So, at step 5... do anything at all (including nothing) that isn't steps 2-4. Done.
So your behaviour is undefined (pretty much). Which is pretty much what I said. You are still assuming the steps are to be performed sequentially, though, which isn't stated.
Your interpretation really only makes sense if you assume that the steps must be done sequentially, which is usually never true for paper tests. Usually, questions are intended to be done in whatever order best suits you which, in this case, is the order that tells you to not do the rest.
Actually, the instructions are contradictory. Why should instruction 5 take precedence over 2-4? It is impossible to comply with all of the instructions, so in programming terms that seems to mean that your specified behaviour is undefined. If the behaviour is undefined then mugging the instructor for his wallet then going to the bar for drinks on him satisfies the conditions.
Based on that it looks as if it was residence permits I was having to skirt around, not work permits. Well, I knew there was some bureaucracy involved!
The problem with going with a Firefox style plugin extension system is there would still be temptation to overload it with the bling, cause lets face it, MSFT since Darth Gates retired have had a serious case of Apple envy.
If the bling is in plugins then that's fine by me: I just won't have those plugins.
By separating the corporate from the small business from the home, you wouldn't have the "must have moar pretty pretty!" pressure, they could work directly with the supermegacorps to find out what they wanted in an OS/Office combo, which as I said would most likely be a nicely locked down XP Pro (low resource so no need for expensive hardware) with Office 2K3 all tied together with easy to deploy IE6 VMs and easy to manage GPOs.
The trouble is, all that does is change "one product to rule them all" to "two products to rule them all". If anybody can deliver real flexibility it would beat that hands down.
Likewise trying to force everyone into the ribbon interface of 2K7, which is obviously more for noobs than pros, is equally stupid.
Exactly. I wouldn't mind the ribbon if I didn't have to use it! It makes life easier for the noobs and the cost of making it more difficult for the pros, and the pros aren't happy. Which is why I would like to see something more flexible. Still, I understand in the next release the ribbon becomes (more readily) customisable (which according to the video they didn't do in 2007 because they didn't have time. Another great idea - rush it out before it's finished!) which might improve things.
But Spain is in the EU. Switzerland isn't, and although it cooperates well with the EU and enters into some agreements with it, the same rules don't always apply.
That's what I think is wrong with 100% of all the religious people in the world. They think their children are clay that they must mold according to their beliefs.
Free movement, yes. But employment? I was working there extensively in 2008, although based in the UK, and we had to be very careful not to run foul of the work permit requirements.
I was homeschooled, my husband was homeschooled and we know many many people who were homeschooled and I can assure that socially awkward is not nearly the problem people make it out to be.
Yes, it was clearly the US they were targeting. If they wanted to home-school their German-speaking children, they could easily and freely moved to Switzerland (the eastern part of the country speaks German).
No they couldn't. They might have been able to emigrate to Switzerland, but not "freely" because Switzerland is not in the EU. They would need work permits as a very minimum. If they'd wanted a German speaking country to freely move to it would have had to have been Austria. Like Swizerland, it has a strong dialect of German, but they could get by with High German.
Even with a strict set of rules for curriculum, there will still be parents who give extra qualifying information along with such topics.. ie.. Here's all the nonsense that secularists believe, and here is the real truth according to the Holly Bibble. The material is still covered, and you can't eliminate that loophole, so the only solution is ban home schooling outright.
Yes, because parents would never do such a thing outside school time, would they?
The following question appeared on a political science final exam in college (pertaining to American History):
"If all laws are just, were the Founding Fathers criminals?"
For what it's worth, when answering a conditional question like that you have to take the "if" part to be true even if you don't consider it to be. So the interesting bits of that question are whether the Founding Fathers broke any laws whilst actually under the jurisdiction of those laws, and if all laws are just does that mean that all laws should have universal jurisdiction. I don't know enough American history to answer the first part, but I reckon I could make a strong case for an answer of "No" to the second.
And where do you draw the line? A country (or state) that still has the death penalty for crimes that don't carry the death penalty in your country (or state)? A country that invades other countries and kills their citizens with no legal warrant? With questionable legal warrant? A country that supplies any of the above with funding or equipment? A country in which individuals supply any of the above with funding or equipment? A country in which some groups are seriously repressed but not killed? A company with a diversity policy not quite as encompassing as yours?
Realistically, if you're making the gas chambers then you have decided your moral position by the business you are in. If you are making the actual tools of killing then there's a case that you have a moral duty to take care over how they will be used. But the further you get from that then the more your moral responsibility is diluted, to the point where it's lost in the noise.
Just out of interest, if there are problems with MS providing software to such governments, what does the Linux/GNU community do to make sure their tools are not used instead?
Well you are working at a very different beast than most folks. From the sounds of it MSFT would have been better off offering your company a "locked down tighter than a nun's thighs" edition, with only corporate approved buttons allowed.
Except somebody in the company develops templates, so we need those bits too. MS do offer the locked down version, through document protection (which is why those options are greyed on my ribbon); my gripe is that they are still on my ribbon.
But your post simply proves what I have been saying for a looooong time: That MSFT fucked up when they decided they needed "one product to rule them all" instead of sticking with the Win9x/WinNT home/business model.
There I do agree with you -- and I think it's made them lose sight of whether MS Word is an overpowered word processor or an underpowered DTP package.
If I were running MSFT I would continue to sell and support a stripped down low resource XP Pro for corporate use along with a Win7 Corporate that would have all the pretty turned off and XP Mode ready to deploy, with a built in VM tied to the Intranet for those needing IE6, along with the corp's choice of 2K3 or 2K7.
That's one way. More flexible would be just one set of office tools with just basic functionality, plus plug-ins for those tools only some people would need. So I wouldn't have the plug-ins for creating styles on my work computer, but corporate comms would. I would have the bibliography plug-in (if it were good enough, which the Office 2007 bibliography feature isn't) but corporate comms might not. My only fear with that is what Microsoft's a la carte pricing structure might look like. I'm assuming MS wouldn't open it up for 3rd-party plug-ins (beyond the existing macro capability, which usually seems to be disabled anyway) so the maintenance and interoperability issue needn't be a biggie.
Yes I did watch the video. What I think you are missing is what Sally Secretary, or indeed Eric Engineer actually needs to do with Office. The reason most people only use 5% of the functionality of Office is that people only need 5% of the functionality of Office to get their job done. When I write a document at work I have to use the corporate template or the document doesn't go out. And when I use the corporate template, almost everything on the ribbon is greyed out, because when I'm writing a technical report I have no business changing the font or the number of columns, and neither has Sally Secretary when she's typing a letter to a customer. But Microsoft has decided that I have to have all that stuff in the ribbon, cluttering the visual field, even though I cannot use it. Sure, somebody needs access to those things, to design the templates, so they're not "bloat", although forcing them onto the desktop of people who will never need them is a damn good way of making them look like bloat.
Yes, the task panes were a big mistake in earlier versions of Office, but the ribbon clearly isn't a solution to that problem because the reviewing pane keeps popping up when I don't want it. "39 toolbars" is only a problem if you have them all open at once. Sally Secretary will only ever have two or three open in her career. And the person designing templates, whether corporately or ready-rolled ones for download, is going to have to think a bit -- at least enough to hit the "help" button from time to time -- whether they or Microsoft like it or not.
1. I think you should find out what "conspiracy" means.
2. The only thing in there that was news to me (I've been using Word since v2.0, pretty much all day every working day) was MS actually admitting to bad things like designing to look good in demonstrations rather than actual usability (admitted for Word 2000). And I can see a lot of things that are plainly wrong in their process, such as a focus on exceptional tasks rather than common ones (designing document layouts rather than working with a strict template created by your corporate communications department) and a focus on what people didn't like about previous versions and "fixing" them, completely ignoring what they did like to make sure they retained it. There was also a clear focus on using the mouse rather than keyboard, which is entirely the wrong focus for a task that is primarily text entry (although it makes sense for the -- rare for most users -- task of design of new types of document).
Incidentally, if everything is now accessible from the ribbon (as stated in that video), where is the command to show/hide field codes? Sure, there's a hot-key, but if it's on the ribbon I've not found it yet.
Still. There is one thing they have clearly achieved. They were not happy that Office 2003 was "good enough", and sure enough, now it isn't.
Actually while you might think it to be lock in, I remember reading an article with one of the Office team (my Google Fu sucks, maybe someone can find it?) talking about why they cooked up the ribbon.
Yes, I know the official reason. But it doesn't make sense. They could have made things just as task oriented with menus as with the ribbon. And look at it this way: if you have so many tools in your workshop that you have trouble finding them in the draws and cabinets, and aren't even sure what you've got any more, would you try to solve the problem by getting rid of all of the drawers and cabinets completely, and dumping all of the tools in a heap on the floor?
There's already a well established and successful way of handling that sort of complexity, used by image manipulation programs and to some extent available in earlier versions of office. Lots of detachable and customisable toolbars that can be shown or hidden according to the task in hand. Dock the ones that you use a lot, show the ones that relate to your current task, and ignore the rest. One of the most annoying features of the ribbon is the way it keeps flicking away from the task in hand. I've been driven half-crazy at work today trying to work with shapes. Insert a new canvas and put some shapes in it. Click on a shape, and select the layout tab. Do what you want with the layout, click on the canvas and -- woah! It's flipped back to the home tab! Click layout again to add a new shape, click the shape and -- woah! it's flipped back to the home tab! Ok, the shape layout tab and canvas layout are different toolsets, but any sane software will let me have both open on my desktop at once. The ribbon actually ignores the task I am working on. Microsoft think they know better than I do what I'm trying to do.
Unlike some here, I don't think MS are stupid or incompetent, at least as far as usability is concerned. If the interface change does the exact opposite of what they say it will do then I'm pretty sure they know that, and that there's something else going on.
but since something like Open Office has an interface that's common to a huge number of desktop applications
I think MS was -- maybe still is -- hoping to change that. I'm waiting for reviews of new software from MS enthusiasts that complain of software with menus looking so dated...
Lock-in. MS Office is pervasive in schools and in business, and a drastically different interface makes it harder for users to shift. True, for a short term the Ribbon is pushing some users who have the choice away from MS Office, but I think that MS are planning to ride that out and by agressive deals with schools, colleges, governments, etc get people locked in.
Slashdot Mirror
So, at step 5... do anything at all (including nothing) that isn't steps 2-4. Done.
So your behaviour is undefined (pretty much). Which is pretty much what I said. You are still assuming the steps are to be performed sequentially, though, which isn't stated.
Your interpretation really only makes sense if you assume that the steps must be done sequentially, which is usually never true for paper tests. Usually, questions are intended to be done in whatever order best suits you which, in this case, is the order that tells you to not do the rest.
Actually, the instructions are contradictory. Why should instruction 5 take precedence over 2-4? It is impossible to comply with all of the instructions, so in programming terms that seems to mean that your specified behaviour is undefined. If the behaviour is undefined then mugging the instructor for his wallet then going to the bar for drinks on him satisfies the conditions.
And where do you draw the line?
This is ever the problem, but how is that an excuse for not drawing it?
Not at all, but it means that you shouldn't think that where you draw it is the only morally valid place to draw it.
Based on that it looks as if it was residence permits I was having to skirt around, not work permits. Well, I knew there was some bureaucracy involved!
The problem with going with a Firefox style plugin extension system is there would still be temptation to overload it with the bling, cause lets face it, MSFT since Darth Gates retired have had a serious case of Apple envy.
If the bling is in plugins then that's fine by me: I just won't have those plugins.
By separating the corporate from the small business from the home, you wouldn't have the "must have moar pretty pretty!" pressure, they could work directly with the supermegacorps to find out what they wanted in an OS/Office combo, which as I said would most likely be a nicely locked down XP Pro (low resource so no need for expensive hardware) with Office 2K3 all tied together with easy to deploy IE6 VMs and easy to manage GPOs.
The trouble is, all that does is change "one product to rule them all" to "two products to rule them all". If anybody can deliver real flexibility it would beat that hands down.
Likewise trying to force everyone into the ribbon interface of 2K7, which is obviously more for noobs than pros, is equally stupid.
Exactly. I wouldn't mind the ribbon if I didn't have to use it! It makes life easier for the noobs and the cost of making it more difficult for the pros, and the pros aren't happy. Which is why I would like to see something more flexible. Still, I understand in the next release the ribbon becomes (more readily) customisable (which according to the video they didn't do in 2007 because they didn't have time. Another great idea - rush it out before it's finished!) which might improve things.
But Spain is in the EU. Switzerland isn't, and although it cooperates well with the EU and enters into some agreements with it, the same rules don't always apply.
That's what I think is wrong with 100% of all the religious people in the world. They think their children are clay that they must mold according to their beliefs.
And the state doesn't?
And I'm saying that "repress their people" is not a naive black-and-white matter. Why is this so hard to understand?
Free movement, yes. But employment? I was working there extensively in 2008, although based in the UK, and we had to be very careful not to run foul of the work permit requirements.
"albeit potenially socially awkward children."
I was homeschooled, my husband was homeschooled and we know many many people who were homeschooled and I can assure that socially awkward is not nearly the problem people make it out to be.
This from somebody on slashdot...
These are religious nutters. And let's face it, the US doesn't need any more of those.
But the USA's whole history is based on Europe sending you our religious nutters! If we can't send them to the USA, where can we send them?
This is a very sensible verdict frankly, because no other developed western country stops you from educating your children yourself
And if you'd broken with tradition and read the article you would discover that Germany doesn't either.
Yes, it was clearly the US they were targeting. If they wanted to home-school their German-speaking children, they could easily and freely moved to Switzerland (the eastern part of the country speaks German).
No they couldn't. They might have been able to emigrate to Switzerland, but not "freely" because Switzerland is not in the EU. They would need work permits as a very minimum. If they'd wanted a German speaking country to freely move to it would have had to have been Austria. Like Swizerland, it has a strong dialect of German, but they could get by with High German.
Even with a strict set of rules for curriculum, there will still be parents who give extra qualifying information along with such topics.. ie.. Here's all the nonsense that secularists believe, and here is the real truth according to the Holly Bibble. The material is still covered, and you can't eliminate that loophole, so the only solution is ban home schooling outright.
Yes, because parents would never do such a thing outside school time, would they?
The following question appeared on a political science final exam in college (pertaining to American History):
"If all laws are just, were the Founding Fathers criminals?"
For what it's worth, when answering a conditional question like that you have to take the "if" part to be true even if you don't consider it to be. So the interesting bits of that question are whether the Founding Fathers broke any laws whilst actually under the jurisdiction of those laws, and if all laws are just does that mean that all laws should have universal jurisdiction. I don't know enough American history to answer the first part, but I reckon I could make a strong case for an answer of "No" to the second.
I thought asses were vegetarian, so how is Ballber going to get a cock into his?
And where do you draw the line? A country (or state) that still has the death penalty for crimes that don't carry the death penalty in your country (or state)? A country that invades other countries and kills their citizens with no legal warrant? With questionable legal warrant? A country that supplies any of the above with funding or equipment? A country in which individuals supply any of the above with funding or equipment? A country in which some groups are seriously repressed but not killed? A company with a diversity policy not quite as encompassing as yours?
Realistically, if you're making the gas chambers then you have decided your moral position by the business you are in. If you are making the actual tools of killing then there's a case that you have a moral duty to take care over how they will be used. But the further you get from that then the more your moral responsibility is diluted, to the point where it's lost in the noise.
Just out of interest, if there are problems with MS providing software to such governments, what does the Linux/GNU community do to make sure their tools are not used instead?
It's not defective, RMS et al: it's a CHOICE.
War is peace, freedom is slavery, ignorance is strength, no choice is choice -- hey, it really is like that superbowl ad!
Well you are working at a very different beast than most folks. From the sounds of it MSFT would have been better off offering your company a "locked down tighter than a nun's thighs" edition, with only corporate approved buttons allowed.
Except somebody in the company develops templates, so we need those bits too. MS do offer the locked down version, through document protection (which is why those options are greyed on my ribbon); my gripe is that they are still on my ribbon.
But your post simply proves what I have been saying for a looooong time: That MSFT fucked up when they decided they needed "one product to rule them all" instead of sticking with the Win9x/WinNT home/business model.
There I do agree with you -- and I think it's made them lose sight of whether MS Word is an overpowered word processor or an underpowered DTP package.
If I were running MSFT I would continue to sell and support a stripped down low resource XP Pro for corporate use along with a Win7 Corporate that would have all the pretty turned off and XP Mode ready to deploy, with a built in VM tied to the Intranet for those needing IE6, along with the corp's choice of 2K3 or 2K7.
That's one way. More flexible would be just one set of office tools with just basic functionality, plus plug-ins for those tools only some people would need. So I wouldn't have the plug-ins for creating styles on my work computer, but corporate comms would. I would have the bibliography plug-in (if it were good enough, which the Office 2007 bibliography feature isn't) but corporate comms might not. My only fear with that is what Microsoft's a la carte pricing structure might look like. I'm assuming MS wouldn't open it up for 3rd-party plug-ins (beyond the existing macro capability, which usually seems to be disabled anyway) so the maintenance and interoperability issue needn't be a biggie.
Yes I did watch the video. What I think you are missing is what Sally Secretary, or indeed Eric Engineer actually needs to do with Office. The reason most people only use 5% of the functionality of Office is that people only need 5% of the functionality of Office to get their job done. When I write a document at work I have to use the corporate template or the document doesn't go out. And when I use the corporate template, almost everything on the ribbon is greyed out, because when I'm writing a technical report I have no business changing the font or the number of columns, and neither has Sally Secretary when she's typing a letter to a customer. But Microsoft has decided that I have to have all that stuff in the ribbon, cluttering the visual field, even though I cannot use it. Sure, somebody needs access to those things, to design the templates, so they're not "bloat", although forcing them onto the desktop of people who will never need them is a damn good way of making them look like bloat.
Yes, the task panes were a big mistake in earlier versions of Office, but the ribbon clearly isn't a solution to that problem because the reviewing pane keeps popping up when I don't want it. "39 toolbars" is only a problem if you have them all open at once. Sally Secretary will only ever have two or three open in her career. And the person designing templates, whether corporately or ready-rolled ones for download, is going to have to think a bit -- at least enough to hit the "help" button from time to time -- whether they or Microsoft like it or not.
1. I think you should find out what "conspiracy" means.
2. The only thing in there that was news to me (I've been using Word since v2.0, pretty much all day every working day) was MS actually admitting to bad things like designing to look good in demonstrations rather than actual usability (admitted for Word 2000). And I can see a lot of things that are plainly wrong in their process, such as a focus on exceptional tasks rather than common ones (designing document layouts rather than working with a strict template created by your corporate communications department) and a focus on what people didn't like about previous versions and "fixing" them, completely ignoring what they did like to make sure they retained it. There was also a clear focus on using the mouse rather than keyboard, which is entirely the wrong focus for a task that is primarily text entry (although it makes sense for the -- rare for most users -- task of design of new types of document).
Incidentally, if everything is now accessible from the ribbon (as stated in that video), where is the command to show/hide field codes? Sure, there's a hot-key, but if it's on the ribbon I've not found it yet.
Still. There is one thing they have clearly achieved. They were not happy that Office 2003 was "good enough", and sure enough, now it isn't.
Actually while you might think it to be lock in, I remember reading an article with one of the Office team (my Google Fu sucks, maybe someone can find it?) talking about why they cooked up the ribbon.
Yes, I know the official reason. But it doesn't make sense. They could have made things just as task oriented with menus as with the ribbon. And look at it this way: if you have so many tools in your workshop that you have trouble finding them in the draws and cabinets, and aren't even sure what you've got any more, would you try to solve the problem by getting rid of all of the drawers and cabinets completely, and dumping all of the tools in a heap on the floor?
There's already a well established and successful way of handling that sort of complexity, used by image manipulation programs and to some extent available in earlier versions of office. Lots of detachable and customisable toolbars that can be shown or hidden according to the task in hand. Dock the ones that you use a lot, show the ones that relate to your current task, and ignore the rest. One of the most annoying features of the ribbon is the way it keeps flicking away from the task in hand. I've been driven half-crazy at work today trying to work with shapes. Insert a new canvas and put some shapes in it. Click on a shape, and select the layout tab. Do what you want with the layout, click on the canvas and -- woah! It's flipped back to the home tab! Click layout again to add a new shape, click the shape and -- woah! it's flipped back to the home tab! Ok, the shape layout tab and canvas layout are different toolsets, but any sane software will let me have both open on my desktop at once. The ribbon actually ignores the task I am working on. Microsoft think they know better than I do what I'm trying to do.
Unlike some here, I don't think MS are stupid or incompetent, at least as far as usability is concerned. If the interface change does the exact opposite of what they say it will do then I'm pretty sure they know that, and that there's something else going on.
but since something like Open Office has an interface that's common to a huge number of desktop applications
I think MS was -- maybe still is -- hoping to change that. I'm waiting for reviews of new software from MS enthusiasts that complain of software with menus looking so dated...
And I'd switch to OO.o too, if I wasn't obliged to use MS Office for work. But that's one of the ways lockin works.
Lock-in. MS Office is pervasive in schools and in business, and a drastically different interface makes it harder for users to shift. True, for a short term the Ribbon is pushing some users who have the choice away from MS Office, but I think that MS are planning to ride that out and by agressive deals with schools, colleges, governments, etc get people locked in.