So let's take a little hike down history lane... to the time where slavery was lawful, not so long ago. If I had thought that it was morally wrong to own slaves, would that have meant that I should have offered to put myself into the place of a slave? Or should I, seeing as we do now that slavery is morally wrong, have worked towards abolishing slavery altogether?
As a matter of fact, yes. Give an example by working your own bloody plantation. You're doing what's considered slave work. Also you would protest against slavery in a lawful manner. You wouldn't go around forcefully freeing them, or shooting their masters in the head.
And, you see, someone really NEEDED to work on those cotton-fields. How should we be able to make clothes otherwise?
There was an alternative to slavery. Pay people to do it. What's the alternative to animal testing, apart from testing on humans? I honestly don't know of any.
Back in the real world: yes, I'm against it even though at any time I could be struck by a disease that might become curable with animal-tested medication. And I believe that if we made animal testing illegal then this would create the incentive to find other, possibly better, ways to test stuff.
We're on the same page here. I feel exactly the same. However, I totally disagree with breaking into a lab and doing what those nutjobs were doing. That's what bugs me, that extremists are highly regarded, prompting them to do more damage instead of looking for a mutually beneficial way out of animal testing. What they did doesn't help anyone. Doesn't help the animals, doesn't help research, everyone loses.
Also, a lot of crap doesn't need to be tested because it doesn't need to be created in the first place (see BasilBrush's comment).
I agree. People should fight it by not buying that crap anyway. I know I don't.
I just hope you're not a developer. Generic statement is: "How strongly do they believe a lawful activity is morally wrong?". That includes animal testing ("use me, not the animal"), for the simple reason that such tests NEED to be performed on SOMETHING (or someone).
Analogies: - Fur coats. Do they believe strongly enough to never ever wear animal skins even if that would mean freezing to death? - Tree cutting. Do they believe strongly enough to never ever cut a tree, even if that's the only material you can use for a house?
If not, then it's double standards we're talking about: "I am against it as long as it doesn't affect my immediate comfort".
You're comparing apples and oranges. A rape is against the law. Using test animals in a controlled environment is not. I bet that those labs are constantly looking for human test subjects but nobody is willing to take the risk. Balancing a lawful activity against a crime is retarded. Logic flaw FTW.
How strongly do they believe animal testing is morally wrong? Enough to offer themselves as test subjects? If not, then they should just GTFO, because what they're doing reeks "I need attention so I'm smashing stuff to get it". It's just attention junkies needing a fix.
You theorize here. Sometimes, the hardware+software link is simply too tight to be replaced by virtualization software or emulators of any kind. I'm talking about custom communication protocols, custom DLLs and so on.
And if the software fails or does nasty things to your medical data... who are you going to sue? Have you even looked at F/OSS EULAs? I have seen a few EULAs for Windows-based medical software and upon buying the software, there's actually some (not perfect but some) accountability from the vendor. You can sue them if they mess up.
All those computers can be converted to Linux boxes and I'm sure they can find the software for all their medical records etc.
And I'm sure they're not. Medical imaging software, for example, working on embedded machines is definitely NOT available for Linux, nor they will ever be. The market is too small to allow porting software to multiple OSs. It's simply not worth it. Sure, there's Xebra but that's only for viewing already generated imagery, all software actually generating imagery works under Windows. And Xebra doesn't really offer any sort of support or proper accountability.
You know what, I was thinking the same. It's good I browse through comments before rushing to the "reply" button. Also, dental business is lucrative business, if you're a good doctor you can make 10K profit in a month. My uncle (retired dentist) used to make 12-14K EUR monthly profit in Germany on average. Granted, he worked his ass off in 12 hour shifts at his own clinic, but customers kept pouring in. The real reason is "I can't be arsed to do it" or "the new version of the software is not backwards compatible" which is not that far fetched.
Word was better than WordPerfect. Excel was included in an Office Suite, which was a very smart step from Microsoft, and so was Outlook. The reason to buy an office suite is similar to the reason to buy any all-in-one product out there. It does more than one thing, its features act consistently and there's unity in the way it works. Also costs less than 7 different products from 7 different makers.
While well thought out, there is a very important aspect that you neglect. It was hinted at, but not bluntly called out. That aspect is that a huge part of the reason Windows went into the workplace was because people were familiar with it at home.
Um, not really. Windows was embraced by corporations because when that happened, Linux GUI was non-existent and there was really nothing else to pick.
See? Not an EASY way. If I want poison in my food, I can easily add it. If I disagree with an additive already in my food, I can't do squat about it. "Don't drink tap water" is a retarded argument. How about not enrich it with crap?
It opens on my computer in 0.6 seconds, and i'm using a workstation built in 2007. Do you think if I installed windows 8 and run Excel from a cold start it will load faster?
You fail to understand the term "COMPARISON". If solution 1 starts faster than solution 2, then solution 1 is better when talking about start time and comparing the two.
Why are you running programs you don't want to use?
I'm not. But when program X starts in 20 seconds, I don't like wasting time staring at the splash screen.
Genuinely? 50MB of memory, on a PC which likely has 2-4GB is seen as a problem for you? How much memory is your bloated OS wasting?
Again COMPARISON. Product 1 eats less memory than product 2, then product 1 is better, compared to product 2.
Most people I know would say you are using the wrong tool if you have a 96MB spreadsheet. That aside, you probably have it loaded with Excel specific functions, and you can't really blame other software for not being excel.
No, it was only data. No functions, no formulas, nothing. This data was a year worth of data coming from a tool which was decommissioned. Still, we needed historical reporting.
Supercalc macros don't work in excel, and excel is worse at pretty much everything. And supercalc stopped being made in like... 92? But Excel is not supercalc, excel is a bad Lotus123 clone. As I said earlier, you can't blame one program for not being another program.
I can, when people give stupid advice like "easy to switch from A to B". Not easy, not by a long shot.
I think your definition of complex formulas is different than mine. Complex formulas don't work in Excel. Most spreadsheets do real math better. Built in support for complex math is better in OO descendants, Excel requires addons. Do you perhaps mean "Calc doesn't solve the same equations the way that I have hacked them together in Excel?" Excel can't do nearly as much as something like quantrix.
Again, I was referring to "ease of switching". We have spreadsheets which refer multiple other sheets within the same file in formulas, those don't work.
Again, I would like to point out that if you have so many calculations running that you are worried about using 4 cores to run them, a spreadsheet is probably the wrong software for the problem at hand.
See above. Some data dumps from decommissioned web apps need to reside somewhere for infrequent access (say weekly or monthly). Also, the data needs to be kept for legal reasons (e.g. for 7 years) and the most inexpensive solution is sometimes... just spreadsheets.
As someone else pointed out, you are using a very old version of software which technically no longer exists, having been moved to AOO or LO. i hope you are not running a two year old version of Java on your desktop. Lots of Java 6 software breaks with Java 7, it's Java's fault, not the software.
Look at one of my previous comments. I tried AOO and macros DO work but not as expected, they do strange, unwanted stuff. Sad.
OK. I have installed LibreOffice 4.0.2.2. - Still slow to start. Loads up a slew of "features" that are unlikely to be used (Wiki publisher?). - Is still using up 3 times more memory than Excel 2007 on clean startup. - Only uses 1 CPU core while working, exactly like OO 3.3 used to.
However, it managed to load the 96 MB XLS file... in 6 minutes. Upon saving it (which took 4 minutes) as ODS, it made a 74.5 MB file, smaller indeed. So I went to Excel and saved the XLSX as XLSB (Binary format) yielding a file which was... 66 MB large. That took 28 seconds to complete. I Guess Excel takes advantage of 4 cores therefore converting way faster.
In LibreOffice, recording macros is listed as "Experimental (Unstable) Options". Anyway, I ahve enabled it then I proceeded recording a very simple macro. I typed "aaa" in cells A1 to A3, then I typed "bbb" in cells B1 to B3, then I typed "=A1" in C1, dragged the formula to C3, then typed "=B1" in D1, dragged it to D3, then saved macro and ran it again. I obtained: "=A1" in A1, which yielded "Err:522" as content of A1, nothing in A2:A3, nothing in B1:B3, nothing in C1:C3 and finally the D1:D3 formulas were there and were all showing "0".
Sorry but I'll pass LibreOffice for now. Better luck next year.
for those technically inclined, this is the Calc generated macro I obtained:
(nevermind, Slashdot disagreed: "Filter error: Please use fewer 'junk' characters.")
Office 2007 is a 7 year old release. I was comparing a 7 year old product with a 2 year old product, where the 2 year old product failed on all accounts. Now you're telling me "go get the current version". Fair enough, do you want me to compare it against Office 2013?
For fuck's sake. What if I install "AOO" and find out that 9 out of 10 issues remain? What then? And what if I start comparing "AOO" 3.4 with Excel 2013? I bet I'd find the gap even larger.
Two aliens land near a gas pump. One pulls out a laser gun and yells: "Earthling, kneel!" The other alien runs away. Big explosion ensues. The trigger happy alien emerges from the blast quite well smashed and asks the other: "why did you run away?" The other alien says "when I saw his dick hanging out all the way to the ground and up again and stuck in his ear, I realized these earthlings are pretty tough".
True humor. Not really an element of truth in it. Wow.
If things were planned the right way, nobody should get dinged. Of course, things are rarely planned the right way. But let's say they were. Then there's a set of SLAs which tells the customer "we ensure 99.99% uptime. If we don't, then we deduct X dollars per minute from what we're billing you" or something like that. The customer has their expectations set and when there's an outage, it's accounted for. Furthermore, an SLA involves a theoretical loss of productivity (which is expected).
This "witch hunt" of pointing fingers when a cloud based solution is hit by an outage is retarded and helps nobody. If anything, this behavior will make everyone become a turtle who's running away from proposing any change in the "status quo". And I am personally convinced that lack of change and lack of innovation are huge contributors to driving a company down.
Slashdot Mirror
So let's take a little hike down history lane... to the time where slavery was lawful, not so long ago. If I had thought that it was morally wrong to own slaves, would that have meant that I should have offered to put myself into the place of a slave? Or should I, seeing as we do now that slavery is morally wrong, have worked towards abolishing slavery altogether?
As a matter of fact, yes. Give an example by working your own bloody plantation. You're doing what's considered slave work.
Also you would protest against slavery in a lawful manner. You wouldn't go around forcefully freeing them, or shooting their masters in the head.
And, you see, someone really NEEDED to work on those cotton-fields. How should we be able to make clothes otherwise?
There was an alternative to slavery. Pay people to do it. What's the alternative to animal testing, apart from testing on humans? I honestly don't know of any.
Back in the real world: yes, I'm against it even though at any time I could be struck by a disease that might become curable with animal-tested medication. And I believe that if we made animal testing illegal then this would create the incentive to find other, possibly better, ways to test stuff.
We're on the same page here. I feel exactly the same. However, I totally disagree with breaking into a lab and doing what those nutjobs were doing. That's what bugs me, that extremists are highly regarded, prompting them to do more damage instead of looking for a mutually beneficial way out of animal testing. What they did doesn't help anyone. Doesn't help the animals, doesn't help research, everyone loses.
Also, a lot of crap doesn't need to be tested because it doesn't need to be created in the first place (see BasilBrush's comment).
I agree. People should fight it by not buying that crap anyway. I know I don't.
I just hope you're not a developer.
Generic statement is: "How strongly do they believe a lawful activity is morally wrong?". That includes animal testing ("use me, not the animal"), for the simple reason that such tests NEED to be performed on SOMETHING (or someone).
Analogies:
- Fur coats. Do they believe strongly enough to never ever wear animal skins even if that would mean freezing to death?
- Tree cutting. Do they believe strongly enough to never ever cut a tree, even if that's the only material you can use for a house?
If not, then it's double standards we're talking about: "I am against it as long as it doesn't affect my immediate comfort".
You're comparing apples and oranges. A rape is against the law. Using test animals in a controlled environment is not. I bet that those labs are constantly looking for human test subjects but nobody is willing to take the risk.
Balancing a lawful activity against a crime is retarded. Logic flaw FTW.
How strongly do they believe animal testing is morally wrong? Enough to offer themselves as test subjects? If not, then they should just GTFO, because what they're doing reeks "I need attention so I'm smashing stuff to get it". It's just attention junkies needing a fix.
You theorize here. Sometimes, the hardware+software link is simply too tight to be replaced by virtualization software or emulators of any kind. I'm talking about custom communication protocols, custom DLLs and so on.
And if the software fails or does nasty things to your medical data... who are you going to sue? Have you even looked at F/OSS EULAs? I have seen a few EULAs for Windows-based medical software and upon buying the software, there's actually some (not perfect but some) accountability from the vendor. You can sue them if they mess up.
All those computers can be converted to Linux boxes and I'm sure they can find the software for all their medical records etc.
And I'm sure they're not. Medical imaging software, for example, working on embedded machines is definitely NOT available for Linux, nor they will ever be. The market is too small to allow porting software to multiple OSs. It's simply not worth it. Sure, there's Xebra but that's only for viewing already generated imagery, all software actually generating imagery works under Windows. And Xebra doesn't really offer any sort of support or proper accountability.
You know what, I was thinking the same. It's good I browse through comments before rushing to the "reply" button.
Also, dental business is lucrative business, if you're a good doctor you can make 10K profit in a month. My uncle (retired dentist) used to make 12-14K EUR monthly profit in Germany on average. Granted, he worked his ass off in 12 hour shifts at his own clinic, but customers kept pouring in.
The real reason is "I can't be arsed to do it" or "the new version of the software is not backwards compatible" which is not that far fetched.
Damn, I entered specifically to say that.
Picasa is awesomely good at matching grainy images.
Word, Excel and Powerpoint covered most of the userbase. OK, and the mail client, no matter how shitty.
Word was better than WordPerfect. Excel was included in an Office Suite, which was a very smart step from Microsoft, and so was Outlook.
The reason to buy an office suite is similar to the reason to buy any all-in-one product out there. It does more than one thing, its features act consistently and there's unity in the way it works. Also costs less than 7 different products from 7 different makers.
Add me to your crowd, please.
While well thought out, there is a very important aspect that you neglect. It was hinted at, but not bluntly called out. That aspect is that a huge part of the reason Windows went into the workplace was because people were familiar with it at home.
Um, not really. Windows was embraced by corporations because when that happened, Linux GUI was non-existent and there was really nothing else to pick.
Who said I was whining?
And many small differences add up to a big one when you look at all of them combined.
See? Not an EASY way.
If I want poison in my food, I can easily add it. If I disagree with an additive already in my food, I can't do squat about it. "Don't drink tap water" is a retarded argument. How about not enrich it with crap?
Give me an easy way to REMOVE the fluoride from tap water and I'll be happy.
No amount of treatment can fix YOU.
It opens on my computer in 0.6 seconds, and i'm using a workstation built in 2007. Do you think if I installed windows 8 and run Excel from a cold start it will load faster?
You fail to understand the term "COMPARISON". If solution 1 starts faster than solution 2, then solution 1 is better when talking about start time and comparing the two.
Why are you running programs you don't want to use?
I'm not. But when program X starts in 20 seconds, I don't like wasting time staring at the splash screen.
Genuinely? 50MB of memory, on a PC which likely has 2-4GB is seen as a problem for you? How much memory is your bloated OS wasting?
Again COMPARISON. Product 1 eats less memory than product 2, then product 1 is better, compared to product 2.
Most people I know would say you are using the wrong tool if you have a 96MB spreadsheet. That aside, you probably have it loaded with Excel specific functions, and you can't really blame other software for not being excel.
No, it was only data. No functions, no formulas, nothing. This data was a year worth of data coming from a tool which was decommissioned. Still, we needed historical reporting.
Supercalc macros don't work in excel, and excel is worse at pretty much everything. And supercalc stopped being made in like... 92? But Excel is not supercalc, excel is a bad Lotus123 clone. As I said earlier, you can't blame one program for not being another program.
I can, when people give stupid advice like "easy to switch from A to B". Not easy, not by a long shot.
I think your definition of complex formulas is different than mine. Complex formulas don't work in Excel. Most spreadsheets do real math better. Built in support for complex math is better in OO descendants, Excel requires addons. Do you perhaps mean "Calc doesn't solve the same equations the way that I have hacked them together in Excel?" Excel can't do nearly as much as something like quantrix.
Again, I was referring to "ease of switching". We have spreadsheets which refer multiple other sheets within the same file in formulas, those don't work.
Again, I would like to point out that if you have so many calculations running that you are worried about using 4 cores to run them, a spreadsheet is probably the wrong software for the problem at hand.
See above. Some data dumps from decommissioned web apps need to reside somewhere for infrequent access (say weekly or monthly). Also, the data needs to be kept for legal reasons (e.g. for 7 years) and the most inexpensive solution is sometimes... just spreadsheets.
As someone else pointed out, you are using a very old version of software which technically no longer exists, having been moved to AOO or LO. i hope you are not running a two year old version of Java on your desktop. Lots of Java 6 software breaks with Java 7, it's Java's fault, not the software.
Look at one of my previous comments. I tried AOO and macros DO work but not as expected, they do strange, unwanted stuff. Sad.
OK. I have installed LibreOffice 4.0.2.2.
- Still slow to start. Loads up a slew of "features" that are unlikely to be used (Wiki publisher?).
- Is still using up 3 times more memory than Excel 2007 on clean startup.
- Only uses 1 CPU core while working, exactly like OO 3.3 used to.
However, it managed to load the 96 MB XLS file... in 6 minutes. Upon saving it (which took 4 minutes) as ODS, it made a 74.5 MB file, smaller indeed. So I went to Excel and saved the XLSX as XLSB (Binary format) yielding a file which was... 66 MB large. That took 28 seconds to complete. I Guess Excel takes advantage of 4 cores therefore converting way faster.
In LibreOffice, recording macros is listed as "Experimental (Unstable) Options". Anyway, I ahve enabled it then I proceeded recording a very simple macro. I typed "aaa" in cells A1 to A3, then I typed "bbb" in cells B1 to B3, then I typed "=A1" in C1, dragged the formula to C3, then typed "=B1" in D1, dragged it to D3, then saved macro and ran it again.
I obtained: "=A1" in A1, which yielded "Err:522" as content of A1, nothing in A2:A3, nothing in B1:B3, nothing in C1:C3 and finally the D1:D3 formulas were there and were all showing "0".
Sorry but I'll pass LibreOffice for now. Better luck next year.
for those technically inclined, this is the Calc generated macro I obtained:
(nevermind, Slashdot disagreed: "Filter error: Please use fewer 'junk' characters.")
Office 2007 is a 7 year old release.
I was comparing a 7 year old product with a 2 year old product, where the 2 year old product failed on all accounts. Now you're telling me "go get the current version". Fair enough, do you want me to compare it against Office 2013?
Did I at least make you laugh?
Also WHOOOSH.
Really now, you went all the way to analyze a bloody joke just to fuel an argument over the INTERNET? Good god.
For fuck's sake. What if I install "AOO" and find out that 9 out of 10 issues remain? What then?
And what if I start comparing "AOO" 3.4 with Excel 2013? I bet I'd find the gap even larger.
Makes sense :)
Two aliens land near a gas pump. One pulls out a laser gun and yells: "Earthling, kneel!" The other alien runs away. Big explosion ensues. The trigger happy alien emerges from the blast quite well smashed and asks the other: "why did you run away?"
The other alien says "when I saw his dick hanging out all the way to the ground and up again and stuck in his ear, I realized these earthlings are pretty tough".
True humor. Not really an element of truth in it. Wow.
If things were planned the right way, nobody should get dinged. Of course, things are rarely planned the right way.
But let's say they were.
Then there's a set of SLAs which tells the customer "we ensure 99.99% uptime. If we don't, then we deduct X dollars per minute from what we're billing you" or something like that. The customer has their expectations set and when there's an outage, it's accounted for. Furthermore, an SLA involves a theoretical loss of productivity (which is expected).
This "witch hunt" of pointing fingers when a cloud based solution is hit by an outage is retarded and helps nobody. If anything, this behavior will make everyone become a turtle who's running away from proposing any change in the "status quo". And I am personally convinced that lack of change and lack of innovation are huge contributors to driving a company down.