Politicians are allowed to change their mind. Most of the older Republicans were Democrats when they started their political careers. There are a couple problems:
a) Large numbers of politicians are liar hence the electorate needs to separate out changes in conviction from pandering. b) Changes in conviction call into question your judgement. If a politician claims he decided the issue improperly before what has caused him to change his mind? c) Because we have a serious corruption problem. Idealogical politicians are less subject to influence than moderates. Being open minded unfortunately correlates pretty strongly if it is not outright identical with being persuadable by lobbyists and donors. The American people in the last 3 elections are responding to the corruption problem by voting open minded / non-idealogical politicians out of office in huge numbers. d) Politicians are benefited by flexible. Because the constituents that voted for them, particularly in primaries are ideological they frequently benefit from inflexibility. There is a natural conflict of interest.
So on balance a politician is going to need to explain any change in position in a way putting doubts and fears to rest.
Conversely during the 1950s when you had a whole generation that had watched 100m die and a good chunk of the world's cities reduced to rubble from ideology: pragmatism, open mindedness a sense of good will towards the other side were highly valued traits and intellectual inflexibility was seen very negatively.
RIM's margins on phones is 35.7%. The company has been writing down other assets, the last thing they need right now is to be paying taxes. But no they make money on phones. Tablets are a different story.
It has nothing to do with politicians being corrupt though that certainly makes the problem worse. If you look at any idealogical breakdown of the voting population it is almost impossible to assemble coalitions of 50%+1 that agree on objectives and means across an array of issues. Politicians to get reelected need to be able to spin. The problem is not one of immorality, the problem is the diversity of the electorate.
That means a registered press where certain people have much greater FOIA rights than others. Essentially a group of journalists and/or organizations are registered for insider access and they get accurate information. You are tossing #2. That's essentially what we had in the first term of the Bush administration where access required obedience.
It has nothing to do with politicians being immoral though that certainly makes the problem worse. If you look at any idealogical breakdown of the voting population it is almost impossible to assemble coalitions of 50%+1 that agree on objectives and means across an array of issues. Politicians to get reelected need to be able to spin. The problem is not one of immorality, the problem is the diversity of the electorate.
RIM isn't increasing their share and is falling slightly in terms of sales, but it is not quite that bad.
2010 global sales: 49.6m 2011 global sales: 51.5m
You get the impression from the US market where RIM has gone (users not sales) from 21.9m Sep 2010 to 12.5m in May 2012. But that still does represent sales, the average life of a smart phone is 11.5 months. In the US Apple's share of the computer market is just about about getting to the level of RIM's share of the smartphone market, to help put it in perspective.
RIM is deeply troubled, they aren't dead by any means. They've had a rough few years but they haven't done anything truly tragic like follow LG and later Nokia's lead and go with Windows mobile.
We have a classic problem with the freedom of information requests:
1) We want accurate historical records maintained of how decision were made, by whom and why. 2) We want a have an open press and legal system to have access to those records so our legal processes and our political processes are based on accurate information. 3) We want to have an open campaign system where all available information is discussed as part of the process of choosing leaders.
Agreed. In the 1980s through early 90s it wasn't uncommon for people's computers to boot into Word Perfect. Word Perfect included its own file manipulation shells and some other applications were in the suite. While DOS handled low level functionality, Word Perfect for all practical purposes was their operating system. Office on Windows while not quite that monolithic often plays a similar role.
I agree with you. Quite often they would be far better using different tools. I spent last month working on documents that had very sophisticated layouts that should have been produced using a form and a typesetting engine not a word processor (i.e. WYSIWYM vs. WYSIWYG). But the people who did it probably didn't know there was any way to author things other than a word processor.
There really are 3 totally separate arguments.
1) Do end users who use office suites in this way need these advanced features? To that one I answer yes. First off note we both agree these people exist in large numbers. And we may both agree they shouldn't be doing things this way but if they are going to do things this way they need advanced features.
2) Should end users be doing this? As I mentioned above, no. It would be far better to be teaching them a diverse toolset. Back in the 1990s I saw TeX/LyX/KLyX as a potential killer app for Linux. Bring professional document composition like you get in the prepress world to average end users. Which means pulling LyX away from scientific and towards more business oriented document construction (i.e. forms and templates) Unfortunately no one really picked up on the WYSIWYM meme and what could have been a differentiator has stagnated. Similarly for the rest of the office suite.
3) What should we as developers be encouraging? And I think we agree on this one.
There was no huge marketing by Nokia, it was an open market phone (no subsidy). Nokia viewed it as a niche product at the time more designed to secure their mindshare in Europe against erosion by Android than to make any money.
Yes, Advertising is often a very good way to figure out how a product is positioning itself in the market. A company's advertising strategy is something that needs to be integrated with the rest of the marketing, their sales team and quite often their engineering priorities. Its one of the best indications of strategy. It also indicates what the potential customer base is asking about.
The current Siri ads are all about how Blackberry and Android smartphone users who find their applications confusing and complex will if they buy an iPhone will suddenly have an intelligent assistant which will mean they don't have to learn all that nonsense. Now that's not entirely true, but it does point to the general direction of Apple's platform (obviousness) vs. Android (power and diversity) vs. RIM (enterprise integration).
Your use of the term "advanced" is ambiguous. It does do bibliographies. [libreoffice.org] But without knowing what you mean by "advanced integrated", I have no way to really address your objection.
Word will extract any reference citations in a document into a digital form which allows for import / export into bibliography managers. The purpose of this is that many people have a bibliographic library you want an application (extension) to manage that library allowing for attachments... The Word processing application needs to maintain that data though at the document level so that bibliography information stays sinced between different managers. In addition in terms of styles there are 4300 commonly used bibliographic databases each that has slightly different formatting and information. That's 4300 import scripts that need to be written (custom styles). If you cite from non-Latin based sources the number is slightly over 5000. The Word community has done that leg work, the OO community hasn't.
Related content management i.e. tying multiple documents together on different axis
No that's not a pivot table, I agree OO/LO got those. What I'm talking about is what Office calls tagging documents by "Content Types" (note this is not how OO/LO use this term, they use it to mean essentially MIME type). Its a CRM concept that a document carry metadata automatically as it gets passed around and versioned. So for example if you include an image of a graph you can also include the data that built the graph inside the metadata for the image. For CRMs certain information about a document can be maintained, and forced (see http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/sharepoint-server-help/introduction-to-content-types-HA010149551.aspx). The majority of the user interaction for the CRM stuff would be at the CRM level and OO doesn't have an equivalent of SharePoint, but the real problem is that OO lacks this sort of CRM support at the document level. This allows me to search for "all documents generated by project 2013478" or "all documents generated originally (i.e. first version) out of the California division prior to 4/23/2011"
In terms of lines and colors, you are right that is in Libre office. That story of how it didn't get into OO is nuts.
Anyway good refutation on most of these which shows the degree of progress in the last few years. It seems like LO/OO is progressing at a fast clip even without Sun which is wonderful to see. I have the rMBP and Office looks terrible. If its going to be a year before Microsoft releases a version that supports retina, Libre Office supported retina out of the box and Neo is working on a partial solution with the intention of waiting until OO does the work of switching hundreds of icons to vector so it might be a chance for me to take a look at Libre Office.
The crashing on Base on OO was infuriating. Base is one of the primary reasons I use Neo/OO since there is no Access for Mac. I used write the most, since I use it all the time with people who don't own Office. But If I want to do something I would do in Access on a PC I use that, so for me at least its the primary application in the suite. I've never really regretted being on Neo, even when they lagged behind OO (which was the reason I was trying OO in the first place).
I have no idea what you are talking about. They "float" just fine for me, and dock when they are supposed to dock. Dockable windows is a per-program interface decision, and is not unique to either Windows or OS X.
In windows floating toolbars are supposed to act like document windows. In OSX floating toolbars a
The carriers would never allow a fully open phone on their networks. It would be worthless. For example Apple originally in Europe wanted to go with an electronic-Sim and not a physical Sim and the carriers told Apple to go pound sand. Almost all the carriers all over the planet won't touch the Windows phone because of the Skype integration especially international voice and SMS revenue threats.
No because in real life the amount of utility a customer gets from their service is directly tied to the quality (cost) of their devices. Customers systematically underestimate the importance of quality devices though. They also are willing to pay a high monthly fee for "service". So making the phones essentially free, and bundling the cost in with the service, effectively lending you money to buy a phone is a win-win.
Verizon, AT&T and Sprint would love to not be in the hardware retail business its a pain in the neck for them. The only reason they do it is the alternatives are worse.
No the real cost is the subsidy. Which ranges from about $13 / mo to about $18 / mo depending on cell phone over 24 months. The cost of the minutes, texting, data, having a DiD (phone number)... is not the cost of the phone.
1) Strong integration with the desktop if you use a Mac. 2) Far and away the largest and most diverse application availability. The advantage Windows has always had on the desktop. 3) Semi-consistent interface across applications 4) Safety and security with regard to applications, i.e. pre-vetting 5) Reasonable priced insurance and a physical location to get phones fixed 6) A promise of after market care. OS upgrades but also excellent telephone support available etc...
Maybe, but you are talking about essentially multiple GUIs. The legacy interface have quite a few bitmaps, the new interfaces are all vector. The legacy interfaces are mouse driven with specific keyboard interfaces, the new ones accept touch. Sure I guess Microsoft could built two GUIs but this is more than "skins" in the classic sense of the same GUI (functionally) with just different look and feel.
What they are thinking is they need a GUI where size of buttons is adjustable. If you hit the touch input button the buttons can get bigger to work with touch vs. a stylus or mouse. Think about the complexity of a GUI with a layered menu system where the elements are variable sized.
Maybe more than most/. users need, but they are light office productivity users. Look at the people who live in Excel or Word. They definitely use advanced features. Many of them use VBA scripts or 3rd party add-ons because the built in functionality isn't enough.
This isn't just a question of look and feel. There are different input methods for new versions of office and different GUI functionality. Windows 7 apps don't have to have a button which resized other controls for touch interface.
The judgement becomes a claimant in the bankruptcy.
Say a company has $3b in assets, $2b in debts and loses a $4b suit. They go into bankruptcy. During the bankruptcy they lose $200m in senior debt.
The company then is restructured one of two ways: a) The plaintiff gets 66% (3b in assets / $4b suit) of the stock of a company with $3b in assets and $200b in debt b) The plaintiff gets 66% of the $2.8b after liquidation
Slashdot Mirror
Politicians are allowed to change their mind. Most of the older Republicans were Democrats when they started their political careers. There are a couple problems:
a) Large numbers of politicians are liar hence the electorate needs to separate out changes in conviction from pandering.
b) Changes in conviction call into question your judgement. If a politician claims he decided the issue improperly before what has caused him to change his mind?
c) Because we have a serious corruption problem. Idealogical politicians are less subject to influence than moderates. Being open minded unfortunately correlates pretty strongly if it is not outright identical with being persuadable by lobbyists and donors. The American people in the last 3 elections are responding to the corruption problem by voting open minded / non-idealogical politicians out of office in huge numbers.
d) Politicians are benefited by flexible. Because the constituents that voted for them, particularly in primaries are ideological they frequently benefit from inflexibility. There is a natural conflict of interest.
So on balance a politician is going to need to explain any change in position in a way putting doubts and fears to rest.
Conversely during the 1950s when you had a whole generation that had watched 100m die and a good chunk of the world's cities reduced to rubble from ideology: pragmatism, open mindedness a sense of good will towards the other side were highly valued traits and intellectual inflexibility was seen very negatively.
RIM's margins on phones is 35.7%. The company has been writing down other assets, the last thing they need right now is to be paying taxes. But no they make money on phones. Tablets are a different story.
And they don't like it anymore than you do. And just as you try and evade, they try and evade. Hence the story.
It has nothing to do with politicians being corrupt though that certainly makes the problem worse. If you look at any idealogical breakdown of the voting population it is almost impossible to assemble coalitions of 50%+1 that agree on objectives and means across an array of issues. Politicians to get reelected need to be able to spin. The problem is not one of immorality, the problem is the diversity of the electorate.
That means a registered press where certain people have much greater FOIA rights than others. Essentially a group of journalists and/or organizations are registered for insider access and they get accurate information. You are tossing #2. That's essentially what we had in the first term of the Bush administration where access required obedience.
It has nothing to do with politicians being immoral though that certainly makes the problem worse. If you look at any idealogical breakdown of the voting population it is almost impossible to assemble coalitions of 50%+1 that agree on objectives and means across an array of issues. Politicians to get reelected need to be able to spin. The problem is not one of immorality, the problem is the diversity of the electorate.
RIM isn't increasing their share and is falling slightly in terms of sales, but it is not quite that bad.
2010 global sales: 49.6m
2011 global sales: 51.5m
You get the impression from the US market where RIM has gone (users not sales) from 21.9m Sep 2010 to 12.5m in May 2012. But that still does represent sales, the average life of a smart phone is 11.5 months. In the US Apple's share of the computer market is just about about getting to the level of RIM's share of the smartphone market, to help put it in perspective.
RIM is deeply troubled, they aren't dead by any means. They've had a rough few years but they haven't done anything truly tragic like follow LG and later Nokia's lead and go with Windows mobile.
We have a classic problem with the freedom of information requests:
1) We want accurate historical records maintained of how decision were made, by whom and why.
2) We want a have an open press and legal system to have access to those records so our legal processes and our political processes are based on accurate information.
3) We want to have an open campaign system where all available information is discussed as part of the process of choosing leaders.
Pick any 2.
Agreed. In the 1980s through early 90s it wasn't uncommon for people's computers to boot into Word Perfect. Word Perfect included its own file manipulation shells and some other applications were in the suite. While DOS handled low level functionality, Word Perfect for all practical purposes was their operating system. Office on Windows while not quite that monolithic often plays a similar role.
I agree with you. Quite often they would be far better using different tools. I spent last month working on documents that had very sophisticated layouts that should have been produced using a form and a typesetting engine not a word processor (i.e. WYSIWYM vs. WYSIWYG). But the people who did it probably didn't know there was any way to author things other than a word processor.
There really are 3 totally separate arguments.
1) Do end users who use office suites in this way need these advanced features? To that one I answer yes. First off note we both agree these people exist in large numbers. And we may both agree they shouldn't be doing things this way but if they are going to do things this way they need advanced features.
2) Should end users be doing this? As I mentioned above, no. It would be far better to be teaching them a diverse toolset. Back in the 1990s I saw TeX/LyX/KLyX as a potential killer app for Linux. Bring professional document composition like you get in the prepress world to average end users. Which means pulling LyX away from scientific and towards more business oriented document construction (i.e. forms and templates) Unfortunately no one really picked up on the WYSIWYM meme and what could have been a differentiator has stagnated. Similarly for the rest of the office suite.
3) What should we as developers be encouraging? And I think we agree on this one.
There was no huge marketing by Nokia, it was an open market phone (no subsidy). Nokia viewed it as a niche product at the time more designed to secure their mindshare in Europe against erosion by Android than to make any money.
Yes, Advertising is often a very good way to figure out how a product is positioning itself in the market. A company's advertising strategy is something that needs to be integrated with the rest of the marketing, their sales team and quite often their engineering priorities. Its one of the best indications of strategy. It also indicates what the potential customer base is asking about.
The current Siri ads are all about how Blackberry and Android smartphone users who find their applications confusing and complex will if they buy an iPhone will suddenly have an intelligent assistant which will mean they don't have to learn all that nonsense. Now that's not entirely true, but it does point to the general direction of Apple's platform (obviousness) vs. Android (power and diversity) vs. RIM (enterprise integration).
Your use of the term "advanced" is ambiguous. It does do bibliographies. [libreoffice.org] But without knowing what you mean by "advanced integrated", I have no way to really address your objection.
Here is a link http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/word-help/apa-mla-chicago-automatically-format-bibliographies-HA102435469.aspx
Word will extract any reference citations in a document into a digital form which allows for import / export into bibliography managers. The purpose of this is that many people have a bibliographic library you want an application (extension) to manage that library allowing for attachments... The Word processing application needs to maintain that data though at the document level so that bibliography information stays sinced between different managers.
In addition in terms of styles there are 4300 commonly used bibliographic databases each that has slightly different formatting and information. That's 4300 import scripts that need to be written (custom styles). If you cite from non-Latin based sources the number is slightly over 5000. The Word community has done that leg work, the OO community hasn't.
Related content management i.e. tying multiple documents together on different axis
No that's not a pivot table, I agree OO/LO got those. What I'm talking about is what Office calls tagging documents by "Content Types" (note this is not how OO/LO use this term, they use it to mean essentially MIME type). Its a CRM concept that a document carry metadata automatically as it gets passed around and versioned. So for example if you include an image of a graph you can also include the data that built the graph inside the metadata for the image. For CRMs certain information about a document can be maintained, and forced (see http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/sharepoint-server-help/introduction-to-content-types-HA010149551.aspx). The majority of the user interaction for the CRM stuff would be at the CRM level and OO doesn't have an equivalent of SharePoint, but the real problem is that OO lacks this sort of CRM support at the document level. This allows me to search for "all documents generated by project 2013478" or "all documents generated originally (i.e. first version) out of the California division prior to 4/23/2011"
In terms of lines and colors, you are right that is in Libre office. That story of how it didn't get into OO is nuts.
Anyway good refutation on most of these which shows the degree of progress in the last few years. It seems like LO/OO is progressing at a fast clip even without Sun which is wonderful to see. I have the rMBP and Office looks terrible. If its going to be a year before Microsoft releases a version that supports retina, Libre Office supported retina out of the box and Neo is working on a partial solution with the intention of waiting until OO does the work of switching hundreds of icons to vector so it might be a chance for me to take a look at Libre Office.
The crashing on Base on OO was infuriating. Base is one of the primary reasons I use Neo/OO since there is no Access for Mac. I used write the most, since I use it all the time with people who don't own Office. But If I want to do something I would do in Access on a PC I use that, so for me at least its the primary application in the suite. I've never really regretted being on Neo, even when they lagged behind OO (which was the reason I was trying OO in the first place).
I have no idea what you are talking about. They "float" just fine for me, and dock when they are supposed to dock. Dockable windows is a per-program interface decision, and is not unique to either Windows or OS X.
In windows floating toolbars are supposed to act like document windows. In OSX floating toolbars a
The carriers would never allow a fully open phone on their networks. It would be worthless. For example Apple originally in Europe wanted to go with an electronic-Sim and not a physical Sim and the carriers told Apple to go pound sand. Almost all the carriers all over the planet won't touch the Windows phone because of the Skype integration especially international voice and SMS revenue threats.
No because in real life the amount of utility a customer gets from their service is directly tied to the quality (cost) of their devices. Customers systematically underestimate the importance of quality devices though. They also are willing to pay a high monthly fee for "service". So making the phones essentially free, and bundling the cost in with the service, effectively lending you money to buy a phone is a win-win.
Verizon, AT&T and Sprint would love to not be in the hardware retail business its a pain in the neck for them. The only reason they do it is the alternatives are worse.
No the real cost is the subsidy. Which ranges from about $13 / mo to about $18 / mo depending on cell phone over 24 months. The cost of the minutes, texting, data, having a DiD (phone number)... is not the cost of the phone.
Look at the ads:
1) Strong integration with the desktop if you use a Mac.
2) Far and away the largest and most diverse application availability. The advantage Windows has always had on the desktop.
3) Semi-consistent interface across applications
4) Safety and security with regard to applications, i.e. pre-vetting
5) Reasonable priced insurance and a physical location to get phones fixed
6) A promise of after market care. OS upgrades but also excellent telephone support available
etc...
Maybe, but you are talking about essentially multiple GUIs. The legacy interface have quite a few bitmaps, the new interfaces are all vector. The legacy interfaces are mouse driven with specific keyboard interfaces, the new ones accept touch. Sure I guess Microsoft could built two GUIs but this is more than "skins" in the classic sense of the same GUI (functionally) with just different look and feel.
What they are thinking is they need a GUI where size of buttons is adjustable. If you hit the touch input button the buttons can get bigger to work with touch vs. a stylus or mouse. Think about the complexity of a GUI with a layered menu system where the elements are variable sized.
They can't. The Ribbon contains more levels than the menus every could. That's the point. It allows for more levels of hierarchy.
Of course. Skydrive is offering Sharepoint like services for people who don't have Sharepoint. If you do have Sharepoint...
Maybe more than most /. users need, but they are light office productivity users. Look at the people who live in Excel or Word. They definitely use advanced features. Many of them use VBA scripts or 3rd party add-ons because the built in functionality isn't enough.
This isn't just a question of look and feel. There are different input methods for new versions of office and different GUI functionality. Windows 7 apps don't have to have a button which resized other controls for touch interface.
Agreed. He's still a nobody of no political import.
The judgement becomes a claimant in the bankruptcy.
Say a company has $3b in assets, $2b in debts and loses a $4b suit. They go into bankruptcy. During the bankruptcy they lose $200m in senior debt.
The company then is restructured one of two ways:
a) The plaintiff gets 66% (3b in assets / $4b suit) of the stock of a company with $3b in assets and $200b in debt
b) The plaintiff gets 66% of the $2.8b after liquidation