I don't know what tools are specific to StarOffice. Will it convert all the files in a directory to StarOffice format? Does it have an MS Office ribbon interface? Does it have the old MS Office interface? Does it have VB?
In my experience OO.org will migrate MS Office files just fine, even files that MS Office itself can't or won't open. Of course not all features are supported on all platforms, but that goes for MS Office as well, not to mention that MS Office does not exist on *nix, which means that those users have to use something else.
I think they are including Star Office more as a special incentive to attract users for googlepack. It probably does not hurt their relationship with Sun either, although I do not see what the long term benefit of that would be.
In any case, it continues the trend that the added value provided by google to mac users is more limited than other platforms. It saddens me that Apple considers them such a good partner. For instance, I would have much rather the iPhone got reliable map results from Mapquest than pretty bad results from google.
As i have mentioned before, I would be more comfortable with the standard if it has a freely available cross platform reference application, as well as freely available reference code, at least for the parsing of the file.
The obvious choice for the former is MS Works. Add a version for Linux and Mac, and give it away. If MS is serious about the standard, they should be willing to put some money into it. After all, unless MS is just becoming a games company, they need to invest in the common business side of the company.
At this point the cross platform reference platform is likely to be OO.org, which is inferior as it is a result of reverse engineering, not intimate knowledge of the standard. I don't see how a standard can exist if it does not have a real reference platform and real freely available reference code.
Here is my experience. Everyone is encouraged to take four years of math, science, english, and social studies. If one does this, then one can have full schedules for all four years of high school. Practically, however, students often skimp on the free, albeit not neccesirily relevant, education and try to minimize classes in the senior year.
Given that students do not want to take 4 years of math, and in many cases are not required to take four years of math, and there is often not a fourth year of math at the suitable level, in many cases it make sense for the student not to take a fourth year of math, which in many cases would be considered advanced.
Here is what I see happening often. A student manages to squeak through to calculus. Unlike other math classes with can be taught at various levels, Calculus is a college prep course that must be taught with some degree of rigor. However, if one encourages every student to take the class, it cannot be taught with rigor as half the students will be ill prepared, and it will become a review class. Therefore, it might be that some students don't take advanced math. Even if the correct decisions are made in middle school, and even if work is done in high school, not every student will learn what is needed for calculus, and that just hurts those that do. Remember, the teacher will be penalized if too many students fail.
Here is what I have seen. The latest indication that math is important is a study in Science that indicates there is little cross pollination among the high school science courses, but more HS math does improve college science work. Also, and i don't recall where I saw this, there is an indication that the number of years of math is not as important as the rigor of math when it comes to college readiness. This is critical because in the educational debate the number of years and level of course are often used interchangeable, which is invalid. With respect to college, one needs four years of increasingly rigorous courses. When it comes to just educating the masses to maximize their ability, exposure is often the most important thing, and for that we may just need a capstone survey math course.
There are fundamentalists on both sides of this issues. These are people in an effort to maintain or acquire power will cherry pick result to achieve the lies that they believe a necessary to survive. However, when one has a scientist freely correct results, and publish the corrections, that scientist is not a fundamentalist and not part of the fascist minority that wishes to enslave people by limiting information. To the contrary, that is person who truly believes that knowledge will set us free.
Then of course we have the sheep that only believe what they want to hear. This is the type of person that will believe that he or she can own a BMW for $300 a month, or that the status quo is long term even though all historical evidence suggests that things change. This is the type of person who believed it when the nuclear power industry said the power would be too cheap to meter, and then blocked out the fact that americans were charged for power never supplied. Or that everyone could own a home, with cheap interest, as the prices would just keep rising forever, never mind that current homeowners suffer due to higher taxes. And these people will probably never acknowledge the $300+ billion dollar welfare payment made to banks this morning.
The one belief i have is that the world would be a better place if more people were suspicious when someone tell them what they wanted to hear. That there is enough oil to last for generations. That there is no substantial long term negative effect on the environment. That we can just keep on doing what we are doing, and no one has to worry. Of course, this is good for economy as people continue to consume, but perhaps bad for america as if we believe there is no reason to change, then there is no reason to innovate, and we will be left behind. It is not so much that science tells us something is true, but that history and common sense tells us that certain things tend to happen, and we have survived by staying ahead of them.
Of course this is not just in china, but in the US as well. Knock offs do well in the US, especially those items with garish logos, as people buy them not for quality but for plumage. So you see fake lacoste shirts, louis vitton and coach bags, and knock off electronics everywhere.
I never understood this. If you can afford such things, buy them. Otherwise go and buy stuff you can afford. All these knock off really just make the "real" items kind of worthless. Unlike 10 or 20 years ago, now when I see a person with an LV bag, I just think they are a poser, not so interested in the design, but trying to cover some inadequacy.
The sad thing is that this is infecting the computer world more than it used to. Now that apple is formidable fashion statement, it is harder for me to take it seriously as my workhorse machine. I mean I have always used Apples because they focused more on work and less on the toy aspect, but things are changing. At least they now have the additional serious background as a developers machine.
The last two are the key. A working person actual loses money for every day they spend in court, has family that they need to provide for, and plans to do thing like buy a house in a the near term.
OTOH, most people will work around a students schedule. A student will not respond to threats that his or her family is going starve, or they will contact his or her boss and get him fired, or that he or she will have a ruined credit rating and never buy a house.
OF course, it could just be that most college student are just kids, with their innocent belief that any law that limits personal convenience is unjust. But this logic, unlicensed music download must be just because otherwise it would be more difficult to get thier music. As as the action is just, though perhaps illegal, it must be fought.
It is probably reasonable that companies will begin to push privacy in term of search engines simply because mining search data is not going to be major profit center.
At present the emerging profit center is truly personal data, emails and documents and spreadsheets. Users are putting all these on free services like Google with a thought of what how it will be used. Search data is small potatoes in comparison.
In fact if someone like MS, with money to spend and no need to make an immediate profit, developed a superior search engine and did not use the search query beyond the immediate display of ads along with the search, that site would might likely have a significant competitive advantage.
It is not that we have applets, but that we can't select to turn the applets on or off. For example, the problem with pop ups in the bad old days was the fact that a web page could open up a new page without the users permission. This was outside the domain of what a page should do. A web page should render content in it's own page, or, if the user clicks on a link, render a new page. The controls on the new page, as well as the size, should never be controlled by the HTML. This was one of those cases where something was implemented because it was easy, not because it was of any use to the user. The problem was fixed largely by renegotiating the domain, as well as giving users finer control of their own computer. The fact that it took nearly 10 years to do this indicates that for many browser developers, the customer is the content provider, not the user, which is why said, particularly commercial developers, were able to give the browser away for free.
It is the same thing with image and cookies. There were not initially huge problems, but these problem were fixed along with the pop up problem, as the basic security assumptions were the same. It would have good for Java and flash to be fixed as well. Flash is fixed in the latest Camino. I wish java would be fixed as well. There is little reason to not give user control of his desktop. Even on TV, th user had the ability to change the channel.
In fact the gin to coffee transition as a contributing factor to the industrial revolution has a lot of legs. I heard it from an englishman about 15 years ago. Whether it is a antecedent event, a concurrent event, or just a coincidence is up for debate. What is true, however, in all these stories that people started working to create a surplus of goods and services leaving the subsistence culture far behind.
I have a couple versions of iWork, and generally find it a good alternative to MS Office. I don't really like the fact that Pages is more a page layout program than a word processor, but that is a minor quibble.
Here is my concern. If I save in the funky MS format, then I have hope of opening the file on MS Windows machines and for the time being Mac. If I save the file in ODF or even the old sw*, then I can open the file on any modern OS, as they all have version of OO.org or Star Office or the like that will run. OTOH, if I use and save in iWork formats, I am back to vendor lockin. It makes little sense for apple to be playing this game. I find iWork to be superior to OO.org in many ways that MS Office is not. The only reason not to use it the random format.
This can be asked for all communication. Is the horse really necessary? Why can't notes wait to be walked to the next village. Is the telegraph really necessary? Does anyone really need real time stock quotes. Is a dedicated phone line between the home and office really necessary? Is there any news that can't wait for the morning, or a telegraph delivery, or a taxi ride. Is the cell phone necessary. Can't people make plans before they separate?
The only reason any of this technology is necessary is that we have gotten used to it. And it does cause problems. For one thing, no one has time to think, just look at how volatile the stock market has become. The cell phone has killed real social interaction, just like the telephone killed the family evening time. I am not saying any of this is bad, but that there have always been negative effects along with benifits.
The common thread to all this is efficiency and cost savings. For instance, with full web access on the go I no longer need to spend $50 on a Key map. It sucks for the mapmaker, but is good for me. I no longer need to spend $1 to get a telephone number when I can just look it up on the web. And with full data acess, I don't need to waste precious minutes on utility calls when I could be using those minutes to talk to my friends.
If all that matters in a phone is size and battery life and voice quality,then yes the phones are becoming less useful. But as the initial telephones showed, for which people paid a huge amount of money, the key thing for a communication device is overall reliability and the mode of communication, not sound quality. The telephone is better than the telegraph because one does not need an expensive telegraph operator and runners. The iPhone is better than most other phones because not only does it allow a full range of communication options, it requires no expensive back ends(IM is problematic as there is no standard protocol).
It this a good thing? I don't know. But I think one thing humans want, and are willing to give up many things for, is rapid efficient communication, even if we arguable never actually communicate.
Science fiction is a mixed bag depending of what plot devices the author need. This is why some don't like it. It is not necessarily a well told story, it is not necessarily a mystery, it is not necessarily a statement of how smart the author is. At it's highest is an exploration of what the process of technology has done, is doing, and might do. At it's most base it is simply another plot device, not unlike Huckleberry Finn. While there is nothing wrong with this, it tends to be a simplistic use of the genre.
Which is what confuses me about this. Many of Heinlein's books were set in the actual present. The same with Pohl. The same with Robinson. Even those set in the past are not necessarily time travel books. An appropriate example is the difference engine, by gibson and sterling. In that book they assume that manufacturing difficulties had been overcome and the age of computers began early.
What I hope Gibson is doing is not being so negative about the future, and focusing on the realistic implications of technology, or the best guess reality based on who we have behaved in the past. As wonderful as Neuromancer and the like are, they added more to the popular culture than the genre of science fiction.
Over the past month I "lost" $1000 due to traffic.
During a year of not working i "lost" 50K.
By downloading my albums from itunes rather than buying locally, my local record shop "loses" perhaps $100 a year.
Of course all of these are not even paper loses, as they do not represent money that is any way real. They barely qualify as opportunity costs.
I really don't understand why these numbers are represented as losses. If a firm pays $.25 for each advertisement, do they lose that money for customers who do not buy anything, or do they just alginate the entire thing as a loss, or do they say it costs, say $2 to acquire a customer. When a computer is down, is this a loss, or cost of doing business with that computer. Presumable if the computer started generating actual losses, the firm would no longer use it. In fact machines are brought in because not using machines costs more money, and represent real losses. Of course, once the machines are in the savings are often not as great as one calculated, which some might consider a loss.
Of course even if this is a loss, it hardly seems significant. It is like $20 per person. The recent price increase at Starbucks likely has a greater impact.
Things like having everything taken away from you is good publicity for those who wish to prevent an action. Why pirate software if you might go bankrupt for doing so. Is it worth risking your family to play a game? Is it worth doing drugs if you can lose everything?
So these stories play right into the hands of people who push these kinds of actions. Detainment and confiscation without due process is a very powerful method of enforcing will upon the masses. Stories such as this allow those who wish to oppress to succeed.
What is unfortunate is that we fight fear with fear. We think laws are unjust because it causes those who break the laws to suffer. This method of fighting injustice does not work because sometimes in order to enforce a law people must suffer.
So why do not have the courage to fight from basic principles. We cannot take a persons stuff away without a conviction of a crime by his peers. We cannot take a persons freedom without probable cause and timely due process. We cannot say that person is a witch, and then kill them knowing full well no jury will convict us. At least in the US, we were founded on the principle that we have inherent rights, and that those rights were given to us by our creator, though it seems that some people believe, especially in the US administration, only Americans were given those rights, or perhaps they do not believe in a creator, even though in their cowardice they claim to.
I think that some people want it all. They are cowards who are perfectly happy to have others suffer without due process, but when it happens to them they whine to the media. Get used to it. The congress is afraid of being called traitors, that they are further increasing the power of the government to take whatever they wish from the people without due process. This little mod chip thing is small potatoes, and meaningless. The power was given freely by the republican representatives of the people.
For instance, if the terms of a credit card is changed, I believe one has the opportunity to cancel the card and continue to pay off the debt. So I can see that if MS and Novel never using new software that uses the GPL3, and never having to worry about the GPLV3. What I do not see is how MS can demand that the are allowed to interact with current software and not be under the current license. That would be like saying that MS users can never be under a licensee more restrictive than the first one agreed to upon initial use fo the software.
What all this misses is there are armies of accountants wieghing risks of an accident against costs to prevent the accident. The system is not perfect, but it is the one we have, and the one we will likely continue to have. Most of the technology in this article is not new. It simply requires a higher budget. Certainly, we could spend money to better detect fatique, but in a worl or limited resouces, is the best use of money to reduce risk?
Perhaps if this accident killed hundreds of people, and resulted in a settlement of tens of billion of dollars, then the landscape might shift. Or, if like automobile manufacturers of past, we find that the accountants are making fundamental compromises of safety merely because the cost of a human life is less than the cost of implementing the features.
About the only thing that does not fall under this risk analysis is the military. This is why they can get away with spending 100 billion dollars a year with only a discrediting italian letter to substantiate the claim, a letter not even endorsed by the US government, but by the british. Otherwise we have to use the imperfect system of where to spend our money and where not to. I don't suppose that we are going to see an increase in taxes, or the removal of the new corporate welfare incorporated a few years ago, or a reduction in say in money spent on standardized test for kids. i think we can have anything we want if it is really worth sacrificing.
This is what should happen. Fix it, or remove the feature, or at least make it optional. This is what Apple normally does. It does not ship with all ports open and sharing on.
I hope this indicates a return to sensibility at Apple. Lately they are trying so hard to be like MS, that the security has suffered. Can't turn off HTML in email is at the top of my security vulnerabilities.
I agree. One of the biggest waste of money on corporate project is the insistence on a specific presentation. Very often the usability and content is crap, you usually can't find what you are looking for, but thousands of hours have been put in to make sure the text is in the exact correct place in every browser. And heaven help you if your eyesight is not so great, as the web site is set up for a specific size screen at a specific font, and the content is so convoluted that a screen reader is no help.
What is even more sad is that CSS2 is provided for those who want exact placement, but developer still insist on using the table hack. Likewise, few project have a well documented stylesheets, generally just adding tags as developers find the need.
Buying spectrum is one thing, but building towers is another. And the FCC has said they are not going to force the cell co to open up their towers.
So the question is how much ads are worth. Right now the low end cell phone market is no different from the land line market, at least if you live in a urbanish area. You can get a phone that you can use to make unlimited local calls in your home market for the same as a land line. As you add more services, the price goes up, but it is still competitive with the land line. At this level, cell co are just trying to create a predictable revenue stream. Even per minute customers are encouraged to add services that generate predictable revenue, like the boost visa card that can easily run up recurring charges of $10-20 per month.
How do ads fit into this? Even if the per minute cost is stipulated as negligible, there still is the assumption that the account will generate revenue. Is a person make 4 calls a day going to generate $30 of revenue? Is there an advertiser out there that will pay $.25 to have you listen to an ad? I could be. But then what about all of the people who aren't going to use the phone?
Then there is the question of the major players, who still value the minutes at a non-trivial value. Are they going to want a user to consume hundreds of minutes of prime time every day in exchange for a few ads? Is ATT or Verizon going to buy in and further reduce the value of their product?
Look at the evidence. I was amazed that ATT let the iPhone plan have unlimited data. It is slow data, but this was a change for the majors. But what they got in return was equally amazing. About 100 million dollars in new billing, spread over the next two years, in 36 hours.
I wonder if ads can generate that kind of revenue.
MS is a convicted monopolist, but we have not seen significant monopoly evidence in a while. The IE, WMP, etc are old hat and not really significant to the current OS. Increasingly sites are designed to meet a general audience, including firefox, and now Safari and iphone. iTunes has a majority of the legal download market, and Zune is not doing that much to change it. The one new success, xBox, has little to do with a monopoly. They invested enough money to make the xBox happen, something they may not be able to do with the Zune due to investor pressures.
So I am surprised to see such a blatant abuse now. I think it indicates how desperate MS is to find a new profitable product. While losses for xBox and Zune for year might exceed 2 billion, Google has shown that is it possible to make money pushing ads if you provide a service that people want. However, even with leveraging the desktop monopoly, MS has not been able to compete with google, at least not in the developed world.
So, they are back to thier old tricks. Exploiting the desktop monopoly in new way. Take a product that should be given away, implement some ads, and bribe people to use the MSN add network instead of googles. I am not saying that Google is any better than MSN, simply that instead of creating a better search product, something we desperately need, MS is taking a shortcut.
It seems to me that personal control over one's life, that is the ability to not just have to agree to do whatever one is told, is separate from the ability to tell others what to do. To put it colloquially, the cat might get to eat the mice, but the cat also get ate by the dog. There are few people that are the truly the top of the heap.
What is interesting about delay of an active sex life is the limitation of immediate satisfaction to effect a future gain. For small kids it is the realization that a dollar might be more valuable that a piece of candy. For older kids it is the realization that stealing that candy may not be the best course of action. A smart girl and responsible boy might not want to limit their future choices by introducing a dependent.
I think that most would agree that such an ability would be useful and respected i the workplace, and that such people, who perhaps need less supervision as they will be less likely to make decisions based on short terms gains, will be left to manage themselves. Such people, in fact, will be more likely to decide what they think needs to be done. Such a person might not have control over other people, but at least they have control over themselves.
So, for a monthly fee I can download low quality music to my phone over a very slow network, which will require me to purchase not only the subscription, but also the data plan, and also pay for any data transfered over the data plan limit, or I can just plug the phone into my computer and transfer a new batch of high quality songs each day, for free.
Hmmm...I wonder what my choice would be.
Now for people without computers, I can see how this is a good deal. I would also say that for kids that into this music, it would be good.
I think the lack of iPhone support is a non issue. I suppose that I can subscribe to emusic myself from my computer, get the music into itunes and then on the iPhone, and not have to waste the phones times downloading music instead of surfing the web. I doubt there is enough bandwidth for both. Next thing you tell me is that I am supposed to be annoyed because I do not have opportunity to spend $3 for ringtones.
most people are going to use MS Office like a fancy typewriter. For them, it does not matter what happens in a few months. The need to write a memo or letter, they need to send it to other people, it might even be printed and filed. Long term projects are opened frequently, and during a version change converted.
There are only two reasons that I even notice. I create many documents and on a frequent basis I need documents from one or two years ago. Often, in the past, I have not been able to open those documents in later versions of MS Office. Second, I don't like being at the latest MS Office version, and I believe that sending out MS Office in old version has negatively impacted various interests in my life. Therefore I try to send stuff out as PDF as much as possible instead of word. Other Office applications have solved the problem that MS does not seem to be able to.
I understand that MS has gotten much better about file management, but those bad experiences moved me away from their product and file format. I completely understand why most people do not move, especially if the product is free, as it is often easier, though riskier and sometimes outright silly, to trade files in MS Office format. But if the extent of your writing is memo, most of the time it will not mater.
So should we all move towards solid ink. Less consumables, no getting dirty refilling toner cartridges. No toner cartridges to throw away, although there is one major consumable every 7-10K pages. I guess if a toner is refilled at least three times it is about the same.
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In my experience OO.org will migrate MS Office files just fine, even files that MS Office itself can't or won't open. Of course not all features are supported on all platforms, but that goes for MS Office as well, not to mention that MS Office does not exist on *nix, which means that those users have to use something else.
I think they are including Star Office more as a special incentive to attract users for googlepack. It probably does not hurt their relationship with Sun either, although I do not see what the long term benefit of that would be.
In any case, it continues the trend that the added value provided by google to mac users is more limited than other platforms. It saddens me that Apple considers them such a good partner. For instance, I would have much rather the iPhone got reliable map results from Mapquest than pretty bad results from google.
The obvious choice for the former is MS Works. Add a version for Linux and Mac, and give it away. If MS is serious about the standard, they should be willing to put some money into it. After all, unless MS is just becoming a games company, they need to invest in the common business side of the company.
At this point the cross platform reference platform is likely to be OO.org, which is inferior as it is a result of reverse engineering, not intimate knowledge of the standard. I don't see how a standard can exist if it does not have a real reference platform and real freely available reference code.
Given that students do not want to take 4 years of math, and in many cases are not required to take four years of math, and there is often not a fourth year of math at the suitable level, in many cases it make sense for the student not to take a fourth year of math, which in many cases would be considered advanced.
Here is what I see happening often. A student manages to squeak through to calculus. Unlike other math classes with can be taught at various levels, Calculus is a college prep course that must be taught with some degree of rigor. However, if one encourages every student to take the class, it cannot be taught with rigor as half the students will be ill prepared, and it will become a review class. Therefore, it might be that some students don't take advanced math. Even if the correct decisions are made in middle school, and even if work is done in high school, not every student will learn what is needed for calculus, and that just hurts those that do. Remember, the teacher will be penalized if too many students fail.
Here is what I have seen. The latest indication that math is important is a study in Science that indicates there is little cross pollination among the high school science courses, but more HS math does improve college science work. Also, and i don't recall where I saw this, there is an indication that the number of years of math is not as important as the rigor of math when it comes to college readiness. This is critical because in the educational debate the number of years and level of course are often used interchangeable, which is invalid. With respect to college, one needs four years of increasingly rigorous courses. When it comes to just educating the masses to maximize their ability, exposure is often the most important thing, and for that we may just need a capstone survey math course.
Then of course we have the sheep that only believe what they want to hear. This is the type of person that will believe that he or she can own a BMW for $300 a month, or that the status quo is long term even though all historical evidence suggests that things change. This is the type of person who believed it when the nuclear power industry said the power would be too cheap to meter, and then blocked out the fact that americans were charged for power never supplied. Or that everyone could own a home, with cheap interest, as the prices would just keep rising forever, never mind that current homeowners suffer due to higher taxes. And these people will probably never acknowledge the $300+ billion dollar welfare payment made to banks this morning.
The one belief i have is that the world would be a better place if more people were suspicious when someone tell them what they wanted to hear. That there is enough oil to last for generations. That there is no substantial long term negative effect on the environment. That we can just keep on doing what we are doing, and no one has to worry. Of course, this is good for economy as people continue to consume, but perhaps bad for america as if we believe there is no reason to change, then there is no reason to innovate, and we will be left behind. It is not so much that science tells us something is true, but that history and common sense tells us that certain things tend to happen, and we have survived by staying ahead of them.
I never understood this. If you can afford such things, buy them. Otherwise go and buy stuff you can afford. All these knock off really just make the "real" items kind of worthless. Unlike 10 or 20 years ago, now when I see a person with an LV bag, I just think they are a poser, not so interested in the design, but trying to cover some inadequacy.
The sad thing is that this is infecting the computer world more than it used to. Now that apple is formidable fashion statement, it is harder for me to take it seriously as my workhorse machine. I mean I have always used Apples because they focused more on work and less on the toy aspect, but things are changing. At least they now have the additional serious background as a developers machine.
OTOH, most people will work around a students schedule. A student will not respond to threats that his or her family is going starve, or they will contact his or her boss and get him fired, or that he or she will have a ruined credit rating and never buy a house.
OF course, it could just be that most college student are just kids, with their innocent belief that any law that limits personal convenience is unjust. But this logic, unlicensed music download must be just because otherwise it would be more difficult to get thier music. As as the action is just, though perhaps illegal, it must be fought.
At present the emerging profit center is truly personal data, emails and documents and spreadsheets. Users are putting all these on free services like Google with a thought of what how it will be used. Search data is small potatoes in comparison.
In fact if someone like MS, with money to spend and no need to make an immediate profit, developed a superior search engine and did not use the search query beyond the immediate display of ads along with the search, that site would might likely have a significant competitive advantage.
It is the same thing with image and cookies. There were not initially huge problems, but these problem were fixed along with the pop up problem, as the basic security assumptions were the same. It would have good for Java and flash to be fixed as well. Flash is fixed in the latest Camino. I wish java would be fixed as well. There is little reason to not give user control of his desktop. Even on TV, th user had the ability to change the channel.
In fact the gin to coffee transition as a contributing factor to the industrial revolution has a lot of legs. I heard it from an englishman about 15 years ago. Whether it is a antecedent event, a concurrent event, or just a coincidence is up for debate. What is true, however, in all these stories that people started working to create a surplus of goods and services leaving the subsistence culture far behind.
Here is my concern. If I save in the funky MS format, then I have hope of opening the file on MS Windows machines and for the time being Mac. If I save the file in ODF or even the old sw*, then I can open the file on any modern OS, as they all have version of OO.org or Star Office or the like that will run. OTOH, if I use and save in iWork formats, I am back to vendor lockin. It makes little sense for apple to be playing this game. I find iWork to be superior to OO.org in many ways that MS Office is not. The only reason not to use it the random format.
The only reason any of this technology is necessary is that we have gotten used to it. And it does cause problems. For one thing, no one has time to think, just look at how volatile the stock market has become. The cell phone has killed real social interaction, just like the telephone killed the family evening time. I am not saying any of this is bad, but that there have always been negative effects along with benifits.
The common thread to all this is efficiency and cost savings. For instance, with full web access on the go I no longer need to spend $50 on a Key map. It sucks for the mapmaker, but is good for me. I no longer need to spend $1 to get a telephone number when I can just look it up on the web. And with full data acess, I don't need to waste precious minutes on utility calls when I could be using those minutes to talk to my friends.
If all that matters in a phone is size and battery life and voice quality,then yes the phones are becoming less useful. But as the initial telephones showed, for which people paid a huge amount of money, the key thing for a communication device is overall reliability and the mode of communication, not sound quality. The telephone is better than the telegraph because one does not need an expensive telegraph operator and runners. The iPhone is better than most other phones because not only does it allow a full range of communication options, it requires no expensive back ends(IM is problematic as there is no standard protocol).
It this a good thing? I don't know. But I think one thing humans want, and are willing to give up many things for, is rapid efficient communication, even if we arguable never actually communicate.
Which is what confuses me about this. Many of Heinlein's books were set in the actual present. The same with Pohl. The same with Robinson. Even those set in the past are not necessarily time travel books. An appropriate example is the difference engine, by gibson and sterling. In that book they assume that manufacturing difficulties had been overcome and the age of computers began early.
What I hope Gibson is doing is not being so negative about the future, and focusing on the realistic implications of technology, or the best guess reality based on who we have behaved in the past. As wonderful as Neuromancer and the like are, they added more to the popular culture than the genre of science fiction.
During a year of not working i "lost" 50K.
By downloading my albums from itunes rather than buying locally, my local record shop "loses" perhaps $100 a year.
Of course all of these are not even paper loses, as they do not represent money that is any way real. They barely qualify as opportunity costs.
I really don't understand why these numbers are represented as losses. If a firm pays $.25 for each advertisement, do they lose that money for customers who do not buy anything, or do they just alginate the entire thing as a loss, or do they say it costs, say $2 to acquire a customer. When a computer is down, is this a loss, or cost of doing business with that computer. Presumable if the computer started generating actual losses, the firm would no longer use it. In fact machines are brought in because not using machines costs more money, and represent real losses. Of course, once the machines are in the savings are often not as great as one calculated, which some might consider a loss.
Of course even if this is a loss, it hardly seems significant. It is like $20 per person. The recent price increase at Starbucks likely has a greater impact.
So these stories play right into the hands of people who push these kinds of actions. Detainment and confiscation without due process is a very powerful method of enforcing will upon the masses. Stories such as this allow those who wish to oppress to succeed.
What is unfortunate is that we fight fear with fear. We think laws are unjust because it causes those who break the laws to suffer. This method of fighting injustice does not work because sometimes in order to enforce a law people must suffer.
So why do not have the courage to fight from basic principles. We cannot take a persons stuff away without a conviction of a crime by his peers. We cannot take a persons freedom without probable cause and timely due process. We cannot say that person is a witch, and then kill them knowing full well no jury will convict us. At least in the US, we were founded on the principle that we have inherent rights, and that those rights were given to us by our creator, though it seems that some people believe, especially in the US administration, only Americans were given those rights, or perhaps they do not believe in a creator, even though in their cowardice they claim to.
I think that some people want it all. They are cowards who are perfectly happy to have others suffer without due process, but when it happens to them they whine to the media. Get used to it. The congress is afraid of being called traitors, that they are further increasing the power of the government to take whatever they wish from the people without due process. This little mod chip thing is small potatoes, and meaningless. The power was given freely by the republican representatives of the people.
For instance, if the terms of a credit card is changed, I believe one has the opportunity to cancel the card and continue to pay off the debt. So I can see that if MS and Novel never using new software that uses the GPL3, and never having to worry about the GPLV3. What I do not see is how MS can demand that the are allowed to interact with current software and not be under the current license. That would be like saying that MS users can never be under a licensee more restrictive than the first one agreed to upon initial use fo the software.
Perhaps if this accident killed hundreds of people, and resulted in a settlement of tens of billion of dollars, then the landscape might shift. Or, if like automobile manufacturers of past, we find that the accountants are making fundamental compromises of safety merely because the cost of a human life is less than the cost of implementing the features.
About the only thing that does not fall under this risk analysis is the military. This is why they can get away with spending 100 billion dollars a year with only a discrediting italian letter to substantiate the claim, a letter not even endorsed by the US government, but by the british. Otherwise we have to use the imperfect system of where to spend our money and where not to. I don't suppose that we are going to see an increase in taxes, or the removal of the new corporate welfare incorporated a few years ago, or a reduction in say in money spent on standardized test for kids. i think we can have anything we want if it is really worth sacrificing.
I hope this indicates a return to sensibility at Apple. Lately they are trying so hard to be like MS, that the security has suffered. Can't turn off HTML in email is at the top of my security vulnerabilities.
What is even more sad is that CSS2 is provided for those who want exact placement, but developer still insist on using the table hack. Likewise, few project have a well documented stylesheets, generally just adding tags as developers find the need.
So the question is how much ads are worth. Right now the low end cell phone market is no different from the land line market, at least if you live in a urbanish area. You can get a phone that you can use to make unlimited local calls in your home market for the same as a land line. As you add more services, the price goes up, but it is still competitive with the land line. At this level, cell co are just trying to create a predictable revenue stream. Even per minute customers are encouraged to add services that generate predictable revenue, like the boost visa card that can easily run up recurring charges of $10-20 per month.
How do ads fit into this? Even if the per minute cost is stipulated as negligible, there still is the assumption that the account will generate revenue. Is a person make 4 calls a day going to generate $30 of revenue? Is there an advertiser out there that will pay $.25 to have you listen to an ad? I could be. But then what about all of the people who aren't going to use the phone?
Then there is the question of the major players, who still value the minutes at a non-trivial value. Are they going to want a user to consume hundreds of minutes of prime time every day in exchange for a few ads? Is ATT or Verizon going to buy in and further reduce the value of their product?
Look at the evidence. I was amazed that ATT let the iPhone plan have unlimited data. It is slow data, but this was a change for the majors. But what they got in return was equally amazing. About 100 million dollars in new billing, spread over the next two years, in 36 hours.
I wonder if ads can generate that kind of revenue.
So I am surprised to see such a blatant abuse now. I think it indicates how desperate MS is to find a new profitable product. While losses for xBox and Zune for year might exceed 2 billion, Google has shown that is it possible to make money pushing ads if you provide a service that people want. However, even with leveraging the desktop monopoly, MS has not been able to compete with google, at least not in the developed world.
So, they are back to thier old tricks. Exploiting the desktop monopoly in new way. Take a product that should be given away, implement some ads, and bribe people to use the MSN add network instead of googles. I am not saying that Google is any better than MSN, simply that instead of creating a better search product, something we desperately need, MS is taking a shortcut.
What is interesting about delay of an active sex life is the limitation of immediate satisfaction to effect a future gain. For small kids it is the realization that a dollar might be more valuable that a piece of candy. For older kids it is the realization that stealing that candy may not be the best course of action. A smart girl and responsible boy might not want to limit their future choices by introducing a dependent.
I think that most would agree that such an ability would be useful and respected i the workplace, and that such people, who perhaps need less supervision as they will be less likely to make decisions based on short terms gains, will be left to manage themselves. Such people, in fact, will be more likely to decide what they think needs to be done. Such a person might not have control over other people, but at least they have control over themselves.
so when I install Mac OS 10.5 on my powerbook, it is not Unix?
Hmmm...I wonder what my choice would be.
Now for people without computers, I can see how this is a good deal. I would also say that for kids that into this music, it would be good.
I think the lack of iPhone support is a non issue. I suppose that I can subscribe to emusic myself from my computer, get the music into itunes and then on the iPhone, and not have to waste the phones times downloading music instead of surfing the web. I doubt there is enough bandwidth for both. Next thing you tell me is that I am supposed to be annoyed because I do not have opportunity to spend $3 for ringtones.
There are only two reasons that I even notice. I create many documents and on a frequent basis I need documents from one or two years ago. Often, in the past, I have not been able to open those documents in later versions of MS Office. Second, I don't like being at the latest MS Office version, and I believe that sending out MS Office in old version has negatively impacted various interests in my life. Therefore I try to send stuff out as PDF as much as possible instead of word. Other Office applications have solved the problem that MS does not seem to be able to.
I understand that MS has gotten much better about file management, but those bad experiences moved me away from their product and file format. I completely understand why most people do not move, especially if the product is free, as it is often easier, though riskier and sometimes outright silly, to trade files in MS Office format. But if the extent of your writing is memo, most of the time it will not mater.
So should we all move towards solid ink. Less consumables, no getting dirty refilling toner cartridges. No toner cartridges to throw away, although there is one major consumable every 7-10K pages. I guess if a toner is refilled at least three times it is about the same.