And yet you're claim is entirely wrong. I've been inside government agencies and offices and bog-standard Dell computers are used in all sorts of government agency for "official" (and classified) work. You basically don't know anything of what you are talking about.
Hang on, what happened to the Geek's warcry of "Information wants to be free"?
The problem with that phrase is that it only applies to other people's works and property (especially when they are proprietary). Try to apply the "information wants to be free" meme to GPL code and you will see their hypocrisy in action.
Well, actually you can't prove they aren't directly involved in field work
This is completely different to what I was saying. Sure, they may be helping in field work done by other agencies, but there aren't "NSA agents" going around as a law enforcement agency breaking into people's houses, etc. Such things are done by the FBI or the CIA. Sorry, but despite what movies, TV and over-dramatized books have told you, that is pure fiction.
If the NSA broke in and stuck a small device into an empty PCI slot in your computer, would you notice?
Protip: The NSA doesn't do any real field work such as what you describe. If such a scenario were to happen it would be done by the FBI or the CIA. You seem to have fallen for the wildly inaccurate portrayal of the NSA from Hollywood and TV.
Stopping to maintain their own versions of this is not even remotely the same as excluding them. Anyone who currently has Java and Flash on their Mac will still be able to use it.
Windows is trickier of course with no centralized updates in place.
Why is it trickier? The JRE on Windows has an updater that flags when an update is ready to install. For this not to happen the user has to specifically go out of their way to disable it.
You state the ribbon doesn't make sense, but you don't back that up.
That's because most people who complain about the ribbon are just parroting what others have said or are just whining about it to be contrarian against Microsoft. It's also an elitist thing because anything that helps average users use a program more effectively is always seen as a negative to snobs like the GP. These people think that software should be hard to use so as to exclude people rather than listening to feedback from the users and making the program easier to use.
The ribbon hides functionality to coddle morons, that's its main purpose.
Which is hilariously wrong. How does it hide functionality? Plus I'd love to hear how functionality which is hidden in multilayer menus so that almost no one knows it is even there is supposedly "exposing" functionality?
By contrast, good UI design exposes functionality in such a way that users can actually use it.
Yes, which is why the ribbon came out and was based on actual UI and usability testing.
Microsoft's solution to "hey! 90% of people use only 10% of our product's features" wasn't "Ok, let's try and expose at least another 10% to these guys in a way that makes sense so maybe they'll use and appreciate it" but rather "Ok, let's hide that 90% so our stupid, stupid users don't get lost picking through the remaining 10%".
No, Microsoft's solution was to actually listen to the users who underwent the usability testing that they performed. It's hilarious how often Slashdot seems to claim that everyone hates the ribbon and yet in the company I work for of 500+ people not a single person who has used Office 2007 since we upgraded has not liked the new UI. And quite a few of those people would consider themselves "power users".
Software design, btw, has very little to do with where all the buttons are hidden.
Usability has very little to do with software design? lolwut?
because Microsoft sets a cutoff point for os support where as such a cut-off point would be against the open source way.
And yet Microsoft still supports their OSes far longer than any Linux distro except for ones like Red Hat or SLES. You're lucky to get anything beyond 1 year, let alone 3 years at best. If you can point out say a version of Slackware, Debian, etc from 2001, the year XP came out, that is still regularly receiving patches and fixes then you can talk.
If the 'you can't give stuff away and make a profit' argument held in reality Google would be bankrupt instead of one of the most profitable companies in the world.
So care to show from the Google financials all the profit they are generating from giving away Android? Oh wait, you can't. The only reason they are able to give away Android and other software for free is because it is subsidized as a loss leader by their ad revenues which make up the vast bulk of their revenue. Sun found out this the hard way when their core revenue dried up and they had nothing else to fall back on since they basically were giving away everything else for free.
Interoperability : OOO loads more formats the Office 2010
Which means pretty much nil to the vast majority of Office users when pretty much 100% of their documents are in an Office format. No one, for example, in the company I work for is going to care that OpenOffice might open up 15 year old WordPerfect documents better than Office 2007 when no one in the company or no one we work with uses that format to transmit documents.
It shouldn't come as a surprise that MS is willing to whore themselves out to the lowest common denominator.
Yes, how dare they make their software more usable and less opaque to the users instead of the other way around! That's clearly the antithesis of good software design.
I've wondered who at Microsoft has allowed some of the recent changes in their products. From moving the buttons around in IE, to removing the menus in Office.
They've done it due to UI and usability studies they have conducted with average users of these products.
Yes it is. You've done nothing in your post but parrot the same false dilemma.
Which do you choose?
Neither because your choices are intentionally worded in a way to further the false dilemma. Why do I need to assume that your scenario choices are the only ones that exist?
A clever shill will create a new user account when their old one is being filtered.
A clever shill would never get filtered. If you are being filtered and have to make a new user account to continue shilling means you're a huge failure.
They will not submit a review whose summary states, "Armed with this book, can a Business Analyst be used to write application logic? I don't believe so, and I'll tell you why."
And then you ignore the part where it says the book is recommended for Drool users and that it's a keeper. It's hilarious how you focus on a single sentence to claim this is a negative review and then ignore the fact that he's telling people to buy the book.
I have yet to meet someone IRL who *really* likes it.
Because we all know that your subjective anecdotes comprise the entire userbase of MS Office, right? It's funny that you claim that so many people hate it yet the entire foundation behind the ribbon was based on feedback from users during usability and UI tests.
Slashdot Mirror
and its open source roots
You mean except for the fact that its roots are the proprietary StarOffice suite?
The next MacOS release will require signed applications and guess what.... only Steve gets to sign.
Only for those things put on the App Store. The app store will not be an exclusive place to download apps on OS X. Stop spreading lies.
So that explains all those Mormon families with 4-10 kids! Oh wait...
And yet you're claim is entirely wrong. I've been inside government agencies and offices and bog-standard Dell computers are used in all sorts of government agency for "official" (and classified) work. You basically don't know anything of what you are talking about.
Yeah except that tiny fact that the US is still the #1 manufaturing nation in the world. Hyperbole much?
Hang on, what happened to the Geek's warcry of "Information wants to be free"?
The problem with that phrase is that it only applies to other people's works and property (especially when they are proprietary). Try to apply the "information wants to be free" meme to GPL code and you will see their hypocrisy in action.
Well, actually you can't prove they aren't directly involved in field work
This is completely different to what I was saying. Sure, they may be helping in field work done by other agencies, but there aren't "NSA agents" going around as a law enforcement agency breaking into people's houses, etc. Such things are done by the FBI or the CIA. Sorry, but despite what movies, TV and over-dramatized books have told you, that is pure fiction.
If the NSA broke in and stuck a small device into an empty PCI slot in your computer, would you notice?
Protip: The NSA doesn't do any real field work such as what you describe. If such a scenario were to happen it would be done by the FBI or the CIA. You seem to have fallen for the wildly inaccurate portrayal of the NSA from Hollywood and TV.
but that would require exploit in PNG or JPEG, which probably would be noticed elsewhere too
Considering how often there have been security fixes for libpng and libjpeg I wouldn't be acting too high and mighty.
HDMI transports the decoded, uncompressed video stream not the compressed stream.
J2se is. J2me is not. That's three problem that Google faces.
Except that they have created a derivative of j2me which is not open source.
You're either an idiot or being intentionally dense. By "free music" they mean music they download off a shady pirate site not public domain music.
The Flash and Java exclusion timings
Stopping to maintain their own versions of this is not even remotely the same as excluding them. Anyone who currently has Java and Flash on their Mac will still be able to use it.
Windows is trickier of course with no centralized updates in place.
Why is it trickier? The JRE on Windows has an updater that flags when an update is ready to install. For this not to happen the user has to specifically go out of their way to disable it.
You state the ribbon doesn't make sense, but you don't back that up.
That's because most people who complain about the ribbon are just parroting what others have said or are just whining about it to be contrarian against Microsoft. It's also an elitist thing because anything that helps average users use a program more effectively is always seen as a negative to snobs like the GP. These people think that software should be hard to use so as to exclude people rather than listening to feedback from the users and making the program easier to use.
The ribbon hides functionality to coddle morons, that's its main purpose.
Which is hilariously wrong. How does it hide functionality? Plus I'd love to hear how functionality which is hidden in multilayer menus so that almost no one knows it is even there is supposedly "exposing" functionality?
By contrast, good UI design exposes functionality in such a way that users can actually use it.
Yes, which is why the ribbon came out and was based on actual UI and usability testing.
Microsoft's solution to "hey! 90% of people use only 10% of our product's features" wasn't "Ok, let's try and expose at least another 10% to these guys in a way that makes sense so maybe they'll use and appreciate it" but rather "Ok, let's hide that 90% so our stupid, stupid users don't get lost picking through the remaining 10%".
No, Microsoft's solution was to actually listen to the users who underwent the usability testing that they performed. It's hilarious how often Slashdot seems to claim that everyone hates the ribbon and yet in the company I work for of 500+ people not a single person who has used Office 2007 since we upgraded has not liked the new UI. And quite a few of those people would consider themselves "power users".
Software design, btw, has very little to do with where all the buttons are hidden.
Usability has very little to do with software design? lolwut?
because Microsoft sets a cutoff point for os support where as such a cut-off point would be against the open source way.
And yet Microsoft still supports their OSes far longer than any Linux distro except for ones like Red Hat or SLES. You're lucky to get anything beyond 1 year, let alone 3 years at best. If you can point out say a version of Slackware, Debian, etc from 2001, the year XP came out, that is still regularly receiving patches and fixes then you can talk.
If the 'you can't give stuff away and make a profit' argument held in reality Google would be bankrupt instead of one of the most profitable companies in the world.
So care to show from the Google financials all the profit they are generating from giving away Android? Oh wait, you can't. The only reason they are able to give away Android and other software for free is because it is subsidized as a loss leader by their ad revenues which make up the vast bulk of their revenue. Sun found out this the hard way when their core revenue dried up and they had nothing else to fall back on since they basically were giving away everything else for free.
Interoperability : OOO loads more formats the Office 2010
Which means pretty much nil to the vast majority of Office users when pretty much 100% of their documents are in an Office format. No one, for example, in the company I work for is going to care that OpenOffice might open up 15 year old WordPerfect documents better than Office 2007 when no one in the company or no one we work with uses that format to transmit documents.
It shouldn't come as a surprise that MS is willing to whore themselves out to the lowest common denominator.
Yes, how dare they make their software more usable and less opaque to the users instead of the other way around! That's clearly the antithesis of good software design.
I've wondered who at Microsoft has allowed some of the recent changes in their products. From moving the buttons around in IE, to removing the menus in Office.
They've done it due to UI and usability studies they have conducted with average users of these products.
The dilemma is not false
Yes it is. You've done nothing in your post but parrot the same false dilemma.
Which do you choose?
Neither because your choices are intentionally worded in a way to further the false dilemma. Why do I need to assume that your scenario choices are the only ones that exist?
A clever shill will create a new user account when their old one is being filtered.
A clever shill would never get filtered. If you are being filtered and have to make a new user account to continue shilling means you're a huge failure.
They will not submit a review whose summary states, "Armed with this book, can a Business Analyst be used to write application logic? I don't believe so, and I'll tell you why."
And then you ignore the part where it says the book is recommended for Drool users and that it's a keeper. It's hilarious how you focus on a single sentence to claim this is a negative review and then ignore the fact that he's telling people to buy the book.
I have yet to meet someone IRL who *really* likes it.
Because we all know that your subjective anecdotes comprise the entire userbase of MS Office, right? It's funny that you claim that so many people hate it yet the entire foundation behind the ribbon was based on feedback from users during usability and UI tests.