You need more designers, more coders, more artists, better equipment, etc... That's just the way it works. That's the way it's been for the last 2 decades.
You're absolutely right, and that's a big part of why I didn't buy a console for 2 decades until the Wii arrived. I want enjoyable games, not tedious movie-wannabes or, even worse, pretentious dross by programmers who want to be "artists". That approach just means sinking the budget into visuals instead of game design.
Cheap and fun beats high-definition dullness every time.
This isn't a testement on how much better linux is, It is a testement to how people dislike change. I belive the majority of people are this way.
And that's exactly why Microsoft spends a small fortune every year bribing officials and politicians around the world into turning a blind eye when they strongarm OEMs into preinstalling Windows.
I can lie to the public and raise their awareness of the lies as well (and make a HUGE bunch of money at it). Will you praise me for it, too?
I have no idea what you're talking about, but the point remains that Greenpeace's goals really mean that criticising it for making public statements is pretty silly.
I see, if I criticize Greenpeace, then I must automatically be in favor of whatever Monsanto does, or must be in favor of secrecy.
Well, if you criticise Greenpeace for generating publicity, then the implication is that you'd rather see these issues worked out in private, which is Monsanto's usual method for handling bad test results.
Of course, we know Greenpeace won't do that, since they're all about the publicity.
Yeah, because, like, raising public awareness about things should be done in secret. You know, like all that lobbying Monsanto does; there's a bunch of publicly-spirited guys doing things the right way! Un huh, un huh...
In short, there is very little incentive for microsoft to improve their products
I agree but it still leads to shoddy workers. No one with any pride in themselves or their work can survive in that sort of environment and have any semblance of morale left to them; consequently it is mostly people motivated by salary rather than a drive to create good software that apply to work for MS and the few idealists that do get recruited accidently quickly become demotivated or simply leave.
Let's just eliminate the jobs "programmer" and "software designer".
I don't think it's as bad as that, although it certainly would be a huge shake up. The fact is that software has a value, and new software will always be worth paying for regardless of availability of source. Many people today are paid to develop open-source software. I would say that any company that relies on software and does not get the right to use and modify the source is insane, but it could be done under trade-secret/NDA rules; it does not have to be publicly released.
What do you mean by the sort of people Microsoft employs?
I mean second rate coders with no pride in their work. I've been at university milk-rounds and seen who applies to them; I wouldn't employ them myself. And the proof of the pudding is in the eating: MS software is badly written and buggy. Applications routinely have bugs that last for decades before being fixed. Shoddy work comes from shoddy workers.
How come every case where Linux is not the solution is somehow flawed?
Any case where you or your company is relying on software it has no control over is flawed, and doubly so if you don't even have control over the data. The ideal solution is that no software is closed-source (and not written by the sort of people MS employs too, but that's another issue). Obviously Linux is not the solution to this as things stand. Companies rely on much more difficult to replace programs than Office - Quickbooks, for example (which is an example where you're locked out of your own data).
As long as one external company can decide whether the bugs in the software you use every day are worth fixing or not, then you have a problem. Linux is not the only solution to that, nor is it currently a total solution to that, but the principle remains.
The social cost of having a monopoly controlling one of the most important industries in the world is a factor in wanting to change things too but is WAY off-topic.
Open source devs/enthusiasts need to stop lamenting and start competing.
OK. Make it illegal to bundle an OS with a computer, and make it illegal to bundle applications with an OS. Let the users decide what to buy. Strangely, MS spends huge proportions of its cash on making sure governments and companies do not enforce such requirements. Is that what you mean by competing?
There are certain people who really don't like Firefox. I would use Opera over it given the choice, even when Opera was not free without ads. FF is bloated, leaky, and crashy.
I challenge you to explain to your mother how to use a TeX template to make a more attractive document without the need for a fancy word processor.
Well, the point of having templates is to let non-technical staff be able to produce documents, so I don't think I'd have any trouble with that; I certainly didn't with my girlfriend (creating the templates might cause some trouble, though). However, the argument you were making was that OO has deficiencies which "confuse" users; I was wondering what you were thinking of. The side argument that I made - that WYSIWYG wordprocessors are all poor for making complex documents - did not, in fact have anything to do with TeX per se, although it does a better job on certain types of documents such as textbooks, novels, and short letters (ie, not heavily illustrated) than Word or OO.
The implication I was trying to make was that do formatting and content creatation at the same time, makes for an unsatisfactory set of compromises and results in all modern word processors being fairly average at their jobs.
Do you have a serious professional interest in advanced document formatting?
Yes, but I use DTP / typesetting software for that: TeX, InDesign, Quark, even Inkscape for 1-pagers. Word processors all fall between "more power than I need for letters and other simple documents" and "Not powerful or easy enough to use for complex layouts".
Indeed, even for simple documents I use TeX with suitable templates since I can then work using a simple, fast, memory thrifty text editor and concentrate on the subject I'm writing about, and leave worrying about visuals to later, when I'm not actually trying to think about content. For magazine work, I try to use InDesign over Quark, and again I separate working on layout from working on copy.
I'd have to say that MS Office 2007 is beautiful and extremely intuitive.
I disagree on both counts, which does not mean that I think OO is any better.
but I think more web companies generally cater to Firefox.
Sadly, the fact is that they all cater to IE, and Firefox if they have time/budget. If IE was not pre-installed then no one would support it at all.
IE7 and Safari remain a "good enough" solution for out-of-the-box consumers.
IE is only "good enough" because every web designer in the world is forced to support its errors and work around its many failings. Their efforts, not Microsoft's, are what makes an HTML page render correctly in that browser.
Considering the way web standards operate, it would seem obvious that a horde of random developers would be better at maintaining a browser than a large corporation
I don't know how you think web standards operate but in fact they are set by thousands of programmers and designers looking at the HTML spec and then a list of bugs in IE and franticlly trying to find a compromise between the two. I don't see what the connection is with the Open Source Vs Corporation argument.
Effective office suites need only solid design practices and decent software engineering. Good ideas and usability research are the basis for a solid office suite.
Maybe. Who knows, since that's never been tried. Office suites are designed by feature boxes on the side of the packaging. Certainly in the field of word processing, neither Microsoft nor anyone else has really come up with anything particularly good.
was certainly not surprised when Microsoft released a brilliant and productive new office interface and system out of nowhere
One man's "brilliant and productive" is another man's "not better, not worse, just different", I guess.
If customers want to use OpenOffice they can download.
But they won't, regardless of quality. If users just downloaded the best free option off the net then no one would ever have to design their webpages to allow for IE's quirks ever again.
MS's entire business is founded on the fact that 90%+ of people use whatever software that comes with their machine; Office suites, OS's, browsers, whatever.
In most cases, it's got critical deficiencies that will confuse most customers.
"Head of Sales" translates to "IQ of 40, fantastic liar". Never ask sales anything. Sales is there to be told things; they have no ability, talent or insight. If they did then they'd be actually doing something instead of selling the results of other people's skills and talent.
Tools such as ufraw can convert them to 8 bits/channel images such as JPEG but don't allow you to actually manipulate the image in its native color resolution.
I use ufraw to convert to 16bit/channel images (png, pnm etc) and then use either my own software or Krita to work in that space. Jpeg and GIMP are only brought in at the end (if at all) to make "user level" images for web or printing. 8 bit is fine for the result, but you do need more space to work in for manipulations.
Bizarrely, Wales appears to think the latter is the most important thing, and that up until he found out about that, was perfectly happy with the deception.
It has to be pointed out that Wales is obviously lying about that; there is no way that he did not know that SJ wasn't using his fake credentials as weight in arguments. People were already talking about that before Wales made his moronic comment about not having a problem with it. Now that he realises that the world is not as uninterested in truth as he is, he has revised history just like he revises his own Wikipedia entry from time to time to suit his egocentric worldview.
Why is it you "better than tho" assholes always harp on typos
Because, as your post shows, if you let the "typos" (and I suspect that in your case they are not typos) build up then eventually what you are trying to say becomes garbled. In which case, there was no point in saying it.
I guess if i really cared what you or anyone else thought for that matter I could have run my previous comment through spell check too
You have put your finger on it: when I read someone who is so bad at communication and can't tell the difference between "your" and "you're" or "tho" and "thou", I know that that person is apathetic and thus unlikely to be good at anything they do, regardless of the amount they're being paid to do it.
Oh, yeah, read what "Saint" Paul wanted you to read. That's not the same thing as what Jesus wanted you to hear. Not the same thing at all; that's why the bastard scuttled off to Rome, away from all those irritating people who knew Jesus and could contradict Paul's pathetic claptrap.
Then let me make it clear to you; Amazon invented this capability.
No they didn't. Cookies were introduced to identify returning users by a unique code. The fact that Amazon made that code synonymous with a credit card number is a minor detail.
The reason you say it is "obvious" is that Amazon has made it so by their wide and successful use of it.
No, it's because it was obvious. It was obvious then and it's obvious now for the simple reason that it was a trivial and obvious use of someone else's idea.
And spouting off about cookies is not prior art -- you have to actually show how this was being used in the same way
Cookies are the invention, you moron. Identifying customers is what cookies were invented for. I don't have to find prior art because this is the SAME art.
Obvious is difficult to define. Sure, it's obvious now in 2007 a whole 12 years after cookie functionality was added to Netscape. But was it obvious in 1997?
Yes. Blatantly obvious. They took cookies and used them for the purpose they were designed for. It's like patenting travelling in cars and claiming that the invention of the car itself was a separate issue.
Slashdot Mirror
Yep, and the resulting game was a yawnathon of 15-years-old gameplay. Wake me up when we get to the promised land.
TWW
You're absolutely right, and that's a big part of why I didn't buy a console for 2 decades until the Wii arrived. I want enjoyable games, not tedious movie-wannabes or, even worse, pretentious dross by programmers who want to be "artists". That approach just means sinking the budget into visuals instead of game design.
Cheap and fun beats high-definition dullness every time.
TWW
And that's exactly why Microsoft spends a small fortune every year bribing officials and politicians around the world into turning a blind eye when they strongarm OEMs into preinstalling Windows.
TWW
I'm pretty sure Bin Landen's not in Northern Ireland. Too much competition.
TWW
I have no idea what you're talking about, but the point remains that Greenpeace's goals really mean that criticising it for making public statements is pretty silly.
I see, if I criticize Greenpeace, then I must automatically be in favor of whatever Monsanto does, or must be in favor of secrecy.
Well, if you criticise Greenpeace for generating publicity, then the implication is that you'd rather see these issues worked out in private, which is Monsanto's usual method for handling bad test results.
Yeah, because, like, raising public awareness about things should be done in secret. You know, like all that lobbying Monsanto does; there's a bunch of publicly-spirited guys doing things the right way! Un huh, un huh...
I agree but it still leads to shoddy workers. No one with any pride in themselves or their work can survive in that sort of environment and have any semblance of morale left to them; consequently it is mostly people motivated by salary rather than a drive to create good software that apply to work for MS and the few idealists that do get recruited accidently quickly become demotivated or simply leave.
TWW
I don't think it's as bad as that, although it certainly would be a huge shake up. The fact is that software has a value, and new software will always be worth paying for regardless of availability of source. Many people today are paid to develop open-source software. I would say that any company that relies on software and does not get the right to use and modify the source is insane, but it could be done under trade-secret/NDA rules; it does not have to be publicly released.
What do you mean by the sort of people Microsoft employs?
I mean second rate coders with no pride in their work. I've been at university milk-rounds and seen who applies to them; I wouldn't employ them myself. And the proof of the pudding is in the eating: MS software is badly written and buggy. Applications routinely have bugs that last for decades before being fixed. Shoddy work comes from shoddy workers.
TWW
Any case where you or your company is relying on software it has no control over is flawed, and doubly so if you don't even have control over the data. The ideal solution is that no software is closed-source (and not written by the sort of people MS employs too, but that's another issue). Obviously Linux is not the solution to this as things stand. Companies rely on much more difficult to replace programs than Office - Quickbooks, for example (which is an example where you're locked out of your own data).
As long as one external company can decide whether the bugs in the software you use every day are worth fixing or not, then you have a problem. Linux is not the only solution to that, nor is it currently a total solution to that, but the principle remains.
The social cost of having a monopoly controlling one of the most important industries in the world is a factor in wanting to change things too but is WAY off-topic.
Open source devs/enthusiasts need to stop lamenting and start competing.
OK. Make it illegal to bundle an OS with a computer, and make it illegal to bundle applications with an OS. Let the users decide what to buy. Strangely, MS spends huge proportions of its cash on making sure governments and companies do not enforce such requirements. Is that what you mean by competing?
TWW
There are certain people who really don't like Firefox. I would use Opera over it given the choice, even when Opera was not free without ads. FF is bloated, leaky, and crashy.
I agree. That's why I use Opera.
Well, the point of having templates is to let non-technical staff be able to produce documents, so I don't think I'd have any trouble with that; I certainly didn't with my girlfriend (creating the templates might cause some trouble, though). However, the argument you were making was that OO has deficiencies which "confuse" users; I was wondering what you were thinking of. The side argument that I made - that WYSIWYG wordprocessors are all poor for making complex documents - did not, in fact have anything to do with TeX per se, although it does a better job on certain types of documents such as textbooks, novels, and short letters (ie, not heavily illustrated) than Word or OO.
The implication I was trying to make was that do formatting and content creatation at the same time, makes for an unsatisfactory set of compromises and results in all modern word processors being fairly average at their jobs.
TWW
Yes, but I use DTP / typesetting software for that: TeX, InDesign, Quark, even Inkscape for 1-pagers. Word processors all fall between "more power than I need for letters and other simple documents" and "Not powerful or easy enough to use for complex layouts".
Indeed, even for simple documents I use TeX with suitable templates since I can then work using a simple, fast, memory thrifty text editor and concentrate on the subject I'm writing about, and leave worrying about visuals to later, when I'm not actually trying to think about content. For magazine work, I try to use InDesign over Quark, and again I separate working on layout from working on copy.
TWW
Frankly, compared to Microsoft, pretty well any alternative is a magical security wand.
State governments don't have time for BS.
If only...
Windows Server has been gaining popularity lately with good cause- it's a product that's quickly improving.
I've been hearing that tune since Windows 2.0 came out. Lost interest long ago.
TWW
I disagree on both counts, which does not mean that I think OO is any better.
but I think more web companies generally cater to Firefox.
Sadly, the fact is that they all cater to IE, and Firefox if they have time/budget. If IE was not pre-installed then no one would support it at all.
IE7 and Safari remain a "good enough" solution for out-of-the-box consumers.
IE is only "good enough" because every web designer in the world is forced to support its errors and work around its many failings. Their efforts, not Microsoft's, are what makes an HTML page render correctly in that browser.
Considering the way web standards operate, it would seem obvious that a horde of random developers would be better at maintaining a browser than a large corporation
I don't know how you think web standards operate but in fact they are set by thousands of programmers and designers looking at the HTML spec and then a list of bugs in IE and franticlly trying to find a compromise between the two. I don't see what the connection is with the Open Source Vs Corporation argument.
Effective office suites need only solid design practices and decent software engineering. Good ideas and usability research are the basis for a solid office suite.
Maybe. Who knows, since that's never been tried. Office suites are designed by feature boxes on the side of the packaging. Certainly in the field of word processing, neither Microsoft nor anyone else has really come up with anything particularly good.
was certainly not surprised when Microsoft released a brilliant and productive new office interface and system out of nowhere
One man's "brilliant and productive" is another man's "not better, not worse, just different", I guess.
TWW
But they won't, regardless of quality. If users just downloaded the best free option off the net then no one would ever have to design their webpages to allow for IE's quirks ever again.
MS's entire business is founded on the fact that 90%+ of people use whatever software that comes with their machine; Office suites, OS's, browsers, whatever.
In most cases, it's got critical deficiencies that will confuse most customers.
Deficiencies or differences (from MSO)?
TWW
"Professor" and "Phd" are not the same thing.
TWW
TWW
I use ufraw to convert to 16bit/channel images (png, pnm etc) and then use either my own software or Krita to work in that space. Jpeg and GIMP are only brought in at the end (if at all) to make "user level" images for web or printing. 8 bit is fine for the result, but you do need more space to work in for manipulations.
TWW
It has to be pointed out that Wales is obviously lying about that; there is no way that he did not know that SJ wasn't using his fake credentials as weight in arguments. People were already talking about that before Wales made his moronic comment about not having a problem with it. Now that he realises that the world is not as uninterested in truth as he is, he has revised history just like he revises his own Wikipedia entry from time to time to suit his egocentric worldview.
TWW
Because, as your post shows, if you let the "typos" (and I suspect that in your case they are not typos) build up then eventually what you are trying to say becomes garbled. In which case, there was no point in saying it.
I guess if i really cared what you or anyone else thought for that matter I could have run my previous comment through spell check too
You have put your finger on it: when I read someone who is so bad at communication and can't tell the difference between "your" and "you're" or "tho" and "thou", I know that that person is apathetic and thus unlikely to be good at anything they do, regardless of the amount they're being paid to do it.
Indeed. Lying should rule you out as a contributer regardless of degrees or lack thereof. Was that what you were saying?
He has helped to produce one of the best information sites in the world.
Well, that is as may be, but this article is about Wikipedia.
TWW
Oh, yeah, read what "Saint" Paul wanted you to read. That's not the same thing as what Jesus wanted you to hear. Not the same thing at all; that's why the bastard scuttled off to Rome, away from all those irritating people who knew Jesus and could contradict Paul's pathetic claptrap.
No they didn't. Cookies were introduced to identify returning users by a unique code. The fact that Amazon made that code synonymous with a credit card number is a minor detail.
The reason you say it is "obvious" is that Amazon has made it so by their wide and successful use of it.
No, it's because it was obvious. It was obvious then and it's obvious now for the simple reason that it was a trivial and obvious use of someone else's idea.
And spouting off about cookies is not prior art -- you have to actually show how this was being used in the same way
Cookies are the invention, you moron. Identifying customers is what cookies were invented for. I don't have to find prior art because this is the SAME art.
Yes. Blatantly obvious. They took cookies and used them for the purpose they were designed for. It's like patenting travelling in cars and claiming that the invention of the car itself was a separate issue.