I don't doubt it's Office screwing them up. Every time I've ever tried to lay out a long document in Word with figures and graphs, especially if they have captions, I've found myself wanting to pull my brain out through my nose with a pair of kitchen tongs. They fly all over the place and sometimes completely disappear. The only reliable way I've found is to write the whole thing and then put the pictures in at the end, which is incredibly annoying if you're writing a 20,000 word dissertation. BTW I've used every version of Word from 2.0, excluding XP (gave up and switched to OO well before it was released.)
Interestingly enough, one of the first things my Fiance said after using OO for the first time was 'oooh, the pictures stay where you put them'. (By the way, I know about all the different options for placing pictures and how they sit with the text. It's all a mess).
The only strong criticsm I have of OO is mailmerge: this is a key SMB need, very obvious and straightforward in Word, yet I've never been able to figure out how to do it without delving into setting up data sources and all sorts of things I don't want to know about.
Re:20 years later and still arguing :(
on
Amiga Sells AmigaOS
·
· Score: 3, Informative
The problem was that, except for a few unimportant exceptions, the ST GEM was a single-tasking OS: when you launched an application, the desktop disappeared. My parents had an STE, and I didn't understand what all the fuss about the Amiga was all about until I bought a second-hand one myself.
I had never played with a properly multitasking OS, and I was amazed to find that I could pull down the application window and find the desktop sitting there underneath. The Amiga had better graphics, better sound, and a real OS.
Little touches on the Amiga Workbench made it a joy to use: it tracked which disks I had inserted and put icons for them on the desktop, and told me when to swap, by name (the ST GEM had a kludgy 'please insert disk B into drive A' system); applications had proper icons (the ST had a bizarre icon for all apps that looks strangely like a Sinclair Microdrive cartridge). The only plus for the ST was the built-in PSU and midi ports.
I remember going to use my parents STE after a few months with my Amiga and realising how far behind it was.
It is abundantly clear from this that you do not own anything more than the medium on which the software is distributed.
Then you must be reading a different piece of text than the one you quoted - unless you mean something different by 'medium' than I do. To me, 'medium' means a CD or a disk, minus the data. Buying a piece of software means that you have the CD plus the data encoded on it, to do with as you wish, within the law, including copyright law. You're arguing the reverse of what the judge argued - you're saying you only buy the media and need a license to actually use the software. The judge is saying that when SoftMan bought whatever software it was, they obviously have the right to use it, i.e. "is entitled to the use and enjoyment of the software".
I think the confusion here is that we are all used to seeing software as an abstract piece of intellectual property. The software companies would like to think that we never buy software, but only a license to use it, and that the media is an effectively worthless necessity (less so now with DSL available). The judge here seems to be grounding it in the physical - if you go into a shop and by a software CD, then you obviously have the right to use it - anything else would be ridiculous. If you think about it in terms of a book or an art print then it makes perfect sense - I can do as I please with a book I bought, save photocopying it for my friends.
Look, it's really simple. I don't have the proof that this is the case in US law (I'm a Brit) but the arguments make sense.
use
* you are automatically allowed to use the software that you bought in any way you please - just like reading a book
* you are allowed to make adaptations to that software in order to run it on your chosen machine e.g. installation copies it to the hard disk - just like I might e.g. annotate a book for words that I don't understand
* you may have bought a piece of software under a license that restricts the above - e.g. a student version of a development package may prohibit the use of the software for commercial purposes
distribution
* by default, you have no right to redistribute software - just like you can't photocopy an entire book and give it to a friend
* but you _may_ buy software under a license that allows redistribution under certain terms and conditions - e.g. the GPL, or a development package that allows redistribution of runtime libraries
...simple isn't it?
Use and redistribution are two entirely different things, something that arguements about the GPL seem to miss. As far as the GPL is concerned, modifying source and recompiling is a legitimate 'use', but as soon as I decide to redistribute by selling or giving away outside of my organisation, I must comply with the terms of the GPL. If the GPL is found unenforcable at some point in the future then the right to redistribute ceases, and anybody with a piece of GPL software worldwide must cease redistribution (but use is fine) until the author of each piece of software offers a new license.
It's not a plural, it's an alternative abbreviation. In the US you abbreviate mathematics to math, in the UK we abbreviate mathematics to maths.
Re:Maybe if teachers worked with technology instea
on
Professors vs. WiFi
·
· Score: 2
I agree mainly.
I am studying medicine at a 'new style' course in the UK, which uses problem-based learning in groups. The few lectures that we do have are usually given by experts in the field; attendance is compulsory because it is embarassing for a senior doctor to arrive to find a half-empty room, and there is usually information given that is useful but not easy to find.
My first degree was in computer systems engineering and we were mainly free to skip lectures if we wanted too. I usually found that the professors that included an attendance element in the grade were those that were well aware that their lecturing style and preparation were inadequate, and used compulsory attendance as an ego-boost. One lecturer resorted to playing barely relevant videos for 30 minutes in the middle of each lecture to make up time (he was lecturing on Robotics from 15-yr old 35mm slides).
What on earth are you talking about?? Clearly you haven't had to do any major projects on Word. Its formatting is far from 'object oriented' (buzz-word alert) and it is perfectly possible to completely screw up a document by pressing enter or delete in the wrong places. Word uses hidden tags just like WP (you can see some of them by clicking the little paragraph icon) but doesn't give a sane means of sorting things out when the go wrong. I start cursing within about 10 minutes of using Word if I'm doing anything more complicated than writing a shopping list - fonts and styles jump around, pictures don't stay where I put them or won't go away if I change the anchoring properties then decide I don't want them, etc. etc.
I must be dreaming that the two Athlon 800 servers that I built have been running 24/7 since August 2001 then. One's Windows 2000 Server (upgraded from NT4) and the other is Debian GNU/Linux. The 2k box has crashed occasionally due to a naff IDE tape backup drive, but other than that both have been rock solid. That's with consumer motherboards, bog standard RAM and IDE RAID.
Exactly what can be done with the.org TLD that is going to be so bad anyhow?
Well, they could unfairly favour large, rich corporations over poor non-profit organisations when settling disputes for one thing. The whole point of.org is to provide a safe place for non-profit orgs to live - if it's being administered by an org that is dominated by big corps and (ex-) directors of ICANN then I can't see that being a good thing.
I don't think they do share lots of code. They might share code that does similar jobs, but it's not the same. The two desktops use different toolkits and different underlying theories, ideas and methods.
I think that interoperability is more important than having a single uniform desktop. 'Competition' even when its not about brands is healthy and important for the vitality of a project.
I don't think blank actually counts as spoilt though! I assume that under the British system it would just be discarded.
There is a definite political statement in deliberately spoiling a ballot paper. If I wanted to do this, I would put a large 'X' across the whole paper and make it clear that I intended to do that.
Not as flamebait, but why? Why should you be allowed to deliberately gum up the works? And if it's to make a point about voting, why should you be opposed to the machine announcing it?
I have been tempted to spoil a ballot paper in the past when I am unsatisfied with the candidates or the voting process. Here in Britian spoilt papers are counted up and it does send a message to politicians because they can see when there is a rise in the number of spoilt papers. It is a right to vote anonymously, so I would be most upset if a machine took away my right to anonymously spoil a ballot paper in protest.
Yes - and what's the point in different brands of cars, dishwashers, TVs etc. It's all about choice. Whilst I totally respect what the KDE team have done, I personally cannot stand the KDE desktop - for me it reeks of all the things that I can't stand about Windows. But at the end of the day it is a matter of choice.
In what other ubiquitous technology is it the duty of the user to learn that technology's underlying framework? Is it a reader's duty to learn what a particular author's writing process is? Or learn bookbinding? Must a driver learn how the internal combustion engine or transmission works? To turn on a light, do you need to know how to wire the circuit?
They're not being asked to understand the underlying technology. They're being asked to understand the basic fundamentals. Anyone can create a link to any other page, for any reason. That's not like understanding the engine, that's like understanding what the turn signal means or what the brake pedal does, and is absolutely essential for any meaningful use of the web!
I would think that Ford's position is that they are paying for another person's foolishness.
But as has been stated several times - they were choosing to do this. They could have blocked http requests originating via that domain name - I'm not managing a large corporate website, but even with my basic knowledge of Apache I could do that in a matter of minutes. They choose not too - therefore their motivations must have lied elsewhere.
But then I reckon my Girlfriend's mother could cope with
apt-get update apt-get upgrade
to patch Mozilla, or even easier - open up Red Carpet and select upgrade.
I would say from having administered a network with a mixture of win98, NT and 2k machines for two years that most MS fixes are far from 'smooth' and cause lots of problems. The messages jump from patronising [or as it is often called, "user friendly"] messages straight to "system error 14675 occured, rolling back the patch - please contact the system administrator". Then you have to wade through log files and find out what went wrong.....
Woah - what graphics hardware are you using? I use gdm exclusively here, never login from the console because this is mainly a web-browsing and WYSIWYG (OpenOffice) word processor. The only time I have _ever_ seen X >= 4.0 go down hard is when I was using an early version of drivers for an ATI TV tuner.
If you look in the 'fonts' preferences, there's now an option for minimum font size. It's a great way to deal with ridiculously small fonts without making everything else look chubby.
I've also found that the screen calibration thingy on the fonts preferences (select 'Other..' under 'Display Resolution') makes a big difference too.
MS has armies of well paid programmers who know the software inside out, is in the middle/end of an apparently unilateral security review, and has taken two months to patch a hole in their flagship web server product.
Mozilla has - well perhaps a relatively small army of programmers, many of whom are voluntary, and managed to patch a bug that is really only a pain in three days.
Yes - you can't quantatively compare the two and say that Mozilla is x percent more efficient/reliable/whatever than MS, but you can make a qualitative comparison and ask why MS took an order of magnitude longer time to respond. Even if we give MS the benefit of the doubt and assume that the IIS hole is much harder to patch than the Moz hole, MS should have and could have thrown much more resources at the problem to make sure it got fixed within a week - but they didn't.
Well I'm using a fairly entry-level LCD (1024x768 TFT on a sub GBP 1000 laptop), so I guess it's noe just tubes. I know that some fonts seem to look particularly bad on non-anti-aliased Mozilla compared to anti-aliased IE, but I think that Arial and other Sans Serif fou=nts look just fine without the blurring effect that most AA algorithms seem to produce.
Slashdot Mirror
Interestingly enough, one of the first things my Fiance said after using OO for the first time was 'oooh, the pictures stay where you put them'. (By the way, I know about all the different options for placing pictures and how they sit with the text. It's all a mess).
The only strong criticsm I have of OO is mailmerge: this is a key SMB need, very obvious and straightforward in Word, yet I've never been able to figure out how to do it without delving into setting up data sources and all sorts of things I don't want to know about.
I had never played with a properly multitasking OS, and I was amazed to find that I could pull down the application window and find the desktop sitting there underneath. The Amiga had better graphics, better sound, and a real OS.
Little touches on the Amiga Workbench made it a joy to use: it tracked which disks I had inserted and put icons for them on the desktop, and told me when to swap, by name (the ST GEM had a kludgy 'please insert disk B into drive A' system); applications had proper icons (the ST had a bizarre icon for all apps that looks strangely like a Sinclair Microdrive cartridge). The only plus for the ST was the built-in PSU and midi ports.
I remember going to use my parents STE after a few months with my Amiga and realising how far behind it was.
Bet you were pretty good at tic tac toe aswell.
Then you must be reading a different piece of text than the one you quoted - unless you mean something different by 'medium' than I do. To me, 'medium' means a CD or a disk, minus the data. Buying a piece of software means that you have the CD plus the data encoded on it, to do with as you wish, within the law, including copyright law. You're arguing the reverse of what the judge argued - you're saying you only buy the media and need a license to actually use the software. The judge is saying that when SoftMan bought whatever software it was, they obviously have the right to use it, i.e. "is entitled to the use and enjoyment of the software".
I think the confusion here is that we are all used to seeing software as an abstract piece of intellectual property. The software companies would like to think that we never buy software, but only a license to use it, and that the media is an effectively worthless necessity (less so now with DSL available). The judge here seems to be grounding it in the physical - if you go into a shop and by a software CD, then you obviously have the right to use it - anything else would be ridiculous. If you think about it in terms of a book or an art print then it makes perfect sense - I can do as I please with a book I bought, save photocopying it for my friends.
Look, it's really simple. I don't have the proof that this is the case in US law (I'm a Brit) but the arguments make sense.
...simple isn't it?
use
* you are automatically allowed to use the software that you bought in any way you please - just like reading a book
* you are allowed to make adaptations to that software in order to run it on your chosen machine e.g. installation copies it to the hard disk - just like I might e.g. annotate a book for words that I don't understand
* you may have bought a piece of software under a license that restricts the above - e.g. a student version of a development package may prohibit the use of the software for commercial purposes
distribution
* by default, you have no right to redistribute software - just like you can't photocopy an entire book and give it to a friend
* but you _may_ buy software under a license that allows redistribution under certain terms and conditions - e.g. the GPL, or a development package that allows redistribution of runtime libraries
Use and redistribution are two entirely different things, something that arguements about the GPL seem to miss. As far as the GPL is concerned, modifying source and recompiling is a legitimate 'use', but as soon as I decide to redistribute by selling or giving away outside of my organisation, I must comply with the terms of the GPL. If the GPL is found unenforcable at some point in the future then the right to redistribute ceases, and anybody with a piece of GPL software worldwide must cease redistribution (but use is fine) until the author of each piece of software offers a new license.
type copyrightedsong.mp3 into the box and click "Google Search"
no... it's a CB radio that fits into an 8-track player. That way you could add a CB to your car without any wiring.
OpenWindows (Sun)
DECWindows (DEC)
- you need to send a form letter with mailmerge to 50 people
- you have the names and addresses in front of you on paper
- you're computer literate but don't understand what an operating system is, what 'root' means or how to edit a config file
Now, using only the help function in OOo, go and do your mail merge. See how far you get. I get bogged down in 'data sources', LDAP, blah blah.It's not a plural, it's an alternative abbreviation. In the US you abbreviate mathematics to math, in the UK we abbreviate mathematics to maths.
I am studying medicine at a 'new style' course in the UK, which uses problem-based learning in groups. The few lectures that we do have are usually given by experts in the field; attendance is compulsory because it is embarassing for a senior doctor to arrive to find a half-empty room, and there is usually information given that is useful but not easy to find.
My first degree was in computer systems engineering and we were mainly free to skip lectures if we wanted too. I usually found that the professors that included an attendance element in the grade were those that were well aware that their lecturing style and preparation were inadequate, and used compulsory attendance as an ego-boost. One lecturer resorted to playing barely relevant videos for 30 minutes in the middle of each lecture to make up time (he was lecturing on Robotics from 15-yr old 35mm slides).
What on earth are you talking about?? Clearly you haven't had to do any major projects on Word. Its formatting is far from 'object oriented' (buzz-word alert) and it is perfectly possible to completely screw up a document by pressing enter or delete in the wrong places. Word uses hidden tags just like WP (you can see some of them by clicking the little paragraph icon) but doesn't give a sane means of sorting things out when the go wrong. I start cursing within about 10 minutes of using Word if I'm doing anything more complicated than writing a shopping list - fonts and styles jump around, pictures don't stay where I put them or won't go away if I change the anchoring properties then decide I don't want them, etc. etc.
I must be dreaming that the two Athlon 800 servers that I built have been running 24/7 since August 2001 then. One's Windows 2000 Server (upgraded from NT4) and the other is Debian GNU/Linux. The 2k box has crashed occasionally due to a naff IDE tape backup drive, but other than that both have been rock solid. That's with consumer motherboards, bog standard RAM and IDE RAID.
Well, they could unfairly favour large, rich corporations over poor non-profit organisations when settling disputes for one thing. The whole point of .org is to provide a safe place for non-profit orgs to live - if it's being administered by an org that is dominated by big corps and (ex-) directors of ICANN then I can't see that being a good thing.
I think that interoperability is more important than having a single uniform desktop. 'Competition' even when its not about brands is healthy and important for the vitality of a project.
I don't think blank actually counts as spoilt though! I assume that under the British system it would just be discarded. There is a definite political statement in deliberately spoiling a ballot paper. If I wanted to do this, I would put a large 'X' across the whole paper and make it clear that I intended to do that.
By being 1337 hax0r
I have been tempted to spoil a ballot paper in the past when I am unsatisfied with the candidates or the voting process. Here in Britian spoilt papers are counted up and it does send a message to politicians because they can see when there is a rise in the number of spoilt papers. It is a right to vote anonymously, so I would be most upset if a machine took away my right to anonymously spoil a ballot paper in protest.
Yes - and what's the point in different brands of cars, dishwashers, TVs etc. It's all about choice. Whilst I totally respect what the KDE team have done, I personally cannot stand the KDE desktop - for me it reeks of all the things that I can't stand about Windows. But at the end of the day it is a matter of choice.
They're not being asked to understand the underlying technology. They're being asked to understand the basic fundamentals. Anyone can create a link to any other page, for any reason. That's not like understanding the engine, that's like understanding what the turn signal means or what the brake pedal does, and is absolutely essential for any meaningful use of the web!
But as has been stated several times - they were choosing to do this. They could have blocked http requests originating via that domain name - I'm not managing a large corporate website, but even with my basic knowledge of Apache I could do that in a matter of minutes. They choose not too - therefore their motivations must have lied elsewhere.
apt-get update
apt-get upgrade
to patch Mozilla, or even easier - open up Red Carpet and select upgrade.
I would say from having administered a network with a mixture of win98, NT and 2k machines for two years that most MS fixes are far from 'smooth' and cause lots of problems. The messages jump from patronising [or as it is often called, "user friendly"] messages straight to "system error 14675 occured, rolling back the patch - please contact the system administrator". Then you have to wade through log files and find out what went wrong.....
Woah - what graphics hardware are you using? I use gdm exclusively here, never login from the console because this is mainly a web-browsing and WYSIWYG (OpenOffice) word processor. The only time I have _ever_ seen X >= 4.0 go down hard is when I was using an early version of drivers for an ATI TV tuner.
I've also found that the screen calibration thingy on the fonts preferences (select 'Other..' under 'Display Resolution') makes a big difference too.
Mozilla has - well perhaps a relatively small army of programmers, many of whom are voluntary, and managed to patch a bug that is really only a pain in three days.
Yes - you can't quantatively compare the two and say that Mozilla is x percent more efficient/reliable/whatever than MS, but you can make a qualitative comparison and ask why MS took an order of magnitude longer time to respond. Even if we give MS the benefit of the doubt and assume that the IIS hole is much harder to patch than the Moz hole, MS should have and could have thrown much more resources at the problem to make sure it got fixed within a week - but they didn't.
Well I'm using a fairly entry-level LCD (1024x768 TFT on a sub GBP 1000 laptop), so I guess it's noe just tubes. I know that some fonts seem to look particularly bad on non-anti-aliased Mozilla compared to anti-aliased IE, but I think that Arial and other Sans Serif fou=nts look just fine without the blurring effect that most AA algorithms seem to produce.