"This Code Is Clean"
Sigh,
After 6 hours of coding on Friday, 14 hours straight yesterday and 7 today, 
I am finally finished (in case you didn't catch that, it's 27 hours total).
I'm listening to: Geto Boys - "It Feels Good To Be A Gangsta" bobbing my head to the heavy beat.
I AM OFFICE SPACE.
I think I'm going to start work on a new movie.
"College Space"
homework hoovers
It'll be a horror/Comedyhomework hoovers
;-)
Here's a little piece of my output. This program was created to split up memory into fibonacci sized blocks (block size = previous size + 2nd previous size) and ship it over to an array that holds them in doublely linked lists. Anyway, it was a lot of work, and most of the time was spent figuring out what I needed to do and then juggling the memory from list, to allocated and back again. Also the memory manager can split larger memory blocks and coalesce them as needed (aka, if you need 13, but there aren't any blocks that size, it goes to 21, splits it into 13 and 8 and takes 13).
Yeah, it's pretty boring, but it's the work of 27 hours and I'm proud of it.
Also, I tried OpenOffice
for the first time (it's the portable version of beta 2). I LOVE IT!
I tried the 1.x version a while back and didn't really like it. I preferred word, but this new version is great! It has a feature that goes through your typed text and searches for large words and then it starts getting sweet. It autocompletes the words as you type...Now, this sounds like it could be annoying, but it's really, really useful.
Microsoft Word has a feature similar to this, but it only autocompletes on words like "Wednesday" or "January". This is a problem since I don't type those often.
Since it pulls words from the file I'm writing at the time, I most likely will use them again and I can prepare to use the autocompletes (just press enter to complete the word).
I found that it was very easy and quick to get used to. I can see this feature becoming a necessity, just like mouse gestures in firefox or a scroll wheel on a mouse. One of those features you get so used to that when you use someone else's computer and it's not there you kinda step back a second and then say,
"Oh, wow! I forgot what it was like to use a computer before this."
lol, I'm kinda dramatic about this, but I was close to "flat-lining" when I submitted this (submitted at 23:59, so I just made it in under the door) and this feature almost doubled my typing speed.
I just finished torrenting the newest leak of Windows Vista.
I'm very excited about installing it on my laptop. Sadly, I haven't found any 64bit versions, so I keep using the x86 beta on my 64bit laptop. :-Oh well. I'll be sure to put up some screenshots when I've got it up and running.
Speaking of Office,
I went to a presentation put on by Microsoft Thursday. The lead speaker was the corporate vice president of the Office division, Grant George. It was interesting mainly because he talked about the OpenDocument formats. He was asked whether the newest version of Office would support it. He said something like,
"Oh... well, we do what the market requires. Right now we aren't too concerned with this new format."
Basically, he said that they would support it if and only if they had to. It really makes sense for a business standpoint. They have the standard right now. OpenOffice and StarOffice are trying their hardest to make their products that can translate the Microsoft formats. It's great for Microsoft. If their competitors get on their backs, or start taking over their share of the market, all Microsoft has to do is completely change the way their files are created and read and all the competitors are sent back (also they could say that the format was changed to add in new features; AKA video in word files and such). If OpenDocument were to become a format used globally, Microsoft would have to start competing on a new level.
What's on that level? A bunch of stuff Microsoft doesn't want to worry about. They would have to compete with features and price. Users (and companies) would be able to buy (or in the case of openoffice, just download for free) the office package that suites them best, not the software that their customers have or the industry uses as a standard. I really wish someone would do something similar to adobe. That monster of a company has the publishing industry under it's finger. The first thing any publisher, printer, webdeveloper, or independent artist buys is a $600 copy of photoshop.
Now, I love photoshop
and have used it for many years (legal copy, too), but other software solutions aren't compared on what they can do, but rather if they can export to the adobe standard. These situations are located in almost all software categories (AutoCad, Windows Explorer, Quicktime, Quark but now InDesign...) (Quark kinda shot themselves in the foot). I was just surprised to hear the Microsoft Rep say that they didn't have any plans on implementing the new format.
In his defense,
nothing has been finalize, really, so there isn't much to say. I'm sure Microsoft will release a plugin or patch later to allow exporting and importing OpenDocuments.
Also, when you're the biggest and you've got everything coming your way, why cut yourself and your profits down? It's not a smart business practice and I would most certainly do the same thing!
lol.
Well, it's 1:30 and I have a 9am class
(yay for databases)
1 comment:
One big reason for Microsoft to implement the OpenDocument format (rather than their own proprietary DOC or XML format) would be that governments worldwide are very concerned about document longevity (documents in government must exist in a free and open format for up to 300 years!). Just because something is written today with Microsoft Word, which is the dominant word-processor, doesn't mean it will be readable 20+ years from now. Case in point: WordPerfect -- the standard/dominant word processor for many years in the 1980s and 1990s. Now, the "standard" format has completely changed with Word, and those older documents sometimes cannot be read at all anymore.
True -- MS Word is the standard today, and they control the market, as well they should; they have the best and most-used product. However, if Microsoft wants to continue its dominance in government and business documentation, it will be forced to comply with some sort of long-life, open (non-proprietary) format. This includes Microsoft relenquishing their stance that a user's documents created with Word/Excel/etc. are partly their intellectual property, and as such, they (Microsoft) can restrict access to them.
See the recent Commonwealth of Massachusetts comments.
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