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