Those other outlets being? All technical web forum discussion seems to be in decline. Probably because you used to have to be technical to be on the web at all, now you don't.
I'm an average user. My office-related activities consist of writing letters, short papers, and making the occasional presentation. OO.O does all of this just fine, and I hence have no need to shell out $100 for an Office suite.
You are not alone. You are in fact a long, long way from being alone.
Depending on the geographic location, OpenOffice has been measured as being installed on between 10% and 20% of machines.
Unless you call this "tiny", the OP has it wrong.
This measured 10% to 20% share correlates quite well with the number of copies of openOffice that have been downloaded.
But how many of those OOo installs are alongside MS Office installs, rather than instead of?
You obviously haven't been pirating all that much. I could have the latest version of MS Office on my PC in less than 5 minutes, fully operational. Pay for software that's worth its price.
If it isn't worth the price, why would you bother pirating it instead of using OOo?
1. Who's going to go through every spreadsheet and make sure there's nothing too taxing in there?
Having worked for a large organisation, the answer is "the maintainer of the spreadsheet". The IT department will announce a change of policy without bothering to check how you are using the software, and if the change doesn't suit you then you have to make a business case for having non-standard software.
2. For most businesses, the cost of an Office license is really not that great. They'll spend more in man-hours learning something else and for what gain?
Which I suspect is why this is taking off now. Most of our customers are still using Office 2003, and I reckon it would cost less to train Office 2003 users in OOo than in Office 2007/2010.
You sound like Luddites. Like this quote from the article:
"To a certain extent this is all reminiscent of the furore in the sea-change from practical to digital newspaper production in London's Wapping in the early 1980s, engendering protracted but ultimately futile strikes from the pre-digital technicians who were made jobless by new, computerised automation of magazine and newspaper production."
You cannot stop progress simple because you don't like it. The horsewhip makers were laid-off when cars took over, and so too were these pre-digital technicians.
So lets get this straight. Reducing the internet to the type of linear media that existed before the web is "progress" that cannot be stopped. Continuing to take advantage of the non-linear nature of the web and building on it is "Luddite". Er, well, keep taking the dried frog pills.
But those shortcuts are for the new shortcuts, not the old ones, and the new shortcuts are non-intuitive and hard to learn because they can't use the keystrokes that the old shortcuts use.
It works quite well with the keyboard, with all the old shortcuts that still work exactly as before.
But without the visual prompts of the menus, which were the main way of learning the keystrokes and a huge help in finding the less frequently used ones. And with the knowledge that you're using an obsolescent feature, so you'd be well advised to learn not to depend on them if your employer is likely to keep upgrading.
Does it open documents created in Office with little or no issue?
Better than MS Office can, in my experience. I have to use MS Office 2007 at work, but keep a copy of OO.o on my computer because I've found that it will happily open corrupt MS Office documents that MS Office won't even open in recovery mode.
Odd - I love the thinking behind the ribbon UI.
It's a modal editor, which makes me feel more at home when I come to it from Vim
Except it mainly isn't modal; there are just a couple of tabs that come and go. And it decides what mode I ought to be in rather than letting me decide, and consistently gets it wrong. When I was editing a diagram in Word 2003, as I moved around the different diagram elements various toolbar buttons would become disabled and enabled, and when I wanted to use one it was simply there. Doing exactly the same job in 2007, as I move around the diagram options go away completely when they become unavailable, and don't come back when they become relevant unless I jump through hoops to bring them back.
The 2003 interface was modal and got it right. I set up custom toolbars, and I decided which ones were relevant to the task I was performing and opened them. 2007 took that away from me. Instead of having all of my tools tidied away in drawers and just getting out the ones I needed, Office 2007 threw all the tools in a virtual pile on my workshop floor and took the drawers away.
I know some people who don't like the ribbon, the vast majority have a clear preference for it.
I'd bet that there's a correlation between dislike for the ribbon and how may features of Office the person uses. The person who only uses Word, for example, as a Notepad replacement (as ThePhillips called it) can still use it like that and might spot some interesting things on the Ribbon that they find useful. The person who was already making use of a wide range of features finds that many of those features are now harder to access (especially if they don't want to have to keep moving their hand between mouse and keyboard -- the Ribbon is heavily biased towards mouse use) and doesn't get those nice surprises of discovering features they didn't know about.
That fits the anecdotal evidence just fine. The majority of Office users are probably just punching out internal memos, reports, personal letters and the like, all using simple fixed templates. The majority of/. users who use Office, though, have probably explored deep into the menus and make use of esoteric features, because that's what geeks do. The 2007 interface was a poke in the eye for the power users, but Microsoft are unlikely to care because those making purchasing decisions tend not to be power users, and they probably expect the number of new users coming in at the bottom end to dwarf the number of users lost at the top end. And they're probably right.
But for a 'Power User' that uses the keyboard shortcuts, one has to remember the 2003 menu layout and type away blindly
Or use the new keyboard shortcuts, of course, but they're far less intuitive than the old ones precisely because they retained support for the old ones. What would be the intuitive keystroke for a selection often isn't available because it's already in use for back compatibility. One of the very many annoyances of the 2007 interface -- it's not only the ribbon, which is fine eye-candy but a usability nightmare.
This for example is why Slashdot hides your password as ******** if you accidentally happen to write or paste it to a comment - a practice every website should do.
Yes. I shouldn't have used my funniest and most insightful comment ever for a password, because now the rest of/. won't see it.
Look at the amount of energy that is wasted. Nuclear energy typically works by generating heat, the heat differential used to generate the electricity, then the electricity used to do the work. The second step is pretty inefficient, and the energy lost in that step is still lost even if the last step is efficient.
But the article does say "Think of it as a proof of concept for turning life's most essential molecule into a global commodity", a concept that Perrier et al have already pretty comprehensively proven.
Well, they've only just discovered what's killing them. That's a good first step, but it would be a remarkable turn of speed if they'd already got to a cure. (It will be a nice turnaround if we have to vaccinate them, though...)
There used to be a system much like that in the UK a couple of centuries ago. It resulted in rival fire-fighting companies fighting in the street over who got to put out a fire (and get the profits from it).
That would set a terrible precedent. Everyone would see that the $75 was not required and opt out. The FD would only be able to collect from people that had fires. I doubt that would be anywhere NEAR enough money to keep them operating unless they drastically increased the fee.
"If you have nothing to hide you have nothing to fear" is only valid if those collecting and handling the data are competent and benign. Whether that's a counter-argument depends on your view of those collecting and handling the data, but there are very few organisations I would consider to be competent and benign.
Slashdot Mirror
Because the US particularly cares whether Assange lives in Sweden?
Yes, if it gives him legal freedom of speech protection that he doesn't have at the moment.
other outlets on the web provide more open ideas
Those other outlets being? All technical web forum discussion seems to be in decline. Probably because you used to have to be technical to be on the web at all, now you don't.
I'm an average user. My office-related activities consist of writing letters, short papers, and making the occasional presentation. OO.O does all of this just fine, and I hence have no need to shell out $100 for an Office suite.
You are not alone. You are in fact a long, long way from being alone.
Depending on the geographic location, OpenOffice has been measured as being installed on between 10% and 20% of machines.
Unless you call this "tiny", the OP has it wrong.
This measured 10% to 20% share correlates quite well with the number of copies of openOffice that have been downloaded.
But how many of those OOo installs are alongside MS Office installs, rather than instead of?
You obviously haven't been pirating all that much. I could have the latest version of MS Office on my PC in less than 5 minutes, fully operational. Pay for software that's worth its price.
If it isn't worth the price, why would you bother pirating it instead of using OOo?
1. Who's going to go through every spreadsheet and make sure there's nothing too taxing in there?
Having worked for a large organisation, the answer is "the maintainer of the spreadsheet". The IT department will announce a change of policy without bothering to check how you are using the software, and if the change doesn't suit you then you have to make a business case for having non-standard software.
2. For most businesses, the cost of an Office license is really not that great. They'll spend more in man-hours learning something else and for what gain?
Which I suspect is why this is taking off now. Most of our customers are still using Office 2003, and I reckon it would cost less to train Office 2003 users in OOo than in Office 2007/2010.
You sound like Luddites. Like this quote from the article:
"To a certain extent this is all reminiscent of the furore in the sea-change from practical to digital newspaper production in London's Wapping in the early 1980s, engendering protracted but ultimately futile strikes from the pre-digital technicians who were made jobless by new, computerised automation of magazine and newspaper production."
You cannot stop progress simple because you don't like it. The horsewhip makers were laid-off when cars took over, and so too were these pre-digital technicians.
So lets get this straight. Reducing the internet to the type of linear media that existed before the web is "progress" that cannot be stopped. Continuing to take advantage of the non-linear nature of the web and building on it is "Luddite". Er, well, keep taking the dried frog pills.
When I'm cleaning the house it's hard for me to believe that there's not enough spider silk in the world already.
But those shortcuts are for the new shortcuts, not the old ones, and the new shortcuts are non-intuitive and hard to learn because they can't use the keystrokes that the old shortcuts use.
It works quite well with the keyboard, with all the old shortcuts that still work exactly as before.
But without the visual prompts of the menus, which were the main way of learning the keystrokes and a huge help in finding the less frequently used ones. And with the knowledge that you're using an obsolescent feature, so you'd be well advised to learn not to depend on them if your employer is likely to keep upgrading.
It's more fun to work out why this proof fails when using non-standard analysis (in which 0.999... != 1).
Does it open documents created in Office with little or no issue?
Better than MS Office can, in my experience. I have to use MS Office 2007 at work, but keep a copy of OO.o on my computer because I've found that it will happily open corrupt MS Office documents that MS Office won't even open in recovery mode.
Odd - I love the thinking behind the ribbon UI. It's a modal editor, which makes me feel more at home when I come to it from Vim
Except it mainly isn't modal; there are just a couple of tabs that come and go. And it decides what mode I ought to be in rather than letting me decide, and consistently gets it wrong. When I was editing a diagram in Word 2003, as I moved around the different diagram elements various toolbar buttons would become disabled and enabled, and when I wanted to use one it was simply there. Doing exactly the same job in 2007, as I move around the diagram options go away completely when they become unavailable, and don't come back when they become relevant unless I jump through hoops to bring them back.
The 2003 interface was modal and got it right. I set up custom toolbars, and I decided which ones were relevant to the task I was performing and opened them. 2007 took that away from me. Instead of having all of my tools tidied away in drawers and just getting out the ones I needed, Office 2007 threw all the tools in a virtual pile on my workshop floor and took the drawers away.
I know some people who don't like the ribbon, the vast majority have a clear preference for it.
I'd bet that there's a correlation between dislike for the ribbon and how may features of Office the person uses. The person who only uses Word, for example, as a Notepad replacement (as ThePhillips called it) can still use it like that and might spot some interesting things on the Ribbon that they find useful. The person who was already making use of a wide range of features finds that many of those features are now harder to access (especially if they don't want to have to keep moving their hand between mouse and keyboard -- the Ribbon is heavily biased towards mouse use) and doesn't get those nice surprises of discovering features they didn't know about.
That fits the anecdotal evidence just fine. The majority of Office users are probably just punching out internal memos, reports, personal letters and the like, all using simple fixed templates. The majority of /. users who use Office, though, have probably explored deep into the menus and make use of esoteric features, because that's what geeks do. The 2007 interface was a poke in the eye for the power users, but Microsoft are unlikely to care because those making purchasing decisions tend not to be power users, and they probably expect the number of new users coming in at the bottom end to dwarf the number of users lost at the top end. And they're probably right.
But for a 'Power User' that uses the keyboard shortcuts, one has to remember the 2003 menu layout and type away blindly
Or use the new keyboard shortcuts, of course, but they're far less intuitive than the old ones precisely because they retained support for the old ones. What would be the intuitive keystroke for a selection often isn't available because it's already in use for back compatibility. One of the very many annoyances of the 2007 interface -- it's not only the ribbon, which is fine eye-candy but a usability nightmare.
This for example is why Slashdot hides your password as ******** if you accidentally happen to write or paste it to a comment - a practice every website should do.
Yes. I shouldn't have used my funniest and most insightful comment ever for a password, because now the rest of /. won't see it.
Heck, I'm still stuck in FFIV.
Look at the amount of energy that is wasted. Nuclear energy typically works by generating heat, the heat differential used to generate the electricity, then the electricity used to do the work. The second step is pretty inefficient, and the energy lost in that step is still lost even if the last step is efficient.
Is this the stuff that Sarah Palin has been drinking? And now they want them drinking it in the Middle East? Just wondrin'.
But the article does say "Think of it as a proof of concept for turning life's most essential molecule into a global commodity", a concept that Perrier et al have already pretty comprehensively proven.
That depends on whether you factor in how efficiently the electricity to run them on is generated.
I thought everybody knew that the world was created by Queen Victoria and started with her funeral.
Well, they've only just discovered what's killing them. That's a good first step, but it would be a remarkable turn of speed if they'd already got to a cure. (It will be a nice turnaround if we have to vaccinate them, though...)
There used to be a system much like that in the UK a couple of centuries ago. It resulted in rival fire-fighting companies fighting in the street over who got to put out a fire (and get the profits from it).
That would set a terrible precedent. Everyone would see that the $75 was not required and opt out. The FD would only be able to collect from people that had fires. I doubt that would be anywhere NEAR enough money to keep them operating unless they drastically increased the fee.
Does the FD not have matches?
"If you have nothing to hide you have nothing to fear" is only valid if those collecting and handling the data are competent and benign. Whether that's a counter-argument depends on your view of those collecting and handling the data, but there are very few organisations I would consider to be competent and benign.