Don't do this... EVER!

...or else, I'm gonna find you and insult you to death!

Any new technology tends to go through a 25-year adoption cycle.
                                                                   -- Marc Andreessen

Office Open XML (also informally known as OOXML or OpenXML) is an open file format developed by Microsoft and standardized by ECMA (ECMA-376), ISO and IEC (ISO/IEC 29500:2008). Typical Office Open XML file extensions include:

1. .docx
2. .pptx
3. .xlsx
4. .docm.
5. .pptm
6. .xlsm

Different office suites have limited support of Office Open XML format at the time of this writing. Most (if not all) office suites have only partial support for ISO/IEC Office Open XML format at the time of this writing (which means that same document might display differently in different office suites). Even 2007 or newer versions of Microsoft Office have varying levels of support for ISO/IEC 29500:2008 (Microsoft has stated that upcoming MS Office 2013 will support both read and write of ISO/IEC 29500 Strict).

• How can you blatantly assume that every other person on this planet is using 2007 or newer version(s) of Microsoft Office? In case you don't know, there are loads of free and commercial MS Office alternatives.
• I know that Microsoft provides free compatibility packs for older versions of MS Office, but how can you assume that every person has spare time and bandwidth to download and install these packs?
• What about those who use platforms which are not supported by Microsoft Office (e.g. Linux)?
• What about those who can't afford a Microsoft Office license?
• What about those who use cloud based office suites (e.g. Google Docs/Drive)?

Especially when sending documents as attachments to mailing lists, stop being stupid and have sense to use more widely supported formats (such as DOC or PDF) so that everyone can easily access the document.

Mind you, even if you are using 2007 or newer versions of MS Office, you can save a file in 97-2003 format for use in pre-2007 versions of MS Office (and many other office suites), so that you and everyone else can easily access it in most office suites.

Standardization of Office Open XML has been criticized due to many reasons. Quoting Google:
"If ISO were to give OOXML with its 6546 pages the same level of review that other standards have seen, it would take 18 years (6576 days for 6546 pages) to achieve comparable levels of review to the existing ODF standard (871 days for 867 pages) which achieves the same purpose and is thus a good comparison.
Considering that OOXML has only received about 5.5% of the review that comparable standards have undergone, reports about inconsistencies, contradictions and missing information are hardly surprising."

It'll take many (many!) years before Office Open XML will become ubiquitous (when it'll hopefully be supported by all major office suites). Until then, please use more common formats such as PDF, DOC or TXT.

Key points in Professor Thrun's "Higher Education 2.0" talk at DLD 2012

This is an excerpt from Professor Sebastian Thrun's talk at DLD 2012 titled "Higher Education 2.0". He announced Udacity in the same conference. The complete video of his talk is available on youtube (If you have ~22 minutes to spare, go watch it. This excerpt is nothing when compared with his talk).


"...So, we scrambled. We put together a small technology team. We built a really ugly website. And, we started recording ourselves day and night. And just to show you how primitive our technology was, there was literally a camera, a pen and a webcam...

We decided to flip the entire way we teach. Rather than lecturing students, we decided to quiz students... The principle way of engaging is that the student has to think. We are doing this to empower the student to learn which is fundamentally different from the way the lectures take place in universities today... And, we recorded this day and night at the expense of my family life, my sleep; one class took me about maybe 10 to 15 hours to record. And, then something bizarre happened. I was teaching the same class at Stanford to 200 students. On day 1, we had this full class of 200 students. And just 2 or 3 weeks in, class was empty. There were only 30 students showing up. So, I asked the students: "What's happening? Why are you not coming to class?". And they all said: "We actually prefer you on video"... You got to think about this. These are students who pay 30000 dollars a year at Stanford University to see the best and most famous of all professors. And, they prefer some video. That was a big shock to us.

...Here's my favourite critical email. Here is the very short sentence that moved me. The complaint is that this is a "weeder" class...the class is setup in a way that doesn't motivate but puts really harsh materials in front of students. And, tests them whether they can do it...[This email] was absolutely true. ...in my 20 years of teaching, at Carnegie-Melon, at Stanford, I'd always been a tough teacher. I'd always given students really hard question, I'd always let them fail, and would come to their rescue, making myself look really smart. Here was no purpose of weeding. This was an open university, there was no reason to reduce class size, there was no certificate to be earned; and here I was teaching a weeder class". Then I started to realize that we really set up our students not for success but for failure. We really empower professors by looking smart, and we don't really help the students to become smart. And this was just one example of a person who was dropping out, because I was the smart-ass who didn't help her.

I started realizing that grades are the failure of the education system.

Giving somebody three, or four, ... just means that really educators failed to get them to A+ level. So rather than grading students, with grades, as I'd done in the beginning of the class, my task had to be to make students successful, to get everybody to an A+ level. So it couldn't be about harsh questions and difficult questions, where they had one chance, and when they got it wrong they got a C, we changed the entire system to make it so that the questions were still hard, we gave more assistance, we let them take it multiple times, when they finally got them right they would get an A+ and I think it was much better for that.

That really made me think about the education system as a whole.

Salman Khan (of Khan Academy) has this wonderful story: when you learn to ride a bicycle, and that's quoting from his talk, and you fail to learn a bicycle, then you don't stop learning a bicycle, give the person a D, and move on to a unicycle. You keep training them as long as it takes to ride a bicycle, and then they can ride a bicycle.

Our classes today, in math for example, when someone fails, we don't take the time or the needs  to make the student a strong student, we give them a C or a D or an F, then we move to the next class, and now they're already brain-marked as losers, they miss the necessary skills and knowledge, and they're set up for failure.

This medium has the opportunity to fundamentally change all of this.

... Maybe we should rethink education. Universities were invented in 1088, about a thousand years ago.... The lectures were the most effective way to convey information. ...[we had the invention] of digital media. And, miraculously, professors today teach exactly the same way they taught 100 years ago. University has been the most suprisingly the least innovative of all places in society. Perhaps we should reconsider and think about new media, for teaching, that can personalise themselves and helps us to become effective."


PS: I plan to annotate this post except that I don't know when it'll happen. In the meantime, bolded text in above quoted text will further highlight some points that are worth noting.

How do free and open source projects earn revenue?

Most good programmers do programming not because they expect to get paid or get adulation by the public, but because it is fun to program. -- Linus Torvalds

Ever wondered how commercial companies which develop open source software make money? How are they able to thrive in today's competitive world (with competitors employing tactics such as Fear, uncertainity and doubt, Embrace, extend and extinguish etc). Here are some ways using which free and open source projects get their revenue:

1. Donations (from users).

2. Microdonation providers such as flattr and Gittip.
3. Crowdfunding such as Bountysource.

4. Advertisements on project's website.

5. Another possibility (typically used by operating system (distribution) vendors):

• Ubuntu changes default search provider for firefox 
• Linux Mint using Google Custom Search Engine 
• Linux Mint default search engine in Linux Mint 12 to DuckDuckGo

6. Paid support: Provide support to customers in return for money.

7. Octave dev demands money to release bugfix that he already wrote (post on /r/programming)