While you and many others may not realize it yet. OpenOffice suffers from the exact same problem as Office itself. Different versions act differently. If they acted the same, they'd be the same version. The file format doesn't have to change in order for a new version to be a problem. All that has to happen is a change in the rendering engine of the word processor for instance. Change the rendering engine, old documents behave differently, likely not in the intended way since most people tend to make the documents look right in the renderer they are using, not one that will be invented in the future. This is especially true when you're using a WYSIWYG editor rather than direct editing of the files.

Its retarded to think that just because OpenOffice is from a different code base that it will never have the issues that Word (and other word processors) have had between revisions, thats WHY they are different revisions.

If you haven't seen OOo behave differently between revisions then you don't need much more than notepad for your word processing needs. Thats not an insult to the OO team in any way, its just reality. As a developer myself I know the pain of trying to keep as close to perfect compatibility between revisions as possible, but there comes a point when things have to change if you want to actually have new features or even in many cases just bug fixes themselves. OOo isn't immune, but it does a good job. But I've seen plenty of more than slightly complex OOo documents behave in unexpected ways between releases.

The REAL problem is that developers are adding features to software just so it can be 'new' and in the case of MS so they can sell you a new copy. The problem with sales of software is that if you actually make a quality product, your market is a fixed size. If you made the perfect word processor, you can only sell so many copies throughout all of history if you use a standard/sane licensing model. If you license it per PC you have some recuring sells as they do die eventually, but if you license it per person, it won't be very long at all until everyone owns a legitimate copy and you don't have any income.

In order to get around that problem, pretty much all software developers add features to their product to give you a reason to buy a new version. This is fine and works well for the most part. The problem is, Word was done years ago. There isn't going to be a 'killer new feature' any time soon, about the only new major feature you can add is speech recognition, but thats not specific to a word processor. With each new revision of Office they have to make some sort of change to give you a reason to buy it. As a result, the recent products from MS have been basically flops. Office 2007 is a step backwards in so many ways its not even funny, and with the exception of the improved IMAP server support in Outlook, I've yet to find a actual product enhancement other than interface design changes. Theres nothing left for them to add, its ALL already there.

So Word 2003 does everything I want, I don't need Office 2007 cause I dont' care about the UI changes, I know how to use W2003. But ... my mom doesn't, and also her new PC came with Office 2007. If all they did was change the UI it wouldn't matter, but they intentionally go a step further and make it impossible, or in this case more difficult than it should be to open those files in 2003. Why? Because if I want to communicate with my mom using Word docs, then we need to be using compatible file formats, one of us has to buy another license of Office, and with that, you have no generated a recuring revenue stream by using a viral approach. All the while, users suffer.

While OOo may not cost any money directly. Don't think for an instant its not living in the same world, it has a cost, you just may not know what that cost is yet. Theres a reason its backed by a company that also sells commercial software.

You know, if you actually knew anything about economics, and did something other than listen to journalists sensationalize the situation and try to scare everyone into watching their new info on how to survive, you might realize the economic situation isn't that bad.

We're experiencing a burst of a bubble. But that bubble is relatively small in the grand scheme of things. People aren't broke, the money is in the economy, the banks and lending institutions are broke. So we can't take out any more loans because we're over committed already, but there is no lack of cash flow, its in the enviroment moving, not tied up in some bank vault.

Now that SOX has forced all these lenders to list what they actually are worth rather than what they'd like everyone to think they are worth they are getting called on, and a run results, and well, thats whats happened.

If everyone would stop with this bullshit 'the economy is bad' then it wouldn't be, it really is that simple. We're on a fractional reserve system with no standard backing, FAITH in the economy is what controls the economy, so as long as idiots keeps saying 'omg its so fucking bad!!!!' it will be.

As for GM/Ford/Dodge needing money to survive. No, they don't. This is a GREAT fucking excuse to get a free ride on my tab. They didn't have 'problems' until they saw the lending industry getting a free ride. While that statement isn't entirely true, they've had problems for years because no one holds their management responsible for their actions, but their issues today are no different than they were last year, except now they've seen a great way to scam money from the goverment. Its awesome its like they get to sell cares with out actually producing the cars.

So while I realize that this post is about as far offtopic as they come, please, stop being a fucking complete tool of the media and stop talking about how bad the economy is.

Math 2.0

Jealous much?

Awesome, smooth scrolly maps. Thats just what I need while trying to drive. How about we do something useful and provide a turn by turn direction app rather than jerking ourselves over the fact that we now have a beta (at best) version of a component that google did at production quality 6 months ago. That 6 months just assumes that they didn't bother with the nice smooth scrolling before GPS functionality was available to them.

Also, Google Maps does far more than just 'smooth sliding'. Theres all sorts of smoothing built into Maps, such as that it will attempt to stay centered on the route line rather than your actual position on the map, which can be a little confusing if you happen to be on the main highway and it thinks your on the side road or vice versus.

Anyway, I was unaware of the quality of OSM at this point, its come a hell of a long ways since I saw it last. So rather than screwing around with almost worthless eye candy, how about someone gives us some turn by turn directions from OSM data instead? Or damnit, someone send me a damn Mac so I can port one of the existing apps over before my developer cert expires.

Awesome reply dude, you pointed him at a Windows text editor, perhaps you should consider that Windows text editors don't run on the iPhone so Q10 is absolutely useless to him.

I feel that I should point out also, that there are thousands of text editors for Windows, many of which have the feature he has asked for and that just about anyone who is posting to slashdot, probably has the sense to find at least ONE of them.

I'm amazed at how people now days have no reading comprehension skills or at least utterly fail to consider the context something is written in. Are schools really that bad now days?

Much like anyone with a working knowledge of CS probably has the ability to verify the CS research, math is a rather logical science which is often pretty easy to verify. Sure sure, there are things that are hard to confirm based on the amount of calculations that must be performed and irrational numbers and all that (infinity is a bitch to test), but those things exist in CS as well.

Its silly to some how imply they are vastly different from each other, they are in fact almost identical to each other.

You haven't lived til you've had sex with a 26 year old crack whore. At that point, they are experienced and to the point, which makes for quick turn around on your servicing. Well worth the five bucks they charge, unlike the $15 we're expected to pay for a CD full of crap.

Except, as stated time and time again, they aren't common carriers and never have been. BellSouth teleco may be, BellSouthISP, not so much.

when is the last time you saw a decent flight sim? Or, more specifically my personal favorite - space flight sims.

www.x-plane.com

Been a fan of x-plane since I first tried 6.x, its a geeks dream as it is highly accurate based on blade element theory for modeling aerodynamics, allows you to plugin external apps via plugins or network connections, has support for lots monitors (I've seen people with 7 hooked up to it), has software to plugin REAL aircraft hardware for simulation purposes like GPS displays. Certified by the FAA for training, used by the SpaceShip/WhiteKnight guys to train before they fly the real deal. Comes with a full aircraft editor that is capable of making and simulating just about anything you can throw at it, as well as editors for various other bits of the world in which the simulator runs. Comes with complete terrain maps for the entire globe, most large cities look nice and some people have made a few of the airports spot on accurate.

Also on that page is Space Combat. Uses the same basic engine as x-plane but in space.

Runs on Windows, Linux, OS X, and the iPhone, and its even actually impressive on the iPhone, although I must say unless you just want to see your iPhone running a flight simulator, its not worth the money.

I'm not in any way affiliated with X-Plane, its just a damn good simulator.

imagine what would happen to the creative arts if its legal framework suddenly disappeared

It would go back to the way it was before the legal framework existed? And by that I mean individual producing some reasonable content that others could enjoy while the original artist was compensated fairly. And before you jump on 'its not fair', explain why art existed before copyright or shut up. Art existed before copyright, not the other way around. And before there was copyright, artists got paid and made a living producing their art. The difference was, they actually had to work for their money, rather than work for a little while then make so much money they never have to work again, while continuing to make money on the work they had done previously.

Copyright creates services where you can do something one time, then be compensated for it multiple times without actually doing anything new. Sorry if your view is that artists should be rich for their one hit wonder, but the rest of the world who actually works for a living doesn't share that point with you.

As someone who's dabbled in designing a game engine, this sort of things always sound like no brainers. Then when you get right down to implementing them in a game and making them actually fast enough to keep the game real time, you realize that a lot of cool ideas that can be used to make things more realistic from a simulation perspective are no feasable with the processing power available.

Lets face it, while Zork was awesome in its original form, if the processing power was available to do 3d graphics at the time, they probably would have done so. But it wasn't. Nor was the capability to do graphics anything even remotely comparable to what the game would have needed to do it justice. So instead, they use text because the processing power required to turn that text into something that was usable they did have available.

Right now we can simulate phyics, use ray traced graphics and reverse kinemetics to make games look pretty damn realistic, just don't expect to get 60 frames a second out of anything the home user has in a world like F.E.A.R. uses. Sure, you can pre-render a movie, but that 2 minute movie clip make take an hours worth of processing power depending on enviroment complexity.

So while you may look at these kinds of things and think: 'So what, I've done better in my little test apps where I was experimenting.', doing it within the constraints the developers of a real time game have is another story. I know I have done several things 'better' than the latest games have done, for instance I've written some AI to make the X-Plane flight simulator more realistic with its ATC traffic, but when plugged into the simulator and loaded it up several other aircraft in close proximity like you would expect to find at a large airport, the ATC calculations require too much processing power for my machine to nicely run the simulation. So I have to back out things till I get the speed to an acceptable level. The end result? My AI wasn't all that impressive since I ended up backing out most of the code that made it better in order to get it performing fast enough. In my case, I probably could have solved it with some multithreading goodness, or at least made it fall somewhere between what I originally created and what ended up running in the drawing thread but I think you can see my point.

How did this get modded insightful?

Its wrong on so many levels.

First, you've confused voltage and amperage.

Second, electricity moving through matter is technically a flow of holes where atoms are missing electrons. You get more resistence when dealing with electricity in this form, fewer atoms equals more resistence since there are few atoms available to make hole swaps with. The skin effect when operating at high frequencies makes the effective resistence of PCB trace higher than direct current but still fair lower than open air. The very thought that air is more conductive than a copper trace on the PCB is silly.

The key to this guys idea is that you get rid of not just the wire, but OTHER COMPONENTS such as filters that deal with other issues related to the length of the trace.

"This has not been tried before -- that the circuits are connected to the antenna wirelessly. They've been connected through wires and a bunch of other components. That's where the power gets lost," Mr. Shamim said.

Its not the PCB trace thats eating the power, its the filter caps, coils, connectors and other such things that add resistence to the system and rob power.

For future reference just because you read the wikipedia article doesn't mean you know what you're talking about, especially in cases where you clearly didn't understand the wikipedia article, potential difference (voltage), skin effect, or electrical resistence in general.

Its a sign that something else is wrong in your engine that is not being serviced when the O2 sensor is being replaced. I would guess that your exhaust values aren't seating properly and are roasting the O2 sensor, but I doubt you'd have it happen twice before the valves were burnt so bad that you were worrying about other problems.

If you're going through an O2 sensor every 20k miles, something else is wrong, possibly just that your mechanic likes the profit he makes off you. You're not adding lead additives to your gas are you?

An xbox 360 is not something you pop a battery and headphones into and take jogging. If Microsoft can be sued over this, who's to say that they couldn't go after every other stationary tray-loading spinning-disc-player manufacturer? Sony, Dell, Philips, NEC, you're next! Even laptop(remember, laptops are designed to be portable) owners wouldn't tilt theirs 90 degrees sideways while spinning a disc.

Having owned a CD walkman, and taking it everywhere with me when I was younger, including running and riding a bike, I can not think of a single disk that was scratched by the player. Nor did my PS2 scratch disks when I moved it, or my Wii, or this laptop, hell I've even knocked over my desktop machine while installing software and not had the disk get scratched. So if ALL these other times in my life these devices have been able to deal with it, and the ONE time I lay my 360 over because the drive is so damn noisy I'm looking for any possible way to silence it and stop it from vibrating so much, it kills my disk. And not even just a little scratch, we're talking looks like someone took a dremel tool and made a few nice circles on it kind of scratch.

I think we can blame MS and not sue everyone else on the planet who sells optical drives just fine.

And for the record, it would be pretty hard to play gears of war and hold a slice of pizza in your hand at the same time, even without sauce on your fingers. Just because you're a fat slob doesn't mean the rest of us are.