Novell, Sun, Opera, etc, etc. They all line up for a nice little one-time piece of the cake.
Except Novell, Sun, Opera all have legitimate cases against Microsoft. Of course they expect they're entitled to compensation - if a monopoly fucked you over, stole / usurped your tech, denied you a market, scared off your customers, I bet you would too.
Opera are smaller, but I bet Novell, Sun, AOL and probably Real could all demonstrate massive losses in the hundreds of millions or even billions due to anti-competitive behaviour at one time or another by MS. Hence the reason MS is so quick to settle now - it has a lot of money to make these things go away before they reach trial.
Thanks, I'll check it out. I do like Elite style games, but I passed over Eve at the time because I was playing City of Heroes. Now I'm done with CoH I might just go back and see if I missed anything.
I played the WoW beta and on the whole I thought it was extremely well done. The graphics are certainly not cutting edge but they are good enough and work well on all machines, not just the latest. The zones are extremely fast to load, imaginative, bright, and diverse. And I say fast to load I mean it - think seconds to load with very few zone loads at all. The game also possesses a certain Nintendo-esque feel which makes it feel more light and fun.
Gameplay wise, I thought the quests were better than the auto-quest mulch you find in DAOC and SWG and the UI is fairly easy to use too. The crafting was so-so but at least you could make things that had value. The first ten levels were pretty easy to solo in the beta, but it got a bit harder then. I didn't play much longer because the beta ended.
I haven't played EQ2 but I'm not exactly bowled over by its pedigree. I hated EQ (when I realised that the fun had been replaced with grind and Verant didn't care about the top heavy player population), and I saw nothing about SWG to suggest EQ2 would be any better.
Having said that, I don't think I'd pay $15 for a monthly game either. It would have to be a bloody good game, and it would have to be a free download to warrant me bothering.
I never once played Half Life. in fact I've still not seen it in any form at all, mod or otherwise.
With that said, I do own Half Life 2. My impressions so far:
Steam system is pretty annoying. It took an hour to unlock the game I just bought.
The game kicks the shit out of Doom 3. It's more imaginative, aliens don't leap out of hidden panels the whole frigging time etc. Flashlight works with gun.
The physics model is incredible. It's hard to describe, but it has the most life like gravity model I've seen in any game. Things stack properly, fall over, have inertia, have centres of gravity etc.
The levels are very imaginative in general, with lots of variety between them. Some are city based, others in military complexes etc. Some levels such as the boat levels are repetitve, but it sure beats D3 and the tedious "surprise monster from trap door" routine for the Nth time.
The gravity gun is great fun, especially with saw blades:)
The cutscenes are incredibly well done using the game engines. The way the in-game characters turn to face you is spooky.
The stuttering is a bit annoying but I chalked it down to my bad hardware until someone said it was a general bug.
The game runs pretty well on my 1.8Ghz, Geforce Ti300 setup which is saying something.
The load times are pretty annoying. They're not Far Cry long but they are long.
The quick load / save feature seems a bit retarded. If you hit quick load it doesn't necessarily load the file you just saved with quick save.
Counterstrike seems extremely antiquated to me. I haven't played the original HL mod, but CS: Source doesn't seem to offer anything that you can't in half a dozen other games, only better.
All in all I'd rate it 9/10. Unlike Doom 3, it actually warrants most of the hype. I'd say it reclaims the FPS title from Far Cry but it's a close thing between the two.
What on earth are you jabbering about? I point out a straightfoward and simple fact for you (that the POTUS is a hard military target) and you fly off on a tangent about gas chambers. Snap out of it.
Today, it's the 21st century. There is something called international law. It is not generally considered acceptable to kill anyone in another nations' territory without a prior declaration of war.
Since when have terrorists followed the rules of international law?
But whether you like it or not, the President of the United States is a hard, military target. And He is the "Commander-in-Chief of the Army and Navy of the United States" after all.
But you're right nations should go off bombing heads of state that they don't like. But if such niceties are important to the US perhaps they should practice what they preach. Rather than for example opportunistically dropping 2000lb bombs on leaders they don't like.
Kennedy (or any other president) isn't an unarmed civilian though. He is the commander in chief of the US, including it's armies. Whether you agree with the notion or not, he is a legitimate target for any enemy of the US.
Drugs are the ultimate example. Manufacture is so tightly controlled that ibuprofen is ibuprofen whether is says Advil on the front or not. I really can't comprehend why anyone would favour Advil when it costs substantially more than an *identical* drug that says Walgreens.
But that's the power of advertising and placebo I guess. I reckon if you explained to some people outright and in detail that they were the same they still wouldn't change brands.
It seems weird that a product doesn't say if its suitable for vegetarians. What strikes as doubly weird is how many products in the US go to the effort to say they are kosher. A strange world.
Re:What day of the week is it?
on
Sun-isms Debunked
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· Score: 2, Insightful
But Linux is easy to use. I have no experience of administering a large server, but I doubt - strongly doubt - it could do a better job when it comes to running a small network or desktop than a simple ol' Linux. That's not to say you couldn't make a comparable system from Solaris (it's just another *nix after all), but all the advanced tools are not much good when all you want is file & print services out of the box. The best advantage Linux has in this arena is that absolutely kills Solaris for the amount of hardware it supports. Oh and that it is free, as in free, no strings attached. Though of course you can pay for support if you need it.
The funny thing is that used to be Sun's line - Linux is the baby brother of Solaris. Hence JDS is Linux and the servers are Solaris. I have no objection to that and they're probably right to some degree. Their recent affrontage seems to come from the fact that Novell & Red Hat aren't content with that statement and already offer robust enterprise ready offerings. Again I have no experience of using either of them but neither have I heard any complaints from people in my company who do. In fact I know for a fact that they are ripping out Sun boxes left and right and replacing them with Red Hat. This isn't some web hosting company either. It's a major financial institution.
Vegetable soup, by definition doesn't have meat in it. Or maybe it does in the US, but in Europe a cursory glance at the ingredients and the vegetarian mark would tell you if it did or not. And the list of ingredients plus calorific content is clearly marked whether the product is generic or not. The same with beans and everything else.
I have no experience of organic fresh produce, but around my way very few vegetables / fruit even say what 'brand' they are. They might say they're Kerrs Pink potatos (i.e. the variety) and the country of origin, but not the brand. There are a few exceptions like bananas or melons, but most everything else is pick and mix.
There are very few store cards that work like that in Britain. Usually your card gives you points for shopping but your bill is the same. Sometimes you might get bonus points for certain things but it's all just points. Your reward is in the form of vouchers that appear in a quarterly statement. So in a way you are rewarded, but we're talking tiny rewards here like 1-2p discount in the pound rather than 10-20% penalty for not using a card.
Now of the few stores that do give a discount (e.g. GAME), the prices are artifically inflated anyway. GAME might give you a 2.5% discount if you hold a card but that's because their prices are daylight robbery to begin with.
If the discounts seem low, it is perhaps because because personal data has less value in the UK and the EU. Why? Because the data protection act prevents it being passed around and amalgamated into uber databases.
I suspect the same is no true in the US. Data is a valuable and tradeable commodity and thus Safeway et al 'reward' you more for giving your personal life away. My experience of Safeway is that they hike the price by ludicrous amounts on basic items if you don't have one of their cards. I found the practice disgusting. I found a much better way to shop - at Albertsons where there was no dis-loyalty tax as far as I could see.
Personally I don't care what their excuse is. Any store that tried to artificially penalise me would get very little my business at all. Either that, or I'd feed grit into their data mining operation by using bogus details.
On the subject of generic products, I find it extremely hard to understand the mindset of people who always buy brandnames on groceries. Okay, if you're buying a car or a PC it might wise to 'stick to what you know'. But groceries are cheap and experimentation is fun. Most of the time that tin of beans, or loaf of bread with Tesco written on it tastes the same anyway and may even have been made in the same bakery / factory as a brand. Except it costs less because a large chunk of the cost doesn't get farmed back into advertising. Of course there is a chance it might taste worse (as there is that it might taste better), but if it comes to that you've lost a pittance and know better next time.
And when it comes to household goods and drugs, I have to wonder if people are simply stupid when they pay extra money for brand name bleach, toilet paper or whatever. Bleach is bleach. Aspirin is Aspirin. Anyone who buys branded goods like these when there are cheaper, identical generics deserves to be slapped.
I ended up pulling the.torrent out of the executable and using BitTornado to grab it. My download went from 10k to 50k which is my limit. There is some hacking required since you must manually announce yourself to overcome some tracker strangeness, but otherwise it worked fine.
Excuse me, but what's your point here? You seem to be arguing that games producers absolutely need middlemen to take a huge slice of their revenue or they make nothing at all. It's not the case with musicians and it's certainly not the case with software as many an (extremely rich) shareware author could tell you.
Even if marketing hype initially doubled or tripled sales, Valve is still worse off than if they went it alone and sold exclusively online. Or if they had signed with a retail distributor who would agree with the existing online distribution model.
And there would be absolutely no shortage of those. In fact, I'm sure that once Valve gets rid of Vivendi, or drags them back to the negotiation table for HL3 you can bet that Steam will be something that is not up for negotiation. If Vivdeni doesn't like it, there would be dozens of other distributions beating down the door who would.
Well the point is that if a retailer can sell a game for $39.99, undercutting the RRP, then why can't Valve?
Yes there could be contractual reasons, but as a price point $49.95 sucks for online games. I can walk into a store and buy the same game for the same or less, immediately and have a manual and CDs to show for it. If I buy it online, I have to twiddle my thumbs for 15+ hours as it downloads and I have to burn the CD / DVD afterwards. I don't know about you but I have a 12Gb download monthly limit and DVD blanks cost $2 each. So the real cost of the download is upwards of $55.
Financially it simply isn't worth it to do. I'm sure some people will 'to support Valve' or whatnot, but frankly I don't see the idea taking off until there is a proper incentive for doing it.
Now I'm not averse to buying games online. In fact I bought Galactic Civilizations in that way. But the point with GalCiv was that it cost $10 less than it did in the stores. If Stardock can do it, then so can Valve. Especially when Valve's are likely to sell many, many more HL2 games than GalCiv ever sold.
That was my thought too. There are no printing, distribution (see note) or stocking costs, the middle man and the retailer have been removed from the equation and the end user is expected to use a large chunk of their bandwidth allowance to grab it online and burn the game if they expect to keep it.
$29.99 seems fairer. That's $29.99 of money that goes to Valve as opposed to the $8 or whatever it is that goes with the retail version. Everyone wins except the legacy distributors - Valve because they get 4-5x the profit, the customer because they get the game for less.
Okay, so there are some distribution issues surrounding online downloads, but these can largely be mitigated with P2P. For example World of Warcraft uses a (very sucky) custom Bittorrent client to download the game. I have no idea what the savings are for distributing via a.torrent but I can well imagine that bandwidth consumption is slashed to 1/50th.
Expecting people to pay what they could reasonably expect to pay in the stores, is a non-starter as far as I'm concerned. Norton / Symantec do something similar.
As an aside, the WoW custom torrent app is so abysmally slow (as in broken slow) and requires various open ports, that I followed the advice I found somewhere, and split the.torrent out of the executable to download through a normal BT client. It was about 5 times faster.
It's easy to disable spatial Nautilus - just use the directory browser instead of opening folders. There's even a right mouse context menu item for this - "Browse Folder".
Personally I'm glad that Linux has finally caught up with UI advances which have existed on the Mac for twenty years now.
FC2 didn't have Java, but it had Java related stuff like the ant packages. Personally I don't see it as a big deal since by their nature Java packages are almost download and go. Getting ant to work just means unzipping it somewhere and ensuring it and Java are in your paths.
Not really. I'd prefer the ads to be as irrelevant and as pointless as possible. Fortunately as I live in Ireland they usually are. I'd say 80-95% of the crap advertised by sites is stuff I can't buy even if I wanted to.
The only international site that I've even seen sites 'targetted' to Ireland (or more usually the UK) is Yahoo!.
the game did not ship with the module containing the actual executable code(likely dubbed "half-life 2 client.gcf")
This is an absolutely fucking stupid system. I sure hope that once installed the thing plays without requiring the CDs to be inserted. Or have we entered a world where you:
Have to play with a copy protected CD inserted
Register a serial number
Must download the executable before it will start
While I guess this might stop the Halo 2 situation of pirated games appearing before launch, the price is a lot of negative publicity and general confusion. Perhaps Vivendi can live with that but I bet they would be so happy if Valve or another games outfit decided to take their business elsewhere the next time around rather than have a repeat debacle.
Which is exactly why I believe OpenOffice.org should do the same.
The first thing OO should do when it starts the first time is ask "Are you upgrading from Microsoft Office?" and then proceed to offer a bunch of things that it will do make migration easier.
I believe the most important is to offer the same toolbar, menu and keyboard bindings as Word, Excel, Powerpoint. i.e. "Do you want to configure Open Office to resemble MS Office?". OO already has support for customizing toolbars and bindings. Someone should produce a customisation set that is as close to MS Office as possible. During startup, OO should offer to make it the default.
Other things would help too. I notice OO 1.9.56 is using the XP theme engine (a big improvement), but not everywhere. For example, the new toolbars look and feel pretty nasty. The drag and drop behaviour feels like something from out of the 90's with ghost outlines.
Open Office also projects an aura of being 'complicated' (which is not the same as being more powerful) compared to Word. There is too many buttons visible by default, and some of them (and menu options) are fairly inscrutable. There is a drop down toolbar button called "Insert" which drops down to reveal 9 or so fairly unintuitive 'things' represented by icons that you can insert. Why not just say what they are as text instead of wasting people's time hovering over each one to get the tooltip? Apparantly the floret thing means "Special Character" so why not just say that?
And finally, there should be menu option that says "Help for Word / Excel / Powerpoint users" that is formatted as a "How Do I?" kind of document. As in... "How do I send a document as an attachment?" "How do I turn on revision control etc.".
I'm not familiar with the inner workings of the OO project, but I know that usability can make a dramatic impact on how an app is perceived. The little things such as toolbar order, number of buttons, menu labels etc. can make a big difference. Just look at GNOME - before the HIG it was a mess, but now it's a thing of beauty and functionality. I hope the OO usability folks are armed with a big stick and don't just have their bugs prioritized at the bottom of the heap.
Open Office 2.0 is going to kick butt. How much butt depends on how welcome they make MS Office users feel.
That's not the point. I'm guessing they are saying that MS Word touted HTML generation, preview and URL link facilities (however shitty they may be). Perhaps WP discovered they couldn't offer equivalent functionality because MS Word was using undocumented features in IE to achieve what it was doing.
Mozilla didn't crash left and right though. NS6 for all it's immaturity was actually very stable since it had been beaten upon for months and months in the QA labs. That's why Mozilla was already up to something like.8 when NS 6 was.7 I believe. People griped about that but it was because NS 6 was thrashed to shake out all the crash bugs. Of course the time Gecko was being tested in the AOL client, it was up to about 1.2 or so and most if not all the issues had gone.
By then the memory consumption was lower, it was faster, leaner and actually consumed less memory when embedded than IE.
You're right that XUL is still a pain to program when you start, but it is miles better that AOLs own layout engine. And once you get over the learning curve it's actually pretty cool since you can develop content and test it by loading it into the browser. But the technical dificulties were irrelevant. As I mentioned, Netscape already had a working email client written for XUL. It had even been deployed to AOL China or Japan I believe. It had already proven itself. It was obvious then to anybody in the know that XUL was the right choice then and is the right choice now. Thunderbird is the direct successor of that early work. I believe the reason it wasn't chosen was simply because the group who got it in the end were based in Dulles whereas Netscape (or AOL West as it was by then) were still 'outsiders' and perhaps perceived as threatening in some way. There were lame excuses for the decision, concerning multiple processes using a single profile, but they weren't insurmountable by any means.
To give you an idea of the mentality (since it should be obvious I was working for AOL at the time). I attended a meeting about putting Gecko into AOL. It was some technical guys and the marketing people in a room in DC. We explained the technical issues (and how to solve them), the benefits and so on. I swear their eyes glazed over. They either didn't care or simply couldn't comprehend. The rest of the meeting was spent by them discussing what colour a fucking button should be in the client or something equally banal.
That's the divide that existed between marketing and the technical people. A button was a feature to them. The fact that they were using their mortal enemy's browser engine or the major bother they had getting MS to fix it or the tens of millions that tier 1 support cost didn't even seem to register as a problem for them.
Netscape really, really tried to get them to listen but it was just impossible. Netscape even forced everyone to get an aol.com address in a bid to seem more part of AOL. So fredblogs@netscape became fredb0734@aol.com. It didn't do any good, especially seeing as AOL mail was utter garbage even with AOL communicator installed.
The funny thing is I hear rumours that AOL want to try again with Gecko. It's too bad they sacked everyone who knew anything about it. Talk about closing the barn door after the horse has bolted!
Slashdot Mirror
Except Novell, Sun, Opera all have legitimate cases against Microsoft. Of course they expect they're entitled to compensation - if a monopoly fucked you over, stole / usurped your tech, denied you a market, scared off your customers, I bet you would too.
Opera are smaller, but I bet Novell, Sun, AOL and probably Real could all demonstrate massive losses in the hundreds of millions or even billions due to anti-competitive behaviour at one time or another by MS. Hence the reason MS is so quick to settle now - it has a lot of money to make these things go away before they reach trial.
Thanks, I'll check it out. I do like Elite style games, but I passed over Eve at the time because I was playing City of Heroes. Now I'm done with CoH I might just go back and see if I missed anything.
Gameplay wise, I thought the quests were better than the auto-quest mulch you find in DAOC and SWG and the UI is fairly easy to use too. The crafting was so-so but at least you could make things that had value. The first ten levels were pretty easy to solo in the beta, but it got a bit harder then. I didn't play much longer because the beta ended.
I haven't played EQ2 but I'm not exactly bowled over by its pedigree. I hated EQ (when I realised that the fun had been replaced with grind and Verant didn't care about the top heavy player population), and I saw nothing about SWG to suggest EQ2 would be any better.
Having said that, I don't think I'd pay $15 for a monthly game either. It would have to be a bloody good game, and it would have to be a free download to warrant me bothering.
With that said, I do own Half Life 2. My impressions so far:
All in all I'd rate it 9/10. Unlike Doom 3, it actually warrants most of the hype. I'd say it reclaims the FPS title from Far Cry but it's a close thing between the two.
falkag, doubleclick et al were the first residents for my Ad Block extension in Firefox.
What on earth are you jabbering about? I point out a straightfoward and simple fact for you (that the POTUS is a hard military target) and you fly off on a tangent about gas chambers. Snap out of it.
Since when have terrorists followed the rules of international law?
But whether you like it or not, the President of the United States is a hard, military target. And He is the "Commander-in-Chief of the Army and Navy of the United States" after all.
But you're right nations should go off bombing heads of state that they don't like. But if such niceties are important to the US perhaps they should practice what they preach. Rather than for example opportunistically dropping 2000lb bombs on leaders they don't like.
Kennedy (or any other president) isn't an unarmed civilian though. He is the commander in chief of the US, including it's armies. Whether you agree with the notion or not, he is a legitimate target for any enemy of the US.
But that's the power of advertising and placebo I guess. I reckon if you explained to some people outright and in detail that they were the same they still wouldn't change brands.
It seems weird that a product doesn't say if its suitable for vegetarians. What strikes as doubly weird is how many products in the US go to the effort to say they are kosher. A strange world.
The funny thing is that used to be Sun's line - Linux is the baby brother of Solaris. Hence JDS is Linux and the servers are Solaris. I have no objection to that and they're probably right to some degree. Their recent affrontage seems to come from the fact that Novell & Red Hat aren't content with that statement and already offer robust enterprise ready offerings. Again I have no experience of using either of them but neither have I heard any complaints from people in my company who do. In fact I know for a fact that they are ripping out Sun boxes left and right and replacing them with Red Hat. This isn't some web hosting company either. It's a major financial institution.
I have no experience of organic fresh produce, but around my way very few vegetables / fruit even say what 'brand' they are. They might say they're Kerrs Pink potatos (i.e. the variety) and the country of origin, but not the brand. There are a few exceptions like bananas or melons, but most everything else is pick and mix.
Now of the few stores that do give a discount (e.g. GAME), the prices are artifically inflated anyway. GAME might give you a 2.5% discount if you hold a card but that's because their prices are daylight robbery to begin with.
If the discounts seem low, it is perhaps because because personal data has less value in the UK and the EU. Why? Because the data protection act prevents it being passed around and amalgamated into uber databases.
I suspect the same is no true in the US. Data is a valuable and tradeable commodity and thus Safeway et al 'reward' you more for giving your personal life away. My experience of Safeway is that they hike the price by ludicrous amounts on basic items if you don't have one of their cards. I found the practice disgusting. I found a much better way to shop - at Albertsons where there was no dis-loyalty tax as far as I could see.
Personally I don't care what their excuse is. Any store that tried to artificially penalise me would get very little my business at all. Either that, or I'd feed grit into their data mining operation by using bogus details.
On the subject of generic products, I find it extremely hard to understand the mindset of people who always buy brandnames on groceries. Okay, if you're buying a car or a PC it might wise to 'stick to what you know'. But groceries are cheap and experimentation is fun. Most of the time that tin of beans, or loaf of bread with Tesco written on it tastes the same anyway and may even have been made in the same bakery / factory as a brand. Except it costs less because a large chunk of the cost doesn't get farmed back into advertising. Of course there is a chance it might taste worse (as there is that it might taste better), but if it comes to that you've lost a pittance and know better next time.
And when it comes to household goods and drugs, I have to wonder if people are simply stupid when they pay extra money for brand name bleach, toilet paper or whatever. Bleach is bleach. Aspirin is Aspirin. Anyone who buys branded goods like these when there are cheaper, identical generics deserves to be slapped.
I ended up pulling the .torrent out of the executable and using BitTornado to grab it. My download went from 10k to 50k which is my limit. There is some hacking required since you must manually announce yourself to overcome some tracker strangeness, but otherwise it worked fine.
Even if marketing hype initially doubled or tripled sales, Valve is still worse off than if they went it alone and sold exclusively online. Or if they had signed with a retail distributor who would agree with the existing online distribution model.
And there would be absolutely no shortage of those. In fact, I'm sure that once Valve gets rid of Vivendi, or drags them back to the negotiation table for HL3 you can bet that Steam will be something that is not up for negotiation. If Vivdeni doesn't like it, there would be dozens of other distributions beating down the door who would.
Reading the whole of my post is so difficult isn't it?
Yes there could be contractual reasons, but as a price point $49.95 sucks for online games. I can walk into a store and buy the same game for the same or less, immediately and have a manual and CDs to show for it. If I buy it online, I have to twiddle my thumbs for 15+ hours as it downloads and I have to burn the CD / DVD afterwards. I don't know about you but I have a 12Gb download monthly limit and DVD blanks cost $2 each. So the real cost of the download is upwards of $55.
Financially it simply isn't worth it to do. I'm sure some people will 'to support Valve' or whatnot, but frankly I don't see the idea taking off until there is a proper incentive for doing it.
Now I'm not averse to buying games online. In fact I bought Galactic Civilizations in that way. But the point with GalCiv was that it cost $10 less than it did in the stores. If Stardock can do it, then so can Valve. Especially when Valve's are likely to sell many, many more HL2 games than GalCiv ever sold.
$29.99 seems fairer. That's $29.99 of money that goes to Valve as opposed to the $8 or whatever it is that goes with the retail version. Everyone wins except the legacy distributors - Valve because they get 4-5x the profit, the customer because they get the game for less.
Okay, so there are some distribution issues surrounding online downloads, but these can largely be mitigated with P2P. For example World of Warcraft uses a (very sucky) custom Bittorrent client to download the game. I have no idea what the savings are for distributing via a .torrent but I can well imagine that bandwidth consumption is slashed to 1/50th.
Expecting people to pay what they could reasonably expect to pay in the stores, is a non-starter as far as I'm concerned. Norton / Symantec do something similar.
As an aside, the WoW custom torrent app is so abysmally slow (as in broken slow) and requires various open ports, that I followed the advice I found somewhere, and split the .torrent out of the executable to download through a normal BT client. It was about 5 times faster.
Personally I'm glad that Linux has finally caught up with UI advances which have existed on the Mac for twenty years now.
FC2 didn't have Java, but it had Java related stuff like the ant packages. Personally I don't see it as a big deal since by their nature Java packages are almost download and go. Getting ant to work just means unzipping it somewhere and ensuring it and Java are in your paths.
The only international site that I've even seen sites 'targetted' to Ireland (or more usually the UK) is Yahoo!.
This is an absolutely fucking stupid system. I sure hope that once installed the thing plays without requiring the CDs to be inserted. Or have we entered a world where you:
While I guess this might stop the Halo 2 situation of pirated games appearing before launch, the price is a lot of negative publicity and general confusion. Perhaps Vivendi can live with that but I bet they would be so happy if Valve or another games outfit decided to take their business elsewhere the next time around rather than have a repeat debacle.
The first thing OO should do when it starts the first time is ask "Are you upgrading from Microsoft Office?" and then proceed to offer a bunch of things that it will do make migration easier.
I believe the most important is to offer the same toolbar, menu and keyboard bindings as Word, Excel, Powerpoint. i.e. "Do you want to configure Open Office to resemble MS Office?". OO already has support for customizing toolbars and bindings. Someone should produce a customisation set that is as close to MS Office as possible. During startup, OO should offer to make it the default.
Other things would help too. I notice OO 1.9.56 is using the XP theme engine (a big improvement), but not everywhere. For example, the new toolbars look and feel pretty nasty. The drag and drop behaviour feels like something from out of the 90's with ghost outlines.
Open Office also projects an aura of being 'complicated' (which is not the same as being more powerful) compared to Word. There is too many buttons visible by default, and some of them (and menu options) are fairly inscrutable. There is a drop down toolbar button called "Insert" which drops down to reveal 9 or so fairly unintuitive 'things' represented by icons that you can insert. Why not just say what they are as text instead of wasting people's time hovering over each one to get the tooltip? Apparantly the floret thing means "Special Character" so why not just say that?
And finally, there should be menu option that says "Help for Word / Excel / Powerpoint users" that is formatted as a "How Do I?" kind of document. As in... "How do I send a document as an attachment?" "How do I turn on revision control etc.".
I'm not familiar with the inner workings of the OO project, but I know that usability can make a dramatic impact on how an app is perceived. The little things such as toolbar order, number of buttons, menu labels etc. can make a big difference. Just look at GNOME - before the HIG it was a mess, but now it's a thing of beauty and functionality. I hope the OO usability folks are armed with a big stick and don't just have their bugs prioritized at the bottom of the heap.
Open Office 2.0 is going to kick butt. How much butt depends on how welcome they make MS Office users feel.
That's not the point. I'm guessing they are saying that MS Word touted HTML generation, preview and URL link facilities (however shitty they may be). Perhaps WP discovered they couldn't offer equivalent functionality because MS Word was using undocumented features in IE to achieve what it was doing.
By then the memory consumption was lower, it was faster, leaner and actually consumed less memory when embedded than IE.
You're right that XUL is still a pain to program when you start, but it is miles better that AOLs own layout engine. And once you get over the learning curve it's actually pretty cool since you can develop content and test it by loading it into the browser. But the technical dificulties were irrelevant. As I mentioned, Netscape already had a working email client written for XUL. It had even been deployed to AOL China or Japan I believe. It had already proven itself. It was obvious then to anybody in the know that XUL was the right choice then and is the right choice now. Thunderbird is the direct successor of that early work. I believe the reason it wasn't chosen was simply because the group who got it in the end were based in Dulles whereas Netscape (or AOL West as it was by then) were still 'outsiders' and perhaps perceived as threatening in some way. There were lame excuses for the decision, concerning multiple processes using a single profile, but they weren't insurmountable by any means.
To give you an idea of the mentality (since it should be obvious I was working for AOL at the time). I attended a meeting about putting Gecko into AOL. It was some technical guys and the marketing people in a room in DC. We explained the technical issues (and how to solve them), the benefits and so on. I swear their eyes glazed over. They either didn't care or simply couldn't comprehend. The rest of the meeting was spent by them discussing what colour a fucking button should be in the client or something equally banal.
That's the divide that existed between marketing and the technical people. A button was a feature to them. The fact that they were using their mortal enemy's browser engine or the major bother they had getting MS to fix it or the tens of millions that tier 1 support cost didn't even seem to register as a problem for them.
Netscape really, really tried to get them to listen but it was just impossible. Netscape even forced everyone to get an aol.com address in a bid to seem more part of AOL. So fredblogs@netscape became fredb0734@aol.com. It didn't do any good, especially seeing as AOL mail was utter garbage even with AOL communicator installed.
The funny thing is I hear rumours that AOL want to try again with Gecko. It's too bad they sacked everyone who knew anything about it. Talk about closing the barn door after the horse has bolted!