And they are very careful *not* to do much about fraud.
Their position is that they are *just* a middleman that connects buyers to sellers. The rest is up to you. If you are defrauded, they want you to go to law enforcement, *not* to eBay.
They actively *do not* work to shut down fraudulent sellers or auctions, because to do so would be to assume liability, which is precisely what they don't want to do. So they are careful always to say "eBay is just a forum, we take no responsibility for what is posted here, that is up to you..." and to make clear to users that they are not liable for anything -- the veracity of any buyer or seller or deal is up to those that *use* eBay to research.
I think this position is a little weaker now that they also own PayPal, but back in the day they would claim to be just like classified ads or like cut-rate real-world auction and liquidations houses: buyer and seller beware, they're just the cheap man in the middle who holds no responsibility for either party.
Poor definition of addiction. It's not.
on
Hooked On The Web
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· Score: 1
The Internet is not an addiction for most of those 6-10% -- it is a means of living. Bill paying, shopping, gathering news, chatting with friends -- these are the things that people do on a daily basis anyway. Choosing to do them "online" is not much different from choosing to do them "in strip malls" or "downtown."
No doubt some would argue that addictive behavior is behavior that people "can't stop" or that is carried out even when the subject doesn't want to carry it out. But many of the things that are done online in this fasion are necessary to rote functionality. I also don't want to pay my bills or drive in traffic, but find myself doing it anyway.
Does this mean I am "addicted" to paying bills or driving in traffic? Hardly. They're things that must be done. I always do them with a debit card and my Volvo, respectively. Does this mean that I am "addicted" to debit card use, or to driving Volvos?
No. This is modernity. The list of things that *must be done* is huge and easily occupies most of one's day. If your preferred method for getting these things done is online, because it saves you time, saves you money, or whatever, this strikes me as less "addiction" and more "adaptation."
"In the end, given enough time... given the right environment..."
Corporate America does not give enough time, and is not the right environment. Having recently stopped working in a corporate environment just for that reason, I can tell you that Quality is NOT Job #1 at most corporations. In fact, you're likely to get laughed at if you even suggest that you privelege quality over, say, deadlines, quantity, marketing strategy, or six dozen other business interests.
When you're working for your own ego, your own pleasure, and your own interests, however, rather than for shareholders, mid-level management, and upper management, you are likely to do INFINITELY better work. At least, I know I do.
Wrong. My friends care about me, so they read my blog. I care about them, so I read their blogs. We do chat on the phone sometimes, maybe even a lot. But blogspace is a nice way for all of us to keep up on each others' lives (and all be on the same page) without being forced to dedicate precious phone time to "what I did this week and how it made me feel" three ways.
First, can you prove that man made greenhouse gases are the sole reason behind global temp. increases, can you prove it isn't volcanos or decomposing plant matter?
Um, who cares? (see below)
Second, what temp. is the correct temp. for the Earth?
Wrong question, genius. There is no correct temperature for Earth. But there is a correct temperature for us. The Earth won't care if it's average surface temperature is ten degrees hotter next decade, but we sure as hell will.
What gets me is that conservatives seem perfectly happy to run around screaming "It's not our fault! It's not our fault! I promise! It's not our fault!" while they die as the result of environmental change.
It doesn't matter whose fault it is if you're dead anyway. The idea is to try to survive, by actively preventing extreme climate change, no matter who or what is responsible for it. Get it? Survival. What a tree-huggingly liberal idea!
The Fuji S2 is indeed suffering from a similar problem, though it doesn't use a Sony CCD. The forums at Digital Photography Review are littered the the dreaded "black frame" S2 reports, and Fuji has recently announced that they will repair/replace all affected models regardless of warranty status.
That said, I wouldn't hesitate to buy a Fuji camera now that it's clear that this will be handled by Fuji, since the image quality from the Fuji DSLRs is excellent, and enjoys a higher dynamic range than offerings from Nikon or Canon.
I'm a six-times published nonfiction author (via a national imprint) and an editor. Are you?
Give me a better tool and I'll use it. You miss the point entirely and it shows. You want me to be specific, but the point is that if I'm so specific enough about the types of documents in question that you're able to construct a tool based on my specs, the tool will end up being too special a case, applicable only to that type document--like LaTeX, or like a table in a database.
In the real world it is more cost effective to buy one general-purpose tool (as much as you abhor the thought) that's got a little bloat than to buy a hundred special-purpose tools. In any case in which I'd have previously reached for a yellow pad of paper, I now open a word processor. It's that simple. No, a text editor is not an adequate replacement for a notepad, because I can't underline in a text editor, nor can I bullet, highlight, use different color pens, sketch, or ANYTHING ELSE I'd have done on a real notepad. But I can do all of those things in a word processor.
If you now have the audacity to suggest that a paper notepad is The Right Tool For The Job rather than a word processor, I'll be rendered speechless. Let me preempt such a statement by reminding you that: paper notepads waste trees, can't be e-mailed, are only as legible as my handwriting, are not searchable, must be filed physically, and are easily lost or misplaced.
The fact that you fail to understand (or listen) once again suggests that you live in Nerd Neverland, where every problem has a Perfect Solution and those who fail to develop/buy such Perfect Solutions are "part of the problem."
So be it. I have to get work done, and while you moralize about whether my problems are the Right Problems, I am busy solving them. If you think you can come up with a better, cheaper, more widely interoperable replacement for the common paper sketchpad, feel free to develop it and sell it to me. Until then, I have no use for your software moralizing.
Most people use Word to gratuitously format specious documents that they capriciously attach to emails, when a simple bit of text would do. And by most, I mean like 90%. The other 9% are printing clipart flyers on poster paper to advertise their pet avocation on a light pole. 1% of folks are creating paper forms and such which will continue to be required until such time as 100% of our population is connected and computer literate.
I'm sorry, but this is just bullshit and makes me think you've never worked outside of IT. Where I work, there are very few (if any) "specious documents" and no flyers, but there are a hell of a lot of documents that get passed around containing lots of important and useful information, often that needs to be editable by whomever is holding the file, often that would be very difficult (and horribly lengthy) to approach as plain text, often that isn't conducive simply because of the nature of the data to the construction of a database or spreadsheet or "final" formatted document.
If you wiped a word processor off of most business computers, then went to employees and said, "okay, we're going to make you something new, what do you need," they'd say they need a program:
- That holds free-form information easily, - that they can type in without having to obey a lot of structure, - in which they can begin typing without having to plan out the "entire project" first, - that they can easily move and shuffle text around in as they build their thoughts, - with tables that they can sort, - and other tools to manage incidental numeric or tabular data, - as well as tools that let them highlight important text, - search and replace, - add footnotes, - data fields and mail-merge when necessary, - that many people can edit as the file gets passed around, - that will keep track of who edited it last and what they chagned, - and that has a nice correlation to printed output, in case someone needs a hardcopy. - And they'd probably say, "It'd be nice if it'd fix my typos, too!:-P"
Guess what. They just asked for a word processor.
But back to your point, I'm curious - what particular feature of Word helps you organize your text-based data over and beyond what plain text and a good text editor? Let me guess: the colorful sparkles.
As a matter of fact, yes. What's so hard to understand about that? Visual cues are very important. Excel is nice for some tabular data, but isn't text-friendly enough or free-form enough for other data.
What do you do when you need to take a couple of weeks to organize a complex set of ideas that contain lots of notes and textual data but that stretch across five or ten pages and might justify the inclusion of a couple of lists or a photo or two, and that you'd like to be able to sort on or share with others if possible?
Well? How do you do it? For this set of complex notes that you'll be using for the next week, do you log into MySQL and create a bunch of tables pointing to individual plaintext or image files within the file system, along with extra fields for footnotes and relateds and addendums and "wow!" flags, then code a web interface and manage your brainstorming through that? Madness. Do you nicely format each new thought or addentum into a section in a master LaTeX document, then wade through the escape codes and generate new output each time you have another thought? I thought not. If you don't use a word processor, text editor, or spreadsheet (which only works for certain kinds of ideas and data, as previously mentioned), you probably do it on a yellow notepad... which, with a red and a black pen and doodled symbols... is full of colorful sparkles and not at all unlike the empty pages in a word processor document.
We are visual beings, and recorded language is also visual. Most of the ways in which we represent numeric information or relational information are also visual. You ridicule that as though it implied stupidity, but I'm guessing you
As a side note, you can also see it on the screen. I just started KWord and typed the word "text" and it's visible; the 't' and the 'e' are touching and the 'x' and the 't' are touching, yet there's a big gap in the middle. It almost looks as if I'd typed:
te xt
But I didn't. 'Arial' looks as if I'd typed:
Aria l
Neither is quite as exaggerated as they'll appear here with an actual space character in them, but again, it's really obvious when compared to other Linux word processors.
I use CUPS. Basically I use a default Fedora Core install with KDE+KOffice. This problem has been there now since at least RH8 (i.e. through RH9, FC1, FC2, and FC3). I don't need a document, I just need to select the "Arial" or "Times New Roman" fonts and print out their name in 12-pt normal as the only word in the document. In just one word, it's already obvious--some letters touch each other, while others have gaps between them.
It's not "obvious" per se, until you compare it to the same words printed out using the same fonts and sizes in WordPerfect for Linux, OpenOffice, or MS Word running under Crossover. At that point, you can really tell the different: the KWord output just flat-out looks like it's getting the letter placements wrong.
Um, except gedit/wordpad don't offer tables, formulas, styles, graphics, or fields pulled from a database. Most geeks on/. work in technical environments where the bulk of work is either code or networks or research.
In the office world (i.e. the other 90% of the globe) the need to work with highly structured documents both visibly and rapidly on an ongoing basis is extreme, and Word/Excel are actually a very good fit indeed.
I'm a hardcore KDE user and have been since the K stood for "Kool" (in fact, I remember the original project announcement page).
I Konqueror for my web browsing, KMail for my email, etc., and love the application+desktop integration. My one bugaboo is that I still can't use KWord to produce nice output, because it gets the character spacing wrong with TrueType fonts.
Has anyone else experienced this? It's been this way since the first time I tried KWord; the letter sizes and spacings are simply uneven compared to the same document/font output from WordPerfect, OpenOffice, MS Word, etc.
Is this just becuase I'm using KOffice RPM packages in Fedora (and before that Red Hat) and the GNU police have compiled something out? Do I need to compile KOffice from scratch and include some controversial/rights-questioned component to get nice output?
I've tried using both the "real-hinter" freetype library and the "auto-hinter" (in Red Hat systems, stock) freetype library on my systems, but it doesn't seem to change KWord's output. I'd really love to use KWord for my personal work, but I do need it to produce quality output.
The reason is simple. Typesetters/formatters are great for generating splendid output. But most people never produce a hardcopy (or any "final" output) for 90% of their documents. Instead, their documents are workplaces for organizing ideas, bascially pseudo-database records in a filing system stored in their "My Documents" folder.
In short, the vast majority of word processor use is for manipulating, organizing, and retrieving text-based data in a format rapidly parsable by human eyes as part of a workflow or thought process.
For such things, LaTeX, troff, or any other text formatter... sucks. In fact, it isn't even appropriate for the task.
But you're right, if you just want nicely structured, rendered output in hardcopy or PDF, you can't beat 'em.
It's very simple, a Christian friend explained it all to me: Christ cannot come in his magic God The Father armor suit until there are no more naked people anywhere, because nudity makes his magic armor suit dissolve due to harmonic interaction between the light waves reflected off the suit and the color of human skin (black people excepted, of course, which is why nobody cares if they fuck). If Christ can't come with the magic God The Father suit, there will be no advanced life forms to save us from Commander Satan and the Demoniacs from planet Gehennom, and make no mistake, they will invade and munch on the souls of your children.
Nudity even messes with the Mighty Brainwaves of Righteousness that priests use to exorcise (i.e. block from teleportation) the solid-holigram forms of Satan's Demoniacs, which have already begun to arrive in advance scout and recon parties for the Collection Of Souls that will mark the end of the Earth if we can't get Christ and the God The Father magic suit here in time.
So it's essential for the survival of our species that we stamp all of this stuff out and LET THE MAGIC FORCES SAVE US FROM THE DARKNESS, DAMMIT!
Or if you're serious, go on: post a message to the terrorists asking them to stop. Or, I know, I'll do it!
Terrorists: Please stop all of this now! Enough already!
Now let's see if they're as easy to "manipulate" as you've just claimed to be. (Sounds of feet tapping, looking around to see if the terrorists have all read my post and gone home...)
Or are you willing to concede that I didn't change your behavior, that you decided to reply of your own free will, as did I. We were already inclined to discuss issues on Slashdot and are simply acting in keeping with our own habits and preferences.
A terrorist is going to use that very same agency to ignore you, and is more inclined to do other things. Although you are welcome to post nicely how much you wish they'd stop and see if that does any good-- or send a letter to the Bush, Putin, and Blair administrations telling them exactly what they're doing wrong in their bids to change terrorist behavior.
I'm sure once you've explained all about stimulus-response to them and the fact that all they need to do is provide the correct stimulus for the response they seek, they'll be able to put your wise words straight to use and dispense with the terrorism problem by Monday.
So let me get this straight: You're saying that a) you think you can control humans and change their behavior, and b) you also think that it's a good idea for you to do so.
i simply don't understand people who see more menace in western authorities than in terrorist's actions.
You don't understand?
It's because I am about a billion times more likely to be negatively affected by bad or rights-limiting policy than I am to be killed by a terrorist.
I'd rather take a 1:1,000,000,000 chance on not getting hit by a suicide bomber while living a nice life than take a 1:2 chance that I'll suffer at the hands of the government so that they can ensure (and really, they can't even do that) that I won't get hit by a terrorist.
Those with the financial resources to control truth making (i.e. the multinational corporations that make up media and public discourse, or that have a vested interest in it) have managed to shift, through "education," the cultural consciousness to support a ridiculous assumption about money and resources:
All material, by right, belongs to corporations and governments, not to people. People actually believe this now, with all their heart and soul! They see it as "just!"
We're in the preposterous situation wherein when some person hasn't enough money to survive, we tell them "It's your own fault. You're just not keeping up with the times. No person has a right to success. If you want to live, you'll have to go out and earn it. If you want money, you'll have to make it worthwhile for someone to give it to you. You don't have a right to any part of the pie, and if you can't earn it, that's nobody else's problem but yours."
Meanwhile, if a corporation or government agency hasn't enough money to survive, everyone begins to look about wildly to see just who is holding on to the goods and resources that rightfully belong to them. "Where is the money!? Someone is witholding from the corporation what is rightfully theirs. And by holding on to what justly would come to them in their beleaguered state, the guilty parties are stealing!" And the corporations are happy to chime in: "Help us! We have desire to exist and have a need to be sustained. In fact, it is essential! Not every one of us can be as successful as the others, but society has taken care to ensure our survival, and it is unjust for anyone to withhold the resources that make survival possible!"
It is exactly ass-backward. We have decided that it is people who, in the competitive marketplace, must innovate or die, while corporations have a right to at least the basic necessities for survival-- and too many citizens see it as an actual injustice when those resources are not successfully taken from the people by law to maintain earnings for the corporations that "need" it.
Ass backward.
The only question is how bad it has to get before the revolution comes.
Um, what? Do you know what TCP/IP is? Google can feel free to do whatever it wants, including launch its own "next generation" Internet (??!) but TCP/IP is not going anywhere, no matter whether it's Internet2 or GoogleNet or whatever. (Anyway, "GoogleNet" is just a fancy name for a really large IP block. So what?)
Replacing TCP/IP would break far too many applications, operating systems, and elements of infrastructure for it to be worth anyone's time to transition, unless a compatibility layer were put in place, which is a) likely to be nearly trivial anyway so it would be done b) in which case it wouldn't hurt Microsoft to have had it replaced.
Give me some better evidence or reasoning and I'll look at it, but otherwise, I don't see TCP/IP going anywhere. Google will use TCP/IP like everyone else because it's there, it works, and it is capable of doing things like helping them to create their own massive network that is still an integrated part of the Internet at large.
Somehow people often seem to assume that only catastrophic events can have any real impact on the social order. Not true. The Internet began as nothing more than a technical experiment at three academic sites involving only a few people. The World Wide Web was initially just an obscure application written by an academic geek and shared with a few other academic geeks.
Listen to the places that you named. The store. The bar. How do you decide where to go to the store? To the bar? Most people I know these days decide where to shop, where to play, where to drink, and where to stay at least in part (if not entirely) based on websites and website reviews.
Website A caters to a younger crowd. It reviews Bar X and calls is rotten.
Website B caters to an older crowd. It reviews Bar X and calls it lovely.
Yes, Bar X may have been older-friendly already, but if the site(s) are popular enough, this orientation will, as a result of the website reviews, gradually become more acute.
The same occurs with preference engines, only even more egregiously; you don't read a bad review on your favorite site, the business, location, party, or event never even appears on your favorite site, and thus you and anyone like you never knows about them, never attends them. Your social circle loses any participation in, or marketplace influence on, said business, location, party, or event. And as a result, it offers less and less for your "sort," since your "sort" never turns up. Eventually it loses sight of your "sort" altogether.
In effect, you are segregated from it (or it from you). Repeat for every population living in a given urban space and you have populations that simultaneously occupy the same city but lead completely separate, distinct, and radically different lives.
And, as a corollary, the diversity of each of them is drastically reduced.
What you're asking for is forward compatibility, and that doesn't even exist in Windows. You can't run Office XP on Windows 3.1 or 95!
Of course you're going to have trouble running FC4 packages on RH7.3--most of the components in FC4 didn't exist yet when 7.3 was released, and software written to take advantage of FC4's new features just isn't goind to find them in RH7.
HOWEVER, I've never had any trouble installing and running older packages, i.e. RH8 packages in FC4. The backward compatibility (i.e. like the ability to run Windows 3.1 applications in Windows XP) is probably better than it is in Windows, and easier to manage as well.
One of the things I've noticed about the Linux world right now is that it has been slightly behind the adoption curve.
Four-five years ago, everyone jumped on the "Linux on the desktop" bandwagon and it just wasn't there yet, and a lot of people had bad experiences as Linux was in transition. Now I find that the major distros are very good (and very plug-and-play) but there are a lot of people who recently (i.e. maybe in 2000 or 2001) had very poor experiences with Linux and are now loathe to try it again.
Or maybe SuSE isn't quite as good as Red Hat or Debian, I don't know. Most of my experience is with the Red Hat family, though I also work with a decent number of Debian servers, and I honestly haven't seen package dependency hell in either case since Red Hat 7.x--basically since 2000 things have been increasingly better, until today when I do an FC4 install it only takes me ten minutes or so to snag and install all the aftermarket stuff I want (Java, Flash, media players, etc.) and each one goes in with no question at all.
And all of my Loki games and commercial Linux software on CD still install and run with no missing dependencies as well.
I almost listed Gentoo in my post, but that felt a little rich since I'd never used it. I have used the BSD ports system, however, and given that the one is similar to the other, I'd assume that Gentoo is very good in that regard.
I think the (possibly regrettable, I don't know) answer to this is that Linux users need to choose: they can have an easy-to-use distribution that is a near monopoly in the Linux world (which is WHY it will then solve problems like the one you describe), or they can have a hundred different distributions.
Right now, so long as you pick one of the "big three" (Debian, Red Hat/Fedora, SuSE), you will have very little package/software install trouble.
Most companies that release Linux software offer the following downloads (as do most OSS software websites for individual products):
1..tar.gz to compile from source (gets you right into th dependency hell you want to avoid) 2. RPM for Red Hat/Fedora 3. RPM for SuSE 3. DEB for Debian
I have been in the Red Hat family since Red Hat 5 or so and I can tell you that beginning with Red Hat 8 things started to get really easy, and by the time the Fedoras had come around, I spend nearly zero time compiling my own software or chasing package dependencies. Tools like yum/apt even make it so that you don't have to FIND a download site and double-click on and icon, you just type in a command that says "I WANT IT!"
But even for commercial software like Flash or Java, it's cake, I just install the package. The reason is because the package is DESIGNED FOR MY OPERATING SYSTEM.
Sorry, but most of the other Linux operating systems (Slackware, Mandrake, Yoper, Xandros, whatever) are too small for packagers to target them, and that's generally what results in package hell--you are trying to use a package that assumes the components installed by default in another operating system. So even if they are both RPMs, installing a Red Hat/Fedora RPM on Mandrake will cause you trouble. Even once you get the packages all installed, the configuration and support files are likely to be located in all the wrong places.
And yes, generally the packages ARE clearly labeled. So I guess my answer is the one people hate to hear, but if you're going to ask the question about "package hell" then you're going to get this answer: switch to a bigger distro (best case is probably Red Hat/Fedora) and the problem will generally go away.
Slashdot Mirror
And they are very careful *not* to do much about fraud.
Their position is that they are *just* a middleman that connects buyers to sellers. The rest is up to you. If you are defrauded, they want you to go to law enforcement, *not* to eBay.
They actively *do not* work to shut down fraudulent sellers or auctions, because to do so would be to assume liability, which is precisely what they don't want to do. So they are careful always to say "eBay is just a forum, we take no responsibility for what is posted here, that is up to you..." and to make clear to users that they are not liable for anything -- the veracity of any buyer or seller or deal is up to those that *use* eBay to research.
I think this position is a little weaker now that they also own PayPal, but back in the day they would claim to be just like classified ads or like cut-rate real-world auction and liquidations houses: buyer and seller beware, they're just the cheap man in the middle who holds no responsibility for either party.
The Internet is not an addiction for most of those 6-10% -- it is a means of living. Bill paying, shopping, gathering news, chatting with friends -- these are the things that people do on a daily basis anyway. Choosing to do them "online" is not much different from choosing to do them "in strip malls" or "downtown."
No doubt some would argue that addictive behavior is behavior that people "can't stop" or that is carried out even when the subject doesn't want to carry it out. But many of the things that are done online in this fasion are necessary to rote functionality. I also don't want to pay my bills or drive in traffic, but find myself doing it anyway.
Does this mean I am "addicted" to paying bills or driving in traffic? Hardly. They're things that must be done. I always do them with a debit card and my Volvo, respectively. Does this mean that I am "addicted" to debit card use, or to driving Volvos?
No. This is modernity. The list of things that *must be done* is huge and easily occupies most of one's day. If your preferred method for getting these things done is online, because it saves you time, saves you money, or whatever, this strikes me as less "addiction" and more "adaptation."
"In the end, given enough time... given the right environment..."
Corporate America does not give enough time, and is not the right environment. Having recently stopped working in a corporate environment just for that reason, I can tell you that Quality is NOT Job #1 at most corporations. In fact, you're likely to get laughed at if you even suggest that you privelege quality over, say, deadlines, quantity, marketing strategy, or six dozen other business interests.
When you're working for your own ego, your own pleasure, and your own interests, however, rather than for shareholders, mid-level management, and upper management, you are likely to do INFINITELY better work. At least, I know I do.
Wrong. My friends care about me, so they read my blog. I care about them, so I read their blogs. We do chat on the phone sometimes, maybe even a lot. But blogspace is a nice way for all of us to keep up on each others' lives (and all be on the same page) without being forced to dedicate precious phone time to "what I did this week and how it made me feel" three ways.
First, can you prove that man made greenhouse gases are the sole reason behind global temp. increases, can you prove it isn't volcanos or decomposing plant matter?
Um, who cares? (see below)
Second, what temp. is the correct temp. for the Earth?
Wrong question, genius. There is no correct temperature for Earth. But there is a correct temperature for us. The Earth won't care if it's average surface temperature is ten degrees hotter next decade, but we sure as hell will.
What gets me is that conservatives seem perfectly happy to run around screaming "It's not our fault! It's not our fault! I promise! It's not our fault!" while they die as the result of environmental change.
It doesn't matter whose fault it is if you're dead anyway. The idea is to try to survive, by actively preventing extreme climate change, no matter who or what is responsible for it. Get it? Survival. What a tree-huggingly liberal idea!
The Fuji S2 is indeed suffering from a similar problem, though it doesn't use a Sony CCD. The forums at Digital Photography Review are littered the the dreaded "black frame" S2 reports, and Fuji has recently announced that they will repair/replace all affected models regardless of warranty status.
That said, I wouldn't hesitate to buy a Fuji camera now that it's clear that this will be handled by Fuji, since the image quality from the Fuji DSLRs is excellent, and enjoys a higher dynamic range than offerings from Nikon or Canon.
I'm a six-times published nonfiction author (via a national imprint) and an editor. Are you?
Give me a better tool and I'll use it. You miss the point entirely and it shows. You want me to be specific, but the point is that if I'm so specific enough about the types of documents in question that you're able to construct a tool based on my specs, the tool will end up being too special a case, applicable only to that type document--like LaTeX, or like a table in a database.
In the real world it is more cost effective to buy one general-purpose tool (as much as you abhor the thought) that's got a little bloat than to buy a hundred special-purpose tools. In any case in which I'd have previously reached for a yellow pad of paper, I now open a word processor. It's that simple. No, a text editor is not an adequate replacement for a notepad, because I can't underline in a text editor, nor can I bullet, highlight, use different color pens, sketch, or ANYTHING ELSE I'd have done on a real notepad. But I can do all of those things in a word processor.
If you now have the audacity to suggest that a paper notepad is The Right Tool For The Job rather than a word processor, I'll be rendered speechless. Let me preempt such a statement by reminding you that: paper notepads waste trees, can't be e-mailed, are only as legible as my handwriting, are not searchable, must be filed physically, and are easily lost or misplaced.
The fact that you fail to understand (or listen) once again suggests that you live in Nerd Neverland, where every problem has a Perfect Solution and those who fail to develop/buy such Perfect Solutions are "part of the problem."
So be it. I have to get work done, and while you moralize about whether my problems are the Right Problems, I am busy solving them. If you think you can come up with a better, cheaper, more widely interoperable replacement for the common paper sketchpad, feel free to develop it and sell it to me. Until then, I have no use for your software moralizing.
Most people use Word to gratuitously format specious documents that they capriciously attach to emails, when a simple bit of text would do. And by most, I mean like 90%. The other 9% are printing clipart flyers on poster paper to advertise their pet avocation on a light pole. 1% of folks are creating paper forms and such which will continue to be required until such time as 100% of our population is connected and computer literate.
:-P"
I'm sorry, but this is just bullshit and makes me think you've never worked outside of IT. Where I work, there are very few (if any) "specious documents" and no flyers, but there are a hell of a lot of documents that get passed around containing lots of important and useful information, often that needs to be editable by whomever is holding the file, often that would be very difficult (and horribly lengthy) to approach as plain text, often that isn't conducive simply because of the nature of the data to the construction of a database or spreadsheet or "final" formatted document.
If you wiped a word processor off of most business computers, then went to employees and said, "okay, we're going to make you something new, what do you need," they'd say they need a program:
- That holds free-form information easily,
- that they can type in without having to obey a lot of structure,
- in which they can begin typing without having to plan out the "entire project" first,
- that they can easily move and shuffle text around in as they build their thoughts,
- with tables that they can sort,
- and other tools to manage incidental numeric or tabular data,
- as well as tools that let them highlight important text,
- search and replace,
- add footnotes,
- data fields and mail-merge when necessary,
- that many people can edit as the file gets passed around,
- that will keep track of who edited it last and what they chagned,
- and that has a nice correlation to printed output, in case someone needs a hardcopy.
- And they'd probably say, "It'd be nice if it'd fix my typos, too!
Guess what. They just asked for a word processor.
But back to your point, I'm curious - what particular feature of Word helps you organize your text-based data over and beyond what plain text and a good text editor? Let me guess: the colorful sparkles.
As a matter of fact, yes. What's so hard to understand about that? Visual cues are very important. Excel is nice for some tabular data, but isn't text-friendly enough or free-form enough for other data.
What do you do when you need to take a couple of weeks to organize a complex set of ideas that contain lots of notes and textual data but that stretch across five or ten pages and might justify the inclusion of a couple of lists or a photo or two, and that you'd like to be able to sort on or share with others if possible?
Well? How do you do it? For this set of complex notes that you'll be using for the next week, do you log into MySQL and create a bunch of tables pointing to individual plaintext or image files within the file system, along with extra fields for footnotes and relateds and addendums and "wow!" flags, then code a web interface and manage your brainstorming through that? Madness. Do you nicely format each new thought or addentum into a section in a master LaTeX document, then wade through the escape codes and generate new output each time you have another thought? I thought not. If you don't use a word processor, text editor, or spreadsheet (which only works for certain kinds of ideas and data, as previously mentioned), you probably do it on a yellow notepad... which, with a red and a black pen and doodled symbols... is full of colorful sparkles and not at all unlike the empty pages in a word processor document.
We are visual beings, and recorded language is also visual. Most of the ways in which we represent numeric information or relational information are also visual. You ridicule that as though it implied stupidity, but I'm guessing you
As a side note, you can also see it on the screen. I just started KWord and typed the word "text" and it's visible; the 't' and the 'e' are touching and the 'x' and the 't' are touching, yet there's a big gap in the middle. It almost looks as if I'd typed:
te xt
But I didn't. 'Arial' looks as if I'd typed:
Aria l
Neither is quite as exaggerated as they'll appear here with an actual space character in them, but again, it's really obvious when compared to other Linux word processors.
I use CUPS. Basically I use a default Fedora Core install with KDE+KOffice. This problem has been there now since at least RH8 (i.e. through RH9, FC1, FC2, and FC3). I don't need a document, I just need to select the "Arial" or "Times New Roman" fonts and print out their name in 12-pt normal as the only word in the document. In just one word, it's already obvious--some letters touch each other, while others have gaps between them.
It's not "obvious" per se, until you compare it to the same words printed out using the same fonts and sizes in WordPerfect for Linux, OpenOffice, or MS Word running under Crossover. At that point, you can really tell the different: the KWord output just flat-out looks like it's getting the letter placements wrong.
Um, except gedit/wordpad don't offer tables, formulas, styles, graphics, or fields pulled from a database. Most geeks on /. work in technical environments where the bulk of work is either code or networks or research.
In the office world (i.e. the other 90% of the globe) the need to work with highly structured documents both visibly and rapidly on an ongoing basis is extreme, and Word/Excel are actually a very good fit indeed.
I'm a hardcore KDE user and have been since the K stood for "Kool" (in fact, I remember the original project announcement page).
I Konqueror for my web browsing, KMail for my email, etc., and love the application+desktop integration. My one bugaboo is that I still can't use KWord to produce nice output, because it gets the character spacing wrong with TrueType fonts.
Has anyone else experienced this? It's been this way since the first time I tried KWord; the letter sizes and spacings are simply uneven compared to the same document/font output from WordPerfect, OpenOffice, MS Word, etc.
Is this just becuase I'm using KOffice RPM packages in Fedora (and before that Red Hat) and the GNU police have compiled something out? Do I need to compile KOffice from scratch and include some controversial/rights-questioned component to get nice output?
I've tried using both the "real-hinter" freetype library and the "auto-hinter" (in Red Hat systems, stock) freetype library on my systems, but it doesn't seem to change KWord's output. I'd really love to use KWord for my personal work, but I do need it to produce quality output.
Can anyone help me?
The reason is simple. Typesetters/formatters are great for generating splendid output. But most people never produce a hardcopy (or any "final" output) for 90% of their documents. Instead, their documents are workplaces for organizing ideas, bascially pseudo-database records in a filing system stored in their "My Documents" folder.
In short, the vast majority of word processor use is for manipulating, organizing, and retrieving text-based data in a format rapidly parsable by human eyes as part of a workflow or thought process.
For such things, LaTeX, troff, or any other text formatter... sucks. In fact, it isn't even appropriate for the task.
But you're right, if you just want nicely structured, rendered output in hardcopy or PDF, you can't beat 'em.
It's very simple, a Christian friend explained it all to me: Christ cannot come in his magic God The Father armor suit until there are no more naked people anywhere, because nudity makes his magic armor suit dissolve due to harmonic interaction between the light waves reflected off the suit and the color of human skin (black people excepted, of course, which is why nobody cares if they fuck). If Christ can't come with the magic God The Father suit, there will be no advanced life forms to save us from Commander Satan and the Demoniacs from planet Gehennom, and make no mistake, they will invade and munch on the souls of your children.
Nudity even messes with the Mighty Brainwaves of Righteousness that priests use to exorcise (i.e. block from teleportation) the solid-holigram forms of Satan's Demoniacs, which have already begun to arrive in advance scout and recon parties for the Collection Of Souls that will mark the end of the Earth if we can't get Christ and the God The Father magic suit here in time.
So it's essential for the survival of our species that we stamp all of this stuff out and LET THE MAGIC FORCES SAVE US FROM THE DARKNESS, DAMMIT!
Cute, but meaningless.
Or if you're serious, go on: post a message to the terrorists asking them to stop. Or, I know, I'll do it!
Terrorists: Please stop all of this now! Enough already!
Now let's see if they're as easy to "manipulate" as you've just claimed to be. (Sounds of feet tapping, looking around to see if the terrorists have all read my post and gone home...)
Or are you willing to concede that I didn't change your behavior, that you decided to reply of your own free will, as did I. We were already inclined to discuss issues on Slashdot and are simply acting in keeping with our own habits and preferences.
A terrorist is going to use that very same agency to ignore you, and is more inclined to do other things. Although you are welcome to post nicely how much you wish they'd stop and see if that does any good-- or send a letter to the Bush, Putin, and Blair administrations telling them exactly what they're doing wrong in their bids to change terrorist behavior.
I'm sure once you've explained all about stimulus-response to them and the fact that all they need to do is provide the correct stimulus for the response they seek, they'll be able to put your wise words straight to use and dispense with the terrorism problem by Monday.
So let me get this straight: You're saying that a) you think you can control humans and change their behavior, and b) you also think that it's a good idea for you to do so.
I don't think I need to add anything.
i simply don't understand people who see more menace in western authorities than in terrorist's actions.
You don't understand?
It's because I am about a billion times more likely to be negatively affected by bad or rights-limiting policy than I am to be killed by a terrorist.
I'd rather take a 1:1,000,000,000 chance on not getting hit by a suicide bomber while living a nice life than take a 1:2 chance that I'll suffer at the hands of the government so that they can ensure (and really, they can't even do that) that I won't get hit by a terrorist.
Those with the financial resources to control truth making (i.e. the multinational corporations that make up media and public discourse, or that have a vested interest in it) have managed to shift, through "education," the cultural consciousness to support a ridiculous assumption about money and resources:
All material, by right, belongs to corporations and governments, not to people. People actually believe this now, with all their heart and soul! They see it as "just!"
We're in the preposterous situation wherein when some person hasn't enough money to survive, we tell them "It's your own fault. You're just not keeping up with the times. No person has a right to success. If you want to live, you'll have to go out and earn it. If you want money, you'll have to make it worthwhile for someone to give it to you. You don't have a right to any part of the pie, and if you can't earn it, that's nobody else's problem but yours."
Meanwhile, if a corporation or government agency hasn't enough money to survive, everyone begins to look about wildly to see just who is holding on to the goods and resources that rightfully belong to them. "Where is the money!? Someone is witholding from the corporation what is rightfully theirs. And by holding on to what justly would come to them in their beleaguered state, the guilty parties are stealing!" And the corporations are happy to chime in: "Help us! We have desire to exist and have a need to be sustained. In fact, it is essential! Not every one of us can be as successful as the others, but society has taken care to ensure our survival, and it is unjust for anyone to withhold the resources that make survival possible!"
It is exactly ass-backward. We have decided that it is people who, in the competitive marketplace, must innovate or die, while corporations have a right to at least the basic necessities for survival-- and too many citizens see it as an actual injustice when those resources are not successfully taken from the people by law to maintain earnings for the corporations that "need" it.
Ass backward.
The only question is how bad it has to get before the revolution comes.
Integration testing? Best practices? Performance guides?
:-P
Ugh, I have to be at work in ten minutes, please don't pollute my pre-work morning with corporatespeak.
Um, what? Do you know what TCP/IP is? Google can feel free to do whatever it wants, including launch its own "next generation" Internet (??!) but TCP/IP is not going anywhere, no matter whether it's Internet2 or GoogleNet or whatever. (Anyway, "GoogleNet" is just a fancy name for a really large IP block. So what?)
Replacing TCP/IP would break far too many applications, operating systems, and elements of infrastructure for it to be worth anyone's time to transition, unless a compatibility layer were put in place, which is a) likely to be nearly trivial anyway so it would be done b) in which case it wouldn't hurt Microsoft to have had it replaced.
Give me some better evidence or reasoning and I'll look at it, but otherwise, I don't see TCP/IP going anywhere. Google will use TCP/IP like everyone else because it's there, it works, and it is capable of doing things like helping them to create their own massive network that is still an integrated part of the Internet at large.
Not at the universities I attended. They encouraged a critical examination of all perspectives, employing any number of theoretical approaches.
Sounds like you got a second-rate product. Sorry to hear it.
Somehow people often seem to assume that only catastrophic events can have any real impact on the social order. Not true. The Internet began as nothing more than a technical experiment at three academic sites involving only a few people. The World Wide Web was initially just an obscure application written by an academic geek and shared with a few other academic geeks.
Listen to the places that you named. The store. The bar. How do you decide where to go to the store? To the bar? Most people I know these days decide where to shop, where to play, where to drink, and where to stay at least in part (if not entirely) based on websites and website reviews.
Website A caters to a younger crowd. It reviews Bar X and calls is rotten.
Website B caters to an older crowd. It reviews Bar X and calls it lovely.
Yes, Bar X may have been older-friendly already, but if the site(s) are popular enough, this orientation will, as a result of the website reviews, gradually become more acute.
The same occurs with preference engines, only even more egregiously; you don't read a bad review on your favorite site, the business, location, party, or event never even appears on your favorite site, and thus you and anyone like you never knows about them, never attends them. Your social circle loses any participation in, or marketplace influence on, said business, location, party, or event. And as a result, it offers less and less for your "sort," since your "sort" never turns up. Eventually it loses sight of your "sort" altogether.
In effect, you are segregated from it (or it from you). Repeat for every population living in a given urban space and you have populations that simultaneously occupy the same city but lead completely separate, distinct, and radically different lives.
And, as a corollary, the diversity of each of them is drastically reduced.
What you're asking for is forward compatibility, and that doesn't even exist in Windows. You can't run Office XP on Windows 3.1 or 95!
Of course you're going to have trouble running FC4 packages on RH7.3--most of the components in FC4 didn't exist yet when 7.3 was released, and software written to take advantage of FC4's new features just isn't goind to find them in RH7.
HOWEVER, I've never had any trouble installing and running older packages, i.e. RH8 packages in FC4. The backward compatibility (i.e. like the ability to run Windows 3.1 applications in Windows XP) is probably better than it is in Windows, and easier to manage as well.
Hmmm... How long ago was you SuSE experience?
One of the things I've noticed about the Linux world right now is that it has been slightly behind the adoption curve.
Four-five years ago, everyone jumped on the "Linux on the desktop" bandwagon and it just wasn't there yet, and a lot of people had bad experiences as Linux was in transition. Now I find that the major distros are very good (and very plug-and-play) but there are a lot of people who recently (i.e. maybe in 2000 or 2001) had very poor experiences with Linux and are now loathe to try it again.
Or maybe SuSE isn't quite as good as Red Hat or Debian, I don't know. Most of my experience is with the Red Hat family, though I also work with a decent number of Debian servers, and I honestly haven't seen package dependency hell in either case since Red Hat 7.x--basically since 2000 things have been increasingly better, until today when I do an FC4 install it only takes me ten minutes or so to snag and install all the aftermarket stuff I want (Java, Flash, media players, etc.) and each one goes in with no question at all.
And all of my Loki games and commercial Linux software on CD still install and run with no missing dependencies as well.
I almost listed Gentoo in my post, but that felt a little rich since I'd never used it. I have used the BSD ports system, however, and given that the one is similar to the other, I'd assume that Gentoo is very good in that regard.
I think the (possibly regrettable, I don't know) answer to this is that Linux users need to choose: they can have an easy-to-use distribution that is a near monopoly in the Linux world (which is WHY it will then solve problems like the one you describe), or they can have a hundred different distributions.
.tar.gz to compile from source (gets you right into th dependency hell you want to avoid)
Right now, so long as you pick one of the "big three" (Debian, Red Hat/Fedora, SuSE), you will have very little package/software install trouble.
Most companies that release Linux software offer the following downloads (as do most OSS software websites for individual products):
1.
2. RPM for Red Hat/Fedora
3. RPM for SuSE
3. DEB for Debian
I have been in the Red Hat family since Red Hat 5 or so and I can tell you that beginning with Red Hat 8 things started to get really easy, and by the time the Fedoras had come around, I spend nearly zero time compiling my own software or chasing package dependencies. Tools like yum/apt even make it so that you don't have to FIND a download site and double-click on and icon, you just type in a command that says "I WANT IT!"
But even for commercial software like Flash or Java, it's cake, I just install the package. The reason is because the package is DESIGNED FOR MY OPERATING SYSTEM.
Sorry, but most of the other Linux operating systems (Slackware, Mandrake, Yoper, Xandros, whatever) are too small for packagers to target them, and that's generally what results in package hell--you are trying to use a package that assumes the components installed by default in another operating system. So even if they are both RPMs, installing a Red Hat/Fedora RPM on Mandrake will cause you trouble. Even once you get the packages all installed, the configuration and support files are likely to be located in all the wrong places.
And yes, generally the packages ARE clearly labeled. So I guess my answer is the one people hate to hear, but if you're going to ask the question about "package hell" then you're going to get this answer: switch to a bigger distro (best case is probably Red Hat/Fedora) and the problem will generally go away.