A nice little web link on google.com ("Are your friends complaining about not being able to open your Word 2007 documents? Fix it here") would do the trick.
That could just link to OOo -- tell them to use that, instead:-)
Yes, I know it's not a complete substitute -- I have to use MS Office because my customers require me to use forms with macros that OOo won't handle (they pay the piper, they call the tune) -- but it would be fine for most users.
Oh, and of course, you'd still have to deal with the wrong default format. Drat, it was looking so promising...
And although it's a pain in the butt, we'll cope. OOo is already pretty good at reading MS proprietary files -- better than MS Office in some cases. Although I usually work in MS Office, I keep OOo on my computer as a recovery tool, because it will successfully read MS Office files that are too damaged for MS Office to read even in recovery mode. Yes, it would be better if OOXML didn't exist. Given that it exists, it would be better if it's not accepted as a standard. But even if it does get accepted as a standard then I bet the free (at least as in beer, hopefully as in speech) tools would be along smartish. Maybe not good enough to claim full standard compliance, but good enough for everyone to open their documents and get on with their jobs.
They made it retroactive, I believe, but you had better be careful with code with the original terms since BSD originated code is under the new license, but the old code from a different author (but same license) may not be using the modified/revised BSD terms. Which appears to be the case with at least one of the BSD licenses used in Abiword. It's not actually the old BSD license, it's the old BSD licence with the author's name replacing references to the Regents of California. So when they made the new BSD license retroactive, the code used by Abiword was unaffected because it wasn't the Regents' to change.
In UK terminology it's a "Mutual Society" I think. There are very few left in the UK, though. Most of them demutualised when the government relaxed the banking regulations some years ago.
Were/are D Notices legally binding? I thought they were enforced on a "violate this and you won't be invited to press briefings any more" basis. Certainly the current equivalent is a "voluntary" scheme: http://www.dnotice.org.uk/.
If you know your history you'll be well aware that Copernicus didn't publish his work until he was old and about to die. The church also banned his book and he did not take part in mocking the pope as the character Simplicio. Arguably, it banned De revolutionibus in reaction to the Galileo affair, as the Wikipedia article points out.
Even if the actual political situation had more to do with maintaining control and power, than with the content of the science, trampling scientific theories to maintain that control is vile. This is from someone who purports to be the voice of God on Earth, and according to the religion he heads is meant to be doing good for all men. Apparantly the mistreatment of individuals is quite justified in order for him to maintain power. snip
If it was common practice to punish someone who went against church doctrine with house arrest (if being merciful as in Galileo's case), kill them barbarically (eg. burn them alive), or excommunicate them therefore making them a pariah within the community, doesn't that speak volumes about why the church has done harm? Only if you commit the fallacy of comparing the church of 500 years ago with the secular standards of today. If you compare the church of 500 years ago with the secular standards of 500 years ago you find that the church was at least no worse than the secular authorities, and some have argued that it was actually a restraining force on the worse barbarities (it didn't just ban Copernicus, it also banned the Malleus Maleficarum (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hammer_of_witches)).
You seem more than willing to cast a blind eye to past pope's indiscretions while at the same time nailing today's scientists for basically telling the pope to go elsewhere to spread his doctrine. There is a world of difference between the two. One is much much worse than the other, yet your own prejudice means you're happy to let the worse of the two go. Hardly! Please don't take me for a Papal apologist! But there was already no shortage of voices here condemning the Pope, and I believe that the condemnation needed examining. The Pope isn't automatically wrong in everything he does, just because he's Pope.
I don't think you're being at all fair or rational, and I wonder what's up with/. moderation that you've been modded up. I've been modded up, down and sideways. I'm still waiting for "funny" and "offtopic". I think it's the kneejerk "It's the Pope, he must be wrong" posts that are the ones not being fair or rational, and I would say the same for any "It's the Pope, he must be right" posts if I saw any. If any of the upward mods have been deserved I hope they're for pointing out that the issues are not as simplistic, as black-and-white, as many of the posts up to that point had suggested.
Even leaving the whole Galileo issue aside, what business did the Catholic church have dictating to scientists what was correct and what wasn't? Do you somehow think that the whole Catholic inquisition was OK?
The church didn't dictate to the scientists; the scientists advised the church because the church was pretty much the only organisation running educational establishments at the time (and was also a major source of research funding). The scientists told the church that it was paying Galileo to teach bad science, the church told Galileo to stop, Galileo responded by bad-mouthing his boss, and it didn't work out well for him.
Ok, I've put that into modern terms -- as another poster has pointed out, the scientific method as we know it didn't exist until the 20th century, and "research" would have been making observations, not doing experiments, but I stand by my analogy; it was the medieval equivalent of a biology lecturer being fired from his university post for bad-mouthing anybody who tried to stop him teaching creationism/ID.
No, I don't think the inquisition was ok. Although most of the atrocities usually attributed to it were actually done by civic authorities which the church tried to prevent, and although the scale of the atrocities is sometimes exaggerated -- some modern populist accounts put the number of people killed as being greater than the then population of Europe -- it did commit enough atrocities to be a resounding Bad Thing.
Galileo had evidence to support his theory He had evidence that not everything revolved around the Earth -- the moons of Jupiter. That wasn't evidence that the Earth revolved around the sun.
Making Galileo out to be a crank scientist who turned out to be right is a pretty damaging view of one of the great scientists of his age. Have you checked out any of his other theories? Yes, his movement from theory to observation was crucially important to the subsequent development of science, but his role as "martyr" seems to have led to his reputation being rather over-inflated.
Instead he chose a place where he knew he would be challenged by opposition. Did he ask to speak there, or was he invited?
because having little tolerance for absurd ideas and bigoted people is TOTALLY the same thing as having little tolerance for people living their life their own way.
the following two actions are SOOO the same
1) Tell someone they're not welcome because they're asinine bigoted ideas
2) Pass laws against someone, condemn them to hell,etc because they don't live by your rules and therefore are second class citizens
Oh, absolutely they're different. And what the scientists did was neither of those. They didn't tell the Pope he wasn't welcome, they campaigned to prevent him speaking at the university. They didn't pass laws, because mob rule doesn't like laws. And I bet none of them have bothered to find out why Galileo was really excommunicated and just assumed the popular myth was true (simplistically, he was excommunicated for effectively calling the Pope an idiot when the Pope asked for scientific evidence of what was considered a discredited crackpot theory by the scientists of the time, which Galileo insisted on teaching. It was the equivalent at the time of removing the teaching accreditation of somebody who insists on teaching creationism and calls anybody an idiot who asks them to justify it. Yes, "condemning to hell" might seem over the top, but only if you believe in hell. Otherwise the Pope did pretty much what the scientific community of the time required.)
Yes, the Pope and the RC church have a lot to answer for, but did you notice how the scientists played it so that he couldn't win? They campaigned to stop him from speaking, then when he cancelled they accused him of playing the martyr. In a liberal democracy, people are allowed to express ideas and the ideas are allowed to stand or fall on their own merits, but those scientists clearly don't believe in that; it seems that they believe that their ideas can only stand if they suppress competing ideas. Religion doesn't have bigotry DRM'd, evidently. Or maybe the scientists have managed to crack it?
having it curved is going to make drawing a straight line, or anything other than gaming, really difficult I would think. Well, I'd like one for side-by-side comparisons of documents. Two ordinary monitors side-by-side wouldn't be as good because -- er -- give me a moment to think...
Two-word noun phrases are only hyphenated when used in adjective form.
I don't know about US usage, but in British usage there's no such rule, according to both Partridge's "Usage and Abusage" and Fowler's "Modern English Usage" (arguably two of the three most influential prescriptive grammars of the 20th century, the third being Fowler's "The King's English", which I don't have to hand).
As Partidge points out, "In the life of a compound word there are three stages: (1) two separate words (cat bird); (2) a hyphenated compound (cat-bird); (3) a single word (catbird)."
Apart from a few cases where the form is forced by a risk of ambiguity, whether a compound is hyphenated is determined by how far along that progression the compound has gone, and there is no rule to determine it. For example, in the same article Partridge uses "Dog-show" as a compound noun, thus hyphenated. And as an example of where a hyphen is forced, Partridge compares "The author's tense-sequence is defective in this passage" (see the hyphenated noun phrase used as a noun there?) with "A tense sequence of events succeeded a dull sequence". Clearly two-word noun phrases are not only hyphenated when used in adjective form.
So you're right that "grammar Nazi" does not have to be hyphenated, but for the wrong reason.
Re:The best tools stay out of the way...
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Could it credibly have unintentionally quoted it?
Re:The best tools stay out of the way...
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Microsoft doesn't care as much about long-term Office veterans because they'll typically have a large document collection in the MS proprietary formats. The format lockin makes the barrier to switching Office Suites much higher. They could be in for a rude awakening there. I keep a copy of OO.o on my computer, not because I use it as an office suite but because it's better than MS Office at recovering problematic MS Office files. It's only macros that defeat it, and in my experience they usually don't matter so much in legacy documents.
Re:The best tools stay out of the way...
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The best tools will not bother you unless you let it... Agreed, which is why I think the ribbon is a poor tool, at least as a menu replacement (it wouldn't be so bad as a toolbar replacement).
I have used Microsoft word for years, and I don't think its features would bother you unless you are particularly sensitive.... They didn't -- until Office 2007. It had annoyances, sure, but nothing I couldn't live with.
If it does, there is WordPad, if you really just want to use it as a glorified typewriter.... But I have the opposite problem -- I'm a power user, with a heavily customised interface, custom macros and the rest. Wordpad wouldn't cut it. The ribbon basically said "power users not permitted" (it took me ages to find custom document properties in 2007 -- something I need to access for every new document. Microsoft seems to think that nobody uses them. Well, maybe nobody who makes the corporate purchasing decision, and they're probably right.)
Re:The best tools stay out of the way...
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That's encouraging. It's about as unfashionable as it's possible to be in the UK, but I did have a sort of background awareness that mainland Europe was less swayed by such whims.
The same could be said for the GIMP, Blender and Gnome/KDE interfaces. Good thing slashdot is as hard on open source giffaws like that as their closed-source counterparts. I've not used the GIMP or Blender, and I've never wanted to change the KDE interface, so contrary to/. spirit I'll any leave criticism of those to people who know what they're talking about.
Re:The best tools stay out of the way...
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If you have used Office before, you're probably expecting something to be in the same place it's always been when it's actually not. I've had to deal with that on every release so far, and when I first moved from View on the BBC Micro, and when I switch between MS Office and OO.o. This isn't about things moving, it's an unsuitable (for me) way of working being imposed.
Re:The best tools stay out of the way...
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Very nice signature btw. GG? Yep. I was wondering whether anybody else here would be old enough to recognise it.
Re:The best tools stay out of the way...
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Perfect for the exec who chooses his PA on bust size rather than on organisational skills.
That is redundant, sir.
Well, MS get enough flack around here. I thought I should at least give them credit for understanding their core market.
Re:The best tools stay out of the way...LARGE BUST
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Wouldn't work here. The missus knows that I prefer small.
Re:The best tools stay out of the way...
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All of the anti-Vista and anti-2007 rhetoric frequently strikes me as just anti-MS drivel. Granted there are people like you who don't care for the 2007 interface but most of the criticism is rather empty and shallow and often from people who have done little more than spend 5 minutes trying out the products.
Thanks for the credit -- I don't think any OS or toolset gets it right all of the time, and I try to call it on individual cases. There is MS stuff that I like (Visual Studio, for example) and MS stuff that I don't like (Office 2007, obviously).
The specific things I don't like about the Office 2007 UI are:
I don't like moving my hands from the keys when typing, so I like to access functions using keystrokes. Almost all the key sequences for common operations were longer on Office 2007. Had they just been different I'd have bitten the bullet, as I did going from 2000 to 2003, but these were longer, which slowed me down. And yes, I know I could have used the 2003 keystrokes, and most of them would work (but would nag me about using obsolete key sequences), some would not do anything, and some would crash the application without giving me the chance to save my work (yes, I confess, it was the Beta -- did the interface change much in the release?)
The ribbon certainly used up more space on my screen. As I work on the road a lot and don't want a gorilla arm, I tend to work on a small laptop, and couldn't afford the space. Yes, I know I could make it auto-hide, so that when I think I'm about to click on a piece of text the ribbon suddenly drops down and I end up clicking on it instead. Ornery old cuss that I am, I didn't like that any better.
The ribbon gave equal screen real estate to functions I would only use every couple of years when creating new templates as it did to stuff I'd use every day, and wouldn't let me change that.
The ribbon didn't have enough structure. When looking for a button I didn't use very often, I would spend ages doing a visual search of a pile of often similar looking icons in quite a large visual field. It was like having all the tools in my workshop tipped in a few piles in the middle of the floor, instead of having them neatly put away on the shelves and in the drawers. Yes, sure, I would have got used to where to find the common icons quite quickly, but I used the keyboard for those, remember?
I'm a verbal person. I don't forget names, but I forget the faces that go with them. From the days I started in computing I found pseudocode far easier to follow than a flowchart. I see "File | Save" and I immediately see what it means. I see a picture of something and my mind takes time over it. Office 2003 catered for visual and verbal thinkers: I had the menus, visual thinkers had the toolbars. 2007 took that choice away from me, and tried to force me into a style of recognition that my mind doesn't do well.
But they are all largely a matter of personal style. A heavy mouser won't mind the longer key sequences. Somebody desk based with a huge hi-res screen won't miss the real-estate. A right-brain dominant person will be glad to see the back of the menus. There are plenty of people for whom the interface will work just fine. What got me is that 2007 took away my choice. I had to work the way MS chose for me to work -- no, worse, I had to work in the way that a graphic designer in Redmond chose for me to work, and of course they have a visual rather than a verbal mind because that's what makes a good graphic designer. And I bet they have a huge screen. And I bet they prefer the mouse to the keyboard, because the mouse is better at graphics and layouts than the keyboard is. But I am not a graphic designer.
I've been told that there are third-party tools that can fix a lot of the problems I had. But the fact that it needs third-party tools to make the interface acceptable suggests to me that MS got it wrong in the first place. Not wrong in the sense that the interface is wrong for everybody, but wrong in that it assumes everybody works and thinks the same. One size does not fit all.
Re:The best tools stay out of the way...
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Goodbye Cruel Word
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Office 2007 is leaps and bounds over anything Microsoft put out before. The interface is also heavily improved
That is very much a matter of taste. I found the Office 2007 user interface an unusable, intrusive abomination, that was constantly in my way when I was trying to work [1], so after a few months I went back to 2003. I agree that it was "leaps and bounds over anything Microsoft put out before", but in the bad direction. Your mileage may vary, of course.
[1] It did look good, though, I'll give it that. Perfect for the exec who chooses his PA on bust size rather than on organisational skills.
Who do you report them to, and where can I find details on what they can and can't do? There are a few here in the UK that I'd like to stomp on -- UK companies I've bought from (and have been happy with the product) without realising that they'd swamp my inbox with no opt-in or opt-out and that won't remove me even when I email, phone and write. Yes, I've blacklisted them, but I still see them because my blacklist gets lumped in with the heuristic detection, which I have to check occasionally for false positives.
Slashdot Mirror
That could just link to OOo -- tell them to use that, instead :-)
Yes, I know it's not a complete substitute -- I have to use MS Office because my customers require me to use forms with macros that OOo won't handle (they pay the piper, they call the tune) -- but it would be fine for most users.
Oh, and of course, you'd still have to deal with the wrong default format. Drat, it was looking so promising...
And although it's a pain in the butt, we'll cope. OOo is already pretty good at reading MS proprietary files -- better than MS Office in some cases. Although I usually work in MS Office, I keep OOo on my computer as a recovery tool, because it will successfully read MS Office files that are too damaged for MS Office to read even in recovery mode. Yes, it would be better if OOXML didn't exist. Given that it exists, it would be better if it's not accepted as a standard. But even if it does get accepted as a standard then I bet the free (at least as in beer, hopefully as in speech) tools would be along smartish. Maybe not good enough to claim full standard compliance, but good enough for everyone to open their documents and get on with their jobs.
Not "Are", "Were". D Notices no longer exist, they've been replaced by DA notices which are voluntary.
In UK terminology it's a "Mutual Society" I think. There are very few left in the UK, though. Most of them demutualised when the government relaxed the banking regulations some years ago.
Were/are D Notices legally binding? I thought they were enforced on a "violate this and you won't be invited to press briefings any more" basis. Certainly the current equivalent is a "voluntary" scheme: http://www.dnotice.org.uk/.
Arguably, it banned De revolutionibus in reaction to the Galileo affair, as the Wikipedia article points out. Even if the actual political situation had more to do with maintaining control and power, than with the content of the science, trampling scientific theories to maintain that control is vile. This is from someone who purports to be the voice of God on Earth, and according to the religion he heads is meant to be doing good for all men. Apparantly the mistreatment of individuals is quite justified in order for him to maintain power.
snip If it was common practice to punish someone who went against church doctrine with house arrest (if being merciful as in Galileo's case), kill them barbarically (eg. burn them alive), or excommunicate them therefore making them a pariah within the community, doesn't that speak volumes about why the church has done harm? Only if you commit the fallacy of comparing the church of 500 years ago with the secular standards of today. If you compare the church of 500 years ago with the secular standards of 500 years ago you find that the church was at least no worse than the secular authorities, and some have argued that it was actually a restraining force on the worse barbarities (it didn't just ban Copernicus, it also banned the Malleus Maleficarum (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hammer_of_witches)). You seem more than willing to cast a blind eye to past pope's indiscretions while at the same time nailing today's scientists for basically telling the pope to go elsewhere to spread his doctrine. There is a world of difference between the two. One is much much worse than the other, yet your own prejudice means you're happy to let the worse of the two go. Hardly! Please don't take me for a Papal apologist! But there was already no shortage of voices here condemning the Pope, and I believe that the condemnation needed examining. The Pope isn't automatically wrong in everything he does, just because he's Pope. I don't think you're being at all fair or rational, and I wonder what's up with
The church didn't dictate to the scientists; the scientists advised the church because the church was pretty much the only organisation running educational establishments at the time (and was also a major source of research funding). The scientists told the church that it was paying Galileo to teach bad science, the church told Galileo to stop, Galileo responded by bad-mouthing his boss, and it didn't work out well for him.
Ok, I've put that into modern terms -- as another poster has pointed out, the scientific method as we know it didn't exist until the 20th century, and "research" would have been making observations, not doing experiments, but I stand by my analogy; it was the medieval equivalent of a biology lecturer being fired from his university post for bad-mouthing anybody who tried to stop him teaching creationism/ID.
No, I don't think the inquisition was ok. Although most of the atrocities usually attributed to it were actually done by civic authorities which the church tried to prevent, and although the scale of the atrocities is sometimes exaggerated -- some modern populist accounts put the number of people killed as being greater than the then population of Europe -- it did commit enough atrocities to be a resounding Bad Thing.
the following two actions are SOOO the same
1) Tell someone they're not welcome because they're asinine bigoted ideas
2) Pass laws against someone, condemn them to hell,etc because they don't live by your rules and therefore are second class citizens
Oh, absolutely they're different. And what the scientists did was neither of those. They didn't tell the Pope he wasn't welcome, they campaigned to prevent him speaking at the university. They didn't pass laws, because mob rule doesn't like laws. And I bet none of them have bothered to find out why Galileo was really excommunicated and just assumed the popular myth was true (simplistically, he was excommunicated for effectively calling the Pope an idiot when the Pope asked for scientific evidence of what was considered a discredited crackpot theory by the scientists of the time, which Galileo insisted on teaching. It was the equivalent at the time of removing the teaching accreditation of somebody who insists on teaching creationism and calls anybody an idiot who asks them to justify it. Yes, "condemning to hell" might seem over the top, but only if you believe in hell. Otherwise the Pope did pretty much what the scientific community of the time required.)
Yes, the Pope and the RC church have a lot to answer for, but did you notice how the scientists played it so that he couldn't win? They campaigned to stop him from speaking, then when he cancelled they accused him of playing the martyr. In a liberal democracy, people are allowed to express ideas and the ideas are allowed to stand or fall on their own merits, but those scientists clearly don't believe in that; it seems that they believe that their ideas can only stand if they suppress competing ideas. Religion doesn't have bigotry DRM'd, evidently. Or maybe the scientists have managed to crack it?
I don't know about US usage, but in British usage there's no such rule, according to both Partridge's "Usage and Abusage" and Fowler's "Modern English Usage" (arguably two of the three most influential prescriptive grammars of the 20th century, the third being Fowler's "The King's English", which I don't have to hand).
As Partidge points out, "In the life of a compound word there are three stages: (1) two separate words (cat bird); (2) a hyphenated compound (cat-bird); (3) a single word (catbird)."
Apart from a few cases where the form is forced by a risk of ambiguity, whether a compound is hyphenated is determined by how far along that progression the compound has gone, and there is no rule to determine it. For example, in the same article Partridge uses "Dog-show" as a compound noun, thus hyphenated. And as an example of where a hyphen is forced, Partridge compares "The author's tense-sequence is defective in this passage" (see the hyphenated noun phrase used as a noun there?) with "A tense sequence of events succeeded a dull sequence". Clearly two-word noun phrases are not only hyphenated when used in adjective form.
So you're right that "grammar Nazi" does not have to be hyphenated, but for the wrong reason.
Could it credibly have unintentionally quoted it?
That's encouraging. It's about as unfashionable as it's possible to be in the UK, but I did have a sort of background awareness that mainland Europe was less swayed by such whims.
Well, MS get enough flack around here. I thought I should at least give them credit for understanding their core market.That is redundant, sir.
Wouldn't work here. The missus knows that I prefer small.
Thanks for the credit -- I don't think any OS or toolset gets it right all of the time, and I try to call it on individual cases. There is MS stuff that I like (Visual Studio, for example) and MS stuff that I don't like (Office 2007, obviously).
The specific things I don't like about the Office 2007 UI are:
But they are all largely a matter of personal style. A heavy mouser won't mind the longer key sequences. Somebody desk based with a huge hi-res screen won't miss the real-estate. A right-brain dominant person will be glad to see the back of the menus. There are plenty of people for whom the interface will work just fine. What got me is that 2007 took away my choice. I had to work the way MS chose for me to work -- no, worse, I had to work in the way that a graphic designer in Redmond chose for me to work, and of course they have a visual rather than a verbal mind because that's what makes a good graphic designer. And I bet they have a huge screen. And I bet they prefer the mouse to the keyboard, because the mouse is better at graphics and layouts than the keyboard is. But I am not a graphic designer.
I've been told that there are third-party tools that can fix a lot of the problems I had. But the fact that it needs third-party tools to make the interface acceptable suggests to me that MS got it wrong in the first place. Not wrong in the sense that the interface is wrong for everybody, but wrong in that it assumes everybody works and thinks the same. One size does not fit all.
That is very much a matter of taste. I found the Office 2007 user interface an unusable, intrusive abomination, that was constantly in my way when I was trying to work [1], so after a few months I went back to 2003. I agree that it was "leaps and bounds over anything Microsoft put out before", but in the bad direction. Your mileage may vary, of course.
[1] It did look good, though, I'll give it that. Perfect for the exec who chooses his PA on bust size rather than on organisational skills.
Who do you report them to, and where can I find details on what they can and can't do? There are a few here in the UK that I'd like to stomp on -- UK companies I've bought from (and have been happy with the product) without realising that they'd swamp my inbox with no opt-in or opt-out and that won't remove me even when I email, phone and write. Yes, I've blacklisted them, but I still see them because my blacklist gets lumped in with the heuristic detection, which I have to check occasionally for false positives.
Or perhaps the idea is to criminalise everybody, so they can (legally) make life hard(er) for anybody who is inconvenient to the authorities?