if you hadn't said something, i would have posted a top-level comment: Sun's java-dev listserv is abuzz with reports that this upgrade can break Java (the reported problem is a segfault when java attempts to run).
so be careful. i have not personally installed it yet.
i'll tell you why: hardware. despite its reputation for industry-leading quality hardware, i have had an incredible string of bad luck with my laptops.
originally i bought an iBook, but in 29 days the monitor pooped out in a hailstorm of static (strange, but apparently not uncommon). they replaced the 'book (under 30 days is considered DOA) with a new iBook, which also pooped out in the exact same way in exactly 29 days.
i should have cut my losses right then and demanded my money back, but i allowed them to give me a PowerBook trade-up instead. this would have been great except that the PowerBook had the dreaded Bright Spots on the monitor. as a computer professional, i had to wait a while before i could give up my computer long enough to get it fixed, but i did eventually do that.
so at that point i would have had a PowerBook for the price of an iBook, except that the repair technician didn't quite do his job right: the monitor didn't quite close down and latch properly. also, every now and then the monitor would go dark. i mean, the image would still display on the screen but there was no brightness -- i think the power supply to the florescent tube light was failing, possibly because the technician's poor work left a bad signal connection at the hinge. it would always come back on again when i closed the case and reopened it, though, so i didn't worry about it.
i didn't worry about it, that is, until last week when the screen went dark and wouldn't come back on after a power cycle.
so let me recap: the first iBook's screen, the second iBook's screen, the PowerBook's first screen, AND the PowerBook's second screen all failed on me. i bought the first iBook about twenty months ago. on Monday my machine will go into the shop (and of course i'll be paying cash for this because it's out of warranty) and i will try my fifth laptop monitor.
if OS X weren't by far the best operating system software available on the planet earth, i would not even consider again purchasing Apple hardware (and i'm a life-long Mac man and zealot). this was my third Apple hardware purchase (I had an LC III and an iMac) and i would love nothing more than to make it my last. i have arrived at the end of my patience with respect to Apple hardware. if there are any more problems with this computer, i will abandon the Mac platform (with my next laptop purchase) in favor of commodity hardware and free software. i'd rather not do that, though, because OS X really is that much better than anything else i've ever used. really.
this is a response to your question and the responses to your post which agree that re-using is not recycling. i disagree, and i present a canonical definition as evidence: recycle.
in my mind, you re-cycle something when you take it out of its original use and put it to another use, even if the second use is the same as the first (such as, as someone said, painting a bookshelf and putting it in a new room).
you have cited a definition with which i do not agree. we will have to agree that to you, "open source" means something more than to some others, such as me.
you know what? the Wiki explicitly mentions the disagreement we are having; it appears that you are a strongly-disapproving member of the OSF community, whereas i am a common user.
i think you're confusing free software and open source software. i think "simply" seeing the code *does* make it open source. if you can modify and redistribut it, that makes the software free.
Yeah. Really. That's my question: each of these letters contains a statement (which you quoted) that the information in the letter is accurate under penalty of perjury. So... uh... where are all the perjury trials? Where are the countersuits? I'm under the impression that making false claims in legal matters constitutes fraud. What am I missing? I must be missing something.
The article says that the recipients' lawyers will be contacting the senders' lawyers, so maybe we'll see a little counteraction; but somehow I doubt it.
In F911 he says that the Bush family is closely tied to the bin Laden family, without saying that the bin Laden family long, long ago disowned their errant son, Osama, and denounced his tactics (that is, terrorism). I myself personally happen to know that ties to the bin Laden family in fact do NOT imply ties to Osama himself, but to a person who does not know that, Moore would have implied that Bush was somehow cozy with Osama, which is not only untrue but quite the opposite of the truth.
In BFC, he says that right after Columbine, the NRA swooped in and held a big pro-gun rally, even over the objections of the locals and the local politicians. Moore neatly leaves out the facts that (1) the NRA meeting had been planned for over a year (so it's not like the NRA said "hey, let's go have a gun rally where that shooting just happened"); and (2) that the NRA in fact DID cancel every part of their convention except one, a shareholders' meeting or somesuch, which was REQUIRED by FEDERAL LAW to take place (that is, it is illegal to change the time and place of that type of meeting on such short notice). So in this case, in reality the NRA in essence did cancel their convention, but Moore leaves out that context and says that the meeting went on as planned, not mentioning the fact that the NRA's hands were tied by federal law.
Furthermore, in that same scene, Moore shows Charlton Heston holding up a gun and saying "from my cold dead fingers", implying that the quote came from the requested-to-be-canceled convention, but that quote actually came from a totally different gun rally years earlier. (There are lots of complaints about the cutting from clip to clip, in BFC, creating inappropriate contexts.)
That was just from my memory so don't take it as God's gospel. It's not hard to find lists of complaints about the contexts Moore creates which are opposite to the truth.
Perhaps I should be clear that I'm a hippie liberal and love peace and love and harmony; that I will be voting against Bush; etc. But I have a big problem with Moore because he uses half-truths and half-lies to push his agenda. It doesn't matter that I agree with his agenda; I dislike his tactics. I do have respect for Moore, though, since I saw an interview where he was asked "so is this movie a fair depiction of reality?" and Moore said "oh good lord no, it's only one side of the story". At least he's up-front about THAT. And also, it is true that Bush uses half-truths and not-quite-lies to push his agenda, too: which also makes me mad.
didn't "The Right" complain that Clinton was a potsmoking draft dodger in 1992, before running a cokesnorting draft dodger in 2000? didn't "The Right" champion States Rights so people could drive fast, before refusing States Rights so people could smoke weed in peace? didn't "The Right" directly cause the Enron/Worldcom mess by pushing deregulation? didn't "The Right" say that our government was too big and too expensive before they gained control of THE ENTIRE FEDERAL LEGISLATION PROCESS (both houses of congress and the White House) and grew the government even bigger?
I, personally, am still mad about the Republican Revolution. Shit, the only good thing to come out of that was Workfare.
No that's not true. F451 might be like the Rodney King video, but the "misleading" part is not that the officers don't beat up negros every night, rather that the media never showed the parts of that video where Rodney lunged at and tried to attack the officers. By only showing the part where twenty white officers kicked a downed black man, the media took away the context of the beating. Now, most people would nevertheless say that beating a man senseless is not the appropriate response to a suspect hitting an officer, but that is the context of the entire event, and context is important.
Likewise, Mr. Moore may show you some detail of Bush's presidency, but by leaving out the context he robs you of the ability to make an informed judgement. Actually, Moore often does even worse by not only removing the original context, but by implying a totally different, often contradictory context.
It comes down to this: context is everything. Without context, it's next to impossible to apply critical thought.
that isn't funny, it's informative. the official Modern Language Association recommendations for which time zone to use is that if your audience is multi-timezone, and if EST is one of those multi zones, use Eastern Standard Time. no doubt this is because of NY and DC.
i don't understand. you said, in one breath, that you don't remember the last CD you bought and that you buy lots of "discs" (which I can only assume is the same as a CD) from your favorite bands. do you or do you not buy CDs?
my problem with this whole music thing is that i don't, for the most part, like to download individual songs. i prefer whole albums, right, since most good artists put out whole discs of worthwhile music. so if i'm not willing to buy a CD before i hear it, i have to wait until i come across a friend with the disc so i can grab it. even then, the only CDs i buy (i actually buy quite a few) are second-hand, which in some way makes me feel like i'm sending less money to the middle men in hollywood.
my friends and i were wondering recently: if the music industry has to push a small number of artists with a small number of songs, why don't they bother to make them good artists with good songs? i mean, seriously now, what the fuck is this Brittney and Agulera and Lavigne shit? there ARE good artists, there ARE good songs, why not payola THOSE songs onto the radio?
That's a loss leader. As a customer, I consider the use of loss leaders to be sneaky at best, deceptive or even fraudulent at worst ("hey, we have the best prices in town, here's an example"). Even if you don't consider the use of loss leaders amoral, you can't possibly fault the customer for taking advantage of it.
Of course, you never said that you personally fault the customer. I just want to make sure that all the mods who called your comment insightful didn't think that, either.
Gee, I don't know, but if I **WERE** the guy at Bucket Reviews, I'd be ashamed that I didn't know the subjunctive mood of the English language, since my job was to write in that language.
quite the opposite. "Real" capitalism, many liberals (such as myself) think, is a "real" problem. "Pure" capitalism features efficiency (a good thing) but it also has many features which (we) liberals think are bad. Pure capitalism generally leads to a deep rich-poor dichotomy, widespread lying/deception, a disregard for public good, monopolies, and lots of other things we don't like.
That's why, over time, the capitalistic market in the United States has become LESS pure, not MORE pure. Historically (for example) we have decided that we want laws to (try to) prevent monolopies -- because we think monopolies are bad. We also have (for instance) food labeling laws, since food companies wouldn't put labels on their food otherwise. We also have standards and oversight of the many industries to insure safety (meat, automobiles, etc.). Additionally, we have minimum wage laws and progressive income taxes, which are a weak but real attempt to mitigate the rich-taking-advantage-of-the-poor problem.
All of these regulations take AWAY from "real" and "pure" capitalism, and as such they are often opposed by pure-capitalists.
As a consumer and a citizen, I prefer to have laws which protect my safety and my interests, even at the expense of pure capitalism. I believe that (contrary to your claim) I get BETTER goods and services from this regulated economy.
On the other hand, I also believe that this regulated capitalism is better than, say, the command economies of the USSR, etc. I believe capitalism is better because, as stated, capitalism tends to be more efficient (read: cheaper goods) and better at providing the goods that are wanted by consumers (me).
that actually always really pissed me off. actually, the problem was clicking a mailto: link in Mozilla which would always open up an Mozilla mail message. i mean, fine, if you're not going to teach Mozilla how to get my default email client from my OS, then at least give me the option of, say, totally ignoring mailto links or something. SOMETHING.
i guess in the end the solution was not to use Mozilla, but to use one of the browser-only versions instead. that kind of makes sense, since Moz is in fact a monolithic app.
tangent: you know what really chaps my ass about manpages? it's that they don't come with examples. okay, great, thanks for listing the two hundred different configurations available, but what i really what is "to do this, type this" and if there are two or three examples showing common usage, i can probably figure out the rest.
commands like grep, wget, more, cat, and many others i have a basic grasp of, but i use the command line infrequently enough that to string them all together into a useful command i need to check the manpages, but manpages are really not as useful as they ought to be.
You said that there is no learning curve to Word, which I find laughable. I've only tried Word once, maybe twice, and I can tell you that the reason I didn't use it another time is that it was really, really hard to use. That was back in the Clippy days, and it took me waaaaay too long to give Clippy the command which I figured was the most obvious command: "go away and don't come back". Seriously. I recall that there was a "go away" command, but Clippy kept coming back.
But of course Clippy is gone now (a significant bug fix, I'd say). But the thing that keeps me off of Word was the subsequent problem I had: I was trying to make a document that included a bulleted list. When I started my list, Word "figured out" what I was doing and slapped me (without asking, but I digress) into Bulleted List Mode. Great! Only one thing: I didn't like their layout details for whatever reason. I tried to discover how to change those options, but couldn't find the settings (this is the "learning curve" of which you speak). Well, fine, maybe you can't change those settings, I don't know, so I decided I'd just get out of Bulleted List Mode and make up my list on my own with bullets and tabs. So I searched (and searched and searched) for a way to get the hell out of BLM and, shit, after what seemed like hours (a good fifteen minutes, probably) I just gave up. Word was completely useless, because it didn't do what I wanted automatically, and it was difficult/impossible to tell it to do what I wanted.
Now, I'm not a foolish guy. I went to an Ivy League college, majored in Computer Science, and now I develop software for a living. I don't claim to be a Microsoft-product wizard or anything, but I figure I can adequately navigate most software. Admittedly, I didn't read the user documentation, and I did give up after only fifteen minutes, but shit how hard does it need to be to tell the software NOT to do something? Shouldn't NOT doing anything be the default behavior? And if not, shouldn't it be easy to STOP it from doing whatever it's doing?
When I need a text editor, which is relatively rare, I use something basic like TextEdit (standard Mac software, for those who don't know). All I need is text size, alignment, decoration, and tab settings; so I don't think I suffer from a lack of features. Most programs like TextEdit even save in RTF, which is nice because then people who use Word can read my files easily.
I'm just sayin', Word is hard enough to use when you have no prior knowledge. I don't disagree with anything else you said.
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if you hadn't said something, i would have posted a top-level comment: Sun's java-dev listserv is abuzz with reports that this upgrade can break Java (the reported problem is a segfault when java attempts to run).
so be careful. i have not personally installed it yet.
i'll tell you why: hardware. despite its reputation for industry-leading quality hardware, i have had an incredible string of bad luck with my laptops.
originally i bought an iBook, but in 29 days the monitor pooped out in a hailstorm of static (strange, but apparently not uncommon). they replaced the 'book (under 30 days is considered DOA) with a new iBook, which also pooped out in the exact same way in exactly 29 days.
i should have cut my losses right then and demanded my money back, but i allowed them to give me a PowerBook trade-up instead. this would have been great except that the PowerBook had the dreaded Bright Spots on the monitor. as a computer professional, i had to wait a while before i could give up my computer long enough to get it fixed, but i did eventually do that.
so at that point i would have had a PowerBook for the price of an iBook, except that the repair technician didn't quite do his job right: the monitor didn't quite close down and latch properly. also, every now and then the monitor would go dark. i mean, the image would still display on the screen but there was no brightness -- i think the power supply to the florescent tube light was failing, possibly because the technician's poor work left a bad signal connection at the hinge. it would always come back on again when i closed the case and reopened it, though, so i didn't worry about it.
i didn't worry about it, that is, until last week when the screen went dark and wouldn't come back on after a power cycle.
so let me recap: the first iBook's screen, the second iBook's screen, the PowerBook's first screen, AND the PowerBook's second screen all failed on me. i bought the first iBook about twenty months ago. on Monday my machine will go into the shop (and of course i'll be paying cash for this because it's out of warranty) and i will try my fifth laptop monitor.
if OS X weren't by far the best operating system software available on the planet earth, i would not even consider again purchasing Apple hardware (and i'm a life-long Mac man and zealot). this was my third Apple hardware purchase (I had an LC III and an iMac) and i would love nothing more than to make it my last. i have arrived at the end of my patience with respect to Apple hardware. if there are any more problems with this computer, i will abandon the Mac platform (with my next laptop purchase) in favor of commodity hardware and free software. i'd rather not do that, though, because OS X really is that much better than anything else i've ever used. really.
this is a response to your question and the responses to your post which agree that re-using is not recycling. i disagree, and i present a canonical definition as evidence: recycle.
in my mind, you re-cycle something when you take it out of its original use and put it to another use, even if the second use is the same as the first (such as, as someone said, painting a bookshelf and putting it in a new room).
"should of built"? huh?
you have cited a definition with which i do not agree. we will have to agree that to you, "open source" means something more than to some others, such as me.
you know what? the Wiki explicitly mentions the disagreement we are having; it appears that you are a strongly-disapproving member of the OSF community, whereas i am a common user.
i think you're confusing free software and open source software. i think "simply" seeing the code *does* make it open source. if you can modify and redistribut it, that makes the software free.
point of order: this story posting does not have a witty "from the...dept." tagline.
Yeah. Really. That's my question: each of these letters contains a statement (which you quoted) that the information in the letter is accurate under penalty of perjury. So... uh... where are all the perjury trials? Where are the countersuits? I'm under the impression that making false claims in legal matters constitutes fraud. What am I missing? I must be missing something.
The article says that the recipients' lawyers will be contacting the senders' lawyers, so maybe we'll see a little counteraction; but somehow I doubt it.
Off the top of my head?
In F911 he says that the Bush family is closely tied to the bin Laden family, without saying that the bin Laden family long, long ago disowned their errant son, Osama, and denounced his tactics (that is, terrorism). I myself personally happen to know that ties to the bin Laden family in fact do NOT imply ties to Osama himself, but to a person who does not know that, Moore would have implied that Bush was somehow cozy with Osama, which is not only untrue but quite the opposite of the truth.
In BFC, he says that right after Columbine, the NRA swooped in and held a big pro-gun rally, even over the objections of the locals and the local politicians. Moore neatly leaves out the facts that (1) the NRA meeting had been planned for over a year (so it's not like the NRA said "hey, let's go have a gun rally where that shooting just happened"); and (2) that the NRA in fact DID cancel every part of their convention except one, a shareholders' meeting or somesuch, which was REQUIRED by FEDERAL LAW to take place (that is, it is illegal to change the time and place of that type of meeting on such short notice). So in this case, in reality the NRA in essence did cancel their convention, but Moore leaves out that context and says that the meeting went on as planned, not mentioning the fact that the NRA's hands were tied by federal law.
Furthermore, in that same scene, Moore shows Charlton Heston holding up a gun and saying "from my cold dead fingers", implying that the quote came from the requested-to-be-canceled convention, but that quote actually came from a totally different gun rally years earlier. (There are lots of complaints about the cutting from clip to clip, in BFC, creating inappropriate contexts.)
That was just from my memory so don't take it as God's gospel. It's not hard to find lists of complaints about the contexts Moore creates which are opposite to the truth.
Perhaps I should be clear that I'm a hippie liberal and love peace and love and harmony; that I will be voting against Bush; etc. But I have a big problem with Moore because he uses half-truths and half-lies to push his agenda. It doesn't matter that I agree with his agenda; I dislike his tactics. I do have respect for Moore, though, since I saw an interview where he was asked "so is this movie a fair depiction of reality?" and Moore said "oh good lord no, it's only one side of the story". At least he's up-front about THAT. And also, it is true that Bush uses half-truths and not-quite-lies to push his agenda, too: which also makes me mad.
"The Right" says plenty of totally kooky stuff.
didn't "The Right" complain that Clinton was a potsmoking draft dodger in 1992, before running a cokesnorting draft dodger in 2000? didn't "The Right" champion States Rights so people could drive fast, before refusing States Rights so people could smoke weed in peace? didn't "The Right" directly cause the Enron/Worldcom mess by pushing deregulation? didn't "The Right" say that our government was too big and too expensive before they gained control of THE ENTIRE FEDERAL LEGISLATION PROCESS (both houses of congress and the White House) and grew the government even bigger?
I, personally, am still mad about the Republican Revolution. Shit, the only good thing to come out of that was Workfare.
The Bush campaign deserves everything they get on the propaganda front because they dish it out non stop
i don't like bush or moore for this reason, but you are totally correct
well, 50.2 percent of us see it your way
No that's not true. F451 might be like the Rodney King video, but the "misleading" part is not that the officers don't beat up negros every night, rather that the media never showed the parts of that video where Rodney lunged at and tried to attack the officers. By only showing the part where twenty white officers kicked a downed black man, the media took away the context of the beating. Now, most people would nevertheless say that beating a man senseless is not the appropriate response to a suspect hitting an officer, but that is the context of the entire event, and context is important.
Likewise, Mr. Moore may show you some detail of Bush's presidency, but by leaving out the context he robs you of the ability to make an informed judgement. Actually, Moore often does even worse by not only removing the original context, but by implying a totally different, often contradictory context.
It comes down to this: context is everything. Without context, it's next to impossible to apply critical thought.
that isn't funny, it's informative. the official Modern Language Association recommendations for which time zone to use is that if your audience is multi-timezone, and if EST is one of those multi zones, use Eastern Standard Time. no doubt this is because of NY and DC.
i don't understand. you said, in one breath, that you don't remember the last CD you bought and that you buy lots of "discs" (which I can only assume is the same as a CD) from your favorite bands. do you or do you not buy CDs?
my problem with this whole music thing is that i don't, for the most part, like to download individual songs. i prefer whole albums, right, since most good artists put out whole discs of worthwhile music. so if i'm not willing to buy a CD before i hear it, i have to wait until i come across a friend with the disc so i can grab it. even then, the only CDs i buy (i actually buy quite a few) are second-hand, which in some way makes me feel like i'm sending less money to the middle men in hollywood.
my friends and i were wondering recently: if the music industry has to push a small number of artists with a small number of songs, why don't they bother to make them good artists with good songs? i mean, seriously now, what the fuck is this Brittney and Agulera and Lavigne shit? there ARE good artists, there ARE good songs, why not payola THOSE songs onto the radio?
to which you looked back at her with a straight face and said "yes, with that neighbor lady".
i don't get it.
That's a loss leader. As a customer, I consider the use of loss leaders to be sneaky at best, deceptive or even fraudulent at worst ("hey, we have the best prices in town, here's an example"). Even if you don't consider the use of loss leaders amoral, you can't possibly fault the customer for taking advantage of it.
Of course, you never said that you personally fault the customer. I just want to make sure that all the mods who called your comment insightful didn't think that, either.
I'm not familiar with Bucket Reviews, but:
"If I was a Democrat, I'd be ashamed"
Gee, I don't know, but if I **WERE** the guy at Bucket Reviews, I'd be ashamed that I didn't know the subjunctive mood of the English language, since my job was to write in that language.
"technically the equivalent to stealing Bibles".
um, no it isn't. i hope you realize why.
quite the opposite. "Real" capitalism, many liberals (such as myself) think, is a "real" problem. "Pure" capitalism features efficiency (a good thing) but it also has many features which (we) liberals think are bad. Pure capitalism generally leads to a deep rich-poor dichotomy, widespread lying/deception, a disregard for public good, monopolies, and lots of other things we don't like.
That's why, over time, the capitalistic market in the United States has become LESS pure, not MORE pure. Historically (for example) we have decided that we want laws to (try to) prevent monolopies -- because we think monopolies are bad. We also have (for instance) food labeling laws, since food companies wouldn't put labels on their food otherwise. We also have standards and oversight of the many industries to insure safety (meat, automobiles, etc.). Additionally, we have minimum wage laws and progressive income taxes, which are a weak but real attempt to mitigate the rich-taking-advantage-of-the-poor problem.
All of these regulations take AWAY from "real" and "pure" capitalism, and as such they are often opposed by pure-capitalists.
As a consumer and a citizen, I prefer to have laws which protect my safety and my interests, even at the expense of pure capitalism. I believe that (contrary to your claim) I get BETTER goods and services from this regulated economy.
On the other hand, I also believe that this regulated capitalism is better than, say, the command economies of the USSR, etc. I believe capitalism is better because, as stated, capitalism tends to be more efficient (read: cheaper goods) and better at providing the goods that are wanted by consumers (me).
while that is true, moderation can also be achieved by politely turning down all but the engagements you consider most attractive.
that actually always really pissed me off. actually, the problem was clicking a mailto: link in Mozilla which would always open up an Mozilla mail message. i mean, fine, if you're not going to teach Mozilla how to get my default email client from my OS, then at least give me the option of, say, totally ignoring mailto links or something. SOMETHING.
i guess in the end the solution was not to use Mozilla, but to use one of the browser-only versions instead. that kind of makes sense, since Moz is in fact a monolithic app.
tangent: you know what really chaps my ass about manpages? it's that they don't come with examples. okay, great, thanks for listing the two hundred different configurations available, but what i really what is "to do this, type this" and if there are two or three examples showing common usage, i can probably figure out the rest.
commands like grep, wget, more, cat, and many others i have a basic grasp of, but i use the command line infrequently enough that to string them all together into a useful command i need to check the manpages, but manpages are really not as useful as they ought to be.
My friend, a very minor point of order:
You said that there is no learning curve to Word, which I find laughable. I've only tried Word once, maybe twice, and I can tell you that the reason I didn't use it another time is that it was really, really hard to use. That was back in the Clippy days, and it took me waaaaay too long to give Clippy the command which I figured was the most obvious command: "go away and don't come back". Seriously. I recall that there was a "go away" command, but Clippy kept coming back.
But of course Clippy is gone now (a significant bug fix, I'd say). But the thing that keeps me off of Word was the subsequent problem I had: I was trying to make a document that included a bulleted list. When I started my list, Word "figured out" what I was doing and slapped me (without asking, but I digress) into Bulleted List Mode. Great! Only one thing: I didn't like their layout details for whatever reason. I tried to discover how to change those options, but couldn't find the settings (this is the "learning curve" of which you speak). Well, fine, maybe you can't change those settings, I don't know, so I decided I'd just get out of Bulleted List Mode and make up my list on my own with bullets and tabs. So I searched (and searched and searched) for a way to get the hell out of BLM and, shit, after what seemed like hours (a good fifteen minutes, probably) I just gave up. Word was completely useless, because it didn't do what I wanted automatically, and it was difficult/impossible to tell it to do what I wanted.
Now, I'm not a foolish guy. I went to an Ivy League college, majored in Computer Science, and now I develop software for a living. I don't claim to be a Microsoft-product wizard or anything, but I figure I can adequately navigate most software. Admittedly, I didn't read the user documentation, and I did give up after only fifteen minutes, but shit how hard does it need to be to tell the software NOT to do something? Shouldn't NOT doing anything be the default behavior? And if not, shouldn't it be easy to STOP it from doing whatever it's doing?
When I need a text editor, which is relatively rare, I use something basic like TextEdit (standard Mac software, for those who don't know). All I need is text size, alignment, decoration, and tab settings; so I don't think I suffer from a lack of features. Most programs like TextEdit even save in RTF, which is nice because then people who use Word can read my files easily.
I'm just sayin', Word is hard enough to use when you have no prior knowledge. I don't disagree with anything else you said.