Comment Great News! (Score 1) 157
About time - we'll now be able to get those kewl advertisements before each movie in 3D as well..
Comment Re:That's a bit harsh (Score 2, Funny) 458
Nuke him from orbit - it's the only way to be sure.
Comment Fixed since Office 2003 at least (Score 0, Redundant) 123
- loose indentation for some unclear reason. The bullet will start at the middle of the screen. And how to go back to the correct indentation is some voodoo magic
That's why you can quick indent with Tab and Shift+Tab, although I'm not sure what's this "voodoo" behaviour you seem to imply. You can control tab stops and indentations from the ruler - it's not the best, but works good most of the time.
- won't be able to create a bullet point on the same level of indentation than the previous one, after I made some multi-line text under the bullet or went back from correcting some text at another place in the doc
Oh, you mean, like, when you are writing the list, and you want to include some paragraphs under a bullet, and you press Shift+Enter to break inside the longer text, and then when you press Enter again it reverts back to bulleted list? That has been around for as long as I remember, although I cannot verify since which version exactly.
If I had to complain about Word, I'd more likely mention the lack of a proper citation/bibliography mechanism, or missing font kerning and ligatures, or the confusing ordeal of customizing styles vs. manually specifying section formatting. Word is one of the Microsoft's products I hate with passion - and do not use.
Seriously, when a person gets *that* pissed with a rich text editor, then you should try LaTeX - it's little more than HTML+CSS in principle. An eye opener, no less.
Comment Re:Documentation (Score 1) 891
Documentation for commercial software can be sh*t as well. Good luck R-ing the FM, when the FM is just, well, F. At least with FOSS you can bet someone has already been frustrated by that particular feature and complained aloud on their support forums/mailing lists/IRC channels, or whatever. From my experience, the FOSS software that I use provide more superior, compact, up-to-date documentation than the proprietary stuff I have to use.
Case in point:
I'm using a certain high-end commercial CAD product (quite expensive, that). It comes with a kitchen sink included, printed manuals in 5 languages and 2 GB (HTML) of user documentation. Now, all is well and good, if you're an ordinary user. That I am not, as I try to integrate the whole thing in the system we're working on, and I'm using the official API to do that. While I'm not going to complain that the API can be a real PITA (even VB6 pales in comparison) -- the lack of documentation is even more frustrating. The online documentation for this particular API is quite a thing to look at - it is such a mess that you cannot get a list of all methods provided by a class and be sure that there's nothing missing. Some methods and properties are barely explained by a one-liner, and obscure parameters are not mentioned at all. Undocumented functionality galore. Missing functionality abound. Even the examples given do not go beyond the obvious declaration.
Now, as an academic institution, we're not entitled to support. What am I supposed to do now, when their 7-digit, high-end, market-leading, almost-cross-platform, DRM-ed to oblivion, proprietary product does not even work as advertised? There's basically no user community to talk to - everybody's knowledgeable is pretending to be a "consultant" or "expert", and wants to get paid for even the basic stuff.
F 'em.
Case in point:
I'm using a certain high-end commercial CAD product (quite expensive, that). It comes with a kitchen sink included, printed manuals in 5 languages and 2 GB (HTML) of user documentation. Now, all is well and good, if you're an ordinary user. That I am not, as I try to integrate the whole thing in the system we're working on, and I'm using the official API to do that. While I'm not going to complain that the API can be a real PITA (even VB6 pales in comparison) -- the lack of documentation is even more frustrating. The online documentation for this particular API is quite a thing to look at - it is such a mess that you cannot get a list of all methods provided by a class and be sure that there's nothing missing. Some methods and properties are barely explained by a one-liner, and obscure parameters are not mentioned at all. Undocumented functionality galore. Missing functionality abound. Even the examples given do not go beyond the obvious declaration.
Now, as an academic institution, we're not entitled to support. What am I supposed to do now, when their 7-digit, high-end, market-leading, almost-cross-platform, DRM-ed to oblivion, proprietary product does not even work as advertised? There's basically no user community to talk to - everybody's knowledgeable is pretending to be a "consultant" or "expert", and wants to get paid for even the basic stuff.
F 'em.
Submission + - Microsoft Blasts Google Book Deal (zdnet.com)
eldavojohn writes: "With authors, scholars, the DoJ and publishers ripping apart the Google book deal,it's Microsoft's turn. They're claiming it's frankly an illegal 'joint venture' and not a settlement. Well, via ZDNet, Microsoft's four complaints against the deal are: "1) Future infringements are covered by the settlement, affecting the exclusive rights of absent class members for the life of their copyrights. 2) The deal gives away to Google vast rights that were not contested in the underlying litigation. The lawsuits dealt with Google's displaying brief excerpts. Instead of compromising on that infringement, the parties instead agreed to give away the rights to display entire books. 3) The publishers who negotiated this deal each have undisclosed side deals with Google, which will likely give them better terms than the class will get. 4) The publishers plan to exclude their own works from the deal." You might recall over a year ago Microsoft's own scanning effort died."
Submission + - TomTom anounces an open source GPS technology 1
TuringTest writes: (Found via OStatic).
European company TomTom (which recently settled a patent agreement with Microsoft) has announced a new open source format OpenLR for sharing routing data (relevant points, traffic information...) in digital maps of different vendors, to be used in GPS devices. The LR stands for Location Referencing. They aim is to push it as an open standard to build a cooperative information base, presumably in a similar way than its current TomTom Map Share technology in which end users provide map corrections on the fly. The technology to support the format will be released as GPLv2.
Does it make OpenLR a GPL GPS?
Comment Re:Fabulously useful Firefox speedup (Score 5, Informative) 354
Or use the Vacuum Places Improved (what kind of name is that anyway) addon from AMO:
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/13878
Available for FF 3.5+. Labelled experimental at the moment, but works just fine. Works magic with the "awesomebar" suggestion speed: fetching suggestions has never has been so snappy.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/13878
Available for FF 3.5+. Labelled experimental at the moment, but works just fine. Works magic with the "awesomebar" suggestion speed: fetching suggestions has never has been so snappy.
Comment Re:iIt's iStupid iTo iPut i iInfront iOf iEverythi (Score 1) 106
There's an app for that..
Comment Re:Informatics is a weird word (Score 2, Informative) 74
True as it may be, the subject is called really "Informatics" in Bulgaria (I should know, it's my high school major, and I am Bulgarian coincidentally). It is not Computer Science as you understand it, because we didn't study much about e.g. networks, compilers, operating systems and such, but we concentrated really on the fundamentals and theory of programming and related mathematics - writing and testing algorithms, building and testing low-level code in e.g. Pascal or BASIC (on paper, too). Great starter for future programmers, I tell you that. If you haven't written your standard issue quicksort or a customized implementation of Newton's method in 10th grade for a homework assignment, then you wouldn't understand.
As far as "Olympiad" is concerned, the national student competitions between pupils in different schools have been traditionally called "Olympiads". It's a heritage of the olden days of Socialist government, paralleling the Olympic games. We have those in various other fields - mathematics, physics, chemistry, biology, etc.
As far as "Olympiad" is concerned, the national student competitions between pupils in different schools have been traditionally called "Olympiads". It's a heritage of the olden days of Socialist government, paralleling the Olympic games. We have those in various other fields - mathematics, physics, chemistry, biology, etc.
Comment Sorry, South Korea (Score 1) 707
I sure hope they are not going to MOP the floor with an unfriendly neighbouring country.
Comment Shouldn't we call it.. (Score 1) 387
.. the Jackson effect?
Not funny. I am not the greatest fan of MJ, but still his enormous influence on the music we enjoy every day for the last two decades is undeniable. The traffic surge that effectively DDoS'ed several of the largest news websites is a proof of that.
Not funny. I am not the greatest fan of MJ, but still his enormous influence on the music we enjoy every day for the last two decades is undeniable. The traffic surge that effectively DDoS'ed several of the largest news websites is a proof of that.
Comment New Slashdot motto (Score 1) 402
Slashdot. News for livers. Stuff that (hardly) matters.
As someone suggested, can we pay a little less attention to the health of Mr. Jobs and get along with ol'-skool tech news? Seriously, this is probably the third piece of article devoted to the health of the latter. No disrespect to the man at all, he's a proven tech guru and visionary, and I feel sorry for his health issues.. But still, do we need to get through the same pro-Jobs vs. anti-Apple narrative each and every time?
Slashdot has turned into a bastard offspring of a medical journal, a political propaganda rag, and Web 2.0 testing ground.
Perhaps the intention is to turn Slashdot in to a technological tabloid? Sad day..
As someone suggested, can we pay a little less attention to the health of Mr. Jobs and get along with ol'-skool tech news? Seriously, this is probably the third piece of article devoted to the health of the latter. No disrespect to the man at all, he's a proven tech guru and visionary, and I feel sorry for his health issues.. But still, do we need to get through the same pro-Jobs vs. anti-Apple narrative each and every time?
Slashdot has turned into a bastard offspring of a medical journal, a political propaganda rag, and Web 2.0 testing ground.
Perhaps the intention is to turn Slashdot in to a technological tabloid? Sad day..
Comment Re:Us! (Score 1) 94
All your root are belong to us.
No, US.
Comment The same piece of news in English (Score 1) 6
Comment Re:competition with Fermilab (Score 1) 164
scooped on its single most important reason for existing.
Not if you take into account the amount of research and project work conducted in CERN that is applicable in other areas - think superconductors, electronics, computing clusters, data processing and storage, etc.
You can compare it to Asimov's Foundation in a matter of speaking - the final goal is overshadowed by the implications of the intermediate work towards reaching it.
