Rather convenient Slashvertising, comparing total downloads for AOO with unique downloads for LO.

AOO has been too busy removing functionality (my personal favorite: the wpd filter), having a license inquisition, and taking potshots at LO to get much done.

Here it's now almost 2.5 years since OO 3.3, the last Oracle version, and the latest AOO version has no significant advances over OO 3.3-- instead it's got reduced functionality. In the meantime LibreOffice 4 has come a long way.

Don't know why anybody bothers giving press to OO anymore.

Well, things would be cleaner to re-implement this time around if they had to do another rewrite, because cross-platform development is now a basically solved problem.

In 1998, getting one codebase that would work on things like various ancient Unices, "DOS-based" Windows (95/98/Me), and Mac OS 8/9 was a very difficult task. Beyond the lower-level concerns, few good libraries would work across all targets. C++ itself was a mess when trying to work across different systems and compilers- many things could not be counted on to work everywhere until some years after the first C++ standardization in 1998.

So Mozilla wrote their own 'toolkit' (kinda) and portability/compatibility stuff, their own code that did much of what the C++ standard library really ought to do, and a lot of other stuff.

With modern operating systems, modern cross-platform libraries, universal C++03 support and widespread support for most of C++11, a rewrite would be a very different story today.

Right, "broken companies" like Staples, Sports Authority, Domino's, Experian, etc etc. Oh wait, all of those are doing a heck of a lot better than they were before.

Bain took risky buys, companies that were failing, and turned a healthy number of them into successes. Not all their buys worked out but you don't blame the doctor by complaining that his patients have all been sick.

You know, Obama won the election; you can quit with the falsehoods and slander already as it doesn't serve any purpose any more.

Not only are subsidies why service is so expensive in the USA, they're why many phones don't do simple things that consumers want. Since the consumer is not the customer- the phone company is- features which matter to some consumers but which don't make the carrier any profits are left out. Carrier control is the name of the game.

As one example, cell phones in the late 90s/early 00s often had decent computer connectivity, allowing you to transfer your text messages to pc, synchronize things, etc over a serial cable. Sometimes you could install trivial programs on your phone that way too. But carriers realized that if they cut that stuff they could retain more control and squeeze a few more cents out of their customers. Want an extremely basic application on your phone? Sure, that'll be a $5/mo subscription. Want to transfer text messages to PC? Sure, buy our more expensive phone that requires a data plan. In Europe, where phones are normally unlocked and unsubsidized, that didn't happen as much.

Smartphones esp. Android have succeeded in returning some control to consumers. But the situation is still awful for feature phones and not great for non-Cyanogen smartphones. Making the consumer the MFR's customer will change things.

BTW I believe their streams for iOS, PS3, etc are h.264 these days, but their desktop Silverlight player still uses VC-1 last I heard.

If they used modern H.264 and AAC encoders rather than whatever outdated VC.1 and WMA encoders they're using, they could cut that bandwidth use by a third, reducing their costs and improving the customer experience tremendously. Does anybody know why they haven't already done this?

I'm in full agreement with your first three sentences; the US gas tax definitely needs to be substantially increased, as has been said by all the more honest experts, from Steven Chu to Greg Mankiw.

But your last sentence is nuts. People do a reasonably decent job at acting in their own individual self interest. We've distorted their incentives with huge subsidies, and in those circumstances it's especially unsurprising that people choosing what makes sense for them as individuals can lead to overall outcomes that are bad for society.

We don't need to treat people as irrational, we need to change their incentives to better reflect the real social costs of their vehicle use. Then their self-interested choices will lead to better social results.

Again, your example proves my point and not yours. The second-generation (2007-present) Smart Fortwo is a 1800lb vehicle that gets surprisingly bad mileage (31/41) for how tiny and underpowered it is. My (1990?) Chevy Sprint Metro hatchback seated more people (5 vs 2), had way more cargo room, weighed 250lb less, and got better mileage (44/53). The difference is primarily in "safety" engineering geared towards unrealistic crash tests. With today's safety requirements, the closest equivalents to the Sprint now weigh 2400 lb instead of 1550.

The rest of your ranting is just silly and naive. Auto companies advertise MPG too, you know, often about as much as they advertise power. If waving a magic regulation wand made it so they could produce vehicles which were no more expensive, had performance the market would accept, still met the ridiculous crash test standards, and had twice the fuel efficiency, they'd do so in a moment without California or anybody else telling them they had to. Unless you change consumers' incentives by raising fuel taxes and change producers' engineering constraints by loosening collision requirements, you aren't going to get tremendously better MPG esp. without causing a lot of unnecessary pain.

You're completely incorrect about consumer behavior and market regulation, and your example of Nader is a fabulous example.

The Nader-inspired passenger safety craze is directly responsible for the horrendously low average MPG in the USA and all the attendant environmental and political problems. It's also responsible for increased pedestrian and cyclist fatalities (known as early as Pelzman's 1975 study) and may even make drivers less safe.

48 years after his book, despite all the tremendous advances in engineering and materials science, instead of the average vehicle on US roads being sub-1000 lbs and getting 200MPG (very feasible to do considerably better than this for 1-2 passenger cars, c.f. the decade-old VW 1L prototype), the average vehicle is >4000 lb and gets worse than 20MPG, little better than in 1965.

The reason is a curb weight arms race caused by our absurd safety standards. The main way to meet crash test standards when faced with heavy vehicles is to increase your vehicle's weight.

Passenger collision safety involves tradeoffs- among other things, tradeoffs with performance, efficiency, cost, and the safety of others on the road. Nader refused to recognize these tradeoffs. Our current safety laws ignore these tradeoffs, and even if they took them into account, overriding consumers' preferences regarding these tradeoffs will lead to inefficient market outcomes.

If someone wants to purchase a more efficient, less expensive vehicle, the government shouldn't stop them just because it does slightly less well in collision tests. Consumers are perfectly capable of rationally choosing how much they're willing to trade guarantees of their own safety for other desiderata and vice versa.

Regulating externalities, on the other hand, is often OK. Vehicle safety requirements should be based ONLY on the damage caused in collisions to other road users (other drivers, pedestrians, cyclists) and their property. Heavier vehicles perform WORSE in such tests; we might consider having a weight-based Pigovian vehicle tax to offset the safety and pollution externalities for those heavier cars we're still willing to allow on the roads.

Providing consumers with more information is a good idea. I'm fine with performing tests and requiring companies to provide prospective buyers with that information. But requiring disclosure without regulating/prohibiting the sale of the product still allows for what I think most would call a "truly free market."

If using MS's software may brick your neighbor's PC, go ahead and hold MS to the fire. If using MS's software may brick your own computer, require testing and a warning label. But the kind of guarantees the OP seems to want to require would override consumer preferences in a way that would cripple the software industry.

Ah, but what they're bidding on is not merchandise but a government-enforced monopoly. Normal free-market rules are already out the window; you may call what you propose a free market solution but really it's a mercantilist solution. Selling letters of patent to whoever brings the most into the Crown treasury is precisely the kind of thing Adam Smith was writing to oppose in the first place.

Normally the solution is to get rid of the government-granted monopoly. But that doesn't work out so well here. We license spectrum because leaving it to the free market to figure it out would result in horrible interference and transmit power arms races -- a classical tragedy of the commons market failure.

In many market failures government won't actually manage to improve the situation. But the spectrum really is a clear case where intervention can improve social welfare-- as long as we don't get confused about the purpose of spectrum regulation and start treating it like it's a free market designed for increasing government revenue.

It's true that this is basically a "take this away from Veracity" move.

iProvo was a great idea. It was killed by politics.

The extreme right-wing folks who think there should be no public services managed to force Provo to not provide services directly ("retail model") but rather to cut corporate middlemen in on the deal ("wholesale model"). That privatized all the profits while socializing all the costs. Unsurprisingly, it failed.

Given the political realities in Utah right now, I suppose the Google Fiber deal is the best we could hope for. But we would have had something at least as good way back in 2006 if it weren't for idiotic politicians.

It's quite unlikely that you can hear the difference between the lossless original and a 160kbps lossy version from the best modern encoders (e.g. Apple's AAC encoders from the last couple years). If you can, it's going to be for just a few isolated samples tested in ideal circumstances and it won't impact the quality of your listening experience.

People who claim otherwise are either using outdated formats and encoders or they're not doing proper blind testing and their results are dominated by psychological bias.

But if you ever want to encode your music in another format, transcoding from one lossy format to another is like xeroxing xeroxed copies; you get generation loss and are more likely to hear some artifacts. Encoding from the lossless original will never have that problem.

You can think of it like this: when you buy an mp3, you own an mp3. When you buy a FLAC, you own the music- the format becomes irrelevant since you can re-encode it in any other format, past, present, or future, and have the result be just as good as if you re-purchased the music in that other format.

Betteridge's law of headlines.

You mean if I give someone 800 megabytes of unique personally identifying information, they might be able to personally identify me?

Shocking!

It's been in Chrome for a while and landed in FF with version 16 or so. Once it's enabled ("under the hood" settings in Chrome, plugins.click_to_play=true in about:config for FF) sites can't run plugins without you giving some form of explicit permission (either whitelisting a trusted site or clicking to play the plugin elsewhere).

It really should be the default. In fact, it should have been this way ever since NPAPI came on the scene back in Netscape 2.0. Countless security problems would have been much much less serious, performance problems would have been avoided, and people would have focused more on coding their sites to web standards and reduced their dependence on plugins.