Well it's not exactly for you. It's not for me, either. I'm quite happy to administer my own system irrespective of what OS it's running. But not everyone plays games.
I don't know exactly how it would work and to be honest, I wouldn't expect someone to get it right on the first attempt. Rather than try to support lots of hardware, it might even be preferable to just provide the hardware for customers that's known to work.
I do know of lots of people who really just want to use their computer for their work, but they're constantly overrun by annoying administration-related issues that they just don't want to think about.
That may be true, and I'd be just as interested to see someone do it with XP. My experience with seriously administering Windows is mostly from before 2000 and XP, so I can't really comment. I suspect people would pay for it if it worked. I really do think that a lot of people would love the opportunity to be able to pay a reasonable cost for a remote administrator to just help them keep their computer running before it breaks, though.
Oops... I forgot to respond to the other part of your comment:
Now maybe this could be a business opportunity for a neighborhood geek, assuming there are enough people locally willing to try Linux and yield control of their machine to an expert. I suspect, however, the latter is too much for people to accept.
In all honesty, I think people do that when they surrender control of their computer to Microsoft all the time. Microsoft's definitely leaning towards the idea of wanting to control what's on people's computer, although I don't think they do it well. They don't directly respond to problems people have and the standard fix for more than a few is to throw it all out and reinstall the OS.
If people were confident they could trust a business to administer their PC and keep it running smoothly, I think many would quite happily pay a reasonable cost for it. It's clearly not for everyone, but I do know so many people who are driven around the bend by Windows. They'd love to get rid of it and they tell me frequently, but they just don't feel at all confident with anything else.
I'd see as much more than just a neighbourhood geek opportunity. There are lots of things that could go wrong and it'd be hard to get right the first time, but I'm sure there's a good opportunity.
They want to be able to install whatever software they want (for better or worse), and don't want to have to depend on someone else to use what is in their own home. They are likely frustrated by the same thing at work.
I realise that some users do, and I don't think this really prevents that. The main thing would be just making sure that they can get it when they want it, whether that be by phoning up and asking for it now, or using some kind of nice interface for a package management system that automated the process for installing things. (The difference would be that if they broke something through using it, they could at least arrange for someone to fix it remotely.)
5. Make it FAST to launch another incase there's damage to one crew module. Maybe make it so that we launch 2 at the same time with both being capable of holding the whole crew in a emergency landing situation. You could even make sure one is always on orbit and is in good shape(docked at ISS or whatever).
6. Make it REPAIRABLE in space either via ISS assistance or a small repair kit heald on board.
At the risk of offering slashdot-level pointless expertise (but I enjoy it), I guess alternatives to these two could include the possibility of carrying an escape capsule, as an alternative to relying on an entire shuttle or whatever, which is what I think you're suggesting. It could be one that can be taken with the spacecraft so that the crew could escape (similar to the spare Soyuz on the ISS), and ideally the main craft would be able to maintain its orbit on minimal power until a repair crew could be arranged.
If that's not feasible to take an escape capsule up and down on every trip, a further alternative might be to arrange for a network of in-orbit escape capsules with which a main craft could rendezvous if necessary, or have a backup escape capsule or two on standby to be launched if necessary.
These 'Linux is ready for the desktop' stories have been piling up for quite a few years now, but will it really happen?
I really don't think that users being able to administer their systems should be considered a serious problem when considering linux on the desktop.
In recent months I've come to believe that Linux, and many other unix-like systems for that matter, are not only ready for the desktop and have been for some time, they're near perfect for it. The major catch (apart from that whole software compatability thing, perhaps) is that they're only perfect when someone who knows what they're doing is adminstrating the system.
I administer my own home linux system, and I like it that way absolutely, but I wouldn't reccommend it to any of my friends. Sure, I could get them set up and rurning, but every so often they'd want to change something and would need help.
At my university, we run a department network of NetBSD machines, and they're administered brilliantly to the point where new students who are used to Windows can get started in using them for many things without a lot of problems. The security's locked down to a reasonable extent so it's hard for any badly written software the seriously break any of the workstations, but if we want something changed then there's a responsive team of administrators who'll look at providing what's needed. Most importantly, the workstations are reliable and they're looked after by experts who know everything that's on them inside out. Just like my home machine, unixes very rarely break or collapse if they're administrated well.
My point is that Linux is very ready for the desktop, but people shouldn't be expected to administer their own systems. Luckily, though, Linux has several other very handy things going for it:
It's reliable: Switch it on and do things, and it'll usually stay up... even if applications crash here and there.
It can be locked down from the users to prevent a lot of things from going wrong. When the user is prevented from doing certain things to their PC, they're less likely to break things.
Due to the lock-down, a lot of software (such as spyware) will have a much more difficult time embedding itself in the system in a way that can't be cleaned out by an administrator.
It's very accessible for remote administration. Someone can log in remotely and, with the appropriate but usually ubiquitous tools, have direct and immediate access to anything administrative that's required.
High speed connections are becoming more and more common.
What surprises me is that nobody yet seems to have seriously jumped into a potentially great business opportunity of offering remote linux administrations for home users. Essentially it'd be linux by subscription, ironically enough.
I really do know lots of people who use Windows because they're afraid of everything else, and they only even try to administer it and understand the issues because they have no other option. Really they'd rather concentrate on actually doing things with their PC, and would often be happy to pay someone else to administer it if the price were reasonable.
The business would be in providing a remote service which, once a customer's home PC had been set up in an appropriately standard configuration, would offer the service of administering the PC remotely. For instance, if the customer wants new software, they phone up and ask for it. An admin logs in, installs the package, and sets up any appropriate configuration. Perhaps every so often, administrators come along and upgrade whatever software is installed, probably (usually) keeping the configurations within bounds that are known to work on a large scale. Perhaps they even provide conversion services for things like Word files, in cases when something like OpenOffice simply won't handle it properly.
Further, when the Brazilian government and Brazilian businesses spend money on licensing fees, they are actually spending money on things toward building an economy that provides jobs. Paying licensing fees is an integral part of a capitalistic economy.
The earlier reply to your comment was absolutely right. I think you're confusing the issue with some economic theory that points out how a government can sometimes stimulate its economy by circulating money through its own citizens, resulting in more local production, more jobs, and consequently more people with money to continue spending locally in a cycle.
Simply shipping money off-shore does nothing to build a local economy. At best, it might end up a small footnote of the US economy, which would be completely irrelevant to Brazil unless people in the USA are somehow encouraged to pour that money back into Brazil... not very likely.
Mind you, I respect their rights to have such an idiotic license...
If their license is what you say it is, then I don't. I can't speak for the USA, but in New Zealand we cetain laws (specifically the Consumer Guarantees Act and the Fair Trading Act) that provide consumers with certain rights (consumer guarantees and fair trading) to expect that what they're getting when they hand over money is what they'd been led to believe that they were buying.
If such a game hadn't been clearly marked at the point of sale that it might frequently break and become unplayable, the seller would most likely have to provide a full refund if the buyer requested it. I doubt that fine print in a license on its own would be enough, since people don't traditionally expect to have to read a detailed license agreement before purchasing a game off a shelf.
Negotiate with the copyright holders
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Why I Love The GPL
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· Score: 4, Insightful
Now let's assume that there's a premade library that will allow me to easily support the format. Oh joy! Except it uses GPL. Now, I don't want to have to release my code, there's enough theft of ideas in indie gaming as it is. So, I can't really use the library.
Well I'm not going to flame you, but I do think you've missed some of the useful points of the GPL. For one thing, I believe that you actually can use existingly GPL'd code if you negotiate an alternative license with the copyright holder(s) of the code. Admittedly this may sometimes be difficult if there are lots of authors, but given the relatively low number of developers in many projects, I'm not sure if it would be that common. Depending on specifically what part of the code you're interested in, you may not have to contact everyone in a particular GPL'd project.
People tend to release under the GPL because they want to make their work available for use by others, but don't want others to make lots of money from it without giving back. The alternative is that the code may not be available at all.
When I've released some software under the GPL, I've effectively lifted some (but not all) copyright restrictions for anyone who wishes to use it. In doing so, though, I certainly haven't given up my right to choose to lift even more restrictions on my code for certain people.
The GPL licence begins with the traditionally restrictive copyright system, and then lifts some restrictions that specifically allow the software to be distributed openly under certain conditions, still protected by copyright law on behalf of the author(s).
There's nowhere in the GPL, however, where it says that copyright holders can't choose to release their code under a different license to a different party if they so choose. Many authors of many projects do exactly this, and I think you'd find that many other authors would consider making their code available for closed source projects if they realised it could be useful and were paid suitable royalties.
My opinion is that the GPL is good because it encourages many people to release their code in situations where it might not otherwise have been made available at all. I don't see how that's a bad thing -- people who want it under closed source conditions can always ask for it and negotiate an alternative agreement. If the authors agree with your small business cause, they might even choose to give it to you for free.
Can someone please give examples of when a book converted to a movie was anywhere near as good as the book?
Well in this case, it's really a movie converted from a radio series, which the books came after... or a TV series, which is also widely respected by some as being just as good, sometimes better.
As someone else pointed out, though, Douglas Adams really treated all incarnations as equally valid to his universe, even when they blatantly contradicted each other... and he's commented on this many times in his book introductions. As far as he was concerned, the story should be adapted to best fit whatever medium it was being told in. This led to some quite substantial differences in characters, plot, the extent of the story, and the methods of storytelling, depending on whether you were listening to the radio, reading the book, watching TV, playing the computer game, or drying yourself off with the bath towel.
This film will almost certainly be different. It'll have an inconsitent plot, a different script, and maybe some different characters. But if it's good as a film and it gets across the general hilarity of the Hitchikers' universe, then I won't personally be considering it a bastardisation. Based on everything he's done in the past, I'm pretty sure that it'd be something that Douglas Adams would have supported.
As everyone knows, Microsofts R&D department isn't really coming up with anything new and never has.
Actually, Microsoft employs some great researchers who have a lot of respect in academia and elsewhere. It's not fair to claim that Microsoft Research doesn't do anything constructive or innovative.
If you follow some of their output, MS Research produces a lot of interesting work. For instance, Microsoft's employment of perhaps half of the prominent functional programmers and language designers in the recent past has arguably had quite an impact on language design in their.net platform. (I don't really follow language stuff these days, so in this case I'm quoting what I've heard.)
Where the main problem lies is that so much of their research output doesn't seem to actually make it into Microsoft products. That's one reason why, for instance, the Microsoft Windows user interface has been so hopelessly drab and annoying for so long. The marketers would rather have the glitter that appeals to consumer's interpretation of "good usability" than actually work on implementing genuine usability. Surprisingly, there are a lot of people out there who think something's more usable entirely because it has a GUI and looks tidy, and those first impressions are frequently what sells products moreso than long term evaluation which costs time, money, and is boring.
Unfortunately the results of research aren't employed in the commercial world until someone decides to implement them, and that's why Windows is so ironically bad against so much of what we know in all kinds of areas. One would think that Microsoft is in a much better position to take advantage of their own research commercially than universities and other primarily research organisations, but regrettably they don't.
My own belief is that apart from providing some token commercial benefit for Microsoft here and there, one of the main purposes of Microsoft Research is to maintain respect from academics by giving something back to the world. It also functions to snap up good researchers, primarily so that nobody else can have them and get an advantage over Microsoft's existing products.
For instance, Raskin deems that having to enter both a username and password when logging onto a system is "identifying yourself to the system twice". He argues that it would be better to generate a unique password for each user, and then have the user enter just the password to accomplish login. Utopia! I suspect, however, that actual users would much prefer to type in their username and have the ability to set their own passwords.
I'm guessing here, but I think the extension of Raskin's comments is that the whole point of requiring a login and password at all is an extra requirement for the computers' benefit that doesn't really fit into human nature. Among other things, they encourage people to develop bad habits, just as what happens when people develop bad habits of clicking "yes" on continuously popping up dialog boxes. For instance, clearly most people don't respect passwords for what they're intended: they frequently get in the way of what people want to do, and it's not uncommon to see people passing around passwords openly, against traditional advice.
An ideal system wouldn't need to ask for a username or a password, because it'd be able to look at the person, know who it is, and be able to intelligently determine what that person is allowed to do. (When I say "intelligently", I mean at least as well as a regular person would be able to do, or along those lines.)
This isn't within the scope of what technology can currently achieve, but if we're to have the utopia that Jef Raskin promotes, it's the type of thing that we'd really need to aim for.
I think the trick may be clearly distinguished modes. I'm sure not going to hold down a quasi-mode key because I'm writing Java or a work email. When you pick up a sax, not only does it feel different from a flute, but the habits you get in will be applicable for some time, until you put the instrument down.
I think the most valuable thing to take out of Raskin's ideas is that things like Word Processing are very important. Although you might have some problems programming on a Canon Cat, it's nowhere near as common-a-task as Word Processing. Therefore, as an alternative to forcing it into a generic do-everything box, perhaps Word Processing deserves its own machine that's dedicated to word processing, has specialised controls for it, and is very simple to use.
There's a reason why monitors aren't co-designed so we can microwave food inside them. More functions adds more complexity, and there's perhaps a line that we've crossed where we've simply tried to make one small thing far too complicated.
His ideas are heavily centered around everything being a word processor or spreadsheet, and I have a hard time adapting his ideas to applications that are basically forms instead.
While it wouldn't be ideal for the multitude of things that "computers" tend to be used for at the moment, I don't see this as an entirely unreasonable way to think of things. From everything I've read in The Humane Interface, I quite like Jef Raskin's way of thinking.
The amount of learning and knowledge required to carry out many everyday tasks took a leap when things like paper, electronic typewriters, calculators, games, and whatever else, were all forced into a generic box called a PC.
For instance, the electronic typewriter wasn't a big jump from a mechanical typewriter, but the word processor was a huge jump from either of them. On the one hand, there's a tangible object that people can relate to. It has buttons and controls that do definite things, and there's quite a good mental mapping from the control to the result. (Electronic typewriters mimicked mechanical ones reasonably closely in this regard.) With a word processor application, though, everything's virtual. It tries to use metaphor here and there, but they're really only useful if the user recognises and understands the metaphor in the way it was intended.
My own theory is that if these things are separated again so that they're individual tangible tools for individual tasks, augmented by computing power and networking capabilities where appropriate, things will once again become substantially easier for many people to comprehend, understand and learn.
It probably can't be done for everything -- spreadsheets became available almost as a result of all the digital computing power, and I'm not entirely sure how to represent something like that in an individual tool. But then, it's mostly only accountants and other professionals who frequently use spreadsheets as actual spreadsheets. Many other people use them as a way to lay things out as if on paper, and it might be quite possible to develop something else tangible to cater to that.
This is great and I'm sure he would've appreciated it, but that's what I find strange. Why don't we make more efforts to do these things while people are alive.
Are you sure this doesn't happen already and you're just not noticing it? It's not as if Douglas Adams wasn't recognised in many other ways before he died, and this is just ongoing.
Having an asteroid named after you isn't all that big-a-thing, either, and he probably only got it now because it took this long for someone to notice that he didn't already have one. Douglas Adams is mostly getting noticed for it because people already knew him.
That said, I have at least one friend (an applied mathemetician, though not particularly well-known) who has an asteroid named after him. It's more because he happens to know the right people than anything else. The discoverers needed new names for their most recent asteroids they'd discovered, and so decided to name one after him.
Today there are on the order of a hundred thousand asteroids known, most of which only have catalogue numbers. The discoverers can choose to name them whatever they like, but if you're discovering thousands every year, it just becomes too time consuming.
While it has its flaws, I would say Stargate is one of the hardest science fiction shows in history.
The reason why is because it's progressive. If you exclude the introductory and wrap-up episodes common in more recent series, you could swap the first and last episode of ST:TNG. ST:TOS. Quantum Leap (other than Sam regaining his memory).
That may be true, but Stargate's not the only SF'ish show to've done that, and it certainly hasn't had the best execution of it. Like many other shows (such as DSN), the arc was hacked on after it was realised it'd be useful to have somewhere to go. It's been done much better than that with other shows, one of the best examples of which is definitely Babylon 5.
The entire show was built on a progressive story arc that JMS (the creator and writer for a great deal of episodes) had designed before the first episode of the first season was filmed. The specifics of the story had to change here and there to accomodate uncertainties such as possible cancellation each year, but nevertheless JMS did a brilliant job of having it all fit together.
The extent of it all is quite amazing for a television show, and it all makes for a great and comprehensive story told over five years of episodes. To properly appreciate all of the inter-references between episodes --- forwards and backwards --- it's really necessary to read the episode guides at the lurkers' guide in tandem with watching the episodes.
Is it just me or is Google getting a little unfocused with too many acquisitions and weird plans like this?
Well I'm similarly confused. I guess what they do is up to them, but I can't see how VoIP fits in with their current business at all.
From what I understand (I vaguely remember my commerce degree), it's generally good business practice to have a general but definite statement of what your business is designed to focus on. Not something that specifies the concrete aspects of day-to-day business (such as "providing a web search engine"), but certainly something general enough that it envelopes yourself and potential competitors and substitutes. Until now, I'd assumed that Google's guiding statement was something like "To help people to find information that is useful for them."
The point is that through knowing this, it makes it much easier to have a long term strategy and make decisions about how to build up the business so it'll be stable. For instance, any hiring decision that Google made could be weighed against how the new employees would contribute towards the business's goal of helping people to find information. This way, whenever Google moves into a new region such as...
providing email and helping people to search their email, or
indexing hundreds of thousands of old books and helping people to find useful information, or
acquiring the usenet archive and helping people to search it...
...Google would already have thousands of existing employees, all of whom have transferrable skills in the area of helping people to find information in one way or another. They can also make sure that things like re-training of employees is done for the right reasons, that incentives are put in the right places, and so on.
I can't personally see how simply doing VoIP would fit into their existing business at all. It's not traditionally something that invites searching through any large archives of existing information, and I wonder what kind of existing in-house skills Google thinks it can transfer from its core business. Maybe they're thinking something to do with data storage, but that seems risky to me because the reason they have anyone who knows about data storage isn't because it's their core business -- it's because it's a spun-off necessity of part of their existing activities.
It might be that Google has simply realised that they could already have many of the technical and equipment resources to do it and so they want to try and make some money from it. But if they don't have the right minded people in-house already, there could be all sorts of problems and conflict with their existing business. It'd mean they may have to suddenly hire lots of new people to largely run an entirely new part of their business, or they'll have to buy and merge with an existing business that already has the expertise. Either could create problems.
Anyway, it's hard to say what's going on when looking in from the outside. It just seems a bit unusual if they're showing an interest in VoIP, and I'd wonder if there's lots of sudden external influence since it went public, that could potentially lead to its downfall. If I was an investor I'd be starting to get concerned, but I'm not an expert in these things.
I think this "event" reflects the way in which most open source projects are lead.
Certainly you won't see in a commercial product news about the health of the developers as items in a ChangeLog.
I don't follow your line of reasoning at all. There are lots of small businesses, for instance, that operate with exactly the same philosophy and relation to their customers. This doesn't mean that nearly all businesses operate in the same way, and it doesn't mean that it the sometimes less-formal methods of small businesses operators should reflect on those of other businesses.
Open source or not, Pat can run his project however he likes. Similarly, there are many open source projects that are run much more professionally, and they're treated with respect to that by their customers and users. Open source doesn't define a development process (despite some claims to the contrary) -- it merely sets some rules for distribution that in many cases makes the result more flexible for use by others.
Would I use slackware? Perhaps, if it suited my needs, but always with the understanding that it'd be more akin to paying a neighbour to do something for me with all the facets of their personality involved, rather than going to a more established organisation whom I'd trust as being able to more solidly stand behind what they're providing.
in the DOS age, other extensions such as.DOC or extensions that were basically part of the name (like README.1ST) or the total absence of an extension were also very common.
I remember being very irritated when I realised that Microsoft Word had adopted.DOC as its standard file extension. At the time, it was a very common extension used everywhere else for text files in DOS (especially README.DOC), to the point where the MS Word developers couldn't possibly have missed it.
The consequence? In an age where Microsoft was trying to beat down the likes of WordPerfect, especially in the early days of Windows 3, lots of readme files would automatically open in Word, or later WordPad if Word wasn't installed, instead of a regular text editor when people clicked them.
It also became more complicated to distinguish the type of a file by simply looking at the filename, to the point where it was sometimes easier to simply open it in Word which, would at least translate it no matter whether it was a Word document or plain text.
More Linux Desktop Thoughts...
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Linux, Inc.
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And even though there are many camps of people who will argue that Windows is more usable than OS X or vice versa,
This response isn't directly related to what you're talking about, but you got me thinking. I'm currently doing some temp work for a usability evaluation company that specialises in evaluating websites. (I'm a postgrad student with experience in HCI.)
A few days ago, the topic came up that I use linux for everything on my home PC. The company's a small one (~5 people) and uses Microsoft software to work on. One of the people there commented off-hand that I was certainly setting myself up for lots of usability issues. I shrugged it off at the time, and it's true that linux still does have a lot of usability issues. But my own view is that Windows really isn't that much better, if at all, in many places. People are certainly used to it and understand it more, but Windows and associated software has all sorts of usability problems.
The reason I like using linux myself is that it's so clean and nice as an expert user. Windows tends to focus more on beginners, and many people are kept as beginners and doing everything in the beginner way all the time. (Not always, of course.)
Comparing Windows usability with Linux usability doesn't make sense, because linux isn't intended to be usable -- it's intended to be an operating system, with something usable built on top of it. Comparing Windows with a particular desktop manager makes much more sense, at least in terms of usability. And you're not comparing Windows with Linux -- you're comparing it with KDE, or Gnome, or Windowmaker, or twm, or Black Box, or whatever else... all of which could be running on top of linux, NetBSD, Solaris, or possibly even on top of a Windows kernel if they were ever ported that way.
Some time soon, I may take my laptop in to work and show them the nice sorts of usability features that I have a choice of when using linux. I can choose a nice lightweight WindowMaker, which loads quickly and lets me flip between virtual desktops with the roll of a mousewheel. I can choose the more heavyweight KDE, which looks a little more like Windows and is focusing a lot on making it easy to do things without having to know much about what's going on... like rip CD's to MP3's and Ogg-Vorbis by dragging and dropping virtual files. I can choose any number of desktops. At any time in all of them, I can choose to jump to being an expert user by opening a shell, accessing any number of scripting languages to do some very powerful and useful things.
I don't think any of them are fantastically brilliant, but then neither is Windows. On the other hand, each of them has lots of handy usability-centric features that Windows doesn't have, and could definitely learn from.
And that's why I like Linux, because it gives me more flexability to choose what I like most rather than forcing me to follow the Microsoft marketing decisions about what's best for everyone.
I'd love it if I could do some real object oriented storage with PostgreSql, but with the way it's currently implemented, I haven't found it all that useful... at least for what I want.
In particular I fell into a serious trap, partly as a consequence of not reading the documentation properly. It turns out that although the sub-tables will inherit properties from the super-tables, the data and any indexes are stored entirely separately.
Consider the following, for instance. You have a table to represent something like "places". Each has an ID, a name and a population, with an index on the ID. Perhaps this is inherited by other tables to represent things like "villages", "cities", "rivers", whatever, all representing their own information. Then load the tables with all of the relevant information, perhaps millions of records.
At this point, you can select from the "places" table to get a complete list of ID's an names. The problem is that, because the data is stored in all of the individual sub-tables, the "places" table still has zero records in it. (Unless you've explicitly inserted them into that table, of course.) When selecting from the "places" table, postgresql will query all of the tables derived from it, union them together and provide a virtual view. This means a tablescan of several tables upon any select.
In particular, if you plan to look for a place with a particular ID and do a few joins to other derivitive tables, everything slows to a crawl as the asymptotic complexity of all the unions and joins involved becomes exponential.
Anyway, I'd designed a database like this without realising, but eventually converted it back to a regular relational database. Apart from semantics, there just didn't seem to be any big advantage to it and there was a huge cost with anything more than a trivial amount of data involved.
I'm sure it is useful for some things, but the way it's currently managed (and it's possible this has been changed in 8.0) means that it's not suitable for a lot of tasks that people might otherwise assume it is.
Don't get me wrong, I like having more options to choose from. I just want to know why, at this point, I should choose Netscape?
In all honesty, it doesn't sound as if there's any reason for you to switch. That aside, there are still quite a lot of people out there who are hooked on the Netscape branding.
I know at least two people who've simply always used Netscape, beginning with version 4, since it was installed from the CD provided by their dial-up ISP in the late 1990's. They won't consider using IE because they consider it strange and don't trust it, but they will agree to "upgrade" Netscape to a later version of "Netscape". Despite the difference, they have to learn it anyway once it's upgraded.
But in the long run, services is actually the driving force in computing. Products are fine, but upon those products is a whole ecology of companies providing support, enhancement, and integration of those products, tailored for each individual company.
Providing and selling services are completely okay with me, too, as long as it's possible to figure out what those services actually are. Where I have the problem is when the marketing lingo that's describing the product or service is so abstract and general that it's impossible to figure out what on earth the product or service actually does.
For many tech companies these days, it's downright impossible to figure out what they actually do from their marketing material. It's just full of buzz-words that mean absolutely nothing. Instead of saying they'll build software to suit your needs, they promote themselves as having cohesive teams who'll provide scalable solutions to assist in optimising the dynamic agility of your business. Huh?
I can't understand how someone looking for software to be built, or for someone to out-source their payroll system to, or whatever else, could possible figure out to contact to a company that uses that type of marketing. This is one of the reasons that I really don't like working in tech, because there's so much focus on spouting rubbish instead of getting to the point... whether that point be that a company will build products, or provide a service. Apparently it works, though, because these buzzword businesses seem to be thriving.
Microsoft really does have the best office suite in a technical sense. OO.o is generally less intuitive, and has less features (particularly in spreadsheets, but even the word processor lacks much advanced functionality).
I think that's a very subjective thing to say. Certainly, MS Office is more advanced in providing certain features, and some people need it just for that. But there are also some notouriously frustrating bugs is MS Office, that have an effect on very simple and common uses. For whatever reason, these can take years to get fixed.
A few days ago, for instance, I was trying to copy and paste table rows. It worked perfectly okay for a while, and suddenly for no reason I could identify, the table columns of the newly pasted rows would no longer line up with the
others in the table.
Another longstanding Word bug, which has only been fixed recently if it has been fixed (I haven't checked in the past couple of years), has been with Word getting very confused about list numbering when pasting in items, to the point where it's extremely complicated to make the numbers line up properly.
Then there's all the backwards compatabililty with things like file formats. Even competitors often handle old and broken Microsoft formats better than Microsoft sometimes does.
For many people, the "best office suite" would be the one that serves their needs most effectively. Microsoft's had a free ride on this without any serious competition for so long that they've been concentrating on adding new features rather than fixing some of the basic ones that most people are forced to struggle with every day. Hopefully this philosophy will change now that there's some competition emerging.
I like the example Bill gave of song writers who want to get paid for their work. I agree that they should get paid for their work, as long as they are alive.
I also don't have much of an issue with artists being compensated somehow for their work. There are already laws to govern that, although some of the laws are bad, people often break those laws, and the legal system hasn't yet caught up with how best to deal with it.
The problem here is that Microsoft has taken things upon itself to become the judge, jury and executioner of intellectual property disputes. Even worse, Microsoft's algorithm for determining correctness is a direct interpretation of whatever the distributer of given content happens to say. Microsoft accomodates those who claim ownership by stripping the rights of everyone else to dispute that claim.... at least without paying unaffordable mountains of legal bills.
I think it's mostly a question of whether Microsoft should be allowed to act as some kind of international legal system to enforce disputes between parties. Effectively it's enforcing things through a vigilante system with no intelligent arbitration about what's correct.
For instance, in New Zealand (where I am), some copyrighted materials enter public domain earlier than the USA. It becomes legal to reproduce them regardless of what the original content owner says. (Content owners aren't always authors, by the way.) But if I were to try and take advantage of that, Microsoft would jump in and tell me that I can't, unless the entity that claims ownership says it's okay.
Bill's trying to distance himself from accusations of this type of thing in the interview for obvious reasons, but it's exactly what Microsoft is doing. I don't particularly want a Microsoft-determined legal system.
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Well it's not exactly for you. It's not for me, either. I'm quite happy to administer my own system irrespective of what OS it's running. But not everyone plays games.
I don't know exactly how it would work and to be honest, I wouldn't expect someone to get it right on the first attempt. Rather than try to support lots of hardware, it might even be preferable to just provide the hardware for customers that's known to work.
I do know of lots of people who really just want to use their computer for their work, but they're constantly overrun by annoying administration-related issues that they just don't want to think about.
That may be true, and I'd be just as interested to see someone do it with XP. My experience with seriously administering Windows is mostly from before 2000 and XP, so I can't really comment. I suspect people would pay for it if it worked. I really do think that a lot of people would love the opportunity to be able to pay a reasonable cost for a remote administrator to just help them keep their computer running before it breaks, though.
Oops... I forgot to respond to the other part of your comment:
In all honesty, I think people do that when they surrender control of their computer to Microsoft all the time. Microsoft's definitely leaning towards the idea of wanting to control what's on people's computer, although I don't think they do it well. They don't directly respond to problems people have and the standard fix for more than a few is to throw it all out and reinstall the OS.
If people were confident they could trust a business to administer their PC and keep it running smoothly, I think many would quite happily pay a reasonable cost for it. It's clearly not for everyone, but I do know so many people who are driven around the bend by Windows. They'd love to get rid of it and they tell me frequently, but they just don't feel at all confident with anything else.
I'd see as much more than just a neighbourhood geek opportunity. There are lots of things that could go wrong and it'd be hard to get right the first time, but I'm sure there's a good opportunity.
I realise that some users do, and I don't think this really prevents that. The main thing would be just making sure that they can get it when they want it, whether that be by phoning up and asking for it now, or using some kind of nice interface for a package management system that automated the process for installing things. (The difference would be that if they broke something through using it, they could at least arrange for someone to fix it remotely.)
At the risk of offering slashdot-level pointless expertise (but I enjoy it), I guess alternatives to these two could include the possibility of carrying an escape capsule, as an alternative to relying on an entire shuttle or whatever, which is what I think you're suggesting. It could be one that can be taken with the spacecraft so that the crew could escape (similar to the spare Soyuz on the ISS), and ideally the main craft would be able to maintain its orbit on minimal power until a repair crew could be arranged.
If that's not feasible to take an escape capsule up and down on every trip, a further alternative might be to arrange for a network of in-orbit escape capsules with which a main craft could rendezvous if necessary, or have a backup escape capsule or two on standby to be launched if necessary.
I really don't think that users being able to administer their systems should be considered a serious problem when considering linux on the desktop.
In recent months I've come to believe that Linux, and many other unix-like systems for that matter, are not only ready for the desktop and have been for some time, they're near perfect for it. The major catch (apart from that whole software compatability thing, perhaps) is that they're only perfect when someone who knows what they're doing is adminstrating the system.
I administer my own home linux system, and I like it that way absolutely, but I wouldn't reccommend it to any of my friends. Sure, I could get them set up and rurning, but every so often they'd want to change something and would need help.
At my university, we run a department network of NetBSD machines, and they're administered brilliantly to the point where new students who are used to Windows can get started in using them for many things without a lot of problems. The security's locked down to a reasonable extent so it's hard for any badly written software the seriously break any of the workstations, but if we want something changed then there's a responsive team of administrators who'll look at providing what's needed. Most importantly, the workstations are reliable and they're looked after by experts who know everything that's on them inside out. Just like my home machine, unixes very rarely break or collapse if they're administrated well.
My point is that Linux is very ready for the desktop, but people shouldn't be expected to administer their own systems. Luckily, though, Linux has several other very handy things going for it:
What surprises me is that nobody yet seems to have seriously jumped into a potentially great business opportunity of offering remote linux administrations for home users. Essentially it'd be linux by subscription, ironically enough.
I really do know lots of people who use Windows because they're afraid of everything else, and they only even try to administer it and understand the issues because they have no other option. Really they'd rather concentrate on actually doing things with their PC, and would often be happy to pay someone else to administer it if the price were reasonable.
The business would be in providing a remote service which, once a customer's home PC had been set up in an appropriately standard configuration, would offer the service of administering the PC remotely. For instance, if the customer wants new software, they phone up and ask for it. An admin logs in, installs the package, and sets up any appropriate configuration. Perhaps every so often, administrators come along and upgrade whatever software is installed, probably (usually) keeping the configurations within bounds that are known to work on a large scale. Perhaps they even provide conversion services for things like Word files, in cases when something like OpenOffice simply won't handle it properly.
On occasion
The earlier reply to your comment was absolutely right. I think you're confusing the issue with some economic theory that points out how a government can sometimes stimulate its economy by circulating money through its own citizens, resulting in more local production, more jobs, and consequently more people with money to continue spending locally in a cycle.
Simply shipping money off-shore does nothing to build a local economy. At best, it might end up a small footnote of the US economy, which would be completely irrelevant to Brazil unless people in the USA are somehow encouraged to pour that money back into Brazil... not very likely.
If their license is what you say it is, then I don't. I can't speak for the USA, but in New Zealand we cetain laws (specifically the Consumer Guarantees Act and the Fair Trading Act) that provide consumers with certain rights (consumer guarantees and fair trading) to expect that what they're getting when they hand over money is what they'd been led to believe that they were buying.
If such a game hadn't been clearly marked at the point of sale that it might frequently break and become unplayable, the seller would most likely have to provide a full refund if the buyer requested it. I doubt that fine print in a license on its own would be enough, since people don't traditionally expect to have to read a detailed license agreement before purchasing a game off a shelf.
Well I'm not going to flame you, but I do think you've missed some of the useful points of the GPL. For one thing, I believe that you actually can use existingly GPL'd code if you negotiate an alternative license with the copyright holder(s) of the code. Admittedly this may sometimes be difficult if there are lots of authors, but given the relatively low number of developers in many projects, I'm not sure if it would be that common. Depending on specifically what part of the code you're interested in, you may not have to contact everyone in a particular GPL'd project.
People tend to release under the GPL because they want to make their work available for use by others, but don't want others to make lots of money from it without giving back. The alternative is that the code may not be available at all.
When I've released some software under the GPL, I've effectively lifted some (but not all) copyright restrictions for anyone who wishes to use it. In doing so, though, I certainly haven't given up my right to choose to lift even more restrictions on my code for certain people. The GPL licence begins with the traditionally restrictive copyright system, and then lifts some restrictions that specifically allow the software to be distributed openly under certain conditions, still protected by copyright law on behalf of the author(s).
There's nowhere in the GPL, however, where it says that copyright holders can't choose to release their code under a different license to a different party if they so choose. Many authors of many projects do exactly this, and I think you'd find that many other authors would consider making their code available for closed source projects if they realised it could be useful and were paid suitable royalties.
My opinion is that the GPL is good because it encourages many people to release their code in situations where it might not otherwise have been made available at all. I don't see how that's a bad thing -- people who want it under closed source conditions can always ask for it and negotiate an alternative agreement. If the authors agree with your small business cause, they might even choose to give it to you for free.
Well in this case, it's really a movie converted from a radio series, which the books came after... or a TV series, which is also widely respected by some as being just as good, sometimes better.
As someone else pointed out, though, Douglas Adams really treated all incarnations as equally valid to his universe, even when they blatantly contradicted each other... and he's commented on this many times in his book introductions. As far as he was concerned, the story should be adapted to best fit whatever medium it was being told in. This led to some quite substantial differences in characters, plot, the extent of the story, and the methods of storytelling, depending on whether you were listening to the radio, reading the book, watching TV, playing the computer game, or drying yourself off with the bath towel.
This film will almost certainly be different. It'll have an inconsitent plot, a different script, and maybe some different characters. But if it's good as a film and it gets across the general hilarity of the Hitchikers' universe, then I won't personally be considering it a bastardisation. Based on everything he's done in the past, I'm pretty sure that it'd be something that Douglas Adams would have supported.
Actually, Microsoft employs some great researchers who have a lot of respect in academia and elsewhere. It's not fair to claim that Microsoft Research doesn't do anything constructive or innovative.
If you follow some of their output, MS Research produces a lot of interesting work. For instance, Microsoft's employment of perhaps half of the prominent functional programmers and language designers in the recent past has arguably had quite an impact on language design in their .net platform. (I don't really follow language stuff these days, so in this case I'm quoting what I've heard.)
Where the main problem lies is that so much of their research output doesn't seem to actually make it into Microsoft products. That's one reason why, for instance, the Microsoft Windows user interface has been so hopelessly drab and annoying for so long. The marketers would rather have the glitter that appeals to consumer's interpretation of "good usability" than actually work on implementing genuine usability. Surprisingly, there are a lot of people out there who think something's more usable entirely because it has a GUI and looks tidy, and those first impressions are frequently what sells products moreso than long term evaluation which costs time, money, and is boring.
Unfortunately the results of research aren't employed in the commercial world until someone decides to implement them, and that's why Windows is so ironically bad against so much of what we know in all kinds of areas. One would think that Microsoft is in a much better position to take advantage of their own research commercially than universities and other primarily research organisations, but regrettably they don't.
My own belief is that apart from providing some token commercial benefit for Microsoft here and there, one of the main purposes of Microsoft Research is to maintain respect from academics by giving something back to the world. It also functions to snap up good researchers, primarily so that nobody else can have them and get an advantage over Microsoft's existing products.
I'm guessing here, but I think the extension of Raskin's comments is that the whole point of requiring a login and password at all is an extra requirement for the computers' benefit that doesn't really fit into human nature. Among other things, they encourage people to develop bad habits, just as what happens when people develop bad habits of clicking "yes" on continuously popping up dialog boxes. For instance, clearly most people don't respect passwords for what they're intended: they frequently get in the way of what people want to do, and it's not uncommon to see people passing around passwords openly, against traditional advice.
An ideal system wouldn't need to ask for a username or a password, because it'd be able to look at the person, know who it is, and be able to intelligently determine what that person is allowed to do. (When I say "intelligently", I mean at least as well as a regular person would be able to do, or along those lines.)
This isn't within the scope of what technology can currently achieve, but if we're to have the utopia that Jef Raskin promotes, it's the type of thing that we'd really need to aim for.
I think the most valuable thing to take out of Raskin's ideas is that things like Word Processing are very important. Although you might have some problems programming on a Canon Cat, it's nowhere near as common-a-task as Word Processing. Therefore, as an alternative to forcing it into a generic do-everything box, perhaps Word Processing deserves its own machine that's dedicated to word processing, has specialised controls for it, and is very simple to use.
There's a reason why monitors aren't co-designed so we can microwave food inside them. More functions adds more complexity, and there's perhaps a line that we've crossed where we've simply tried to make one small thing far too complicated.
While it wouldn't be ideal for the multitude of things that "computers" tend to be used for at the moment, I don't see this as an entirely unreasonable way to think of things. From everything I've read in The Humane Interface, I quite like Jef Raskin's way of thinking.
The amount of learning and knowledge required to carry out many everyday tasks took a leap when things like paper, electronic typewriters, calculators, games, and whatever else, were all forced into a generic box called a PC.
For instance, the electronic typewriter wasn't a big jump from a mechanical typewriter, but the word processor was a huge jump from either of them. On the one hand, there's a tangible object that people can relate to. It has buttons and controls that do definite things, and there's quite a good mental mapping from the control to the result. (Electronic typewriters mimicked mechanical ones reasonably closely in this regard.) With a word processor application, though, everything's virtual. It tries to use metaphor here and there, but they're really only useful if the user recognises and understands the metaphor in the way it was intended.
My own theory is that if these things are separated again so that they're individual tangible tools for individual tasks, augmented by computing power and networking capabilities where appropriate, things will once again become substantially easier for many people to comprehend, understand and learn.
It probably can't be done for everything -- spreadsheets became available almost as a result of all the digital computing power, and I'm not entirely sure how to represent something like that in an individual tool. But then, it's mostly only accountants and other professionals who frequently use spreadsheets as actual spreadsheets. Many other people use them as a way to lay things out as if on paper, and it might be quite possible to develop something else tangible to cater to that.
Are you sure this doesn't happen already and you're just not noticing it? It's not as if Douglas Adams wasn't recognised in many other ways before he died, and this is just ongoing.
Having an asteroid named after you isn't all that big-a-thing, either, and he probably only got it now because it took this long for someone to notice that he didn't already have one. Douglas Adams is mostly getting noticed for it because people already knew him.
That said, I have at least one friend (an applied mathemetician, though not particularly well-known) who has an asteroid named after him. It's more because he happens to know the right people than anything else. The discoverers needed new names for their most recent asteroids they'd discovered, and so decided to name one after him.
Today there are on the order of a hundred thousand asteroids known, most of which only have catalogue numbers. The discoverers can choose to name them whatever they like, but if you're discovering thousands every year, it just becomes too time consuming.
That may be true, but Stargate's not the only SF'ish show to've done that, and it certainly hasn't had the best execution of it. Like many other shows (such as DSN), the arc was hacked on after it was realised it'd be useful to have somewhere to go. It's been done much better than that with other shows, one of the best examples of which is definitely Babylon 5.
The entire show was built on a progressive story arc that JMS (the creator and writer for a great deal of episodes) had designed before the first episode of the first season was filmed. The specifics of the story had to change here and there to accomodate uncertainties such as possible cancellation each year, but nevertheless JMS did a brilliant job of having it all fit together.
The extent of it all is quite amazing for a television show, and it all makes for a great and comprehensive story told over five years of episodes. To properly appreciate all of the inter-references between episodes --- forwards and backwards --- it's really necessary to read the episode guides at the lurkers' guide in tandem with watching the episodes.
Well I'm similarly confused. I guess what they do is up to them, but I can't see how VoIP fits in with their current business at all.
From what I understand (I vaguely remember my commerce degree), it's generally good business practice to have a general but definite statement of what your business is designed to focus on. Not something that specifies the concrete aspects of day-to-day business (such as "providing a web search engine"), but certainly something general enough that it envelopes yourself and potential competitors and substitutes. Until now, I'd assumed that Google's guiding statement was something like "To help people to find information that is useful for them."
The point is that through knowing this, it makes it much easier to have a long term strategy and make decisions about how to build up the business so it'll be stable. For instance, any hiring decision that Google made could be weighed against how the new employees would contribute towards the business's goal of helping people to find information. This way, whenever Google moves into a new region such as...
I can't personally see how simply doing VoIP would fit into their existing business at all. It's not traditionally something that invites searching through any large archives of existing information, and I wonder what kind of existing in-house skills Google thinks it can transfer from its core business. Maybe they're thinking something to do with data storage, but that seems risky to me because the reason they have anyone who knows about data storage isn't because it's their core business -- it's because it's a spun-off necessity of part of their existing activities.
It might be that Google has simply realised that they could already have many of the technical and equipment resources to do it and so they want to try and make some money from it. But if they don't have the right minded people in-house already, there could be all sorts of problems and conflict with their existing business. It'd mean they may have to suddenly hire lots of new people to largely run an entirely new part of their business, or they'll have to buy and merge with an existing business that already has the expertise. Either could create problems.
Anyway, it's hard to say what's going on when looking in from the outside. It just seems a bit unusual if they're showing an interest in VoIP, and I'd wonder if there's lots of sudden external influence since it went public, that could potentially lead to its downfall. If I was an investor I'd be starting to get concerned, but I'm not an expert in these things.
I don't follow your line of reasoning at all. There are lots of small businesses, for instance, that operate with exactly the same philosophy and relation to their customers. This doesn't mean that nearly all businesses operate in the same way, and it doesn't mean that it the sometimes less-formal methods of small businesses operators should reflect on those of other businesses.
Open source or not, Pat can run his project however he likes. Similarly, there are many open source projects that are run much more professionally, and they're treated with respect to that by their customers and users. Open source doesn't define a development process (despite some claims to the contrary) -- it merely sets some rules for distribution that in many cases makes the result more flexible for use by others.
Would I use slackware? Perhaps, if it suited my needs, but always with the understanding that it'd be more akin to paying a neighbour to do something for me with all the facets of their personality involved, rather than going to a more established organisation whom I'd trust as being able to more solidly stand behind what they're providing.
I remember being very irritated when I realised that Microsoft Word had adopted .DOC as its standard file extension. At the time, it was a very common extension used everywhere else for text files in DOS (especially README.DOC), to the point where the MS Word developers couldn't possibly have missed it.
The consequence? In an age where Microsoft was trying to beat down the likes of WordPerfect, especially in the early days of Windows 3, lots of readme files would automatically open in Word, or later WordPad if Word wasn't installed, instead of a regular text editor when people clicked them.
It also became more complicated to distinguish the type of a file by simply looking at the filename, to the point where it was sometimes easier to simply open it in Word which, would at least translate it no matter whether it was a Word document or plain text.
This response isn't directly related to what you're talking about, but you got me thinking. I'm currently doing some temp work for a usability evaluation company that specialises in evaluating websites. (I'm a postgrad student with experience in HCI.)
A few days ago, the topic came up that I use linux for everything on my home PC. The company's a small one (~5 people) and uses Microsoft software to work on. One of the people there commented off-hand that I was certainly setting myself up for lots of usability issues. I shrugged it off at the time, and it's true that linux still does have a lot of usability issues. But my own view is that Windows really isn't that much better, if at all, in many places. People are certainly used to it and understand it more, but Windows and associated software has all sorts of usability problems.
The reason I like using linux myself is that it's so clean and nice as an expert user. Windows tends to focus more on beginners, and many people are kept as beginners and doing everything in the beginner way all the time. (Not always, of course.)
Comparing Windows usability with Linux usability doesn't make sense, because linux isn't intended to be usable -- it's intended to be an operating system, with something usable built on top of it. Comparing Windows with a particular desktop manager makes much more sense, at least in terms of usability. And you're not comparing Windows with Linux -- you're comparing it with KDE, or Gnome, or Windowmaker, or twm, or Black Box, or whatever else... all of which could be running on top of linux, NetBSD, Solaris, or possibly even on top of a Windows kernel if they were ever ported that way.
Some time soon, I may take my laptop in to work and show them the nice sorts of usability features that I have a choice of when using linux. I can choose a nice lightweight WindowMaker, which loads quickly and lets me flip between virtual desktops with the roll of a mousewheel. I can choose the more heavyweight KDE, which looks a little more like Windows and is focusing a lot on making it easy to do things without having to know much about what's going on... like rip CD's to MP3's and Ogg-Vorbis by dragging and dropping virtual files. I can choose any number of desktops. At any time in all of them, I can choose to jump to being an expert user by opening a shell, accessing any number of scripting languages to do some very powerful and useful things.
I don't think any of them are fantastically brilliant, but then neither is Windows. On the other hand, each of them has lots of handy usability-centric features that Windows doesn't have, and could definitely learn from.
And that's why I like Linux, because it gives me more flexability to choose what I like most rather than forcing me to follow the Microsoft marketing decisions about what's best for everyone.
I'd love it if I could do some real object oriented storage with PostgreSql, but with the way it's currently implemented, I haven't found it all that useful... at least for what I want.
In particular I fell into a serious trap, partly as a consequence of not reading the documentation properly. It turns out that although the sub-tables will inherit properties from the super-tables, the data and any indexes are stored entirely separately.
Consider the following, for instance. You have a table to represent something like "places". Each has an ID, a name and a population, with an index on the ID. Perhaps this is inherited by other tables to represent things like "villages", "cities", "rivers", whatever, all representing their own information. Then load the tables with all of the relevant information, perhaps millions of records.
At this point, you can select from the "places" table to get a complete list of ID's an names. The problem is that, because the data is stored in all of the individual sub-tables, the "places" table still has zero records in it. (Unless you've explicitly inserted them into that table, of course.) When selecting from the "places" table, postgresql will query all of the tables derived from it, union them together and provide a virtual view. This means a tablescan of several tables upon any select.
In particular, if you plan to look for a place with a particular ID and do a few joins to other derivitive tables, everything slows to a crawl as the asymptotic complexity of all the unions and joins involved becomes exponential.
Anyway, I'd designed a database like this without realising, but eventually converted it back to a regular relational database. Apart from semantics, there just didn't seem to be any big advantage to it and there was a huge cost with anything more than a trivial amount of data involved.
I'm sure it is useful for some things, but the way it's currently managed (and it's possible this has been changed in 8.0) means that it's not suitable for a lot of tasks that people might otherwise assume it is.
In all honesty, it doesn't sound as if there's any reason for you to switch. That aside, there are still quite a lot of people out there who are hooked on the Netscape branding.
I know at least two people who've simply always used Netscape, beginning with version 4, since it was installed from the CD provided by their dial-up ISP in the late 1990's. They won't consider using IE because they consider it strange and don't trust it, but they will agree to "upgrade" Netscape to a later version of "Netscape". Despite the difference, they have to learn it anyway once it's upgraded.
Providing and selling services are completely okay with me, too, as long as it's possible to figure out what those services actually are. Where I have the problem is when the marketing lingo that's describing the product or service is so abstract and general that it's impossible to figure out what on earth the product or service actually does.
For many tech companies these days, it's downright impossible to figure out what they actually do from their marketing material. It's just full of buzz-words that mean absolutely nothing. Instead of saying they'll build software to suit your needs, they promote themselves as having cohesive teams who'll provide scalable solutions to assist in optimising the dynamic agility of your business. Huh?
I can't understand how someone looking for software to be built, or for someone to out-source their payroll system to, or whatever else, could possible figure out to contact to a company that uses that type of marketing. This is one of the reasons that I really don't like working in tech, because there's so much focus on spouting rubbish instead of getting to the point... whether that point be that a company will build products, or provide a service. Apparently it works, though, because these buzzword businesses seem to be thriving.
I think this is the point of the article.
I think that's a very subjective thing to say. Certainly, MS Office is more advanced in providing certain features, and some people need it just for that. But there are also some notouriously frustrating bugs is MS Office, that have an effect on very simple and common uses. For whatever reason, these can take years to get fixed.
A few days ago, for instance, I was trying to copy and paste table rows. It worked perfectly okay for a while, and suddenly for no reason I could identify, the table columns of the newly pasted rows would no longer line up with the others in the table.
Another longstanding Word bug, which has only been fixed recently if it has been fixed (I haven't checked in the past couple of years), has been with Word getting very confused about list numbering when pasting in items, to the point where it's extremely complicated to make the numbers line up properly.
Then there's all the backwards compatabililty with things like file formats. Even competitors often handle old and broken Microsoft formats better than Microsoft sometimes does.
For many people, the "best office suite" would be the one that serves their needs most effectively. Microsoft's had a free ride on this without any serious competition for so long that they've been concentrating on adding new features rather than fixing some of the basic ones that most people are forced to struggle with every day. Hopefully this philosophy will change now that there's some competition emerging.
I also don't have much of an issue with artists being compensated somehow for their work. There are already laws to govern that, although some of the laws are bad, people often break those laws, and the legal system hasn't yet caught up with how best to deal with it.
The problem here is that Microsoft has taken things upon itself to become the judge, jury and executioner of intellectual property disputes. Even worse, Microsoft's algorithm for determining correctness is a direct interpretation of whatever the distributer of given content happens to say. Microsoft accomodates those who claim ownership by stripping the rights of everyone else to dispute that claim.... at least without paying unaffordable mountains of legal bills.
I think it's mostly a question of whether Microsoft should be allowed to act as some kind of international legal system to enforce disputes between parties. Effectively it's enforcing things through a vigilante system with no intelligent arbitration about what's correct.
For instance, in New Zealand (where I am), some copyrighted materials enter public domain earlier than the USA. It becomes legal to reproduce them regardless of what the original content owner says. (Content owners aren't always authors, by the way.) But if I were to try and take advantage of that, Microsoft would jump in and tell me that I can't, unless the entity that claims ownership says it's okay.
Bill's trying to distance himself from accusations of this type of thing in the interview for obvious reasons, but it's exactly what Microsoft is doing. I don't particularly want a Microsoft-determined legal system.