If you got a couple hundred people to go down to your local Best Buy, they'd probably call the cops. Even if they didn't, the iron-fisted corporate policies of most retailers would probably preclude getting any kind of deal.
Actually, if you showed up and spoke with the store manager, you'd probably get a deal. Especially if there is another place within a simple travel, and you're organized enough to leave if you don't get the discount.
Clearly not, as your reply amply shows. As to the half-witted part, I don't think you know me well enough to make such a rude determination.
No, I do.
Anyone who concludes that someone who disagrees with them has not thought long enough on the issue. In my experience, those who attempt to dismiss Spirituality with parsimony apply a standard of proof to God that would leave George Washington mythical.
Here's a hint as to how most of us who believe both in Science and God reconcile the two: God is actively seeking to hide Himself from us. He is, to borrow a phrase from Carl Sagan, "sufficiently advanced" enough so as to be beyond the reach of our science. Those of us who believe do so in spite of the lack of scientific evidence, because we conclude that the lack exists because of God's will.
Yes, they are. They're both religions where a non-jewish prophet brought a message of the God of Abraham to share with all the world. They both are relgions that teach peace and service to God, while attracting some truly wacko nutjobs.
They're only incompatible in the factual differences (was J.C. God? Was Mohammad a prophet?), not the ethics nor the worldview beyond said differences.
I never heard of a group of Christians claiming to be children of Abraham.
There ARE hebrew and arabic Chirstians, you know.
In a way, it's too bad that Mohammad wasn't around when Christ was walking the holy land. If the Prophet of Islam had met Christ, they would probably have formed one relgion instead of two.
The ones who should be most interested in Microsoft's WGA ambitions should be the antitrust board.
Unless MS stops allowing downloads of non-Windows updates due to the lack of WGA (such as someone running Office on WINE who wants the new service pack), the antitrust board shouldn't care about it. In fact, if WGA makes getting the various Windows-add-ons harder, it might actually be done to help antitrust.
You're ignoring the much simpler explanation that it simply doesn't exist
I'm also ignoring the much simpler explanation that YOU don't exist, you know. Please take it as a point of coutresy that, if someone is discussing spiritual and metaphysical parts of human thought, they're not going to spend a great deal of time on the question of whether or not such thing actually exist. If they do, they can't be proven. If they don't, then they don't.
And trust me -- those who believe in the soul in this day and age have spent more than a little ammount of time reconciling their belief with science. You're not going ot get any of them to change their mind with a half-witted claim to parsimony.
No, not really. Because even a theoretically unaging body would, in time, stop working. Maybe the sentience would collapse. Maybe the body would be physically destroyed. Maybe it'd just run out of harvestable energy and go out with teh rest of the temporal universe in cold-death. It would, eventually, die.
Oh, and as the best scientific evidence shows no room for a physical soul of any weight, the soul cannot be said to exist anywhere physically. It is a spiritual object, and as a spiritual object it exists in all parts of the body and no part of the body, so long as the body can be controled by or in turn influence the will of the soul.
Souls are provided by God's angels to all sentient creatures. If we manage to create an AI, we can be assured that God has given it as much a soul as an animal granted sentience, an alien species, a test-tube baby, or a child of pagans.
Being human is irrelevant to the question. Being sentient and temporal are far more important, spiritually speaking.
So immediately you say reliability and market share don't matter?
no. Please go back to grade school, and spend some time on reading comprehension.
The current version of IIS (6) is far better than the previous version (5) when it comes to just about everything. And while there are probably still a few holes here and there, the same is true of an Apache-based LAMP setup. Is IIS better than Apache, when it comes to serving static HTML or PHP? No, not at all. Is IIS more expensive, if you count the OS cost as well? Hell yes.
Does this mean that, as the grandparent post said, there's no reason to ever sell IIS webhosting? Hell no. Did I say that there was no reason to use Apache? No. All I said was that there are things that IIS can do -- namely, native-windows web hosting and ASP.NET -- that Apache cannot. And for a "webhost" -- not a company setting up their own server, but someone selling space to others -- ASP.NET is a big enough selling point to leave room in the market for it.
Oh, and btw -- low cost and reliability mean nothing if the job doesn't get done. A horse might never break down and be amazingly cheap, but you'll never get the USAF to use a horse to do a jet fighter's job.
Sheesh. You've descended from "jerk" to "trolling moron." way go to.
I mean what kind of a pathethic human being attaaches themselves that strongly to a corporation they have no interest in.
The word is "fan" here, shmuck. There are people who like tools from Sears, cars from GM, and comic books from Marvel. In fact, I'd wager that most discusions on the 'net are from fans.
As for the rest:
1: My one Grandma is more than smart enough to do a custom install, and the other is smart enough to decide that she doesn't need a computer to do anything but the basics. YOURS obviously were too stupid to teach you courtesy.
2: Stamping your feet and trying to repeat a point doesn't make it so. You think that most "serious" (let's call them "paid", shall we?) writers don't use Word? Show me a study. Or a survey. Or, hell, ANY link to ANYTHING that says that they use software other than Word, more often than Word.
I know from experience that there are publishing houses large and small that will take Word Docs (and no XML, or HTML, and certainly not TeX), that (as previously stated) layout programs actually used by the industry can read Word's.DOC for article text better than other formats, and virtually every tool sold at writers can speak.DOC as well as OOo can, if not better.
Not a single one of these would have developed if Word wasn't used, and MS wouldn't get nearly the revenue they did if a sizable majority of the population didn't run out and buy every new version of Office. I know that it offends your smug sense of how the world should work, but the world is as it is, and for every niche like physics papers which take TeX, there are two that don't but do take Word.
Knowing that and knowing Apaches market share, who would you say is more reliable?
Reliability and Usability are not the same thing--and neither is market share. Apache has the size of the market it does because, more than other resons, the cost of an Apache box is hardware + setup, not hardware + setup + software fees. (And the fee to get anything as good as Apache is well more than the cost to pay someone to setup Apache.)
If there were NO reasons to choose IIS over Apache, we wouldn't be having this discussion. But there are, more even than IE over Firefox. ("because it works with MS Office", in case you're wondering about the latter.) And because there are things that IIS does, and people want their server to do, that Apache (or any other OSS app) doesn't do, there's a rather profitable market for IIS webhosting.
There are in the past 20 years several accounts of perfectly normal children....
Sorry, no. Each of those "perfectly normal children" wasn't, and the failure -- as no one less than Marilyn Manson said -- was that the parents and educators both didn't notice and didn't listen.
Do you know what's changed? we closed teh frontier and stopped fighting meat-grinder wars, leaving no place for the distraught to go. Which meanst that we have to find a way to reach those of us who would just as soon leave town as continue.
Sorry, a PDF "solution" that requires the installation of a new PS reader, a port redirector, an old VB virtual machine, AND the pretty front-end isn't really that good. I covered this one in "install a new Print sub-system."
There are some serious ilusions (sic) you
are living, oh dear...:)
Dude, kindly learn some basic HTML before you get smug with
me. Your post was, well, exactly why MORE folk should use a word processor
like Word for their 'net communications. Because it looked like crap to me, to
the point where I wasn't sure what the hell you were saying until the last sentence.
Speaking of:
Blogging from Word - you are about being funny, right?
Yes, there are some "dumb" users who are using Word as HTML editor -
thankfully, they are minority - and they propably (sic) will love
"new mindblowing" feature, hyped by Microsoft marketing and astrosufers
(sic). No one else will use it, thought (sic).
(see how your words a nice and segmented? How even a dolt
can tell that they're different from mine? Aim for that when quoting.)
Word is and always will be a terrible HTML editor, because
it's not one. It's a word processor, intended to aid in writing. The sort of
half-wit RTF editor that blogs give promotes, among other things, bad
writing. There's no real way to make a "draft" or print out a copy, or write
offline. I mean, unless you use a different program, which usually gives you
all of those.
I never said it was a "new mindblowing" feature. I'll
probably never use it - not because I don't see a use for it, but because I don't
do any blogging where I care about the formatting or content at all. My wife,
on the other hand, does, and she's rather happy with it. (All I wanted was for
her to give me a user's reaction, because work is likely going to implement
2007 when it comes out, and that means I'll be supporting it.)
Oh, and one last thing - I know it's hard for you to understand,
but there are people who genuinely like Windows, who actually know what they're
talking about, and are neither formal MS employees nor hired PR guys
astroturfing for MS. Some of us actually like what MS puts out, just like
somewhere there are people who actually like KDE and Gnome on their own merits.
Not to be a negative Nancy but since Apache is 70% of the market
Apache is 0% of the market. IE, Firefox, and their peers are. When you sell webhosting you aren't selling a product -- you're selling space on mall, and virtually no one cares if you use FedEx or UPS to get your books to your store, so long as they're in English (HTML) when they get them.
In contrast, if you write for Linux, you CANNOT just give your app to Windows users and have them get as much out of it as Linux users. (While if you write for Firefox / Apache, you CAN get the IE user to pick it up and use it. Same for most IE / IIS / ASP pages going to FIrefox.)
First things first -- I'm not an astro turer. They get paid, or at least recognized by Microsoft. I don't. In fact, there isn't a blood thing that MS has ever given me that a random guy of the street can't get for free.
You can't send emails?
not from within Word. Office's email functionality is based in Outlook, and neither I nor anyone whose computer I touch installs Outlook.
The new format is still proprietary and it will probably corrupt still.
The new format is a few zipped XML files. (Gosh, where have I ever seen that?) In fact, it's not greatly different from Word's "OpenXML" format. (And it won't corrupt, since unlike.doc it's not a binary memory dump.)
Serious writers don't use Office.
Sure they do. I know it's hard for you to understant outside of your physics-paper / OSS clique, but most serious writers DO use office. In fact, I'd wager that if you grabbed a dozen names of people who write for money, you'd find at least seven of them that do the majority of their writing in Word. Three of the others will use WordPerfect or some other non-F/OSS Word Processor, and the last two will not care what software they use.
Don't believe me? Then explain why every serious boxed publishing system from Adobe to Quark can import.DOC.
Re:What's in it that would make me want to buy it?
on
Office 2007 Delayed Again
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
XML format: If I want a good XML file format, I'd sooner trust OpenOffice
Actually, for real XML I trust neither. But since it's an XML based format for either, I can "trust" that even if the software spontaneously dies everywhere tomorrow, I can get my thesis/paper/novel into something i can keep working on. (I've noted the non-obvious benefits elsewhere.)
XPS: why would I want that?
Because it's not PDF, but does the same task. And unlike the bastardized MDI format from XP-2003, XPS is actually going to have a free reader out there.
PDF: you can get decent PDF creation with free software. There are a bunch of different options. I like CutePDF
CutePDF isn't "descent" PDF until you pay for it. Until then, it's little better than installing a ps2pdf equivalent.
Blogging: Who in their right mind would pay hundreds of dollars for a Microsoft Word upgrade, just so they can use Word to post to their blog? There are loads of ways to post to your weblog, free options, and MS Word seems like it's more than overkill. In fact, for what most people use Word for, it's overkill.
Nobody who cares about hundreds of dollars. But if you're getting a new PC with Office, or getting a Student edition, or getting it so you can support it, or for any number of other reasons, you'll use it.
Word gets downplayed a lot by geeks -- especially F/OSS geeks -- because they see it as something that it isn't. It is either overkill or underkill for just about every "task" that it does... and yet, no F/OSS tool out there does everything that Word does for a writer as elegantly.
(Wanna prove me wrong? Point me to a Win32 program that can take either.DOC or a similar equivalent, and can count the words in any arbitrary section of text, can track the changes I make at least as well as Work 2k (only the last writing session is all I really need), has an on-the-fly spellchecker, built-in or hooked-in thesaurus, some option to fix common typos, some similiar option to undo accidental typo-corrections easily, and can either export to.DOC or has a Palm OS program that can read and at least common on an RTF-style version.)
(Oh, and OOo while OOo passes 1, 3, 4, 6, and 8, it fails pretty miserably at 2, 5, and 7.)
Most blogs accept articles via email, you can email from word
I can't, and neither can Grandma, after she heard that Outlook has viruses.
If PDF was a compelling feature people would have switched to open office by now.
If OOo was 100% feature-complete with Word, I would have. But it's not, and it's not in ways that make it not worth the effort for me (or virtually anyone else I know) to use it.
The new format?? Who the hell cares about that.
Everyone who's ever complained about Office's proprietary file type, who's ever bitched about the size of a word document, or who's ever had a word document spontaneously corrupt.
I listed things that the average joe would use. Not that they would jump up and down and spend $1,000 for, but things that, once they have, they will use and benefit from using. The challenge wasn't "the upgrade isn't worth it." It was "the upgrade is nothing anyone would use."
The simple fact is that unless you're a serious writer, you don't care one way or another and won't either spend the cash to get office or spend the time to get OOo. Unfortunately for OOo, the serious writers do care, and they by and large have given OOo a pass.
Care to post a link to instructions? 'cause OOo 2 just gave me a blank page when I tried to open a file with it.
Re:What's in it that would make me want to buy it?
on
Office 2007 Delayed Again
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
Anyone that wants PDF or Blogging from Word probably has that without 2007.
No, not really.
PDF with Word you can get by either going through the hassle of installing a second printer subsystem, the frustration of getting a sub-par system for a modest fee, or the expense of buying a software package whose cost can equal that of Word.
Blogging -- there is no in-Word blogging for any system prior than 2007. Period. At best, you can get an ugly cut-and-paste that will either get you no benefit or just give you bloat.
And if you think that only tech-savy users want PDFs or Blogging, you've spent too much time navel gazing.
I can't imagine a ruling that would allow people to start challenging patents on "obviousness".
You apparantly don't live in a nation of law and judicial review.
the case would never have gotten to the supreme court if we weren't allowed to challenge a patent as being obvious. It's part of the law, both in America and in every nation whose laws have shaped to adhere to ours (and vice versa). The question here is, HOW obvious the patent has to be to use.
Slashdot Mirror
If you got a couple hundred people to go down to your local Best Buy, they'd probably call the cops. Even if they didn't, the iron-fisted corporate policies of most retailers would probably preclude getting any kind of deal.
Actually, if you showed up and spoke with the store manager, you'd probably get a deal. Especially if there is another place within a simple travel, and you're organized enough to leave if you don't get the discount.
*never* made mistakes
"make" or "have *never* made".
Your spelling might be correct, but your word-choice needs work.
Clearly not, as your reply amply shows. As to the half-witted part, I don't think you know me well enough to make such a rude determination.
No, I do.
Anyone who concludes that someone who disagrees with them has not thought long enough on the issue. In my experience, those who attempt to dismiss Spirituality with parsimony apply a standard of proof to God that would leave George Washington mythical.
Here's a hint as to how most of us who believe both in Science and God reconcile the two: God is actively seeking to hide Himself from us. He is, to borrow a phrase from Carl Sagan, "sufficiently advanced" enough so as to be beyond the reach of our science. Those of us who believe do so in spite of the lack of scientific evidence, because we conclude that the lack exists because of God's will.
Excuse me? The two religions are not compatible.
Yes, they are. They're both religions where a non-jewish prophet brought a message of the God of Abraham to share with all the world. They both are relgions that teach peace and service to God, while attracting some truly wacko nutjobs.
They're only incompatible in the factual differences (was J.C. God? Was Mohammad a prophet?), not the ethics nor the worldview beyond said differences.
I never heard of a group of Christians claiming to be children of Abraham.
There ARE hebrew and arabic Chirstians, you know.
In a way, it's too bad that Mohammad wasn't around when Christ was walking the holy land. If the Prophet of Islam had met Christ, they would probably have formed one relgion instead of two.
The ones who should be most interested in Microsoft's WGA ambitions should be the antitrust board.
Unless MS stops allowing downloads of non-Windows updates due to the lack of WGA (such as someone running Office on WINE who wants the new service pack), the antitrust board shouldn't care about it. In fact, if WGA makes getting the various Windows-add-ons harder, it might actually be done to help antitrust.
You're ignoring the much simpler explanation that it simply doesn't exist
I'm also ignoring the much simpler explanation that YOU don't exist, you know. Please take it as a point of coutresy that, if someone is discussing spiritual and metaphysical parts of human thought, they're not going to spend a great deal of time on the question of whether or not such thing actually exist. If they do, they can't be proven. If they don't, then they don't.
And trust me -- those who believe in the soul in this day and age have spent more than a little ammount of time reconciling their belief with science. You're not going ot get any of them to change their mind with a half-witted claim to parsimony.
The soul could be the overall pattern of these physical things
No, that'd be the mind. Kindly look up what "the soul" actually referrs to before trying to find a temporal base to it.
No, not really. Because even a theoretically unaging body would, in time, stop working. Maybe the sentience would collapse. Maybe the body would be physically destroyed. Maybe it'd just run out of harvestable energy and go out with teh rest of the temporal universe in cold-death. It would, eventually, die.
Oh, and as the best scientific evidence shows no room for a physical soul of any weight, the soul cannot be said to exist anywhere physically. It is a spiritual object, and as a spiritual object it exists in all parts of the body and no part of the body, so long as the body can be controled by or in turn influence the will of the soul.
What of AI then? What of the soul?
Souls are provided by God's angels to all sentient creatures. If we manage to create an AI, we can be assured that God has given it as much a soul as an animal granted sentience, an alien species, a test-tube baby, or a child of pagans.
Being human is irrelevant to the question. Being sentient and temporal are far more important, spiritually speaking.
So immediately you say reliability and market share don't matter?
no. Please go back to grade school, and spend some time on reading comprehension.
The current version of IIS (6) is far better than the previous version (5) when it comes to just about everything. And while there are probably still a few holes here and there, the same is true of an Apache-based LAMP setup. Is IIS better than Apache, when it comes to serving static HTML or PHP? No, not at all. Is IIS more expensive, if you count the OS cost as well? Hell yes.
Does this mean that, as the grandparent post said, there's no reason to ever sell IIS webhosting? Hell no. Did I say that there was no reason to use Apache? No. All I said was that there are things that IIS can do -- namely, native-windows web hosting and ASP.NET -- that Apache cannot. And for a "webhost" -- not a company setting up their own server, but someone selling space to others -- ASP.NET is a big enough selling point to leave room in the market for it.
Oh, and btw -- low cost and reliability mean nothing if the job doesn't get done. A horse might never break down and be amazingly cheap, but you'll never get the USAF to use a horse to do a jet fighter's job.
Sheesh. You've descended from "jerk" to "trolling moron." way go to.
.DOC for article text better than other formats, and virtually every tool sold at writers can speak .DOC as well as OOo can, if not better.
I mean what kind of a pathethic human being attaaches themselves that strongly to a corporation they have no interest in.
The word is "fan" here, shmuck. There are people who like tools from Sears, cars from GM, and comic books from Marvel. In fact, I'd wager that most discusions on the 'net are from fans.
As for the rest:
1: My one Grandma is more than smart enough to do a custom install, and the other is smart enough to decide that she doesn't need a computer to do anything but the basics. YOURS obviously were too stupid to teach you courtesy.
2: Stamping your feet and trying to repeat a point doesn't make it so. You think that most "serious" (let's call them "paid", shall we?) writers don't use Word? Show me a study. Or a survey. Or, hell, ANY link to ANYTHING that says that they use software other than Word, more often than Word.
I know from experience that there are publishing houses large and small that will take Word Docs (and no XML, or HTML, and certainly not TeX), that (as previously stated) layout programs actually used by the industry can read Word's
Not a single one of these would have developed if Word wasn't used, and MS wouldn't get nearly the revenue they did if a sizable majority of the population didn't run out and buy every new version of Office. I know that it offends your smug sense of how the world should work, but the world is as it is, and for every niche like physics papers which take TeX, there are two that don't but do take Word.
Knowing that and knowing Apaches market share, who would you say is more reliable?
Reliability and Usability are not the same thing--and neither is market share. Apache has the size of the market it does because, more than other resons, the cost of an Apache box is hardware + setup, not hardware + setup + software fees. (And the fee to get anything as good as Apache is well more than the cost to pay someone to setup Apache.)
If there were NO reasons to choose IIS over Apache, we wouldn't be having this discussion. But there are, more even than IE over Firefox. ("because it works with MS Office", in case you're wondering about the latter.) And because there are things that IIS does, and people want their server to do, that Apache (or any other OSS app) doesn't do, there's a rather profitable market for IIS webhosting.
There are in the past 20 years several accounts of perfectly normal children ....
Sorry, no. Each of those "perfectly normal children" wasn't, and the failure -- as no one less than Marilyn Manson said -- was that the parents and educators both didn't notice and didn't listen.
Do you know what's changed? we closed teh frontier and stopped fighting meat-grinder wars, leaving no place for the distraught to go. Which meanst that we have to find a way to reach those of us who would just as soon leave town as continue.
You mean this one?
h
http://www.oisoft.com/index.pl/freepdf_x64_englis
Sorry, a PDF "solution" that requires the installation of a new PS reader, a port redirector, an old VB virtual machine, AND the pretty front-end isn't really that good. I covered this one in "install a new Print sub-system."
There are some serious ilusions (sic) you are living, oh dear...:)
Dude, kindly learn some basic HTML before you get smug with me. Your post was, well, exactly why MORE folk should use a word processor like Word for their 'net communications. Because it looked like crap to me, to the point where I wasn't sure what the hell you were saying until the last sentence.
Speaking of:
Blogging from Word - you are about being funny, right? Yes, there are some "dumb" users who are using Word as HTML editor - thankfully, they are minority - and they propably (sic) will love "new mindblowing" feature, hyped by Microsoft marketing and astrosufers (sic). No one else will use it, thought (sic).
(see how your words a nice and segmented? How even a dolt can tell that they're different from mine? Aim for that when quoting.)
Word is and always will be a terrible HTML editor, because it's not one. It's a word processor, intended to aid in writing. The sort of half-wit RTF editor that blogs give promotes, among other things, bad writing. There's no real way to make a "draft" or print out a copy, or write offline. I mean, unless you use a different program, which usually gives you all of those.
I never said it was a "new mindblowing" feature. I'll probably never use it - not because I don't see a use for it, but because I don't do any blogging where I care about the formatting or content at all. My wife, on the other hand, does, and she's rather happy with it. (All I wanted was for her to give me a user's reaction, because work is likely going to implement 2007 when it comes out, and that means I'll be supporting it.)
Oh, and one last thing - I know it's hard for you to understand, but there are people who genuinely like Windows, who actually know what they're talking about, and are neither formal MS employees nor hired PR guys astroturfing for MS. Some of us actually like what MS puts out, just like somewhere there are people who actually like KDE and Gnome on their own merits.
Not to be a negative Nancy but since Apache is 70% of the market
Apache is 0% of the market. IE, Firefox, and their peers are. When you sell webhosting you aren't selling a product -- you're selling space on mall, and virtually no one cares if you use FedEx or UPS to get your books to your store, so long as they're in English (HTML) when they get them.
In contrast, if you write for Linux, you CANNOT just give your app to Windows users and have them get as much out of it as Linux users. (While if you write for Firefox / Apache, you CAN get the IE user to pick it up and use it. Same for most IE / IIS / ASP pages going to FIrefox.)
Man that's a new low for the astro turfers.
.doc it's not a binary memory dump.)
.DOC.
First things first -- I'm not an astro turer. They get paid, or at least recognized by Microsoft. I don't. In fact, there isn't a blood thing that MS has ever given me that a random guy of the street can't get for free.
You can't send emails?
not from within Word. Office's email functionality is based in Outlook, and neither I nor anyone whose computer I touch installs Outlook.
The new format is still proprietary and it will probably corrupt still.
The new format is a few zipped XML files. (Gosh, where have I ever seen that?) In fact, it's not greatly different from Word's "OpenXML" format. (And it won't corrupt, since unlike
Serious writers don't use Office.
Sure they do. I know it's hard for you to understant outside of your physics-paper / OSS clique, but most serious writers DO use office. In fact, I'd wager that if you grabbed a dozen names of people who write for money, you'd find at least seven of them that do the majority of their writing in Word. Three of the others will use WordPerfect or some other non-F/OSS Word Processor, and the last two will not care what software they use.
Don't believe me? Then explain why every serious boxed publishing system from Adobe to Quark can import
XML format: If I want a good XML file format, I'd sooner trust OpenOffice
.DOC or a similar equivalent, and can count the words in any arbitrary section of text, can track the changes I make at least as well as Work 2k (only the last writing session is all I really need), has an on-the-fly spellchecker, built-in or hooked-in thesaurus, some option to fix common typos, some similiar option to undo accidental typo-corrections easily, and can either export to .DOC or has a Palm OS program that can read and at least common on an RTF-style version.)
Actually, for real XML I trust neither. But since it's an XML based format for either, I can "trust" that even if the software spontaneously dies everywhere tomorrow, I can get my thesis/paper/novel into something i can keep working on. (I've noted the non-obvious benefits elsewhere.)
XPS: why would I want that?
Because it's not PDF, but does the same task. And unlike the bastardized MDI format from XP-2003, XPS is actually going to have a free reader out there.
PDF: you can get decent PDF creation with free software. There are a bunch of different options. I like CutePDF
CutePDF isn't "descent" PDF until you pay for it. Until then, it's little better than installing a ps2pdf equivalent.
Blogging: Who in their right mind would pay hundreds of dollars for a Microsoft Word upgrade, just so they can use Word to post to their blog? There are loads of ways to post to your weblog, free options, and MS Word seems like it's more than overkill. In fact, for what most people use Word for, it's overkill.
Nobody who cares about hundreds of dollars. But if you're getting a new PC with Office, or getting a Student edition, or getting it so you can support it, or for any number of other reasons, you'll use it.
Word gets downplayed a lot by geeks -- especially F/OSS geeks -- because they see it as something that it isn't. It is either overkill or underkill for just about every "task" that it does... and yet, no F/OSS tool out there does everything that Word does for a writer as elegantly.
(Wanna prove me wrong? Point me to a Win32 program that can take either
(Oh, and OOo while OOo passes 1, 3, 4, 6, and 8, it fails pretty miserably at 2, 5, and 7.)
Most blogs accept articles via email, you can email from word
I can't, and neither can Grandma, after she heard that Outlook has viruses.
If PDF was a compelling feature people would have switched to open office by now.
If OOo was 100% feature-complete with Word, I would have. But it's not, and it's not in ways that make it not worth the effort for me (or virtually anyone else I know) to use it.
The new format?? Who the hell cares about that.
Everyone who's ever complained about Office's proprietary file type, who's ever bitched about the size of a word document, or who's ever had a word document spontaneously corrupt.
I listed things that the average joe would use. Not that they would jump up and down and spend $1,000 for, but things that, once they have, they will use and benefit from using. The challenge wasn't "the upgrade isn't worth it." It was "the upgrade is nothing anyone would use."
The simple fact is that unless you're a serious writer, you don't care one way or another and won't either spend the cash to get office or spend the time to get OOo. Unfortunately for OOo, the serious writers do care, and they by and large have given OOo a pass.
OOo can read .docx?
Care to post a link to instructions? 'cause OOo 2 just gave me a blank page when I tried to open a file with it.
Anyone that wants PDF or Blogging from Word probably has that without 2007.
No, not really.
PDF with Word you can get by either going through the hassle of installing a second printer subsystem, the frustration of getting a sub-par system for a modest fee, or the expense of buying a software package whose cost can equal that of Word.
Blogging -- there is no in-Word blogging for any system prior than 2007. Period. At best, you can get an ugly cut-and-paste that will either get you no benefit or just give you bloat.
And if you think that only tech-savy users want PDFs or Blogging, you've spent too much time navel gazing.
mean, really! 99% of the users wouldn't use anything that isn't in Office 2000
Things that most users will use once they start using Word 2007:
* the new, smaller XML file format.
* Saving as XPS or PDF.
* Blogging.
For the first time in awhile, there's an office upgrade that's really worth getting.
I can't imagine a ruling that would allow people to start challenging patents on "obviousness".
You apparantly don't live in a nation of law and judicial review.
the case would never have gotten to the supreme court if we weren't allowed to challenge a patent as being obvious. It's part of the law, both in America and in every nation whose laws have shaped to adhere to ours (and vice versa). The question here is, HOW obvious the patent has to be to use.
If you control space to any degree you can throw "rocks" at the planet.
Yes, and that's why there's the US Space Command. To come and nuke your space outpost back into a lifeless unhabitable stretch of vacum.